Some final thoughts...

It's been quite a ride for more than 6 years starting when Lead Editor Mike Rose invited me to come aboard after reading some things I had written.

The iPhone had been out for less than a year... the Mac was selling but seemed destined to lose the desktop wars. Now Apple is the darling of Wall Street, and has revolutionized mobile communications as surely as it revolutionized home computing with the Apple II in 1977.

After almost 700,000 words in almost 2,000 posts, it's been fun and inspiring to watch Apple grow. To have in the palm of your hand a device that can wake you in the morning, bring you the news about anything you are interested in, steer a telescope, take your pulse, introduce you to new people, guide your travels, then put you to bed at night with your favorite music or the sound of the sea is a pretty amazing device, one we take for granted today.

My Mac helps me create memorable photos, lets me view the universe from my desktop, and keeps me up to date with family and friends. While not perfect, it is light years beyond my small collection of Windows PC's that never delighted in the way my MacBook Air and MacPro do.

TUAW, for lots of reasons beyond our control, has no future, but Apple's burns brightly. It's been great writing about these growing technologies, and seeing and testing apps -- some that were great and some that fell short. All of us here tried to tell the story of Apple and its offspring of hardware and software companies and tell it straight; the good along with the sometimes ugly.

It's been a privilege to share my thoughts, whether they reached you at your desktop, on your lap, or in your hand.

I loved it when readers would appreciate a tip on a great app, and I loved to hear from developers who got a bad review, took it to heart and made some changes in the inevitable next version.

Thanks to all our readers, and thanks to my many colleagues here at TUAW who always went the extra mile to make our little corner of the Apple universe a place worth stopping by.