Today, we’re celebrating the Mac’s 40th birthday with a couple of questions for you: What was your first Mac? What is your favorite Mac?
Be sure to check out our Mac retrospective and drop us a comment with your replies below. In the meantime, I’ll start things off.
The first Mac I used was likely a Macintosh II in my school library. The first one that really opened my eyes to the beauty of the Macintosh System were likely a pair of Performas in my 4th grade homeroom. They were running System 7 and our teach rewarded us for good behavior and grades with an hour on these machines creating short stories, painting, or playing games. I relished those hours on the Mac and never forgot them.
The first Mac I bought with my own money, however, was the polycarbonate white 2006 MacBook running Tiger. Lots of fond memories with that machine, chief of which was installing Snow Leopard on launch day.
Today, I’m rocking a 2023 15″ MacBook Air in Midnight and it is by far my favorite Mac that I’ve ever owned. The combination of screen size, weight, and the power of the base M2 are a perfect mix. And I’m of the persuasion that Midnight is the best color Apple has put on a Mac yet.
So, what are your first and favorite Macs? We’d love to hear your Mac stories. Fill us in below.
my first mac at work was a 512K, followed by a IIcx. when i went self-employed, i bought a IIci which i used until i had to switch to OSX (the switch was done on a G4 Quicksilver). it was followed by a cheesegrater 3,1. my daily driver is a 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 running macOS 12.7.x and upgraded to the nth. it is still plenty fast for my work. i also use a 2018 mac mini as audio server. i figure that there will be no way around buying a M3 studio sometimes this year. i just wish Apple would have kept the modularity and upgradability of the good old cheesegrater. oh well … sic transit gloria mundi ;-)
I was given an Apple II GS back in about ’92-93 or so. All I know about computers (which isn’t much) I learned on that old thing. Including the AppleWorks spreadsheet.
I graduated up to Lotus 123 and wish it was still around. Have a Mac Pro at home with a few upgrades and love it!!
Looking to get a Macbook Pro one of these days.
Took me a while to ditch my Commodore Vic-20/64/128 boxes, in that order. By the time I saw the handwriting on the wall, I jumped over to a Mac IIsi, and then a 6100AV. I recall buying piggyback cards for upgrading CPU and other stuff, made by OWC at the time.
My favorite was my first. 2007 Mac mini. I so loved the aesthetic with its polycarbonate top and with Snow Leopard it was what made me abandon my WinXP setup of the time. I picked it up used from eBay for a song. Not long after I upgraded to my first unibody mini, but always missed the look of my “original”.
I was having issues with windows crashing and losing my data. Then I decided to give MAC (the toy computer) a try. That was in the fall of 2013! I am still using that Mac!!! I love it so much I reached out to you guys and brought another just incase!
Having been a teacher in San Jose when Apple first gave an Apple II to every school in SC County, I started my journey. My first Mac was the Mac 512, then I bumped up to the Mac SE and then the Mac SE30. Eventually I got a 12″ iBook [?] in 2003, then the iBook G4. My latest MacBook is a 12″/13″? 2017 MacBook. Mac forever! Crashes less often!
quadra 840 AV was first
current Studio with 2 32″ 4k monitors favorite
Um lets see, my first Mac was a Mac Plus that I got off because of a grant during my master’s work. After that there was no holding me back. About a year later I got an SE30, given the nomenclature Apple used at the time they missed a great opportunity – it should have been called the SEx.
I’ve been able to do more with the Mac than any other system. I’ve used it to develop a computer based stuttering therapy system, which after many, many iteration is still in use, and again running on a Mac. I’ve used a Mac to develop different statistical analysis systems. It was a Mac that did the EEG and statistical analyses for my PhD. I also wrote that nightmare on a Mac. All in all it’s been indispensable for my career and in my personal life. In fact I’m writing this note using my M1 MacBook Air while I sit in a coffeeshop waiting for my commuter train to arrive.
My first Mac was the 512K that set me back $3k as I entered grad school in the fall of 1984 to get a Ph.D. I had just finished my first job working overseas with USAID in West Africa and had gotten a scholarship to return to school. We walked into the student store and there it was and I simply could not resist. We could barely afford it but we did and I have have been an Apple person ever since 40 years in September! I did all kinds of what I thought at the time were cool things just using MacWrite and Paint. I have not owned every Mac since, but got the SE in 1988 that lasted ten years! Then the G3 and onwards. Now have an older 2015 27″ as my main PC and am just waiting for Apple to release a new one in the years ahead and I hope that I don’t have to wait forever. Add in color inkjets (Epson 1440) with expensive glossy photo paper I have spent many tens of thousands of dollars over the years. I came to OWC many years ago to get addition memory and that evolved to getting portable hard drives, impeccable used lap tops (MBPs, MBAs), reconditioned iMacs, memory cards etc. I enjoy getting OWC offers and will be in the market for replacing my aging iMac that has an internal 2T SSD that compensates for its old silicon chips. I have a new MBA with the M1 chip and it is nice but too small to be my main PC, but very useful on the road. It was always curious to compare Macs with PCs that were required to be used at work. In a six year assignment for USAID in Ghana beginning in 2007, I had to have my PC on my desk but used my iMac sitting next to it for almost everything. Everyone asked why and I simply said, everything is easier, simpler, more sophisticated, more versatile, bigger software diversity etc etc. Today I remain a happy Mac client. OWC makes the experience that much better.
My first Mac was an SE/30. It eventually gained a Radius Full Page Display and 20 MB of RAM.
My favorite Mac was probably a Quicksilver 2002 with dual 1Gz G4 processors. I still have it. It still works.
My first Mac was a used 27′” iMac 2012 model. Loved it. I added more ram, eventually replaced the hard drive with 1 TB SSD. Used the Temperature monitor from OWC and the kit to remove and restore the screen, which was much easier than I ever dreamed. I used the OWC install videos. It no longer operates and has been replaced with Mac Mini M1 (also used). I still use the Magic Mouse and Apple keyboard from the iMac. They work great. Love them.
I should add, in terms of my favourite Mac, that has to be the mid 2015 MacBook Pro 15″. It was maxed out in terms of both ram and the hard drive. It’s travelled with me from the Arctic to South America, Asia and Europe. It was always the most solid performer of any Mac (or any laptop) I’ve used.
Mac Plus 512k was the first Mac I owned. However, I worked on a Lisa before that and the Lisa was much more advanced in multitasking and more polished software. Too bad it wasn’t a success. The Mac Plus was like Lisa Lite – it took a while for the Mac to catch up. After that my favourite Mac was the colour MacIlcx. Currently on the last Intel MacBook Pro.
As in your experience, the first Mac that was really liked/used was a Macintosh II, or Mac II. It was a big machine by comparison – long, wide, a flat rectangle, no angles or curves, just that big ‘chunk.’ The typical Apple grey-white case and a huge cooling fan that blew out the back, sending papers flying. It had a dual floppy drive in the front upper lh corner, if memory serves. That was almost the only way to get new apps or an OS upgrade in the machine at first. Ah, yes, good ol’ “floppies!” A few of those relics from the past ‘surface’ occasionally.
A 3.5″ internal drive w/ very little memory was included, initially. That was soon upgraded to the largest drive that was ‘affordable’ – which, at the time, wasn’t all that much. Maybe 10 GB, by recollection. Operating memory wasn’t great, either. But, like the internal drive, was soon upgraded to a whopping 4Kb of RAM. That was installed at the office w/ hands that could barely keep from shaking, Ground wires hung off everything – on each wrist and ankle, plus the grounded chair and drafting board. “Damn” if that thing blew up from errant static!
It didn’t ‘blow up’, then, or in a number of “upgrade operations” going forward. Memory got to 8 Kb of RAM, w/ internal drives approaching near a whole TB of storage – and relatively fast. However, the old Mac II finally got to the point that the operating chip no longer came even close to supporting the latest Mac OS. Such would NOT do! Thus that faithful machine was retired, to be replaced by a new Mac version! In any event, a blue & white and grey & silver sorta rounded upright square about 15″ high/tall, maybe? There have been just too many of them to remember the details clearly, BUT… They were all very good Macs!
My first Mac was a Mac SE 20, I purchased the first one sold at the Zenith Store in Miami in February 1987. I still have it (“from my cold, dead hands.”).
My favorite Mac was a 2002 model G-4 Tower; I think it was called “silver doors” or some such. It was my favorite because it handled iTunes PERFECTLY, and we (family of 4, both children in college at the time) all had iPods. We still play lots of audiobooks, but unfortunately the G-4 Tower expired last year :(
Awaiting the release of an M-3 Mac mini for my home office setup.
I first worked on a Macintosh SE. From then on I was hooked. Today I am using a MacBook Air 15″.
My all time power favorite was the Pismo, or Firewire 2000 Powerbook., but I have my warmest memories are of my very first Mac; the 128K original Macintosh, which still sits in a place of honor on a shelf in my computer room. It brought home computing to my household, and served my youngest daughter through 5 years of college. I paid $400 for it in 1989. The best bargain purchase in my entire life.
The first Mac is regularly used was the Macintosh 512K. The first Mac I actually purchased was a Macintosh SE. My favorite might possibly be the iMac G4 (lampshade) that I got for my daughter when she went off to college. There were so many others along the way, but the favorite that I bought for myself and still love the iMac 27″ 5K (2014) that I’m still using.
My first and favorite Mac was my LC II. It was a model used by a lot of teachers and it was so versatile. Had a CD ROM and an internal card to so it could run as an Apple IIe. Great machine!
First Mac USED was Macintosh 512k. (Was my neighbor’s. I wrote a music report about Billy Idol on it.)
First “Mac” purchased was a PowerComputing PowerCenter 132 Tower. (I started a freelance design company with it.)
First Apple Mac purchased was an PowerMac G4 450MHz.
First Mac laptop was an iBook.
Hi,
I bought my first Mac in 1993, an Apple Macintosh Quadra 840AV, the only dektop computer of his time to support video editing in broadcast standard definition! At the end, all Mac models are my favourites….
My first was actually an Apple 2 GS, close enough to a Mac. Hurts my brain to put a finger on all the Mac’s I had since then. I can do every thing I need to do and more with the Mac Mini’s. But my favorite Mac I had was my Quick Silver, easy to upgrade, easy on the eyes.
Oh, the memories…
First Mac was a IIcx with System 6.0.3. I was waiting for a Mac that would work with an external color monitor.
Bought a 128k Mac in Oct. of 1984.
1st Mac I ever used was an SE which we upgraded from 2 floppy discs to 1 floppy and a 40 MB hard drive. We used that for years, then upgraded to a Performa and on and on. We had a number of iMacs of different generations, but my favorite of all before the M1 iMac probably was / is a 2016 MacBook Pro. Alas, it is getting a bit long in the tooth and has had some repairs.
I wrote my doctoral thesis on an LCII in the late 80’s, but the first Mac I owned was a 6100 (pizza box) which I had for many years and was heavily modded along the way. Currently using an older Air. There’s a PowerBook G3 (Pismo) in a cupboard somewhere and a Umax SuperMac S900 (also heavily modded) going moldy in the basement.
My first Apple was an Apple II in 1978 with 4K of RAM. First Mac: a IIci. And that just may have been my favorite. Back in the days of “it just works.”
My first Mac was an original 128K model that I bought late in the first year they were sold. After getting tired of endless disk swapping to copy disks, I updated it to a MacPlus by having the innards replaced by Apple. Even after buying many more Macs over the years, I kept my first Mac for ‘fun’ uses until I gave it to a young Mac fan for his collection. My next favorite Mac was a Beige G3 that I upgraded with a G4 processor I bought from OWC. I still miss being able to update the hardware as I could with the Beige. However, the power of the latest Macs is astounding.
I’ve had plenty of Macs thru the years but my favorite was my first. The Mac 512k enhanced. I really wanted an Apple II but got persuaded by the salesman that a Mac was the way to go and he was right. Somewhere down the line I got rid of it which is something I regret to this day.
The first time I got close to a Mac was in ’87 or ’88 in a friend’s dorm room. Worked on a Mac at a publisher in the ’90s.
Bought my first Mac in summer of 2001, an iMac G3. I loved the design, with the luminescent colorful plastic and that bulbous behind. Maxing out the RAM enabled me to use it up until 2012, by which time I had blown a speaker, the disc drive had given up the ghost, and overall it ran v-e-r-y slowly. In 2014 I was preparing to move and had to get rid of as much non-essential stuff as possible, so the G3 ended up in the building basement in the to-be-recycled pile. It wasn’t easy putting it there (I removed the hard drive first). That one holds a special place in my heart.
Still using my 2012 MacBook Pro, having replaced the battery and maxed out the RAM . . . .
The school system I worked for supplied me with a brand-new titanium Powerbook G4 in 2001. It was an amazing computer and dual booted OS X and OS 9.22. I used it to manage and configure some of the earliest versions of Mac OS X server.
My first Mac is a Late 2015 27” 5K Retina display iMac. I still got it now and works okay but had to change the hard drive to a 4Tb SSD as it died on me. I also double the RAM to 16Gb from the original 8Gb.
I’m hoping Apple will bring back the larger screen iMac to say a 32” soon.
Apart from the ones I owned, I used everything from the original Macintosh up through the big iMacs working for various newspapers.
First Apple i used was a IIe back in the day. First Mac was the original.
First that was solely mine? A IIcx with 128 MB of ram – that thing was a Photoshop monster! it was either a rasterops or radius graphics card… i’ll have to unbox it from the basement….
good memories!
Mac IIsi, then a PowerBook 100, then a Mac clone, a G4 MacPro, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini and now a Mac Studio M1 Max.
First Mac was a dual floppy Mac SE, bought in 1989. I upped RAM to 4 MB and later added an external 105 MB HD (what would I do with all the room??). Over the years since then I’ve had the following desktop Macs:
* Mac IIci
* Mac Quadra 800
* Mac Quadra 840AV
* Mac 7500
* Mac G3 Beige Tower
* Mac G4 Tower (Graphite) (450MHZ)
* Mac G4 Tower (Graphite) (1.4 GHZ GigaDesigns Upgrade)
* Hackintosh #1 (Intel Core 2 Duo E4600)
* Hackintosh #2 (Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550)
* Hackintosh #3 (Intel i5-4690K)
* Mac Studio (M1 Max)
. Favorite Mac is a toss up between my IIci and the Beige G3 Tower.
First Mac: Mac II+
Favorite Mac: Macintosh LC III, Macbook Pro (17 in.) still in operation
Current Mac: Mac Pro (late 2013)
Still have my “Original” mac including the little luggage-style carrying case.
Also have 2 Apple IIe that I believe are in working condition as is my original little Mac, I think it was the “Fat Mac (512).
Loved all these computers, especially the little block original Fat Mac.
mine – which I still have was a Macintosh IIci – I did a a lot with that tool
The first Mac I ever saw and used was a Mac Plus combined with a 10 MB external hard drive, and I had to have one. All I could find was a Mac 512 KE, but with a 20 MB non-bootable external hard drive. I paid $2,295 discounted for the computer, and another $2,495 for the hard drive. Pagemaker was the driving force behind the Mac in those days, and my 512KE struggled, while my buddy’s Mac Plus and its 4 MB of RAM was like a muscle car vs. a Volkswagen Beetle by comparison. I leap-frogged straight to a Mac II cx and then to a Quadra 700 and eventually to a Quadra 900 server — the biggest, heaviest Mac tower ever built. I helped beta test Photoshop before it was released on that 700. I still have eight or nine of my old Macs, and all but one still works. Along the way, I’ve owned a bunch of others like the Mac Classic and Classic II, the SE30 (one of my all-time favorites), and a Mac LC III, one of the famed “pizza box” Macs. Every now and then, I fire it up and run a module for the classic screen saver After Dark which generates random tabloid-style newspaper headlines from a user-changeable list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. The results can be side-splitting hilarious. Some of my friends say I should start a Macintosh museum.
The first Mac I had for extended use was an SE30 when I worked in a tertiary institution (provided by the institution). I still have a sore shoulder as a result from taking it home every night!!! Favourite Mac? – just retired my 2012 MacBook Pro 15″ which I had upgraded with 1TB SSD and 16 gig RAM. Served me incredible well for years. Upgraded to a 2015 MacBook Pro 15″ with same specs!
My first Mac was a IIci …way back in 1989… wrote my first screenplay on it.
My first Mac was a Macintosh SE with 1 MB of RAM, and an 800 KB floppy disk drive. When I abandoned the SE, I was using a Mac SE30, with 16 MB of RAM and an 040 processor upgrade. I forget the size of the HDDs, but they were in MBs. I also liked the Pismo, with a G4 processor upgrade. My favorite portable Mac is the mid-2012 MacBook Pro, which I still use today. Mine’s got 16 GB RAM and a 2 TB SSD. It keeps up with my needs. My favorite Mac of all time is the 2010, 12 core Mac Pro with dual 3.46 GHz processors, upgraded to run the latest OS. For someone with a tight budget, these last two are plenty of bang for the buck.
Macintosh SE. With LaserWriter. It was revolutionary. The Mac changed our lives… and the World. Then InterNet… And then the iPhone. Forever.
First Mac was a MacPlus purchased in January 1986 and eventually upgraded to 1.0 MB RAM.
Favorite Mac was the 800 MHz G4 iMac (hemispherical design) purchased in January 2002 and eventually upgraded to 768 MB RAM and equipped with an AirPort card.
Actually go back to an Apple ][ that a friend in college had, played the first Wizrdry. My first Mac I owned was a PowerBook 170 which I think is somewhere in my basement. Anyone want it?
My purple iMac ️
Correction,
My first Mac was not the IIFX. but the IISi
My first Mac was a Power Mac 7100 80/AV with a video capture card and dual monitor support. One monitor was at 832 x 624 & one at 480 x 360. I used to run Adobe Photoshop 2.5+ with all the modal settings windows on the second monitor.
I loved that machine, and it might still be my favorite Mac i’ve ever had. it cost me $4,000 in 1990s money, which would be something around an $8,000 system today. I did manage to get it fully upgraded to 136MB of RAM. My first large external SCSI 1GB LaCie Hard Drive was $800 and awesome! My prosumer CD burner then was about $600. Bleeding edge stuff!
My favorite Mac since has probably been my old Powerbook 17″ or my current iMac Pro (with 256GB of RAM). I love Macs and do everything in power to only ever run MacOS or Linux distros.
I’d learned in college in 1969 I couldn’t muster the discipline for plunging as a teenager into serious coding for a PDP-10, but there was a grad school architecture course in Fortran for Artists…I wrote a simple algorithm for TicTacToe, spent half an hour at a card punch machine — A. Volkswagon sized Gray Bulk with a keyboard… When you touched the key a black powder charge ignited and sent the appropriate letter punch hurtling thru the Hollerith card. So the Room with thirty of these machines was CaCaphonous!
I ended up learning traditional animation drawing on paper, tracing to Acetate sheets, shooting FILM for ten years.until I couldn’t compete w the new ELECTRONIC boutiques that could crank out a Spinning Sparkledy Logo in a couple of hours. Hand-drawn, my stuff needed at least five or six days for a logo with FX…
In ’85 I closed my bitty Indie studio and a friend let me start learning Mac Graphics on a Classic. Got a job in 1986 in Cincinnati at a $2Million State-of-the-Art Video Production house, learning Quantel Paintbox and Abekas Digital Disk, did 3 years of broadcast animated TV Spots and started learning Vertigo 3D, a Unix-based Montreal cousin of Wavefront, Alias, Symbolics and SoftImage.
• ==> That studio had 40 Macs for the staff, with Illustrator, Photoshop v 01, Ms Word, Quark, Xcel, Pagemaker, Canvass… Fun Stuff!. University of Cincinnati Design School needed someone to teach Animation, and I didn’t play hard to get. So I hung out at their computer lab, sometimes overnight, doing Paintbox in the day, and.fooling with Macs in the evenings. YAHOO!
Before the end of 1989 I bought a Mac IIsi, with 256 color Display, and a Syquest drive and a stack of 44mg external storage cartridges, each one 8 inches square and 3/4″ thick!
¡Hog Heaven! I think I’m on my tenth Mac now, having shared most of’em with my brother, who came to computers a decade after me.
These days it’s an iMac w full Adobe creative suite plus Maya3D, Blender, Sibelius, and some secret sauce. I’ve worked with Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, lots of PCs, Dell, and proprietary systems — like lots of people working in the games and broadcast industry. But my personal systems have always been Macs.
My first Macintosh was a 512kE that I bought used in 1998.
My “favourite” Mac is probably my 2012 Mac Pro upgraded close to the max and running Monterey 12.7.2 – now 12 years old and still going strong, and for what I use it for plenty fast enough.
I’m writing this on a 2021 MacBook Pro 14″ with M2 Pro processor, 32GB Memory and 2TB hard drive. It is an amazing machine, but it’s not the one with 2 x 24″ displays connected to it, and 2 x Guardian Maximus RAIDs (6TB and 14TB) keeping everything backed up.
Roger
Macintosh 128K 1984
First Mac was an LC III in 1993 which I upgraded in several ways until I replaced it with one of my two favorites Macs
I have two favorites. The first was a Mac Cube. It was such an improvement over my first Mac and I upgraded the logic board, memory, storage, RAM and Graphics card (and the enclosure itself). It ran Leopard and I retired it last year (last used as a kitchen counter recipe viewer with a 15″ Studio display).
My second favorite was a 12″ PowerBook G4, 133 Mz from 2004. It was my work computer for years and was retired in 2011, battered but still functional.
The first Mac I ever used was my dad’s Mac 128 in the mid-1980s. Later, I bought my dad a “huge”upgrade — an external 440K floppy drive — so he could keep both the software floppy and his “work” floppy inserted at the same time. I put together the Episcopal Church wedding service for Linda Hudson and myself using that Mac 128 in 1988.
Almost 36 years later, we are an all-Mac, all-iPhone household. (And Linda and I are still married.)
Today, we use 2019-era Mac Book Pros and they’ll work just fine — probably well past the point at which Apple “sunsets” them and calls them “obsolete.” (GRRR.)
I had just been working with an Apple dealer for a few months when we got an invitation to a special even in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in January, 1984. And boy, was it special! Steve Jobs did the introduction of the Macintosh and things just got better after that. Andy Hertzfeld was a couple of tables away at lunch, Bill Atkinson conducted our hands-on session. At the end of that, Steve came into the room to talk to Bill and I got to meet him. On arriving back at our dealership I filled out the ‘dealer pricing’ order form to order my Mac and ImageWriter printer. I still have my copy of that and the Mac. I did upgrade it to a Macintosh Plus the next year but kept the replaced back of the case and logic board. That was my first Mac.
I think my favourite, though, might have been 4th gen PowerBook G3 (Pismo) although it’s a tough choice as I really loved my 2012 27-inch iMac. I bought it used from a photographer and it was the most it could be, quad-core i7, 32GB RAM and 3TB Fusion Drive. I still have it and it runs great but macOS can no longer be upgraded on it.
My first Mac was a PowerBook Duo using System 7.5. I really like the fact that that machine could go from laptop to desktop almost instantaneously.
My favorite Mac was probably my previous Mac: the mid-2013(?) 15″ MacBook Pro – it was the last Intel MacBook design. Working strong until in July I bought a new 16″ MacBook Pro M2. I find the keyboard on this new machine more difficult to type on due to the black keys on a black background, and there is no way to truly shut the machine totally off as it doesn’t have an on/off button or key, so cleaning keyboard and screen is very difficult.
Apple 2e – with 750 kb of extra memory. Loaded programs in DRAM – Really fast.
My 5 year old Mac is only as fast as that 2e was. Simple, fast, useful.
My first Mac was a 128K that came out in January 1984 and was discontinued October 1985. Mine was purchased that first summer. My favorite Mac was the 2006 Mac Pro when I started to learn how to edit and print digital images, do simple desktop publishing projects, and carry over spreadsheet knowledge from my Windows work. It was the first Mac Pro I’d saved money to buy. Now I’m using the coffee-can 2013 Mac Pro which is not going to last too much longer, so in some future time I’ll look into the Mac Studio.
My first Mac was a Fat Mac (32K) back in 1985. Over the years I have tried so many iterations, like the Performa (I wanted COLOR!), and then off to every iMac that came out.
I have been fortunate enough to own 8 Macs.
I still have a Late 2013 MacPro (TrashCan) and although it’s now relegated vey much to a backup status, it was easily the most reliable Mac (or PC) I ever owned. And it was fast. I had it with 64GB/512GB storage. Loved it….sorry for all you TC nay-sayers out there.
I also had a wonderful 13” MacBookPro for traveling – which I sadly trashed in an instant with a full cup of hot coffee – and which I steadfastly never permit a beverage on my left side now. Great travel machine and so sad it died before its time.
I replaced it with a 16” MBP and really hated the Touch Bar and keyboard – my least favorite. It turned into an M1 Mac Mini as soon as Apple Silicon became available, it eventually morphed into an M1 Ultra 2TB/64gb – which I currently love using….it’s as stable and effective today as the Trash Can was 10 years ago.
Jc
My first Mac that I purchase was the the Performa 6300CD. I came with the monitor and I purchase an HP printer at the same time that COMPUSA was running a special on. This computer lasted over 10 years and only replaced the small battery after I think round year 8 of operation. This was an easy change. My wife also learned her computer skills on this Mac. It finally was running very slow on the internet (I was using DSL at the time) rather than the built in modem for dial up which I initially used for several years. I then purchased a late 2008 MacBook (Aluminum body).
My first Mac was an SE/30 back in 89. I have had many Macs since then, both at work and personal. My favorite is my current 2017 iMac 27 5k with an Intel Core i7, 8GB Radeon Pro 580, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB WD Black M.2 PCIe SSD which replaced the original Fusion drive. This will probably be my last Mac as I will not buy a PC with which I cannot replace the SSD.
My favorite Mac was the 2012 Mac Pro. You could very easily get inside and add memory or swap out hard drives. All of the hard drives were on rails and if you purchased a few extra rails, I could make a clone of the boot Drive and then 30 seconds recover from ANYTHING. The European Union banned this design, because it was theoretically possible to take the side off of it and stick your finger in the fan. (Don’t you just love bureaucrats.) I currently have the 2019 Mac Pro which is “OK” but it’s more difficult to access the inside. Everything must be unplugged in order to open the case.
There’s two perspectives: 1) my first Mac, and 2) my favorite Mac. My first mac with the iMac 1984, which I used for many years with its floppy disks and its grace and beauty. I’ve had many other Macs which included PowerBook portable, Power PC Macs, MacBook Pro, and then only desktop iMacs. My favorites were: a) 2011 21-inch with easy to service magnetic release of the screen (no adhesives!). Then b) favorite is my present iMac 2019 27-inch – an incredible workhorse, reliable, able to run Sonoma, no T2 chip, and a reluctance to move into the expensive, non-user serviceable M-Series iMacs. Just wish Apple silicon could be updated for the strong and beautiful chassis of my current 27-inch instead of the “appliance” look and functions of the current 24-inch iMac!
My first Mac was the IIfx in 1990. I graduated from a //c in 1986 that I turbocharged with a 1MB of RAM and a ZIPCHIP that sped it up enormously. I started with Mac OS2!!
G5 PowerMac
Fall ’86 i was starting my PhD dissertation and decided I was going to get an “IBM clone” to do it rather then spend endless hours on the campus mainframe. On the way to buy it I stopped at a friend’s who’d just bought this cool this called a Mac Plus. I was so smitten I didn’t do any research on it and went straight to the University computer center where I bought one for myself. Did the entire dissertation on it with two floppy drives. I’ve had nothing but Macs since, and have actually never even used Windows – which hadn’t yet been introduced. Absolutely no regrets!
First Apple Computer: Apple IIc
First Mac: PowerBook 165c
Favorite? That’s a tie: The Quadra 840AV and the Power Computing Power Tower Pro.
Apple IIGS (baby Mac)
Bondi Blue iMac
no fan iMac
eMac
iMac….
First 11” MacAir
Fav 2018 MacMini config to the MAX.
The first Mac I used was one in 1988 at a job I had, and it was a Mac SE. The first Mac that I owned personally was the first model MacBook Pro with the Intel processor, as there was (and still, is) Windows software I need to run.
My Mac Pro 3.1
The first Mac I used must have been a Mac Plus, back in 1986. It was our first foray into true Desktop Publishing: Pagemaker 1.5, a Linotronic 100 RIP, and a horribly finicky processing Linotype unit for the camera-ready copy created by the RIP. We fairly quickly upgraded to an SE, and then a Mac II. The Mac II had a little 640 x 480 Apple 13″ RGB monitor. Lots of scrolling of the tabloid-sized pages.
The first Mac I owned was a IIci. I loved that one. I took out a loan from our profit-sharing plan to buy it in late 1991, for about $3800, plus another $175 for the Extended II keyboard. 120MB hard drive and 9MB of RAM.
My next personal Mac was a PowerMac 7600, with a 20″ Apple Multiple Scan display (early in 1997).
My favorites are the PowerMac 9600 that I bought used, and my lovely silver 2010 Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is my favorite of all the Macs I’ve used or owned.
My first Mac was a LC…. It did cost a small fortune for me at that time, so I had to work hard besides my daytime job to get the funds.
And I am still happy working on a Mac… nowadays on a M1 MacBook Pro which is a stunning machine!
I first used the original Mac in college, in 1985.
I first bought an 8500/180 Power Mac. That thing was hard to upgrade.