Many years from now, I'll be hunched over in a creaky old pine rocker on the porch of my retirement home. For hours at a time, I'll sit staring at the trees, lost in thought. Then a passing car will startle me out of my reverie and suddenly I'll begin to blurt out words like an old radio whose short-circuited wiring has accidentally righted itself. My utterances might seem incoherent at first, but whoever takes a moment to listen will quickly realize that they're not incomprehensible, merely ancient: "MacPaint ... AppleShare ... ImageWriter ..." I will tell anyone who will pretend to listen, "I was a Mac person." Maybe I'll get really lucky and catch the ear of a young history buff. She will recognize some of my strange utterings from her History of Technology class and understand right away that I come from the dawn of the Age of Personal Computing. With wide eyes and hushed voice, she'll want to know if I ever saw a Macintosh with my own eyes. I'll tell her truthfully and in all modesty, "I owned one." The Mac will presumably be pure history by then.

Every day seems to bring more bad news for Apple and its famously loyal customers: "Apple Loses $708M," "Apple to Slash Work Force by 30%," "Gateway 2000 overtakes Apple in Education Market." One particularly dark moment came last fall, when Yale University officials declared that after 2000 the university network will not guarantee support for the Mac-until recently the most popular machine on campus. This public abandonment threatens to undercut Apple's strategy of falling back on a few niche markets, notably education; for longtime Apple users, it is a betrayal tantamount to telling an aging Nobel Prize-winner that his services are no longer needed.