

Tell Apple the Story of Your First Mac - samelawrence
https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/

======
lazyant
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

------
byuu
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.

~~~
72deluxe
But, does your First Mac == Last Mac?

~~~
byuu
If all of my software remains free, then yes. I am using a Hackintosh to
continue porting my software to OS X, but obviously I can't and won't release
any software built on an untrusted system, so everything is source-only. If I
ever decide to sell a product, then my personal grievances will be irrelevant
and I'll have to buy another.

When it was running, it was a nice, sleek, quiet, fast, low-power system. I
did not enjoy developing on it at all, but web browsing/movie playing/music
playing/chatting was very nice and polished. I realize my experiences may not
be the norm, but it has shattered my perception of, "you pay for hardware
quality." All of the parts inside were stock Samsung HDD/no-name RAM/etc, and
the cooling system was clearly compromised for form over function. No, you're
really only paying for the ability to load OS X without relying on sketchy
third-party cracks. I will definitely be buying their top-end AppleCare
warranty if I ever do purchase another Mac.

------
simonh
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.

------
rdl
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.

------
maerF0x0
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.

------
INTPenis
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".

------
beat
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.

~~~
fallinghawks
Was yours 256K RAM? Mine was, and yet everyone talks about the Mac SE or 512
like those were the earliest ones ever.

I bought a 2nd FD and a 300/1200 baud modem to go with it. I regularly
schlepped that sucker (heavy!) in its canvas bag 3/4 mile across campus from
my dorm to the math building. (Yeah, we had a PDP11 as well.) I used it to
desktop-publish (sort of) a newsletter for our sci-fi club. We didn't have the
ability to scan in the masthead or any pictures, so there was old fashioned
cut and paste going on as well. :)

~~~
beat
128k. Loading software was SSSSLLLLLOOOOOWWWWW.

------
joyeuse6701
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.

------
ra88it
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.

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

[http://www.mac512.com/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh.html](http://www.mac512.com/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh.html)

------
Fomite
Christmas Morning, 1991.

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

------
snowwrestler
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.

~~~
mietek
Well, there _was_ the Star Trek project...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project)

------
sp332
The slider at the bottom is pretty interesting. Looks like programming
disappeared for a while and then came back.

~~~
yardie
Probably because people think programming is using Codewarrior and Applebugs.
I used Hypercard and Excel but never considered it programming until I got to
college and did most of my calculus work in Excel (Matlab was too much work to
setup).

My first attempt at "programming" on a Mac ended up being pretty
disappointing. Codewarrior required a FPU and the Performas had the 68LC040
instead of the proper 68040. All those C books I checked out from the library
were wasted until I could use the school PC lab, for the 30 minutes of free
time I had.

------
shortsightedsid
I'm commenting using my first mac ;-)

------
taigeair
You mean my hackintosh?

