1999
Circa 1999, I was a MSFT engineer. Made a living off windows 95, 98 and their servers. Reinstalling OSs, viruses, DLL hell, and more. So grateful that people had so many problems, but at the end of the day... did I really want to come home and fix my own computer? No, I wanted to come home to a working computer and so I went the Linux route to start around 97...Linux was pretty brutal back then in terms of ease of use...but I learned to make it work. Then I read somewhere that Apple was building a new OS on top of Free BSD, which was super interesting to me. Macs were this mysterious part of my childhood and the GUI was always super attractive to me. When OSX came out, I got myself a used Mac and started to play. Within a year or so I got myself a Mac Pro (Quicksilver I think) and then in 2002ish? I got the 17 inch PowerBook because some hacker who had gotten out of jail recommended it! haha I remember it took like 4 months to get it after I ordered it. Remember, Apple used to introduce products many months before they could be gotten back in the day... well... needless to say, I never looked back and love my OSX!
The iMac was never on my list of possible computers because they were weak compared to either my Powerbooks or MacBook Pros... but with the last few releases, they have become as powerful as one would need and I was just waiting for this version with USB 3 and a real SSD solution (not that slow Toshiba in the previous model) to become my first iMac VS... building another hackintosh or going the Mac Pro route (which I did for a year, only to sell it as it was overkill for my work)