I was never an Apple fan. Even though I’ve lived in Cupertino for most of my life, Apple just seemed like this obsolete thing that should have died away already but was being kept alive by some die hard fans with more guts than brains.

Then I got my first iPod and started using iTunes. The interface was magic! It was easy and intuitive and I started thinking “well, maybe there is something to this apple thing.” Even better, the look of the iPod was beautiful. Here was a device that finally realized then if I’m going to wear a piece of electronics, then I want it to look good as well as be functional.

Fast forward three years. I’m now waiting for my iPhone and seriously considering changing my home PC to a Mac. With the dual boot option and the superb customer service that apple offers, they’re really a more attractive option to me. So add me to the Macheads legions. I have been assimilated.

Gal

In 1983 I was raped by Lisa, so no I don’t have any fond memories of Apple

Wow, memories! In no particular order….

I worked at an Apple dealer in So California (Computer City) in 1981-1986, managed its San Diego store for a few months. We carried Osborne, Grid, Altos, Vector Graphic, IBM, Apple, Compaq… Remember when the Apple ][ became the //e.

Back when Apple had a rep firm instead of a sales force, we would get all excited on (i think it was Friday) when the rep would come in with a big wad of money and peel off hundred dollar bills for every Apple /// sold. A local accounting firm bought dozens of them, and I used the proceeds to put the earnest money on my first house and partially pay for my wedding reception! Those were the days when 23 point margins were the absolute floor for a sale, and you had to get permission from the owners to sell at lower margins. (”only if it’s more than 50 units..” - unheard of for a bunch of kids running a retail computer store! Heck, our technician was only 15 - we used to have to take turns giving him rides home because he was too young to drive)

Then Businessland came into our market and lured many of us to sell to corporate accounts. We did pretty well there - must businesses were buying their first computers. But Businessland was not an Apple dealer and it was like pulling teeth to get a Lisa for a guy who used to buy from me at my old dealership and absolutely wouldn’t buy from anyone else. But he had to have his Lisa. I can’t imagine any computer mfr bending their channel marketing rules like that today!

In the mid-late ’80s, the phone companies all tried to sell computers. The thought process being that if some little upstart like Businessland could be so successful selling toy computers, imagine how successful the Telcos could be selling computers AND phone systems! PacTel InfoSystems was started by the West coast RBOC, and Will Luden, of the Luden’s Cough Drop fortune, was put in charge. They had absolutely NO CLUE about computers - in fact, they refused to do any tech support on a PC because it was “outside the demarc” - meaning that it was customer premises equipment, not part of their network, and therefore outside their domain. The “telcos in the computer business” phenomenon was short lived, and probably accelerated the demise of the full=service computer dealer (who was already being undermined by low-margin clones).

I was Northern Telecom’s (now Nortel Networks) alliance manager to Apple from 88 to 93, and wow we had fun. We had full access to Apple’s skunkworks (and I had a counterpart that had wide range in Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research). One of our projects was “MacPhone” which was basically a Mac hooked up to the RS232 port on the back of a Meridian PBX telephone set. The Meridian PBX used an ISDN-like 2B plus 2D communications link, so it could send commands into the PBX. The Mac ran a software program (developed by a bunch of guys at BNR in Ottawa and Mt View Calif) that worked all the features on the phone that nobody would learn how to use, such as conferencing people together - but it was all point and click. A year later (’91), a developer was hired to add a video codec board to the Mac, which resulted in full duplex videoconferencing, Macphone and screensharing over circuit-switched data. We also got it to work over Switched-56. At one point, the product team had people in the US, Canada and Australia working on it. It sold a lot of Macs for Apple, into universities and businesses, and a lot of switching equipment for Northern Telecom (but very few customers actually bought and used the product - it was mostly used as sizzle to sell the steak). The Northern Telecom sales people totally didn’t get it!

But after about 1992, Apple lost interest in this kind of technology leadership, and Sculley left. The 90s were a dark time for Apple - it’s amazing that they survived.

Apple refused to go to the clone business (well, they did for awhile, and Jobs shut it down when he returned to Apple in the 90s. In retrospect, he did absolutely the right thing). Apple’s full control of everything from its OS to its industrial design and its sales outlets was something we would never have imagined back in the 80s but it’s certainly a major key to their success now. Good for them!

Cheers - Steve

I am constantly entertained when my 4 roommates and I sit in the living room of our house watching a movie, while the only other light source in the room is the dim backlit white apple on our five macbooks. Just over a year ago, I was still battling with my PC, constantly rebooting and reinstalling windows. I HATE IT. I don’t know why I resisted for so long. I’ve had three iPods and still talk about how great they are 4 years after purchasing my first.

All I can say to anyone still on the cusp of converting over to any mac product (with the singular exception being their keyboards and mice) is, DO IT IMMEDIATELY, and I personally guarantee that you will never look back, and will never regret it.

Unless you run very specific software at home (ie. SolidWorks, like I do), you have no reasons not to convert. Even these people can no longer complain.

Make the jump.

PS - “Somewhere” I have an old Macintosh illuminated glass plate lamp that Apple made for the Mac product launch. It was supposed to go into the window of your store. Also have a set of photocopied, hand-annotated Lisa beta documentation from pre-Lisa launch. Hmmm. If I put them on eBay, would anybody care?

PPS - does anyone remember Apple Panic? Sort of like Lode Runner but the little guys were Apples instead of Miners, in think. (c’mon, it’s been >20 years!). One time, the dealer I worked for had a party and brought home half their inventory of Apple ][ computers for games at the party. Hooked one of them up to a huge projection monitor and played Apple Panic on the wall of their home. Funnnn….

What about Creative? Everybody is too obsessed with Apple, and Creative gets overlook. Creative is a multimedia company that was founded on July 1, 1981. Historically, Creative was most famous for their Sound Blaster line of audio cards. Now they are known for their line of portable multimedia players - the Zen line, including the Zen Vision:M which kills the iPod. They’ve been making players as long as the iPod has been out.

Two memories:

(1) In the late 80’s on startup my Mac spoke these memorable words: “Welcome to Macintosh, This is Friday, the 5th of December”

(2) Two words: Oregon Trail

Not being a homeowner I can safely say that my first mac purchase (iBook G4) has had more of an influence on my life then any other purchase I’ve ever made.

It’s changed everything about how I work, play and communicate. It’s sounds corny but that iBook literally changed my life.

But then, I do spend about 10-12 hours a day working on computers. Your mileage may vary.

Oh One more: Dark Castle

I am waiting for iPhone, but not a fan of apple.

In the mid 90’s I knew a guy who swore by Apple, and one day I asked him to show me this computer he was raving about. He had a Macintosh. and I sat and played around for a couple of hours, and I decided that it was actually more user-friendly than Windows 95. Yes, it was 10 years old, and it had no real graphics to speak of, but from that moment on I was a convert. I bought my first computer four years later - a red iMac.

I’m one of the ones old enough to remember the “1984″ add. Time flies… but that is another story.

Man - ask people to reminisce and what do you get? A bunch of retards on comments. Apple fanboys sure are a bunch of flammers.

@ 62

and you’re? lol… on this beautiful occasion, we’ll forgive u generously

From about 1999 to 2002 I recorded pro music and audio with a Mac and Digidesign Pro Tools. Even running on Mac OS 9 and recording full-time, not once did the box crash while recording, we never, ever lost a take. That is more reliable than many tape machines and to have that kind of stability in those years was very appreciated.

Today, making Web content with Photoshop, BBEdit, QuickTime, Safari, Apache, and PHP on a stock Mac with almost no set up is completely awesome. That is the world’s greatest word processor right there, except it processes everything.

Started with an Apple IIe - Mac 512K - Mac LC - Powerbook 145 - Mac Performa 6800 - Powebook “Lombard” - Powerbook 15″ - IMac 20″ - and finally a MacBook 13″.

Its been a long ride and…they only get better!

It continues to boggle my mind that people even consider apple when buying a computer. Paying 2-3 times the price for a computer that has probably 1/1000 the amount of available programs, and the programs it has being an after-thought of the developer. Given, the newer apple products look nice, but people love to ignore the fact that PC laptops are looking better and better everyday. Personally I like the of the newer HP’s over Macbooks.

How can you not feel like a loser when every program on your computer stats with a lower-case “i”. I feel stupid even refering to most apple programs.

Anyone who has used a PC made in the last year knows that PC’s just don’t have the problems that they used to. I literally cant remember the last time my computer “crashed” or “froze”. Honestly the last major technology problem I had was a SAD-FACE on my friends iPod that he wanted me to fix. I told him the apple products cant actually be fixed.

2-3 times the price
Less available programs
Lower-Quality Programs
iStuff
Nice design, but a few PC companies can easily compete
PCs crashing is a hugley overblown problem

I am on my second PowerBook and fourth iPod. Apple makes the world a more elegant place. Everything designed by Apple is beautiful and easy to use. I appreciate all the little details of the design, especially how my PowerBook pulses when it’s in sleep mode — the rate of the pulse is just a little slower than my heartbeat and it calms me down…

Some people like their kids, some people like their pets, and I love my Apple products!

I don’t own a Mac at the moment (want one though). But this post got me remembering being upgraded at work from a Mac Plus to a Mac Classic complete with a 2400 baud modem, and someone showing me Mosaic. Who knew where that would lead?

While my mom happily banged on the space bar and arrows playing “Rogue” on her black and green PC screen, I was always at my friend’s apartment typing on a nice white screen in Helvetica. This same friend didn’t ever get cable and the only junk food in the house was nuts and Annie’s Cheese and Shells.

I don’t think Macs are quite so granola anymore though. I’m on a Mac for work… and I can barely remember the meaning of “anti-virus software”. Magical.

Congratulations, Apple, on 30 years! I cannot believe I still remember those days when I was typing away on my new Apple IIe computer…and got a kick out of playing around with Eliza, that program that had an answer for just about everything you typed.

I’m going to dig up a picture of me with my first computer, an Apple II+

@ Jay #66

Listen to what Jay says about Apple products, and then look at Jay’s site - http://vkowebs.com/ That really sums it up right there. It is a world view, an inability to understand *Design* and aesthetic. It is not a argument that can ever be productive though. It is like debating the truths of evolution with a creationist

Jay is not wired to understand design, as many people aren’t. It’s not his fault.

Luckily for Apple, enough people *are* wired to understand design. These are the drivers that then bring an ever increasing number of people that “don’t quite” understand design, but understand enough to know that macs are just plain better. The combination is finally giving Apple the market share it deserves.

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”

What I don’t get is why the ‘I love my PC - Mac users are retards’ brigade have to hijack a post like this. Who are they trying to convince?

Grow up, say.

My Dad got me my first computer, an Apple IIc, when I was 7 years-old. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I learned everything from math to typing to basic programming on that machine. My favorite thing to do was to use one of the first editions of Print Shop to create birthday cards on my dot-matrix printer. It took forever, but, to me, it was the best thing ever!

First owned an Apple IIc in ‘85. Loved it! Then got a Macintosh SE in ‘87. Probably one of the best computers Apple has ever made. The thing still boots and runs! From there … An LCIII, original iMac, Cube, White iBook, and my most recent mac is the a 20″ iMacIntel. Owned the original iPod, but someone dropped it into a bucket of water - the hard drive is dead now. So I bought a white iPod nano.

change of subject…

What’s up with some of the immature comments!? Maybe just dumb kids? It’s like turning the channel on TV to a baseball game and making fun of all those “fan boys” sitting in the stadium watching the game, wasting a perfectly good afternoon. Should grow up some and realize that people have different interests and tastes.

@75: I guess they just feel left out of the party? Hardcore zealotry knows no propriety? I don’t know. I’m a huge PC fanboy, and I think they’re being petty doing it.

Not only are OS wars retarded, but this is really not a good place for them.

Will you stop at last?

One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t
http://www.thebestpageintheuni.....=macs_cant

I didn’t know one single thing about computers when I enrolled at Drexel University in the fall of 1985. We were the 2nd year students in a prgressive program where Drexel required every student to buy a Macintosh. 256K of RAM, 400K Single-Sided floppy and copies of MacWrite were what we started doing our first papers on. My second year, I downloaded the “build your own Fat Mac” instructions and soldered in a whopping 512K of Ram. By the 4th year, we all had a really big lesson on the price/performance curve. Incoming students were getting Macintosh Pluses with a 20Mb hard drive for less than half of the $4K or so that we had to pony up. No booting the Apple OS with floppies for them. I had a 1200baud apple modem and an imagewriter printer and still used it a bit post-college. This was also the modern-era of software piracy and kids up and down the hall shared games that had no copy protection. I had hundreds of disks then.
This simple exposure to the Mac got me into the computer industry where I exchanged my Mac knowledge for training on DOS and IBM pc’s. That industry has been good to me over the past 20 years. Thanks Apple (even though I still don’t own an Ipod).

My first brand new and sealed Apple computer arrived just 3 weeks ago - Thanks’ Apple for the new macBook Pro’s launched today.

My first computer was actually an Amiga, the prefect compromise between the mac and pc, if only commodore hadn’t completely messed up.

And my first apple/mac was bought 3rd-hand via ebay a few years ago, an ibook that I instantly adored even though the dodgy seller ripped me off.
There’s little to worry about using apple’s, it’s how cars will be in the future, but it means that you forget all the “technical” skillls you need to learn when living on Windows, but with steve jobs having had the forsight to have kept an eye on x86 and now the possibility of dual-booting, there is no reason (subject to money) to not get a mac.

If Apple decided to guarantee Rolls-Royce-type service out of the box at a fairer retail price, or got price-competetive with the PC world, they’d easily get 30-60% world pc market-share. They’re just not as different as Dyson’s are in the vacuum-cleaner world, to justify the price-difference to normal people who don’t read-up on the goings-on in the computing/tech world.

Yours kindly,

Shakir razak

First, congrats to Apple on 30 years! Personally, I’ve had both PC’s and Mac’s and don’t have much of a preference for either.

However, I do want to ask Mike how he can make a statement like the one below without backing it up with some facts.

“The Apple Mac may not hold a position of dominant market share today but amongst the technology influencers there is no other choice.”

Well? C’mon, sure there are people out there that prefer Macs, but can you truly say among technology influencers there is no other choice? I didn’t think so… You’re better than a statement like that Mike.

The true strength of the Applet Mac/IPod is the extremely thought of “User Experience”….which goes on to create the cult that is true hard-core apple cult.

The extreme weakness of Apple as a company is trying to keep the platform close through proprietary things like the Mac OS, or ITunes.The Mac OS would have beaten windows to death if Apple could have kept it open in the initial years.

Similarly what was the need to have DRM in ITunes.

Do you want to buy my startup
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISA.....0126906061

At the risk of this becoming fruity, I’d just like to encourage 79. tired to read through all the comments, and count how may times Mac users say that PCs suck, and how many time PC users say that Macs suck. Then, perhaps, he’d like to like to revise his opinion about what it is Mac users can’t do.

My first apple was the IIe. I remember thinking it was the best thing since sliced bread. “the way to the future”! My brother brought it from the states
and I just loved how ’small’ it was. I have since travelled the path of PC and Mac all the way through my training as a Graphic Designer and later as a practising ( actually, I’ve got it right now ) designer. I love the Mac for it’s wonderful GUI and ease but ( slap my wrists here ) PC’s have also come a hell of way since those heady days. ( OK Windows ripped off the GUI! ) I now use both PC and Mac. Mac for me and other like minded pro’s and PC for the rest of the world - ‘Gates you have a lot to answer for!!’ - but at the end of the day Mac still seems to keep ahead of the ‘bunch’. When, for example, will you see a ‘WindowPod’, ‘WinPhone’ or indeed ‘WinTunes’ ? Enough said I feel. Thank you Apple, Happy anniverssary!!

@ mjharper

You can thank (at least partially) the satirical ad campaign that Apple put out these past few years of PC vs Mac. A great move on Apple’s marketing efforts as that helped “teach” PC users how cool the Mac is.

Though I have never had the great opportunity to own any brand new Apple product I have seen from the beginning that from hardware design choices and the software written (OS & apps) to work on it Apple has continuously been a forward looking company that has expanded the consumer computing electronics industry. One can always postulate that “were it not for the monopolized PC marketing, i.e. every IBM PC sold must be sold with the MS OS (somewhat forcing the masses to embrace MS?), that Apple would have a much bigger market share”. But that is for the MAC/PC debaters. I remember getting an Apple ][GS (basically given to me since it was ‘old technology’) and comparing it to the then nearly new Windows 95. It reinforced the reality that the old technology of Apple was superior and more advanced than the latest PC/MS technology.

Being the leading edge type of company Apple is makes it understandable that sometimes you may nearly fold because the choice, though leading, is not what what fits the fancy of the consumer. Through the highlights (many) and the bottom bumps (as they came), Happy Anniversary Apple!!!!!

P.S. By the way, forcing those longing to get their hands on an iPhone to have to use Cingular (or the New AT&T) is really, well, NOT!!! I really thought that iCell (without the cell carrier requirement) would be a much better, more realistic name for it.

I badgered my parents to buy a beige G3 in ‘97. But before that, most of my computer experience was with the Macs at my dad’s job at the city newspaper. Ah, Tetris. My first keyboarding class was on whatever new Mac was out in the early 90s. As a member of the newspaper team in high school, we used the little Mac boxes for layout and typing up stories.

The beige G3 has since bit it (the dreaded floppy-disk-and-question-mark!), but I’ve had a Biondi iMac (still in use!) and a blueberry iBook, a white iBook and a white iPod Nano, and I’m eagerly awaiting Leopard…

I was lucky enough to get work at Univeristy back in 1989 teaching the University staff how to use the DOS PCs.

I of course created the materials on a Macintosh SE with the then-revolutionary built in hard disk drive. 20 MB (MEGA bytes….) for a thousand bucks extra. Whoa, nelly.

When the concern in class for the key called “Return” or “Enter” came up (stupid PC keyboards) I simply created a font character with the arrow symbol which is present on the proper key. ResEdit, a bit of creativity, and the class was stunned.

For you new to this, the Mac SE was a 1 mHz 68000, 1 MB RAM (upgradeable to 4) , 72dpi b/w screen with square pixels. Which was tack-sharp black print on a white screen. Nine inches diagonal. 72dpi is a publishing standard.

So for the “which is more expensive” myth, which NEVER goes away, I want to hear from somebody who actually USED a $2700 PC back in ‘89. My friend Jeff had one, which he built himself. It could do colors — all four of them. On a big blurry screen. It had a mouse. He programmed each little button each little way to fire off each little batch file that basically scrolled the DIR list. It had a built in hard disk. Ten MB. It was maxed out at 640 KB RAM just like it’s supposed to.

He’d spent the entire summer and $2700 cobbling this thing together so he could run his hot copy of AutoCAD.

I’d spent one afternoon and $2700 purchasing the Mac SE so I could use the “free” Mac Paint, Mac Write, and ResEdit….to teach and make a font character.

You do the math.

THANK YOU APPLE!

In my computer class at school we used Apple IIs with no hard drives and 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. (in the mid 90’s of all things- that’s what happens at a small private school).

The first laptop I ever used was a Mac my father would bring home from work.

I finally bought my first iPod in December. I’m saving for a MacBook.