My first Apple device was an iPod Touch. My wife’s was the OG iPad. After that her sister had bought a 17” MBP and just didn’t like it so she gave it to us. We both used it for awhile then bought our own Macs just before we retired. After supporting Windows for years we just wanted a change. Now have a multitude of Apple devices.
Some items were in response to other bad products. After killing 3 Fitbits in a couple of years we got Watches and never had a problem.
I’m a millennial so the iPod was my gateway drug into Apple. The first iPod Video 30 Gigs to be precise in 2006. Actually the true start was Pepsi promotion that gave you a free song with a code underneath the bottle caps on iTunes. That got me hooked on iTunes content and my parents were early cord-cutters so iTunes was a way for my teenage self to keep up with Avatar the Last Airbender. Had a slew of iPods, (raise a glass to the iPod Nano Watch) got familiar with iOS vis-a-vis iPads and iPod Touches and then got my first iPhone in 2014 and my first Apple Watch in 2017. I also joined the ranks of Mac Users in 2010 with a MacBook Pro I got for High School Graduation and have been using macOS ever since.
What I would give for a modernized iPod with a clickwheel. A Watch as my phone and a new iPod would be my dream every day carry.
My first Mac was the original 512 Mac that appeared not long after the first 128 Mac. I was in the academic world and could get it with student discount.
I had owned two computers before this made by HP. Beautiful machines that came with HP-BASIC built in. You were expected to write your own software. My Mac was the first time I came in contact with “commercial” software. The mouse was also such a great idea. My second HP had a wheel built into the keyboard that allowed you to scroll the screen, but beyond this, the intereaction was all with keyboard keys.
For years during the IBM/Mac wars, PC users would crow about how much faster using the keyboard was than playing with that stupid mouse. But it was hard to keep a good idea down forever once a small bridgehead of Mac users had become established.
I was lent a prototype Macintosh before anyone knew it was coming (and had to sign a very scary non-disclosure agreement before they’d even tell me what they wanted me to test) as I was doing some work with the BBC on their computers in education TV series. I remember watching my then 4 year old moving the mouse and clicking to make a little horse run around, and me using a WYSIWYG word processor for the first time, and desperately wanted one but a Mac was completely beyond my and my employer’s means.
Many years later, I bought the first gen MB Air with my own money, and shortly thereafter, went completely Apple.
I loved Apple for its focus on what I wanted to do rather than tech for the sake of it - just seeing beautifully designed and formed fonts and a thoughtfully designed UI was magical. I still love Apple but often feel the drive for market share and money is now prioritised over the drive for sheer excellence.
July/August 2008, I bought the cheapest stock model of the white plastic MB, which was my first taste of MacOS (including Scrivener, which was a big draw). It was wonderful:
I had lusted after an Apple device for some years, but I couldn’t afford this machine until I got my first job after the PhD. I first encountered Macs some years earlier, when I was a study-abroad student c. 2003 and managed to buy myself a cheap, heavy, slow, and generally awful Compaq laptop. One of my new flatmates instead had one of these aluminium body MBPs from that era. She was also the coolest, hippest, person: a student journalist from Copenhagen who edited her own newspaper. From thereon I was convinced that creatives and writers work better on Mac. Thankfully, the next job provided me with my own MBP (2010), and I haven’t looked back since.
The first Apple device I bought wasn’t actually an Apple device! I grew up with a Mac LC and later a Performa 6300 at home, but as I approached high school graduation, I became fixated on the Apple clones that were getting a lot of buzz in the mid-to-late '90s. During my senior year, I saved money from part-time jobs to help pay for a Power Computing machine I planned to bring to college. I wish I remembered the exact model or what eventually happened to it, but I clearly remember the day it was delivered to my family’s small-town home on an 18-wheeler that could barely make it down the street. (It was an exciting day!)
Why did I buy it? Because I was a total Mac geek in high school, and I remember poring over MacUser magazine, obsessing over the specs of those clone machines.
Thirty years on, the enthusiasm is still there!
I bought my first Mac in 2001 because I was frustrated at graphics drivers in Linux constantly breaking with every update (I was never a Windows user and went from AmigaOS->Linux in 1998). I was lured by Mac OS X and the promise of a Unix environment that didn’t need lots of tinkering.
I regularly used a Mac for the first time in 1994, when I got my first job as a journalist and I was given a Macintosh Portable to work on. I couldn’t afford my own though until 2001.
First used a powerbook for work in the mid 90’s and my boss had a Mac. That was the first time I was really exposed to the software as well, although I had worked with a friend who had an apple II. I liked them, but was using MS-DOS machines mostly and liked to run a dual-boot into linux. After awhile the overhead got to be too much “fun”. When they came out with OSX and I could dive into unix though I knew that would be it for me. And when I got married and with kids, and had to be the IT guy at home, I made sure we went all-in on the apple ecosystem. I even made sure I bought MacBooks as high school graduation gifts for family that were college-bound despite the generation that prefers PCs for gaming (including my own!). They can buy and maintain their own non-apple systems, which they have done, but I don’t want the windows headaches anymore. But to summarize your original question - it was power/ease-of-use, but mostly ability to dive into unix whenever I want, and super low overhead vs DOS/windows.
My first purchase was an iMac G5 for my wife at Christmas in 2004. We had visited the Apple Store and she was eyeing it. Considering the problems I had to deal with supporting her Windows computer, I decided to give it a go.
I bought an iBook for myself the following Spring. These were the first of many Macs over the years.
I also briefly owned an iPod, before any Mac purchase, but I found that it would not play about half of my MP3s for some reason, so I returned it within a couple of days. Sadly, there was a 20% restocking fee back then.
My first Apple product was the 2002 iPod 2G. I had to install a firewire card in my PC and run Musicmatch Jukebox to use it. Until 2012 or so, when I bought a MacBook Air to replace my Lenovo ThinkPad, the only Apple products I bought were iPods.
A Future Shop (now Best Buy) opened up near to us and I wanted to go. They had a display of computers and one of them was the first iMac G4 “sunflower” computer. I was utterly enthralled with it. It was way out of anything I could afford, but I went back to the store just to look at it and use it a little many more times.
That put Apple on the radar for me, and so when I saw the iPod that came out roughly the same time, I made it a mission to get one as soon as I could. That was the gateway… there was no turning back.
I never owned one either, but I’ve seen and used one and the iMac G4 is my favourite Mac ever. Every now and then I still Window shop on eBay.
Back when software was a physical purchase. Also back then there was no alternative to Microsoft Office. Now we don’t have any Microsoft software around.
My first Apple computer, an Apple II, the software was loaded into the memory via cassette tape. Load into the player, wait for the scratching sound, hit pause, type load on the Apple, hit play on the tape player. Minutes later you had a 8k program ready to run. Ah, the good ole days.
Happened upon a 128K Macintosh in person today at MoMA, as part of the “Pirouette Turning Points in Design” show. It’s an exhibition about how everyday objects (Post-Its, emoji, Aeron chairs, flip phones, etc.) have reshaped our lives through inventive design. If you happen to be in NYC between now and November, I highly recommend check it out—lots of neat stuff.
Still have the box in a drawer somewhere.
Samsung made me buy my first apple device. I had a flagship galaxy phone with a broken power button that they refused to warranty repair because of a tiny chip in the screen outside the viewing area. Instead of giving Samsung almost the cost of a phone to replace a screen that wasn’t a problem for me, I spent that money on an iPhone.
After being resolutely anti apple I now have multiple macs, iPads, iPhones a watch, Apple TV, air pods, and so far have been very fairly treated as a customer. Every time I spend money with Apple I treat it as another middle finger to Samsung.
Why? Because it was the first personal computer I encountered that regular people that I knew were able to operate easily. 1989, on a brief stateside visit from church work in France, where I used a “word processor/big typewriter with memory” for creating documents of various sorts. Didn’t know the difference between PC and Mac or Apple II. France had its own entries into the home computer market as well. I naïvely assumed they were all the same. Hah! I took the Yellow Pages (!), listed out all the computer stores in town and went to them one by one: I’m looking for a computer, preferably a portable that will do word processing and moderate page layout. Oh, you have one! Great. Show me how it works. Oh, that one isn’t working at the moment. Oh. Sometimes it was Well, I’m afraid our guy that knows how to run that isn’t here today. But it works just great, trust me! Needless to say, those were all PC shops. Someone at church suggested I go talk to a mutual friend, whom I’ll call Bert. Bert put out all the publications for a small private college, using nothing but a Macintosh SE. He showed me how it operated, and I took a drive. I fell in love immediately, and prepared to head to the nearest CompUSA to get a MacPlus.
Added RAM to the Plus (a tradition that continued with every Mac I’ve owned up until the recent M2Max MacBook Pro), went back to France, where I eventually moved on to the LC and a MacII vx. Returning to the U.S. for good has led to a steady stream of Macs: iMac Bondi, iMac 27" Retina, PowerBook G4, BlackBook, Minis, EMac, and a variety of laptops of varying vintages for my wife, family, and friends. Never regretted any of them. I discovered early on that the Mac let me type French accented letters easily, a truly ugly thing to accomplish on friends’ PCs.
That said, employment at Nortel let me compare PCs and Macs in depth, as I used both there. More recently, forays into Linux have shown me some good modern PC hardware. Different worlds. I truly wish Apple would make it possible for Linux to access iCloud data more easily.
As a relative youngin around here, my first Apple device was an 2nd-gen iPod Touch circa 2009. I remember being very disappointed that the games they showed off at the iPhone Keynotes (like Infinity Blade) would not run on it! For a certain age group, the iPod Touch was such a gateway drug to the Apple world. It primed you to want an iPhone when you became a teenager.
As far as the first Apple device I spent my own money on, I bought a used 9.7in iPad Pro with the keyboard case and pencil during my freshman year of college in 2016. It more than paid for itself as I “procured” my textbooks from around the web and just used the iPad. Also as a math major, I saved probably thousands of sheets of paper by using the Pencil for note-taking, homework, and practice exams during undergrad and grad school.
