I decided that the first article on this blog would be dedicated to MacG.
Why, you ask? Well, because they’re celebrating their 25th anniversary 🎉 and on this occasion, they’re asking their loyal readers what MacG has meant and means to them.

I never comment on articles, it’s not my style. So it took me a while to decide… but my first article will be an answer to this question, as a tribute.

Young adulthood and discovering Mac

In 2009, I was a student in Business and Customer Relations. A default career path due to a rather bumpy academic journey.
I had a soft spot for computers, but I was advised against pursuing it (you’re terrible at math, dude, forget it, thanks teachers). A bit of a geek, but maybe not enough for LAN parties and WoW raids.

Anyway, I had an old, crummy HP laptop with a terrible design that needed replacing, and on a December evening, a classmate invited me over, and I discovered his white polycarbonate MacBook.
I was instantly convinced 😍, the design was fabulous, the system was so much nicer than the Windows XP on my old HP… I absolutely had to have one. So I went online (no Apple Store back then, folks)… And then I found the MacBook 2.4 GHz Test by Florian Innocente.

I read the article (about 10 times? had to be sure, I was broke OK?), understanding it was four times better than the one I’d already tested.
I then spent two months’ salary and ate a lot of pasta for several months (but it was worth it, right).

By the way, that’s how I discovered “MacGeneration” (at the time). hop, straight into the RSS feed. You never know, a small Lyon-based media following news about my new machine… could be useful.

I got my degree, and I think the 16/20 on my final project presentation owes a lot to Keynote’s deliciously dated effects nowadays.

But isn’t the iPhone also a work tool?

A year passed, I was looking for a job without much conviction. The iPhone Edge was released in 2008 followed by the iPhone 3G. iGeneration (still at the time) was buzzing with excitement, articles were flowing, and Steve Jobs was still with us. I decided to take the plunge and bought my first iPhone 3G 16GB (and ate MORE pasta).

I wore that phone out. I took it apart several times, reinstalled it multiple times, repaired it… I wanted to understand how such magic could work. And then I ended up doing the same with the MacBook. Disassembly, reassembly, memory expansion, RAM…

Meanwhile, I was on unemployment and going from small sales job to small sales job. None of it made sense to me.
One day, I was offered a prospecting job selling cardboard furniture rentals to people wanting to stage properties they were having trouble selling. I lasted one day.

In complete cosmic denial, I decided to spend a year in Australia with my girlfriend to escape the harsh reality of being a lost young proletarian.

I returned in spring 2011. Feeling down, I looked for a job (no sales, please! 😭) and ended up finding work as a server in a campground bar (yay!🤩). This job gave me some breathing room to find a “real” job.

And then, out of nowhere, the temp agency offered me an interview at SNCF with the “mobility service” manager.
The guy was struggling to find his new support technician… for iPhone (it was still the Blackberry era): “I can’t find anyone and you don’t know anything about IT but… you have an iPhone so you know how to use it, and if you lasted nine months in Australia, you must be resourceful. And given your travels, you speak English. Let’s give it a shot”.

That was my way in.

So what?

Well, the planets aligned. I had several jobs in the field, MacG continued to keep me informed, and I got properly trained (for real, thanks to “Site du Zéro”). I earned a degree and today I work as a systems engineer.

I believe I owe part of my journey to this small Lyon-based media that gave me the basics, these guys, some of whom are also self-taught, if I understood correctly, like me.

That’s what xGen means to me (any reference to X is purely coincidental, of course 😉)

Thank you. I hope we’ll spend more time together.