My first Apple product was the Apple IIC in 1984. I had just separated from active duty military to enter college and knew I needed a computer to get my work done. Took the IIC through my 4 years of college. Original cost was $1200 which included a 9 pin dot matrix printer. I remember what a huge investment it was at the time and Apple had a payment program that I took advantage of because I knew it would be worth it.
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Mine was a Macintosh Plus. The company where I interned got it and asked me to create slides in Forethought, right before they were acquired by Microsoft and their product was renamed as Powerpoint.
I stayed on a PC and then switched in 2006, so the first Mac that I owned was the very first Mac Book Pro 17-inch.
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My first Mac was an LC II ( pizza box Mac) bought back in 1992. I am a math teacher so along with the computer, printer and monitor, I bought an Apple scanner for $1000!! I thought I could use it to scan images from my textbooks into tests. It was so slow, however, that I barely used it and ended up several years later donating it to a electronics recycling group. Anyway, I loved my original Mac. I typed many tests and worksheets on it using Microsoft Word and Equation Editor and my later on I bought a CD Rom drive so my kids could play Myst and Riven. I had it for 6 years until I bought a Power Mac G3. It was handed down to my son who typed many papers on it for high school. I will always fondly remember my first Mac.
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That was the same year I bought my LC II! $2300 US for the computer, monitor, and printer. I paid $1000 more for an Apple Scanner!!! Costs have really gone down compared to that first Mac. I bet that it would still work if I hadn’t of donated it.
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I started on a Mac LC around 1991 running, I think, System 6.5. I was a sysadmin and let my company buy my computers until 2003 when I just had to have a PowerMac G5. We had switched to Windows in ‘98 and I had been in withdrawal way too long. 
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You made it a long time! I think I’d been at work 6 months before they bought me a Mac, and within a month I’d convinced my boss that I would work better with just my laptop than with that and a Windows machine!
Showing your company how productive you can be on a Mac was probably one of the best things you could do for them. Shortly after I changed jobs several years ago, I talked our president into switching from Windows to a MacBook Pro. They have about 140 Macs now.
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My first mac was an original Mac 128 that I got in February 1984 – only a month after the initial release. At the time there was a long waiting list to get a Mac, but a friend in Connecticut called me to tell me that the local dealer had received an extra and I could purchase it if I wanted (I live in California). I said yes and he shipped it to me. There was no way to program it, so I found a local dealer that would sell me a Lisa, and obtained a bootleg copy of the Macintosh Pascal compiler. I also applied to the Developer Program, but at that time it took several months to get approved, and I wanted to be one of the first to deliver software for the Mac. I got right to work with my bootleg compiler and launched OverVUE, the precursor to our current Panorama X RAM based database program, in August of 1984. Been writing Mac software ever since!
I still have both the Mac 128 and the Lisa in my storage unit.
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. SE 1 Mb RAM, 2 x 1.4 Mb floppy drives.
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I’m late to the game; my first Mac was a Mac mini (Mid 2011) and that’s still my only Mac.
It’s not my main system though. That’s still a Windows PC… From 2008…
I guess I survived thanks to the MacBook Pro laptops I had at work (and my personal iPad Pro), but I’m so ready for Apple to release new iMac hardware 
My first “Mac” was in fact the Aladin emulator running a hacked Mac OS ROM on the Atari 1024ST. When the Mac came out in 1984 it was too expensive for me, so I eventually replaced my Apple II with an Atari 1024ST in '86. I got this because it was relatively cheap, came with the Digital GEM interface and ran the same processor as the Mac - it was the closest I could get on my budget. In '88 I got hold of the Aladin emulator and got the Mac OS up and running - but was so unstable that it was unusable. Anyway, in 2006 I got the Mac Min. Stupid me bought it a month before the announcement of the Intel shift, but I could sell my Power PC version to a guy who used it as a server, I got the CoreSolo Mac Mini. Later upgrade to iMac 24" and now 27" iMac.
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Taught myself to program on Apple II, used Lisa and original Mac 128K. My first personal Mac is a MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008) which I am using right now and still happy with (upgraded RAM to 8GB and on my 3rd HDD and 3rd battery).
I asked myself why I’m still happy with it, and I think the answer is it is the durability, upgradability, the OS, and the other Apple products which I have upgraded more frequently iPods, original iPad, 2 and Pro 9.7, iPhone 4S, 5S, 6S), Apple TV. They kept my home ecosystem always feeling fresh, despite the age of the laptop itself.
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My employer’s work required a PC and Internet Explorer. Within a week of retiring in January 2012, I purchased a 2011 11" MacBook Air, which still rocks. In late 2013 I got the last non-retina 27" iMac, fully loaded, to do the “work” I figure is important these days; it rocks, too.
Taking the time to learn to use a Mac, kept me busy and mentally engaged during that first winter with no job. MPU taught me so much. Thanks Katie and David.
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My first Mac was a 2008 iMac desktop. I knew I would eventually need to learn how to use a computer but I didn’t even know the difference between a PC and a Mac. An old friend who wrote for Macworld, Charles Seiter, had once told me that Mac was the only way to go. Anyway, the iMac sat in it’s box in my living room for a week unopened. With a kick in the butt from another friend I finally set it up. I was clueless on how to use the thing and was always asking questions on simple matters. To this day I get a thrill when I learn anything new on a Mac.
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First Mac I ever used was the actual first Mac, in my first job out of Academia. We used Macs because we needed special fonts for writing documents, as well as MacDraw for diagrams and Mac Paint for screenshots. The machines had single floppy disk drives and the system, app and documents had to fit on the disk, or you had to disk swap like 20 times to save a document. If you had a different disk to save the document that also happened to have an OS on it, the Mac would jump to that OS, possibly changing fonts and desk accessories (that used to live under the Apple Menu). The desk accessories were accessible any time, the apps were one at a time so you had to quit one to run another. Later I joined a project where there were one or two of these things between 5 of us. During that project, we got to the stage where we had one machine each (not on our desks of course) and they all shared a networked hard disk that was a massive 20 megabytes. Megabytes, not gigs. We thought we were in heaven. Now it sounds like the Four Yorkshiremen.
First Mac in our family was a PowerMac 7500 behemoth that over the years got upgraded with more ram, a new motherboard and a massive 1GB hard disk. This is the one that didn’t have space to save a photo that I had been working on in Photoshop. I had a camcorder but editing video on this Mac was out of the question.
But we were about to move across the Atlantic, and this PowerMac was going to have to go in the air shipment, and it had all the documents and spreadsheets for our move. We had some visits to the US before the move, around the time the first 3 Apple Stores opened. On one of those trips we got a little white iBook as a sort of temporary machine to tide us over during the move. It had a massive 10GB disk. The PowerMac never made it out of its boxes when it finally showed up. The iBook was the machine that enabled me to get started editing video, made the jump to OS X and had iPhoto, and had a wifi card even when we still had dialup. But it was still shared between all family members.
The first machine I called my own was the G4 iMac that looked like a Luxo lamp. It’s watching me type this right now, as I have been moving data off it prior to finding a new home for it.
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My first Mac was the original Macintosh, the year it was released, in 1984. I was a junior in high school, and felt like I had entered another dimension, in the future. At school, I used an IBM, and I always appreciated that my early computer days were spent learning different systems.
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I was fortunate to enter the IT field early in my career back in the late 70’s and after working on mainframes and mini-computers (DEC 10 and 11 range) purchased an Apple IIe to see what the micro computer revolution was all about.
This led to talking work into purchasing me the original Mac back in 1984 and I still remember the thrill of unboxing and setting it up for the 1st time.
Having an interest in flight simulation from the 1st PC flight simulator to present day I’ve also had a plethora of powerful Windows machines (which I used to assemble myself).
I’m a big Apple fan and have never missed a broadcast Keynote, often getting up at 3am Australia time on a workday to watch it.
I’ve also been listening to MacPowerUsers since the 1st episode and have nothing but praise for David and Katie in putting in the time and energy to bring us the podcast (and everything else they do for our community).
To put things in perspective, I first programmed/used a computer in 1968. I bought my first computer in 1979 (TRS-80), saw the Macintosh demonstrated under NDA before it was released and had one to use and evaluate at work (1984). However I didn’t buy a Mac until 2004, which was a test case iMac for my wife. I then bought an iBook for myself in 2005.
Why 20 years from trying a Mac to buying one? While that first Macintosh was an amazing machine it had insufficient RAM and the single floppy drive too small to do the documentation I would have wanted it for. My CP/M computer had more capability and was much faster to use. 20 years later with hardware up to the task and a decent OS (OS X) it was time to jump in. And I never bought another Windows PC.
Hmmm…“my” first Mac was one I did not own, but was the one in use when I was in medical training. It was, if I remember correctly, a IIcx, but I may well be wrong on that. We used it to generate procedure reports (I created all of the templates in MS Word), and to write academic papers. We had to complete to get time on it.
My second Mac was a Quadra 950, shared with one office mate, also during medical training. It was a big step up primarily because we didn’t have to share with anyone else.
I remember back then connecting all of our Macs with coax cable and AppleTalk; the TCP/IP stack for Mac was rudimentary at best, which didn’t really matter that much since there wasn’t much of an “internet” at the time.
The first Mac I actually bought on my own was a PowerMac 8500. I remember the night I got it; I drove 40 minutes in the rain to the University of Connecticut bookstore which was the only Mac dealer around at the time to buy it (yes, with an educational discount), drove it home, and stayed up half the night playing with it. I still remember it being the most fun I had had with a computer in years, which is saying something since I go back to the PDP-11 days!
After that I left the fold and spend some years building my own custom machines and running Linux on all of them. When OS X came around and an Apple Store opened at the local mall, I had no choice but to buy back into the Apple System. Oddly enough, I don’t actually remember what I bought. I know it wasn’t an iMac (I’ve never owned any of their models). I think it was probably a white iBook that I got on clearance (at that time, the Apple Store had a clearance table with discounts on discontinued models). Eventually I moved to the cheesegrater MacPro, and I’ve owned a succession of MBPs (now with the 13" with Touch Bar), the “garbage can” MacPro (sold recently), and at least 4 minis (still have one ruining now as my home server).
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My story has a… unique?.. beginning: I had saved up to get an engagement ring for the girl I’d been living with at the time and she broke up with me! I had eyeing getting a MacBook Pro for a while, so I spent the ring money on a 2011 MacBook Pro! It was the most basic model I could afford at the time, but within a year I had maxed the RAM (16GB) and installed an SSD. I still have that MBP, and primarily use it as my “couch Mac”, for web surfing and email. I have a 2016 MBP, which I recently had the top case replaced on due to a battery issue (under warranty). I’m basically all-in at this point: I will probably only use Mac unless otherwise forced by an employer, even then I will probably still use a Mac to get all my personal work done
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