Celebrating the Mac...

This week marked the 30th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, otherwise known as the "Mac." Congratulations, Apple!

I love Macs. Some have "accused" me of being a Mac Evangelist (which, if you didn't know, is actually a thing), but I'm not: I don't seek out opportunities to tell people about my love for Macs, or try to convince them to switch to Mac. I am, however, always happy to field questions when people have them, and to tell them what I love about my Mac (and other Apple products). I see this more a mark of a satisfied customer than an evangelist—in other words, if you were as satisfied with your Windows or Linux computer as I am with my Mac, you would be happy to tell others about it, too.

I have a long history with Apple computers. In fourth grade (or maybe third?) our class went weekly to the computer lab, where we learned very basic (pun intended) stuff on Apple IIe computers. A couple of years later (in 1984), a friend showed me his dad's new computer, which he called a "Mac"—it had this weird thing I had never seen before, which my friend called a mouse, and when he started it up it smiled at us. I was curious.

Though my first computer was a Coleco Adam (the one with the cassette tapes for drives), I continued to use the Apple IIes in the computer labs at school until my junior year, when the school got a Mac Classic. Though it wasn't technically mine, this was "my first Mac"— seriously, I quickly became more adept with that Mac Classic than the computer teacher, and she would often refer people to me about how to do things she didn't know about.

When I graduated from high school, my graduation present was—you guessed it—a Mac: specifically, a Mac LC with the 13" (not the standard 12") color monitor AND one of the new Apple inkjet printers. The whole system cost my mom about $3K, and I used that Mac for years (my first introduction to the longevity of these machines). As a reminder of how far technology has come since then: I was able to be very comfortable with the 40 megabyte hard drive for a long time, and when I upgraded it to have 4 megs of RAM I was pretty sure I would never need more than that. I had a 56K dial-up modem with which I joined AOL (I was a charter member, username: BigEd3) and CompuServe (I don't remember my number; sorry).

Five years later, my mom gave me a laptop computer they weren't using at her office, and I had my first-ever introduction to a Windows-based computer. I came to appreciate the portable nature of that computer, and when my Mac finally was too old to run any of the current applications I wanted to run in '98, I found I couldn't afford a replacement Mac. I built a Windows-compatible computer then, and used that for a few years (also buying a Windows laptop for seminary a couple of years later).

In 2002, though, I once again had the pleasure of a Mac smiling at me when some friends of a seminary classmate offered him their iMac and he wasn't interested (so it came to me). I quickly re-embraced my Apple and Mac roots, and have run Macs exclusively since then.

These are the Macs I've owned (and/or my family has) in the intervening years:

• 12" iBook (2003)
  
• 13" MacBook (2006)
  
• 21" iMac (2006)
  
• 17" MacBook Pro (2007)
  
• 13" MacBook Pro (2010)
  
• 27" iMac (2012)
  
• 13" MacBook Air (2013)
  

I don't see any reason yet to consider other options. Thanks, Apple, for all that you've done to support my technological life for these 30+ years! Keep up the good work.