I started out with the Apple ][. We had a IIe at home when I was going up, and there was one in every classroom at my elementary school. There were various Mac models at my Junior High and High School, but the first Mac I used regularly was a Centris desktop that my parents bought back in the early '90s that was my main computing platform. The first one that was truly mine was a original MacBook Air.
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My supervisor/mentor in grad school got me using a mac working on his book, and so, when I received a major scholarship, I purchased an LCIII in 1993. I loved that computer, and used it for 6 years. Bought a laser printer to go with it, too, so my documents all looked gorgeous.
My first Mac was a Mac mini, back in 2007. Now its a iMac 27’ and i love them.
After using Mac Plus computers in college, I bought a Mac SE when I graduated. I also recently found the 1992 educational pricing list for my second Mac, an LC II from when my wife was in grad school.
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I got my first laptop PC in 2000. They were typically cheap plastic things. It seemed every year that I was replacing my laptop when the cheap plastic cases would break. I thought I would give a Mac a try in 2007. I got a white plastic MacBook. Turning it on for the first time I still remember the opening video being “magical.” It didn’t last me too long as the top casing cracked where I rested my hands. That seemed like a common problem with those MacBooks. But I fell in love with the OS and when I went to replace the MacBook I replaced it with an aluminum MacBook Pro with replaceable battery and non-retina screen. I have not looked back and embraced the Apple ecosystem.
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My first Mac was the first Mac, a 128K purchased mid-1984 that, along with an ImageWriter printer, set me back right at $3,000. I played with it so much I don’t think I slept for the next 3 days! I bought it with Microsoft MultiPlan and Microsoft Chart, but the thing I remember most was what you could do with MacPaint. It shipped with an image of a fish, and if you made a selection of the fish with the lasso, the scales of the fish shimmered making it look alive! Great stuff in the days of DOS-based computers.
I upgraded that 128K to a 512k ‘Fat’ Mac, but the next year I bought one of the most productive Macs I have ever owned. I bought a Lisa/Macintosh XL package, and the dealer threw in a set of LisaOS disks and I ran it for a long time with that configuration. I had also updated to a wide-carriage ImageWriter and ran my small business/POS on it. Paid for itself many times over. Fun times!
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First Mac was a Mac Plus plus a 2nd, external 800k floppy drive, which I got new in 1986 and used in college. Main apps used were WriteNow word processor, Acta outliner (still in existence, sold by same developer under new name Opal), Zterm and SuperPaint, plus a bunch of Desk Accessories.
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My first Mac was a Macintosh Plus I received in 1987 as a Christmas present as a junior in high school. I also received a 20 mb hard drive. That Mac lasted me about 6 years. I then got away from macs for about 20 years and bought a MBP in 2014. We shortly converted the whole house to macs a year later after I spent a day doing Windows tech suppport for my wife and kids. That day, I uploaded all our data into the cloud, junked all PCs (After removing the hard drives) and we went on a Mac shopping spree. I have had no days wasted on tech support since then and the “Mac Tax” has more than paid for itself.
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I’m old. 
I started with an Apple II, and my first Mac WAS the first Mac. What giant leap of faith that was.
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It was a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) with Lion osx. Now I am sure if it is false memory as I did use macs sometimes before but like David I loved the old icons. I would still prefer to have them really! I seem to remember that they were on Lion. However I think I might be misremembering?
mean… I really really want that whole game folder. And a way to get it onto my SE (or an emulator, I suppose, though it’s not the same). I loved playing Life and Death and Crystal Quest (though I was terrible at it) and Glypha and Shufflepuck Café…
Man, now I’m getting all misty eyed and nostalgic!
I think our only option would be for me to send you my 20Mb HD via the US mail! 
OH MAN!!! Sufflepuck! I forgot about that!
I’ll abbreviate my computer history and just say that one of the absolute high points was my Amiga 1000. It was ahead of its time, and came out at a time when “color” meant “games”, so business shunned it, etc.
I eventually went down the DOS/Windows road. I had a job doing field service on computer controlled machinery and CAD systems. I would wind up working on Windows-related problems during the day, then come home to Windows-related problems on my own PC or that of my wife at the time.
I tried really hard to make Linux work, but it’s just a pain. I was transitioning from computers as a hobby to computers as a tool. I just wanted them to work.
I eventually found a beige G3 desktop at a PC store, plunked down my $125 and took it home. So much better! So that’s my first Mac story.
Soon thereafter I bought an iMac G4, and have been as Mac as possible ever since. As I’m sure you all know, they are just better machines. My colleagues alternately say they don’t like Macs, too expensive, etc. then the next day they are banging on their Lenovo laptop to get the trackpad to work, or wondering why the display hinge is broken, etc.
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My first Mac was a plastic G4 iBook…which after 7 replacement keyboards (all with cracked front edges from the raised strips on the screen) and one replacement mother board (All covered by Apple Care) Apple replaced it FOC with a brand new (at the time) aluminium unibody MacBook which is still going strong today .
You may pay the price up front, but get lower lift cost and great service from Apple 
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I worked on an Apple IIe in school and then a mac 128. Once I graduated, I purchased my first Mac - an SE 2/20 FDHD. The salesman told me I would never need more than a 20 MB hard drive!!
I also had a carring case for the SE so it was also my first “laptop”
There was a DA program you could install that would change the sounds and let you assign sounds to certain actions - cant remember what it was called. But if you choose the wrong startup sound - by wrong I mean too much memory for the audio, it would crash the Mac. Good TImes!!
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I wasn’t into computers when I was a kid. No one I knew had one, the only ones I saw were in school, and I have no idea what they were. There was one class that you could take to use them, but before you took that class you had to take a typing class where we learned to type on an old typewriter. The teacher would put on records of classical music and tell us to type to the beat. White out, trying to line up your rows, good grief.
But I digress…
I was overseas when I heard that the next Mac OS was going to be based on Unix. “Finally!” I thought, a reliable Unix core with a usable UI. I bought my first Mac, an iBook G4, as soon as I could after coming back to the states in '03. It was slow, it was heavy, the screen on it wasn’t as good as the PC I had at work, but I loved everything about that old Mac.
Up until that time I’d been using BSD and old Linux on a PC I bought before I knew what I was buying it for. I didn’t really even know what the Internet was when I bought it. How far we’ve come. Anyway, this is the ad that sold me on the Mac:
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Having gotten some money for a Christmas Gift in 1984, I knew I wanted a computer. I thought I wanted a PC Jr. We went to Computerware over in Palo Alto to test drive the computers there. The PC Jr. was okay, but the Mac128 allowed me to write something in MacWrite, and then draw something in MacDraw or MacPaint, and then copy paste the drawing into the MacWrite document. At that point in history this was a HUGE development! But then it was time to move on, so I hit Quit, and instead of quitting, this helpful little creature asked me if I wanted to save my creation first. Double wow! We walked out with the Mac 128. Later upgraded it to a MacPlus, and still have it. Donated it briefly to the Educational computer museum which was run by Liza Loop, but when she had to close the museum, I brought it back home. Oh, I think I my also still have the ImageWriter, too. Oh, and our son was born in 1985, into a home with a home computer. He’s 33 now, never having lived in a home without a computer. (Me, I’m old enough to remember being the first home in our area with a black & white TV, so be kind to me. I consider myself to be fairly computer literate, and proud to be one of the few grannies capable of paying for her groceries with her Apple Watch.) Am now trying to master the hidden tricks with the Apple TV.
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Note: image from Smithsonian - http://americanhistory.si.edu/
Apple ][ in 1979. Fully “maxed out” RAM of 48K, later to 64K with the “language card” for PASCAL programming. I avidly followed the A.P.P.L.E. user group and used the WozPak games and utilities. After a few months of struggling to load software using a cassette tape recorder, I finally bought the Disk II, a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive with a capacity of 140 kB in late 1979. A useful hack to double the capacity of the floppy disks was to defeat the write-protect feature using a paper hole punch to cut a 2nd notch in the floppy disk sleeve, then turn the disk over to use the opposite side of the floppy disk for recording.
The VisiCalc spreadsheet changed everything - the Apple ][ became a real computer. The 40-column display limitation was a real hindrance for spreadsheet and word processor use, so there was a period of a couple of years of competing third-party 80-column display boards for the Apple ][. I happily used dBase II and WordStar in CP/M emulation mode until the 80-column display board became flaky due to overheating. This led to purchase of an IBM PC in 1983, with a proper 80-column built-in display.
After years of struggling with MS-DOS and later Windows, I bought a pair of iMacs for my wife and me in 2009. Neither of us have touched Windows since then and are happily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem - iPhones, iPads, Macs and multiple AppleTVs.
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That brings back some memories.
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