You think your freshman year was crazy? Ha. You never had to balance finals with your part-time job as the “World’s Best Apple Reporter.”
Mark Gurman can't legally buy himself a drink to celebrate his new unofficial title, which BusinessInsider recently bestowed on the 19-year-old University of Michigan freshman.
Actually, Gurman's been painstakingly tracking Apple since high school, when he first picked up an iPod.
The design, the function, the sheer Appleness of the thing made him realize this wasn't just an iPod - this was the first hook the tech giant gets in you.
And before you know it, you're buying a Mac, firmly planted in the "Apple ecosystem," as Gurman calls it.
Not one to be casual with his hobbies, Gurman started scouring using Twitter, forums and published documents for all things Apple, finding leads and developing sources.
He also hunts down which web domains the company buys. That info helps him predict their next move, even before The New York Times or Bloomberg lands the story.
His first big scoop came when he broke the news that Apple was about to launch a brand new iPad.
Since then, he’s making six figures as a reporter for the tech site 9to5Mac.
Originally from the LA area, Gurman says it hasn’t been too tough to keep up with the industry he covers even while he’s very, very far away from Silicon Valley.
The only rough patches come when he’s got finals, he says.
“Unfortunately, during the end of the semester with all the exams piling up, Apple had two big events. So I did what I could: staying up late, got up early. And we did a great job covering the events. And I think I did a good job in school."
To top it off, he’s also a good sport when I ask the really important question: is any of this tech fame helping with the ladies?
"I mean, not a lot of people here even know about it,” he laughs. “But I'm not going to lie and say a couple of girls didn't ask me if the part about the salary in Business Insider was true."
To which Gurman simply tells them: no comment. Classy, no?
