Steve Jobs and the best investment I ever made

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who has died at the age of 56, was a genius who changed millions of people’s lives and – funnily enough – one of the first to recognise that fact was Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

When Mr Jobs literally unveiled the first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984, with showmanship that was in stark contrast to the techie norm, then as now, Mr Gates said: "To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different: it takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I've seen – is the only one that meets that standard."

The two titans of new technology were less kind toward each other later. Mr Jobs accused Microsoft of copying Apple and said they “just make really third-rate products” but then softened that with the characteristically quirky statement: "I wish [Bill Gates] the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

Coming down from the clouds, when the first Apple Macs went on sale in London, I was a cub reporter. When I joined The Daily Telegraph in 1986, we were still making the paper with much the same technology the Victorians used; hot metal presses at the back of our inky offices on Fleet Street.

Journalism is not a well-paid racket and I freelanced to make ends meet. In those days, that meant getting up early in the morning to deliver bits of paper – called ‘folios’ at a time when cutting and pasting meant just that – to magazine publishers before going on to do the day job.

Then a friend explained that computers would change all that forever; making it easier and quicker to produce, store and transmit copy. It all sounded rather technical to a Luddite like me. But I was impressed with the Apple Macintosh Classic. It was easy to use, with little or no need for technical training or back-up because the answer to every problem was always somewhere on the screen, and so I bought one in 1990.

It is an interesting perspective on the massive deflation in the price of technology during the last couple of decades that the Mac Classic then cost pretty much the same as the Mac laptop I am writing on now; about £1,000. Needless to say, that was a lot more money then than now – and you got a lot less for it. The Mac Classic had a small black and white screen and no internet access.

Despite those facts, I wrote more than 500,000 commercial words on that little box of tricks before trading up to an iMac about 10 years later. Without wishing to brag, the Nineties were a happy hunting time for freelance journalism when – for example – ‘a sentence like this might cost you £10 plus VAT’.

What a long time ago that seems now. But it meant that – unlike colleagues whose best investment might be their home or buying shares in emerging markets 20 years ago – mine was definitely the Apple Mac Classic. House prices and share prices can fall – and you haven’t made a penny profit until you sell – but all that freelance was invoiced, paid and taxed long ago.

So, while millions of consumers around the world will remember the Apple co-founder for their enhanced enjoyment of sound and vision on everything from iPods to iPhones and iPads, many of us also have good reason to be grateful to Mr Jobs for making it easier and more efficient to do what we do to make a living.