Tell Apple the Story of Your First Mac

Maybe I can tell the story of my first and last Mac.

It was the worst computer I ever had. Too many things to list, let me see if I remember some of them:

  - random stalls/hang-ups, had to upgrade RAM, throwing away the previous sticks because they were using both slots
  - power cable broke three times, it caught fire once http://lazyant.com/post/501307510/my-macbook-power-supply-cable-went-up-in-flames
  - palm rest broken from regular use
  - battery lasted about 3 months
  - a regular OS software upgrade screwed WiFi connectivity,  it would come and go. Couldn't roll back the software update, had to wait a few months for the next update
  - it made a lot of noise
  - etc etc

Dear Apple, my first Mac was a $600 Mac Mini.

Your salesman informed me that I needed to buy a $30 Mini-DVI to DVI cable, which I did, only to discover one already came in the box.

I kept it out in the open, with good ventilation on all sides, in a 70f room. It ran great for about six months before (most likely) overheating killed the hard drive, where I lost all my data. Opening the case with a putty knife was a fun treat. A CD was stuck in the drive, and none of the various methods and shortcuts to eject it were successful, so I had to physically pry the disc out once I swapped the hard drive to get the OS installation media in. The disc did not survive the extraction.

About three months later, I noticed my Linux VM was running ridiculously slow. Upon investigating, I learned that my RAM reported as 1GB instead of 2GB. One of the sticks had now (again, most likely) died from overheating. I tried replacing the RAM with new RAM, and the system refused to recognize it. I tried putting the original RAM back in, and the system still refused to recognize it. Tried every combination of all four sticks in both slots to no avail. The system never booted again.

And that was the story of my first Mac.

Mine's still going strong. 24" 2nd generation Intel iMac from late 2006. My Chinese in-laws use it to watch Chinese TV and films and skype their relatives in China. A video circuit gave out early on, but was replaced under warranty. The first hard drive failed a few years ago, but I had everything backed up in Time Machine, so no big deal. I only replaced it with a Mini in late 2012.

I can't say it's been more or less reliable that any other PC I've every owned, but in all those 7 years I've not had to worry about viruses once. For that alone it was worth every penny, especially from a 2006 perspective. It's been worth every penny over again for Time Machine. And again for iPhoto, iMovie and back in the day iDVD.

I had access to a lab of 512k/512kE/Plus Macs at the "gifted and talented" program in my public school district in Pennsylvania in 1985-199x, officially one day every 5-10 days, but ended up skipping regular classes, staying late, etc. with the cooperation of a couple of the teachers to use the lab more. HyperCard! Some "choose your own adventure" style game creation toolkit. Some early Mac games. Pascal. early SimCity. Some kind of dialup to somewhere (probably local BBSes? I think Fido mail too).

The main schools at the time had c64, Commodore PET, and then in middle school, labs of Apple II with sometimes IIgs; much less worthwhile, and all in structured classes like "we will all learn to type".

I mowed a lot of lawns, etc to save up for a Mac Classic 1/0 for $899 in 1990. (I had a "colecovision adam" before that, with the tape drive, printer, etc., which was essentially a word processor and games machine even when I got it; a c64 or apple II would have been a vastly better choice for a kid back then). I did Mac stuff with it for a few more years (very simple programming, hacking around with ResEdit, keeping up with the prepress going to digital transition, desktop publishing, etc.), but once I got VMS and UNIX accounts, and various dial-ups, and a modem, it turned into a glorified terminal. I eventually got a 486sx25 and then a P90 to replace it, running early 386BSD, BSD/OS, and Linux, but didn't get back into Macs until 2007 at a startup.

Ah, I remember my first mac... The distinctive organ sound when i turned it on.. The extremely low framerate in SC2 even though I paid twice as much as my PC friends... Sigh, Oct 2012, those were the days...

Before the fanbois hate: I bought a MBA because I was sick of dealing with Linux driver issues on my IBM laptop and wanted a *nix like environment and something really light so I could travel.

I don't think Apple wants to hear how I was promised a Macbook as down payment for a freelance job and how the client was disappointed that I didn't work fast enough so he started screaming at me on the phone and brought me to court to get his down payment back. But when I got to court, with the macbook packed and ready to go back because I didn't want to argue, he didn't show and by default in Sweden if the other person doesn't show you win the case so it became mine. It later became my mothers for a few years before I gave her a better one and now it gathers dust at my sisters I believe. :)

Edit: I think the story of how my first boss in IT got his first Apple is much more positive. I'm not sure if it was a Mac or an Apple but he went into a computer store and saw two computers on display. One had DOS running, which as we all know is just a blinking white cursor at a prompt, and the other had a graphical desktop, with a mouse. He's not an apple person but he told me "obviously I wanted the Apple".

I so strongly remember the first Mac I encountered... in 1984, tucked away in a corner room at Grinnell College. Some friends and I played with the MacDraw and MacWrite programs and the little dot-matrix printer, creating character sheets for a Call of C'thulhu RPG I was running that summer.

I knew this was the future, not that clunky VAX they were putting in downstairs to replace the PDP-11 that ran the campus network.

A year later, I walked away from college and computing, and didn't take it up again for several years. My first PC of my own was a Mac LC.

Does Next count? My father had the a bunch of old macs, Mac IIx and Mac 512k, I used to play reader rabbit on them. Then we had two Next computers, and those were sweet, I still use a Next keyboard with my work macbook air. We used them in grade school, and I remember how confusing the bottom left part of the keyboard was. It never made sense to me why pc and macs had different keyboards. Use to play kidpix on those.

My first Mac was a white iBook purchased from Amazon in December, 2002. My then girlfriend was home when the package arrived. She hid it and made me hunt for it when I got home from work. I finally found it in the dryer.

Inside the box was a pearl white slab of plastic. The best part about it was the smell...

I have not experienced boredom since.

It wasn't the twentieth anniversary mac, originally priced over seven thousand dollars.

http://www.mac512.com/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh.html

Christmas Morning, 1991.

It was a Macintosh LC, and I've never looked back.

Reflecting on the various Macs I've encountered over the years, it occurs to me that Apple does not get enough credit for the innovation they've done on the Mac platform. The current technology is so different from the original, I feel like they should be thought of ad two completely different platforms that just happen to share the same name.

The NextStep/OS X switch was a huge risk, but it has paid off huge. At the time the Unix heritage and shell was seen by most people as a step backward and liability. But it anticipated the rise of Linux and open source, and is probably the #1 reason Macs are so popular with tech influencers today.

It's also the reason they were able to move to Intel processors so easily. Not a chance that happens if they were still on Mac OS.

The slider at the bottom is pretty interesting. Looks like programming disappeared for a while and then came back.

I'm commenting using my first mac ;-)

You mean my hackintosh?