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First Mac experience . . .

How did you . . .

  • By ads (all in one, iLife etc...)?

    Votes: 3 1.9%

  • Friends/Family?

    Votes: 59 37.3%

  • Second Hand/Cheap?

    Votes: 6 3.8%

  • Hand-me-down?

    Votes: 3 1.9%

  • Software compatibility?

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Looks?

    Votes: 13 8.2%

  • Generally better than pcs?

    Votes: 35 22.2%

  • OSX?

    Votes: 39 24.7%
  • Total voters
    158
acearchie

acearchie

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 15, 2006
3,264
104
My dad first switched when he got tired of mac for his movie editing software! At that point I got his old, old, old sony viao laptop I thought it was cool until he got an iMac and I thought wow! I suppose the real reason was he would let me play bugdom when ever I wanted! I considered this the best game on the universe at that time (I was about 8 and new to gaming!). The he got an iBook G3 and from then on I have been mac!
 
First used a Mac at work in 1994.

It was a IIfx with 4mb RAM and a 40MB hard drive and a black and white monitor.
This was for graphic design work - try designing colour work on a black and white monitor.

I eventually bought my own Mac, an LC again with a black and white screen. This was then replaced by a first gen Lime iMac in 1999 which I still have but just pensioned off only a couple of months ago to be replaced by a 2000 model iMac.
 
My first Mac experience was in 1990 with a Mac SE. We got one cause a friend of my Dad's had one.

At that point in time Macs were fairly popular. I've been a Mac enthusiast for over 15 years and proud of it!
 
I voted "generally better than PCs" because that's what I believed. At the risk of getting flamed, though, I am beginning to think I was wrong...or I got a lemon :( .
 
My first Mac experience was a little scary because I didn't know what to expect, but after that, I couldn't get enough!

The year was 2004 and I was still a virgin. A Power Mac and a PowerBook later... I can't be any happier. :)
 
I'm not sure what your poll is actually asking.

I first used Macs (Classics) in 1994 at school. They were interesting machines, but they sucked. I couldn't find the command line, and the mouse balls were all gummed up. The screens were tiny and weren't colour. The one redeeming feature was HyperCard.

I bought an iBook in 2003 (on Valentine's day, actually) and every computer I've bought since has been a Mac :D
 
My first mac wasnt really mine, it was my mums, she brought it home from her work (at a uni) when I was about 12 yrs old, it was a Mac 512. (the first Mac)

I couldn't believe how cool the mouse was! it was the best thing ever.

Later she came home with a Mac Plus. wow! it seemed pretty much the same as the Mac 512.

Then one day she came home with a massive metal box, it was ugly, it was a PC, running DOS with wordperfect on it. I hated it. I wanted the Mac back.

I specifically remember playing with this "PC" when mum wasn't around. I figured out some basic DOS commands, like "dir" and "del". I was looking at some files on one of mums floppy disk's, (happened to be her thesis). I was curious as to why there were two files with funny names, they were "." and "..". I figured I'd help mum, and delete them.

so I typed "del ."

Boy did I get in trouble or what!!!!! it totally erased the disk, urgh.

Unfortunately it was some time until she brought home a powerbook.

On the other hand, I had an Apple IIc (hand me down from mum), which I later (1989'ish) sold and replaced with an Amiga 500 (so cool! gamez!)

I only really knew PC, for a long time (with school, etc), I did so badly in school that mum said that if I did well for the next semester she would buy me a new PC! So I did well, and she bought me my first PC. It was a 386 DX 33 I think, It had 1MB ram, we upgraded it to 8MB ram (1meg simms), and it cost a fortune to upgrade. The machine had a 40meg hard drive! WOW!

Some time went past, and this cool company called Creative Labs came along with this neat consumer device called a sound blaster. I had to have one. They were packaging them in a kit with a 2x speed CDROM!!! OMG! The CDROM had a proprietry interface, (not IDE), and plugged into the sound blaster card.

Mum bought the kit and I installed it myself into my PC. WOW, I could even play a music CD in the machine now! far out!

Kings Quest and Space Quest had jingles now, and voices, instead of beeps! *amazing*. (sierra software were THE game developers back then)

One day I stumbled across a 486 DX40 mainboard (I'm sure it had a soldered-on AMD processor), holy smoke! 486 POWER! I was truely blown away.

This went on for some years... (PC's) lets say... about 16 years!

Then one day my wife and I decided to 'switch' to Mac's. No one we knew had them, so we didn't get to play with them really (except in the apple store)

In all honesty, the iPod (fantastic) helped us decide to switch. Being such a great product, why wouldnt a Mac be a great product?

We both switched early 2006, and haven't looked back :D

OMG my MacBook Pro can play music CD's !@!%! :p
 
You forgot the "iPod halo effect" option :p. Well one day in 2005-ish I was looking at the iPods on the Apple website, trying to see what was so good about them since everyone had them and I didn't know what was so good about them (yet). I soon found out and saved up a $200 to buy an iPod mini! So then I guess I wandered over to the iBook/PowerBook section of the Apple website, dispelled my misconceptions about Macs, and I knew I had to have one of those too! So now (a while later), I'm typing this on my MacBook! That still sounds cool, my MacBook. :D
 
i think i voted for the wrong one. it was a hand-me-down from my sister; she used a classic ii in college and handed it to me afterward. system 7.1 and a mac user ever since.
 
Wow everyone seems like a pretty long running mac user! I though my 8 years was good! Personally I thought these forums would appeal more to new mac users! How wrong I am!
 
i just saw one somewhere on the internet about apple releasing intel macs, and instantly fell in love. th thing is, i didn't get one for many,many months, as i was getting it through the make a wish foundation. I would never look back (if my school didn't supply us with winblows lappies)
 
About 2 years ago I had a series of bad weeks with a PC laptop (reinstall after reinstall), and it really didn't want to do what I wanted it to do, so I decided I needed to change. My opinion was that Apple couldn't be worse, so I did a little research and jumped in, getting a 12" PowerBook. I had no interest in Apple before, and thought iPods were a rip off.

Now I have a MacBook and a 30G iPod.
 
I simply got tired of my old pc, it was way to bulky, ugly, slow and unreliable... It would litterly crash 2 times a day, and some times even more often - when running a second desktop on my tv I couldn't run more than one program on the pc screen or it would crash... once it crashed because I got a call on skype...

So I simply decided to do what I had been wanting to do for many years and I have regretted even just a little bit...
 
My first computers at school were Apple ]['s.

I think my first real exposure to a Mac was an SE that my dad brought home from work occasionally. Considering the rest of the time he was using a VT100 terminal with a 1200 baud modem ("computer games" for me were REXX scripts that did text animations or played "guess a number between 1 and 100"), this was light years ahead!

Then in grade 5 I had a teacher who had one in the classroom, and we used it for typing. I distinctly remember the chunky keyboard and how it would make that "KaTHUNK!" every time you pressed a key.
 
The worst thing I hate about PCs is the fact that after having one for like 6 months they get all clogged up and litreally stopped working! Either this happens to everyone or I go through a lot of flukey laptops! Also all PCs are so big and designed SOOOOO wrong! Its like a sin that people still buy them!
 
I think I've had just about every kind of PC one could own. I think I transitioned from an Apple IIgs to an Atari Mega 2 ST to an Mac 840AV. Before that there were a plethora of various PC and Apple ][ machines. I'm currently dating my 24" iMac. She's wonderful.
 
Cybix said:
I specifically remember playing with this "PC" when mum wasn't around. I figured out some basic DOS commands, like "dir" and "del". I was looking at some files on one of mums floppy disk's, (happened to be her thesis). I was curious as to why there were two files with funny names, they were "." and "..". I figured I'd help mum, and delete them.

so I typed "del ."

Boy did I get in trouble or what!!!!! it totally erased the disk, urgh.
Click to expand...

Haha!

My dad did the same thing, only to his hard drive because he was running out of room and he "hadn't put those files there". :p
 
I got my first Mac back in 1994: A Performa 630 CD, a very capable multimedia machine for it's age and price range... of course multimedia back in those days meant it could play multimedia CDs, i.e. CDs with both video and sound... :p

The Performa was an ugly beige box running System 7.1. I'd never seen an Apple ad, none of my family had any computers, it was brand new and more expensive than a well spec'ed Mac Pro with a monitor is today (and that's even before you take inflation into the account). Didn't have any special software I needed to run.

The only thing that drove me to getting that machine was that I couldn't stand DOS/Windows 3.11 and my Amiga 500 seemed like a joke. So it seemed generally better than PCs...

So I got a Mac. And has never regretted that decision... :)
 
My best friend in high school had an original Mac 128 back 1984. It blew my lowly Commodore 64 out of the water, and I knew I had to have one. It took me until my junior year in college -- 1987 -- to save up enough money, but when I switched, almost 20 years ago, I never looked back.
 
First Mac I used - a Mac Plus in '90, for CAD work in college; with 9" black 'n' white screens, no hard drive, 1MB(?) of RAM, and just a 3.5" floppy (so yes, we all had to do the famous "floppy shuffle"! :p) I remember taking a while to get used to using a mouse, it didn't immediately hit me that to move the mouse a long way you could lift the mouse up, bring it back to you, put it down and scroll again! :eek:

First Mac I owned - an LC, about a year or so later. Wanted the IIsi, but couldn't afford it. Still.. Woohoo!
 
March 1994 Performa 575.
The first computer we had in our house.
66MHz '040, 250MB hdd, 5MB ram (4 on board, plus 1 more in slot!!), 2X CD-ROM.
Picked up a whopping 16MB SIMM to replace the 1MB ($400) and connected to AOL with a screaming fast 14.4 Global Village modem.
And my Apple Color Stylewriter 2400 printer.

Ah, good times.
 
This'll date me.

1988 Macintosh SE, dual floppy.

Computer lab in High school. At the time PC's were running DOS, so the GUI impressed the hell out of me. I remember being fascinated with the 'zooming' window opening, and the mouse.

Ever since, with Windows' adoption later (Windows did exist in '88 but nobody in their right mind would use it), it always seemed to be lacking, a few steps behind, and that it was written by folks who just didn't care.
 
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