Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other computers.
And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like Linux too much to leave it behind.
My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working on my GUI in linux instead of working with it. I just wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work consistently, I didn't want my graphics drivers to break or be so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux, and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of getting out of the way so I can get to work.
Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment. I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to macOS.
I was exposed to NeXTSTEP on my job then and loved it. And I was using FreeBSD at home.
Then Mac OS X came, basically NeXTSTEP with some FreeBSD and a gorgeous GUI. Shut up and take my money…
(EDIT: This is HN, we all know that integrated CPUs/GPUs are not what is referred to as GPU.
Please don't be pedantic. )
I was on Win95 on laptops in the 90s, and that was a complete dumpster fire. Sleep never worked, long boot times, etc. But at the time, I was mostly producing documents and presentations, and Office was file-format-consistent across both platforms. I saw how a colleague's Powerbook worked, and bought my own. It was a HUGE improvement even though it was pre-OSX.
Then the firm tanked, and I went back to coding (LAMP stuff) at about the same time OSX was released. I upgraded and never looked back.
Having a machine where zsh is a click away and on which I can ALSO run Excel is wonderful.
That was what the “i” in “iMac” was for. It had a built-in 56K modem, with an RJ-11 jack.