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What was your first Mac?

512k Macintosh with 2 floppy drives, and a 15" dot matrix printer.

Put my whole business onto JAZZ spreadsheets, Tax department were flummoxed :)

In 1985.
 
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I was first exposed to Macs at college in 1987, we had one of Australia's first DTP systems. But I couldn't afford my own till late 1995.

While everyone else was buying Windows 95 PCs, I bought a Power Mac 7200/75 (I couldn't stretch to the 7200/90, which was more popular).
 
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My first Mac was a grape G3 iMac (tray-loading) with a 333 MHz processor. It had Mac OS 8.6 installed at the factory and came with barely enough memory to even boot up! Still, it was a vast improvement over the WebTV box I had been using to access the internet. Currently I have an M1 iMac and an M2 MacBook Air.
 
Late 2009 MacBook, base model, as base as it could be. Bought in November 2009 for $999 at Best Buy. I ended up upping the RAM from 2GB to 4GB for OS X Lion, and swapped the hard drive from 250GB to 500GB sometime in 2010. It was a good machine, got lots of use. Sure got slow quickly though. Not surprising considering the hardware it had. Still, at the time it ran circles and circles around the comparable HP laptops I had used (2 of which burnt out the display after about a year each)....junk.
 
My first Mac was the Performa 5200 back in 1994 and that lasted until I was given a Toshiba Laptop with my job. In 2006, I bought a Intel MBP, and have upgraded every 3 years or so.
 
WebHead said:
we had one of Australia's first DTP systems
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Speaking of which, I wanted a LaserWriter the moment I laid eyes on one, tho back then they were huge and commanded the princely sum of $A40,000.

I finally bought my first laser printer (B&W) about five years ago for $A600.
 
The Cockney Rebel said:
Mine was a 24” 2008 iMac.

Top spec, at the time.

Such a lovely, lovely machine. It was actually this Mac that got me into photography.

What about you?
Click to expand...
128k Mac, floppy drive no hard drive. Took it to guy in Cupertino who ran a classified newspaper ad (paper, no online back then) to upgrade the RAM to 512k. We brought the Mac to his condo in Cupertino during his lunch break from who knows where. He took the Mac apart and desoldered the RAM then soldered in new RAM chips like a machine, narrating the whole time. We powered it on and it was 512K! Very cool. We also had lots of Apple II+, IIe and IIc Macs (6502 CPU). We eventually got the first Mac with a hard drive. One drive brand/model became notorious for its bearings drying out, sometimes preventing it from booting. Apple or maybe Quantum shipped a new ROM chip for drive controller, which was socketed so we put it in. The chip provided extra torque at startup to overcome the increased bearing friction. Those were the days. Now we have the convenience of downloading firmware updates and using solid state drives, but also the threats of 24/7 worldwide sociopath and nation-state hackers pounding on everything. No one's really happier. We do have more realistic games involving smashing and shooting stuff and people. New stuff with the same old primitive thinking isn't really progress, though.
 
Jtte said:
128k Mac, floppy drive no hard drive. Took it to guy in Cupertino who ran a classified newspaper ad (paper, no online back then) to upgrade the RAM to 512k. We brought the Mac to his condo in Cupertino during his lunch break from who knows where. He took the Mac apart and desoldered the RAM then soldered in new RAM chips like a machine, narrating the whole time. We powered it on and it was 512K! Very cool. We also had lots of Apple II+, IIe and IIc Macs (6502 CPU). We eventually got the first Mac with a hard drive. One drive brand/model became notorious for its bearings drying out, sometimes preventing it from booting. Apple or maybe Quantum shipped a new ROM chip for drive controller, which was socketed so we put it in. The chip provided extra torque at startup to overcome the increased bearing friction. Those were the days. Now we have the convenience of downloading firmware updates and using solid state drives, but also the threats of 24/7 worldwide sociopath and nation-state hackers pounding on everything. No one's really happier. We do have more realistic games involving smashing and shooting stuff and people. New stuff with the same old primitive thinking isn't really progress, though.
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We will always be primitive! We effectively are humans, and there are hard wired api’s built into us, that take centuries to even alter 0.1%.
 
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I was a hardcore windows fan until my job got me a macbook pro and despite me fighting and insisting on getting a Windows machine I was basically told to suck it up. I was super impressed by the build quality and trackpad and so I ultimately got a 2014 macbook air and fell in love and shortly after bought the 5k iMac when I was blown away by the resolution and screen clarity.

The rest is histroy I haven't bought a windows machine in over a decade. I am currently rocking an M4 Studio, an M4 iPad Pro 13" and soon the Vision Pro 2 whenever that comes out.
 
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24” iMac 2007 with the 2.8Ghz core 2 extreme and 4gb ram when I first started college, as a graduation gift from my parents.

Everyone else had laptops, but I just loved the iMac so much I took paper notes so I could have that beautiful boy 🥹 I hauled it back and forth from school to my parents house whenever I would come home ha
 
Born into a Mac family. First computer I used was a 1999 iMac when I was two years old. Family bought various iMacs throughout my childhood. My first personal Mac was a 13“ MacBook Pro in 2009.
 
My Macbook Pro 13” 2015 with intel broadwell chip purchased in Mid 2015 is my first Mac which i still use as my main mac today lol. Now that is what you call a quality value for money product by Apple!
 
LC 475 (used) was my first Mac, and 2nd computer ever…Commodore Vic-20 was first.

It still works till this day, though I last fired it up a decade ago, so maybe it still works.
 
The Cockney Rebel said:
I still have my Time Capsule.

Faaaaaast WiFi.
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I'll never forget a few years in, I had an old flat airport extreme and an airport express.

I bought a new 802.11AC (last model) Airport extreme. Took it home, allocated like 90 minutes of rooting around to make it the master of the network and re-add the other devices.

Plugged it in. Mac found it.

What would you like to do? Default: Something like "transfer wireless network from airport extreme" Click "yes" or whatever.

It transferred config from the old Extreme, wiped the old one and the old airport express. Mac auto joined the new extreme "found an unconfigured airport extreme - would you like to extend the network?". Hit yes. repeat for the airport express.

I was done in like 10 minutes by simply clicking to accept the sensible default options presented.

Why can't other vendors put some thought into the customer experience??
 
My own was the original iMac G3 in Bondi Blue which I bought on release. Prior to that we had a Macintosh 128k with an Image Writer - many hours playing Apache Strike on that machine when I was young. Through school I used a lot of LC machines and my favourite classic Mac, the little Color Classic.

Following the iMac G3, I’ve had:
  • PowerMac G4 FW800
  • PowerBook G4 12”
  • MacBook (Black)
  • MacBook Pro (mid-2010)
  • MacBook 12”
  • MacBook Air M1
  • MacBook Pro 14” M1 Max
 
PICT0007.jpeg
My first Mac was this iMac G3 Snow White. I had to convince my mum I absolutely needed it and I got it second-hand on ebay in 2003 as my Christmas present. I originally wanted an eMac but couldn’t afford it. Coming from a beige Windows XP machine, it was such a revelation, especially with OS X Panther running on it. I sadly had to sell it to get an iBook a few years later. Such a beautiful computer!
 
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MacBook Pro M4 Max, back in February 2025.

Before that, for over 2 decades, various PC laptops (on average, a new one every 5 years) where Windows didn't last one day before being wiped out and replaced by a Linux distro. I'll still be using Linux on a second laptop for years to come.
I can't see myself having Windows on a personal machine any time: unfortunately I can't avoid it at work and it's always a pain.
 
The Cockney Rebel said:
Mine was a 24” 2008 iMac.

Top spec, at the time.

Such a lovely, lovely machine. It was actually this Mac that got me into photography.

What about you?
Click to expand...

The first Apple I owned was an Apple IIGS, but that's not a Mac. The first Mac I owned was a 1992 Mac PowerBook 160. Black and white display with huge bezels, small display, built in trackball (instead of a trackpad), thick plastic case (must have been around 2" high) and not at all light weight, but that's the way it was back then so it was just accepted. Used that for quite a few years, and even when I got a new Mac, let students type papers on it using AppleWorks for years more. IIRC, paid around $3000 for that, but all in all, it did the job nicely and I got my money's worth out of it.

I hate to think of all the money I've spent on Macs since then, but each one felt like a great leap forward in features and functionality (color displays, CPUs, RAM, HDs, battery life, lighter weight, sleeker bodies, etc.) and I was happy with them all. I'm on a 14" M1 Pro now and it's fast and lightweight, though it's mostly a pampered desk queen tethered to a display these days.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
 
I would ask you so many things to those that lived the pre-Intel era… but I don’t want to hijack the thread so maybe I’ll open a new thread.
 
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