September 4, 2009 (sorry, American)…ah that was about a week or two before my TiBook would die and the hunt for a replacement started. Between then and Christmas 2009 I got by with a PC I had lying around.
My daughter was 1 and my son was in first grade. There was about 3.5 years left before the G5 at work would also die and the boss got me a Mac Pro.
During that first week at grad school, I relied on my key lime clamshell (yah, you know the one) to take down lecture notes in seminar because my previous daily driver prior to the stolen A1226 was my A1134 iBook G4. It had been repaired recently under AppleCare (literally, with days left to spare), but despite their half-measure fix, it was still fragile to transport and would get very tetchy when tapped just so between keyboard and trackpad (which was often, since that’s where my thumb rests). This was still during a time when one could log onto the university wi-fi with legacy 802.11b devices, so that wasn’t a problem for the clamshell, nor was using whatever browser I was using (no recollection). It was just… not as fast.
But my oh my: my new cohorts gave me lots of strange looks during that first week since I was using what, even for 2009, seemed like a white squirrel: rarely seen, often spoken of as legend, and unsure how to react when actually spotted.
