Tell us About Your First Mac

I got my first Mac in 2008: a white polycarbonate 13" MacBook (2006 model) with 10.5 Leopard installed. It was a breath of fresh air after years of using a PC. After the troubled Windows Vista, Apple’s excellent Get A Mac Campaign, as well as the insurance policy of an Intel Mac being able to run a virtualised Windows, won me over and I haven’t looked back :wink:

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I spent a ton of money for the Fat Mac 512K in 1986 in Japan where I was living. I was motivated by a terrible experience using a friend’s IBM machine with Wordstar. The experience writing on it was awful. The intuitive experience of the Mac sold me. I remember translating my first book from Japanese to English on the machine. It still sits in my office but, unfortunately, does not startup. The original keyboard and mouse are nearby. This was 32 years ago! Hard to believe. I’ve had a slew of Macs since as well as had to use Window’s machines at work for 7 years. As a professor I run all my classes off an original iPad Pro 12.9 with the prep being done on either the iMac in my home office or in my office at school. My wife has a MacBook Air, we both have iPhones and she has an older model iPad. My job is taking care of all the machines. Sometimes it feels like a full time job. The love I felt for my first Mac keeps me going.

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My first Mac was a Mac128 that I bought in 1985. It came with MacPaint and MacWrite and System 1 and I bought an Apple Imagewriter. I bought Microsoft Multiplan (father of Excel) and a Pascal compiler with it. I bought Multiplan because doing “number stuff” was one of the major goals of having a computer. I bought the compiler because I am a software person and I couldn’t imagine having a computer without a programming language and Pascal was the only thing I could buy…turns out I almost never used it. :slight_smile:

I didn’t own it very long. The Mac512 came out within a year and I sold the Mac128 to a friend and bought the Mac512…Then a Mac Classic, then a IIsi, then … and it continues.

(Note–Microsoft Excel version 1 was released a year or two later – a big improvement over Multiplan).

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My first Mac was in 2006 and it was a white CoreDuo (not Core2Duo) MacBook in White with the combo drive. Lasted me well through until I started university in 2010 and upgraded to a 2.4GHz 13" MacBook Pro. Now I have a 2015 MacBook Pro 13" Retina which I bought last year.

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I was pretty much PC/Windows all the way until about 2010 when my wife was given a 17” MBP (2006 model) that her sister had bought and decided she preferred Windows. We both played with it and it was a good learning platform. When the 2011 iMac came out we bought one for my wife and I started using the MBP as my primary machine.

Even after upgrading the memory and hard drive, I realized that this particular model has significant limitations so I got a late 2011 MBP just before I retired in spring 2012. Been using it ever since. I have upgraded the memory to 16gb and the drive to a SSD. It’s also hooked to a Thunderbolt Display at home.

Last year we upgraded my wife’s iMac to a 27” 5k but she finds the screen too big so we’re thinking about switching her back to a 21” with the next model refresh. I may then use the 27” as my iPad meets most of my travel needs. Most of our extended travel is in our motorhome and it’s easy enough to take along the iMac in it.

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My first Mac was the white plastic MacBook. I was looking to get a laptop for the first time and after having a great customer service experience at an Apple Store, I thought I’d look at the Macs. The white one was the one I could afford at the time. I thought the opening video when you started OS-X the first time was amazing. :slightly_smiling_face:

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My first mac was a white macbook that I bought from a friend who was strapped for cash and offered it to me at half price. I was a unix user (BSD) at the time and bought the macbook because I needed a more powerful unix laptop at the time, and the macbook fit the bill. I was actually excited about it because unlike *nix on a PC, Flash and other web technologies of the time all worked great on the mac. So I had a powerful machine with all the BSD utilities I needed couple with a great interface and ability to waste time on the internet like everyone else.

Interestingly enough, one of the things I really grew to love about the OS X interface was how difficult it was to customize it compared to *nix. I wasted a lot less time. Over the years, I have given my wife PC laptops running Windows and Linux as well as macs. After she had tried everything, she said she wanted a mac permanently because “They have the fewest problems.” So now we have only macs in my house. My son still uses the original unibody Macbook from 2008, ten years later.

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If memory serves, my first Mac was a Macintosh IIfx, circa 1991.

I had recently graduated from university and was working for a company that sold high-end photo retouching and prepress systems. For the first year of my employ I was writing Windows scanner software for Windows 2 (which didn’t even support overlapping windows) and later Windows 3.

And then one fine day, they dropped a shiny new Macintosh on my desk and asked me to write Photoshop plugins for their scanners and film recorders.

The rest, as they say, is history. I was immediately drawn to the Mac’s hardware design and UI. I also loved developing software for this thing and was amazed at how quickly I was able to get a working prototype going, even though I’d never coded for a Mac before.

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I work in a law office and live in PC world at work, so suffered through a series of Windoze laptops at home that lasted approximately 2-3 years each before giving up the ghost. Finally threw caution to the wind in 2008 and spent the (what I thought) exorbitant price of $2,600 for a 15" MacBook Pro with a 250GB HD and built-in superdrive. I was in love with Macs! Since then I’ve had the 2012 15" MacBook Pro with retina display and SSD and now drive a late 2016 13" MacBook Pro with TouchBar and a 1 TB SSD which ironically cost about the same as my old 2008 MBP. Much lighter hauling to the courthouse during trial weeks. And the firm’s Windows IT person now asks ME questions when it comes to Mac stuff. :grin:

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My first Mac is the mac I still use as a daily driver and my only laptop. It’s a 2010 White MacBook that I absolutely love to pieces. I’ve had it since 2010 when I was a sophomore or junior in high school. At the time I was really into photography and it was awesome for that! My needs have changed now but it’s still working really well. Upgraded to 8gb of RAM three or four years ago and a SSD a short time afterwords. It still has it’s moment’s of slowness given the aging processor but it keeps on going. Starting to save up to replace it though I’m so used to the keyboard layout I’m thinking of finding a mechanical keyboard with the same spaced layout. Given I have the iPhone 8 now, I’m starting to really crave a better screen (retina!).

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When I was a kid my mom won a cash award from the McNight Foundation for her work with supporting women in abusive relationships. She saw my interest in computers and used her award earnings to surprise me with an Apple IIGS, something I had dreamed of having but never thought possible given our family finances. I remember walking down into the basement with her and my dad and starting to cry when I saw the IIGS because I knew immediately that she had spent her entire award check on this instead of something for herself. Even though the IIGS is long gone, the memory of my mother’s generosity is something l will always cherish. She was (and is) such a loving and giving person.

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LC II in 1992. It was horribly expensive in Czech Republic 3 years after the revolution, but it felt special. The most exciting Mac hardware for me though was 1997 (?) Powerbook that my friend brought for me from the U.S. I remember spending the whole night setting it up…
The first iMac was pretty cool too, as was the graphite special edition one. I started working as a freelance translator then and had to use PC more and more due to Czech special characters incompatibility. And I must admit I was a bit frustrated with the Mac too at the time, remembering my online banking just crashing all the time.
But eventually I came back, via the halo effect of the first iPad and iPhone 4.
What I like the most on the Mac is the feeling of absolute freedom to do what I need as efficiently as possible, as opposed to the PC that I still have to use at work. The richness of the app ecosystem and automation possibilities are amazing.

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“My” first Mac was a blueberry iMac that I bought for my daughter in 1999. I played around on it, and wasn’t really impressed with Mac OS 9, it seemed unstable, like Windows 95 was also. Around this time I was switching to Linux on the desktop as my primary machine. I learned a lot, but it was a struggle. Fast forward a few years when Mac OS X came out, and I was seriously impressed. I bought a Titanium Powerbook G4 for myself, and have had many Macs since :sunglasses:

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I purchased my first MacBook Pro in late 2010. I had a buddy that was all in on Mac so I asked quite a few questions, but ultimately it was the iPhone that brought me in as it was so painful using an iPhone with Windows. Haven’t looked back since and that MacBook is still chugging along after I (finally) gave it an SSD upgrade and new battery about a month ago. It runs smooth as ever now and has been a great computer for my wife the past couple years! I had hoped for one more OS update on it but sadly that’s not in the cards from Apple.

My first Mac was a 2012 non Retina MacBook Pro! I got it to replace a dying windows machine and had been a PC gamer all my life. I’m one of those strange millennial that started with a Mac, then got an iPhone.

My first Mac was a Color Classic II which I have to this day. I named it Murray and it sits on a table just a few feet away. I needed a computer while working on my MA thesis in 1993 and when I mentioned it to a neighbor he quickly (and thankfully) steered me to a Mac. I had little idea at the time about the difference between Mac and PC. I accessed the early internet on that Mac but by the time the Netscape navigated web arrived around 1997 Murray was no longer capable so I retired the little fella. Been using Macs ever since. Currently have a 2012 Mini which is the 12th Mac I’ve owned. 4 previous Macs are still in my house though only the Mini get’s used. Murray meets my iPad!
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My first Mac was the white plastic MacBook, 2009 ish I think. Loved it until I traded it in and got an 11” MacBook Air. I switched from PC after becoming frustrated with trying to produce music on it. Stayed Mac and now use 5K iMac and a 12” MacBook.

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Mine was a Macintosh Classic II which I used at my first job writing for a computer magazine, back in 1995.

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I was an Apple II guy from about 1980 all the way to about 1993 when I replaced my aging Apple IIGS with a Powerbook 520c while I was in college. However, my first exposure to the Mac was an SE30 my sister would bring home from her job at Motorola (back when they made modems) and I would play Dark Castle on it.

My 520c, though, was awesome. I was in grad school at the time and there was one other guy who brought his laptop to class to take notes and boy did we stick out from all the pen-and-notebook students. I happened also to be editor of the student newspaper and got us our first all Mac editing and layout setup. We were still doing it pasteboard style though, so we’d do layout in Adobe Pagemaker, print out on 8-1/2x11 paper, then trim and paste onto camera-ready pasteboards, which I would then take to the local newspaper to be printed. We had a giant Apple-branded laser printer at the time, although I don’t remember the model. I do remember that we did have a half-dozen Mac Color Classics. Sweet machines.

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My first Mac was the white Core Duo MacBook – I was an aspiring Web Developer (and student) at that time, and running Windows for browser testing and certain Uni applications was a must. The fans were a weak spot, and I think I had them replaced three times.

It was long my favorite Mac until I got the third Generation (I think) MacBook Air and now the 2016 MacBook Pro (yes, with the bad Keyboard and the TouchBar. The former works well enough for me and the latter is important for my productivity, thanks to Better Touch Tool.)

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