My first Mac was a 2012 MBP. Shortly after that, I got a 2015 MBA.
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What was your first Mac?
- Thread starter The Cockney Rebel
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Early 2009 Mac mini. Once I got past the initial discomfort of doing some things differently than I always had on a Windows machine I never looked back. I've had a few other Mac mini's since then and a few MacBooks as my main device, but I always seem to return to a mini as my main machine. Loving the M4 mini these days.
2018 Macbook Air Intel i3, 8GB. Couldn't even play 4k Youtube videos.
It was $1300 CAD 💀
It was $1300 CAD 💀
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My first Mac was a Macintosh Performa 400 in 1993. I was fascinated by how advanced and sleek Macs seemed compared to PCs. It was a graduation present.
Today I'm sitting at an M2 Max Mac Studio with two displays and I would love to show this to my younger self!
We had a Performance 550.
Early adopter of Macs in the printing industry late 80s; Macintosh SE for portable use at customer site and many Macintosh II (ci, cs and fx) with Radius 24”(?) highres monitors or the fantastic tall one-page Apple monitor. Beautiful monochrome CRT screens.
2006 17" polycarbonate white iMac. Still got it. Swapped in an SSD and installed 22.04 64 bit Ubuntu Mate - Wifi, Cam, Speakers and Mic all working - bit of a palaver, but not impossible. With a subdued gradient background and a fully populated Dock at the bottom it looks and feels very much like a Mac. Registered for the free Pro upgrade so now fully supported til 2032 by which time it will be 26 years old and who knows, maybe I will risk another Ubuntu LTS upgrade if I feel strong enough. It's debatable who will last longest, me or the computer.
P.S. I call him Donald. As in Old Mac Donald. I can hear the groans.
So do I actually use it on a daily basis? No, course not, but it was a fun project and I do enjoy rabbiting on about it!
P.S. I call him Donald. As in Old Mac Donald. I can hear the groans.
So do I actually use it on a daily basis? No, course not, but it was a fun project and I do enjoy rabbiting on about it!
my first was the 13-inch aluminum MacBook (2008 or 2009... I don't remember). It was great. It also came out at time when MacBooks used to have polycarbonate shells. It also had a removable battery!!!!
I upgraded to a late 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, which lasted me ages until I replaced it with an M1 MacBook Air in 2021.
I upgraded to a late 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, which lasted me ages until I replaced it with an M1 MacBook Air in 2021.
A Performa 630 bought in April 1995. Which cost me the equivalent of of almost £2500 in today's money. For pretty much the base Mac!
It had a mighty 33MHz, 8 MB of RAM and a 250MB Hard Drive.
I think the lightning to HDMI Adaptor from about 8 years back is more powerful than that computer.
It was for University work but also allowed me to play Marathon and Dark Forces.
It had a mighty 33MHz, 8 MB of RAM and a 250MB Hard Drive.
I think the lightning to HDMI Adaptor from about 8 years back is more powerful than that computer.
It was for University work but also allowed me to play Marathon and Dark Forces.
Macintosh Classic II - b/w 9 inch screen in early 1990s I think.
Used Aldus Pagemaker to put together a 24 page A3 newspaper.
Good fun!!!
Used Aldus Pagemaker to put together a 24 page A3 newspaper.
Good fun!!!
Used white G3 iBook when I was in grad school around 2003 or 2004. Macs were really uncommon on my campus at the time, so I was on my own with issues. It had a problem where it would randomly shut down (crash) when closed, and when I opened it back up it would make the startup chime at full volume. That didn't go over well in class.
I didn't know enough about it to fix it at the time, other than a full OS reinstall, or how turn off the chime, so I sold it after a few months. Came back in 2008 with the Core 2 Duo Unibody.
I didn't know enough about it to fix it at the time, other than a full OS reinstall, or how turn off the chime, so I sold it after a few months. Came back in 2008 with the Core 2 Duo Unibody.
PowerMac G4 “Quicksilver” with OS X Jaguar. I was starting my endeavours into opening a photography and design business and decided that since that industry used Macs, so would I. Although I still have Windows computers, my main computer has been a Mac ever since.
Not sure... I do remember when I got in the classroom and saw a small suit case with something inside that looked like an older mechanical typewriter without the cover on top. Not unusual then, mobile typewriters came in suit cases. Until I saw the small monitor next to it. Maybe the first "mobile" computer. Unfortunately I don't have any photographs of that day.
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I'm ancient. My first Mac was a Macintosh Classic that my college was tossing into the trash (they just gave it to me at the end of the day since it looked interesting to me) and I remember it being possibly the WORST experience I've ever had since CP/M (yeah, I'm THAT old!). I managed to upgrade the ram to 4MB MAX (which is really crap for a computer made in 1991 of all times!) and got the OS to update to 7.5.3 (it supported 7.5.5 but no amount of cutting out unnecessary apps/extensions would allow it to fully fit into the 40MB SCSI HDD it came with, not that I was missing out on much.
I got more ideas from a forum called the Mac 512K. Learned how to get a ADB to external modem adapter and Eudora email to get internet and email working, albeit EXTREMELY crash-prone. That forum did NOT take kindly to criticism. In fact, just spelling 'Mac' as 'MAC' would get a warning from the moderators (as would spelling it as 'mac'). If you dared relay the fact that yes, Macs DO crash (and crash often back in the classic Mac OS days!) they would warn you and any further remarks would warrant a ban. I ultimately got banned when I posted a crappy photo shoot of my Mac Classic doing one of those 'bomb errors' (Sorry, a system error has occurred, [RESTART]) which was another issue, since any crash or 'general protection fault' in Windows 3.11 would just close the program, but ANY crash of any origin on a classic Mac would bring the entire system down requiring a full-reboot which, with enough extensions could take a few minutes! That forum believed that unlike Windows, Macs 'never crash,' and that my issue was 'my fault'. As I 'broke' it somehow, making claims that the RAM was at fault, or the HDD was dying, or it had capacitor plague. No, it was a piece of obsolete crap when it launched in 1991 with a paltry Motorola 68000 CPU and a max RAM of 4 MB in an era of computers that could go as high as 64MB and with CPUs that could compete with the later PowerPC. Even a 68030 would have been a better option. I don't know who was to blame for the Macintosh Classic even existing but despite the horrid experience, I did love the design of Apple hardware and I found 'better' Macs at secondhand shops (some going for as cheap as $15 for a Power Macintosh 6300 which could do stuff!) and I even collected a few Apple II machines (wish I had kept them! I had a pristine IIGS and IIC+ with all the disks!)
I later got a free G4 Titanium Powerbook, which still works (battery still holds charge despite being decades old by this point!) and later a couple of Intel MBPs and now a M3 Air. Windows kinda ruined it with the flat design of Windows 8 and on, and I don't harbor nostalgia for Tandy DeskMate (computers at Middle School) or CP/M so flat design UI really seems dated to me. At least MacOS hasn't changed much since OS X. In fact, with liquid glass in Tahoe, it feels closer and closer to the Aqua look of OS X 10.2, which runs on my Powerbook.
I got more ideas from a forum called the Mac 512K. Learned how to get a ADB to external modem adapter and Eudora email to get internet and email working, albeit EXTREMELY crash-prone. That forum did NOT take kindly to criticism. In fact, just spelling 'Mac' as 'MAC' would get a warning from the moderators (as would spelling it as 'mac'). If you dared relay the fact that yes, Macs DO crash (and crash often back in the classic Mac OS days!) they would warn you and any further remarks would warrant a ban. I ultimately got banned when I posted a crappy photo shoot of my Mac Classic doing one of those 'bomb errors' (Sorry, a system error has occurred, [RESTART]) which was another issue, since any crash or 'general protection fault' in Windows 3.11 would just close the program, but ANY crash of any origin on a classic Mac would bring the entire system down requiring a full-reboot which, with enough extensions could take a few minutes! That forum believed that unlike Windows, Macs 'never crash,' and that my issue was 'my fault'. As I 'broke' it somehow, making claims that the RAM was at fault, or the HDD was dying, or it had capacitor plague. No, it was a piece of obsolete crap when it launched in 1991 with a paltry Motorola 68000 CPU and a max RAM of 4 MB in an era of computers that could go as high as 64MB and with CPUs that could compete with the later PowerPC. Even a 68030 would have been a better option. I don't know who was to blame for the Macintosh Classic even existing but despite the horrid experience, I did love the design of Apple hardware and I found 'better' Macs at secondhand shops (some going for as cheap as $15 for a Power Macintosh 6300 which could do stuff!) and I even collected a few Apple II machines (wish I had kept them! I had a pristine IIGS and IIC+ with all the disks!)
I later got a free G4 Titanium Powerbook, which still works (battery still holds charge despite being decades old by this point!) and later a couple of Intel MBPs and now a M3 Air. Windows kinda ruined it with the flat design of Windows 8 and on, and I don't harbor nostalgia for Tandy DeskMate (computers at Middle School) or CP/M so flat design UI really seems dated to me. At least MacOS hasn't changed much since OS X. In fact, with liquid glass in Tahoe, it feels closer and closer to the Aqua look of OS X 10.2, which runs on my Powerbook.
5 1/4s. And have memories of punching a write tab into "read only" floppies when I needed to repurpose a disk.
Someone correctly note that the //e was not a Mac. My first actual Mac was the lime green macbook running X beta. Boy was that a game changer, having a laptop that ran unix. Prior to there were certainly ways to get linux up and running on a laptop but it was ugly. SPARCbooks and IBM laptop hardware that would run Solaris or AIX came with crazy price tags. OS X really changed things up.
I got a SE/30 for work but then donated it to the in-laws a few years later when I had a faster machine at work. They mourned SE/30's passing 10 years later... They loved that machine, as did I.
I did work experience with punch cards and mainframes.I have programmed using punch cards on mainframes ... that's old.
I was the chubby college kid, and the staff would lock me in between the storage racks 😀.
In 2008 I was tired of having a lot of issues with my PC and jumped to a maxed 24" iMac. Remember when I saw the screen in the store for the first time, it was so huge at that time. After 2 days at home, memory module died and had to be replaced. Not a good way to start. It was the version with the Nvidia 8800GS and fried twice outside guarantee period. Second time I've replaced it with an ATI 2600 Pro which was more reliable. I've upgraded to 6GB of RAM even if it was not officially supported, added an SSD and installed High Sierra also not officially supported. The machine is still in working state and still working pretty decent given its age.