When did everything just 'click'?

That's great!

I'm glad to hear that!

For me, it was just instant, I've always liked the industrial design of Macs, and the OS under was rock solid.

 

Love my 13" MBP and did within 30mins of owning it in June. So glad I spent the extra. The trackpad is just sublime.

 

Took me a couple of months to really get it. Understandable I guess after using Windows for over 15 years. Interestingly though I'm told that my first even computer was actually a Mac. I guess I was too young to remember though.

 

It was when I discovered the hot corners. It just made my experience so much more streamlined. Every time I use a windows machine, I keep throwing my pointers to the corners and then remembering that I have to shrink all the windows to get to my desktop. Oh, that and 2 finger scrolling!

 

I was always so frustrated with Windows that getting my first Mac was a HUGE relief!

Before getting one, I used PearPC to run Mac (when it was PowerPC code) on a PC - it was painfully slow, but I felt like I was peering through the looking glass and seeing something amazing on the other side.

I have never looked back, and only use windows to ensure my websites look great on the incredibly buggy internet explorer!

 

I hated the first two weeks that I had a mac, after many years of windows geekhood. This is because I was totally bent on vicodin due to having wisdom teeth surgery the day after I got the computer; stoned and in pain is not a good way to learn a new operating system. It didn't help that back then they were selling imacs with os 10.0.3 which didn't have support for things like the modem or ethernet or external speakers, and in my pill fugue I had some difficulty in discovering that I was supposed to boot to os 9 for the computer to work entirely. (they mailed us 10.1 discs a couple of months later). My mac experienced finally clicked when I figured out how I could import my music into itunes and space out on the visualization synthesizer.

When switching from PPC to intel my macxperience didn't 'click' for about a month, after which Apple and I learned that they'd sent me a broken computer, which they replaced with a non broken one. Thankfully I'll never know what was wrong with that awful laptop.

 

For me, the defining moment was when I discovered Spaces. Having six or eight screens' worth of work, including a Windows virtual machine, just a keystroke away from each other, is something unheard-of in the Windows world.

Then came the day when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd had to restart the Mac, vs every day or two (max) for Windows. Sold!

 

I bought a PowerPC mini (1.25) in mid-2005. I'm a programmer, and wanted to learn how to program for the Mac. At first, I wasn't too fond of it (the OS was Panther at the time, which is a far cry from Snow Leopard), and basically just diddled around in Xcode et al.

I upgraded to Tiger when that was released, and started using the machine more and more for everyday stuff. Eventually it became my primary machine; my PC beside it was there just for work. The defining moment was when I read (probably on here; I don't remember) some comparison between running apps on a PC vs. on a Mac. Someone said that you could start every app on your Mac and have them all working, and they'd likely all run without a hiccup (something which was VERY likely to crash a PC hard back then).

I tried it... and that little soldier of a computer went through it... like butter.

Since then, I've owned 6 more Macs (iBook, Macbook Pro Gen 1, Macbook Santa Rosa, a C2D mini, iMac C2D and now a new MBP). Still have a PC on my desk as well for work, but outside of coding an occasionally using it for surfing while I'm watching a DVD on the iMac beside it, it doesn't see all that much use. Although all but the iMac and the current MBP have either been sold or given away, each of those machines is still in service somewhere.

 

I used pcs from ages 11 to 16 and assembled my own computer when I was 13. I was quite into games back then as well. At 16, I got myself a Macbook Pro and for the first 6 months or so I only used it for watching films in bed and surfing the web etc. That was also around the time I got interested in art and graphic design- I had finally found something that I wanted to study. My Macbook Pro quickly became my primary computer, I haven't touched my old windows computer since. - Here I am, now 20, done my foundation course in art and design and currently doing the Graphic Design BA course at Central Saint Martins in London, UK. To some extent I 'blame' buying a MBP back then for getting me where I am today.