How Did You Find Mac?

[Perry]

I'm curious as to how everyone here learned about the Mac. What was your first Mac? Describe your experiences!

Mine can be found here: http://applesource.biz/supportboard-new/index.php?topic=29.0

[Erika]

I found the Mac a few years ago. My sister is a designer (and so now am I!). She's been using Macs forever. In high school I had a PC and was "happy" with it. In the same way you're "happy" with macaroni and cheese before you've ever tasted egg plant parmesan. You'll never go back!

:S

I got an iMac. I still remembering opening the box and thinking how amazing everything was. Before even turning on the computer! The attention to detail, the little things are what makes Macs so cool. Since then I've been a faithful Mac user.

One of the biggest rumors I STILL hear every day is that there is no software for Macs. I think, personally, that not only is there more software than you would ever need, but Macs have THE BEST software. Case in point, TimeNet.

Windows is just so clunky and slow and ugly! I could never go back. OS X is sooo pretty and fun to use. And great applications like TimeNet are exactly the reason to stay: I don't know much about hardware (but my Mac is fast though!), but it's the software that makes Macs so great.

Thanks to people like you guys, AppleSource, for making such cool programs!

[Guest]

I've always known about the Mac, and of course, like every other Windows user, had heard that they we're completely useless and that they were horrible, with zero programs and no capabilities what-so-ever.

I started talking to friends who actually *used* Macs. Instantly, I realized that it was Windows users who had machines which were completely useless and horrible, with zero programs and no capabilities what-so-ever. I was outraged. How dare Windows users form such conclusions about Macs when they had never even USED one? (Of course, afterwards I realized that I had been completely hypocritical and shamefully admitted to doing the same. Haha.)

Now knowing about the world of Mac from a first-hand source, I was determined to get my hands on one. As the year progressed and fall turned to winter, winter turned to spring, and finally spring turned to summer. Everything was good, however, most of my friends had Macs and I had my infuriating PC.

Towards the beginning of September, I ordered a refurbished iBook from the online Apple store. I was absolutely thrilled, freaking out completely because I no longer had to suffer the burden of the Blue Screen of Death 5+ times a day (no lie, it was that bad). Around the 20th of September, Booky arrived. Of course, I was about to wet my pants. I breathlessly unwrapped the box.

As soon as I pulled my new iBook G4 out of its box, I immediately dubbed him Booky. He was so adorable and perfect and PRETTY. And still is, mind you. :] He always has the cutest icons ever.

But, I suppose that's getting a little off track.

IN CONCLUSION, I couldn't be happier with my Mac!

The End.

[Timo]

I learned about Apple/Mac in the SEAP (School for Engineering & Audio Producing).
We worked on Macs there running Logic. And it was great !

First I used windows as well, and a Mac was too expensive and was only a dream.
But as I could not work with windows/Logic anymore (crashes all the time), I got all my saved money and made that dream come true, and I bought my first ever Mac, a big Powermac with Logic Pro 7.

2 months later i sold my pc, as I didn't touch it since I got the mac
The last dream came true again 2 months later, in form of a 23" apple cinema display. And I'm so happy with this system, it's a paradise.



Yes, music is my passion and I hope to get better as a producer and to relase records on labels.
Without my mac, I would still be a newbie with crashing windows, virusses and NO save-option in the stoneold logic-version  ><

I'm blank, but I'm happy 

Greetings
Timo

[Perry]

Timo,

What a killer setup! I love it. I've got the 23" screen too. They're sooo nice huh? I'm also a musician. I don't have near the studio setup as you, I'm more of a hobby musician. I've got a few guitars and a small Oxygen keyboard, looking to get a much nicer (full sized one) soon. I'd love to hear some of your stuff sometime. Maybe I'll put my own creations on here as well.



Keep the stories coming everyone. Great to read!

[Timo]

I'm a hobby musician as well...
But I always dream about getting more professional. time will tell.

atm I'm building a new studio, so the picture is not up to date. it looks horrible here atm 
if you look on www.midrange-music.de, you can download a track of mine for free. It's trance music, so I don't know if you like it.

however..let's not going offtopic here..

let's leave it for the mac-stories

cheers
timo

[Guest]

Dude, RAD set up Timo. And happy birthday, by the way.

STAY HAPPY AND DRUNK!

[Kris]

How did I find Mac???  Hmm, good question Perry!

I guess I could start by saying that I was a die hard PC user, and also Red Hat junkie about 10 years ago, for it allowed me to use tons of software, and also run music flawlessly at any given moment.  WinAmp was my friend for years, and also the early Macromedia Suite starting @ version 2 with Flash, and Dreamweaver etc.  I used Photoshop on a PC since version 3, when it was the coolest editing app in the world, but I always had issues with Ram, and crashes.

So years later I started working at Southern Oregon University while attending college, and as my minor was multimedia, I decided it would a huge bonus to work in the multimedia lab (which was entirely Mac OS).   So I quickly found out that the Mac no longer needed to be repaired all the time, and it didn't crash like my PC, so this was the major evolution of my Mac switch.   Being able to get 3 times more work done in 1 day by using a Mac, then waisting all my time wondering WTF is wrong with my PC, and did I remember to save every 20 minutes??? Oh D#$@, I forgot.  Start over I guess.  Mac you saved my passion for working on computers, and also designing, and programming, editing video etc...

Perry also had a major effect in my decisions by always showing me new features, and hints, apps which I needed, and of course making software that I really needed for my design & hosting business which started years ago.  I couldn't have fallen in love with Macs without his desire to bring people into the light of the genious & sexy mac OS X.

Enough rambling. Here is my home office, minus a few gadgets.  iPod Nano, and a mess of other plug'n play hardware.  And yes I have spent way too much money on this office, but I can't help it, spending money is fun!

[Erika]

Kris what a nice office! Looks like Perry has influenced more than one person to switch to a Mac.

[Perry]

Nice man. I'm looking forward to being back in that office with you. Set up shop right there on that second table to the right of your PowerBook. I'll be there Friday. Let's get some work done and then party hardy.

[Simmonet]

Way back before you youngen's were born :p I was taping out Basic code on a Commodore Pet at The Byte Store in East London.

Ended up getting my first job out of school (after a hitch hiking trip round Europe) as a computer operator / programmer on a DEC PDP-11 (hard drives the size of washboards) crunching data for the oil industry.

Long story short, I then went sailing :-)

After New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico, West Indies, Greece, Italy, Bahamas and a few other places, I ended up working the front desk at a Marketing Communications company / Ad Agency. They had Mac: IIci, LCII, Centris! - and I really didn't know *anything* about them, but I was in love! Within 4 months I had added about 5 Filemaker databases to their day-to-day operations (contact manager / envelopes / invoices / PO's etc. Within a year we had a network running QuickMail and file serving. We even upgraded to a Quadra!

Yep, those were the days, I remember going to bat saying we *had to have* another 32MB of RAM in each machine!

So roll on another few years and we had a variety of Mac Clones (I believe at one point I had a Motorola StarMax and my boss had a Power Computing tower coz "he liked their ads"). *Finally* we all had PCI-based Macs 7500, 7600, 8600 and I was into Director programming, video editing (Premiere!).

My main job was project management for that we used Now Contact & Now Up to Date with a series of custom templates for everything from thank you letters to contracts... We used MacDraw Pro to layout event plans and flow charts and Photoshop 3 was pretty much of a staple.

A year before I left the company, we purchased one of the 'brand new' G4s and I got a used Blue & White G3 for video compression... my day-to-day desktop was a tricked out 7600.

The Blue & White upgraded with a G4 chip was mine when I started Simmonet, the 7600 was retired.

After a year I purchased the QuickSilver 867 when it came out (still have it in the office), a year after that the 'Mirror Door' 1.25 DP (still have it) and a 17" Powerbook (got stolen) and the year after that a G5 2.0 GHz DP. (still have it!).

Along the way I also bartered with a school client for 6 G4 Gigabit Ethernet which we use around the office for basic desktop publishing, answering machine (with Phlink) and application server (like TimeNet!).

So how did I find Mac? We kind of found each other :-D

And one last thing... if it wasn't for the Mac I wouldn't be married... that's another story

[Perry]

And one last thing... if it wasn't for the Mac I wouldn't be married... that's another story

You can't just.... leave off with THAT! Now I wanna know...

By the way, I hear you on the PowerBook stolen thing. Ouch. I had a similar situation. I didn't really have mine stolen, per se, but I ordered one on eBay, wired the money, and it never came. Yeah that sucks. Everyone wants the PowerBooks. You've gotta be careful with those things! I'm typing this on my 1GHz PowerBook right now. It's old, but man I love this thing.

Great stories everyone! Grant, I wanna know more about your love story!

[Erika]

Macs and true love. Does it get any better than this? I could read this stuff all day. Endless entertainment!

 :popcorn:

[OktoberFilms]

My first Mac experience was way ack in the 1980s. I visited someone and she had the old classic. Tiny all-in-one with a monochrome screen. I played some Olympic Games simulation and loved it.

Fast forward to ca. 1994. My sister's boyfriend bought a Mac because his designer brother told him PCs were crape. It wasn't too bad. I actually liked it, but I was too busy discovering the wonderful world of the 486 to really fall in love. I did love some of it's quirky things like the trash bin, the interface was miles ahead of the then state of the art Windows 3.11 and I adored the quack sound. Still, I wasn't sold on the idea. they were too expensive and didn't play a lot of games, something important to me at the time.

I noticed the original iMac when it came out. I loved it, but I was under the impression that the OS wasn't up to the design of the computer itself. They came with OS9, I think, so it wasn't totally unfounded, I think.

Fast forward again, this time to 2004. I had been making holiday films for a while now. I hated the programs available to me. Then someone suggests I get a Mac. I jumped on the idea and bought a second hand PowerMac Quicksilver. I loved it and OSX blew me away!  I started neglecting my PC and even my precious ThinkPad was getting lonely.

To make a short story long, I donated the PC, sold the ThinkPad and bought a Powerbook. It took me seven months to switch completely. I currently have two Macs and no PCs. My initial plan was to install VirtualPC for those Windows-only programs I needed, but that hasn't happened yet and probably never will.

[charlie]

Hi everybody – I'm quite new around here as I just registered my Time Net today.

My first Macs were Plus and SE net boxes in around 1986-87. Since that there has been almost all different ones. At the moment I'm using iMac G5. Strong enough to fill all my needs even with PhotoShop.

How did I find Mac then? Well, I just wanted to keep everything simple and effective, did not know anything about the stuff but wanted to stay in frontline. Then found out the first version of PageMaker and just had the feeling that this combination will be the future. My advertising agency was actually one of the first ones to use Mac during those times in Finland, so we had to learn everything ourselves. But believe it was fun!

Now: Thanks to Perry. I have a bit similar feeling with TimeNet – there's so much I can do myself without being any enthustiast of computers or software.

My short history: A dirty old man ... born in Finland just before WW2. Then business. Business and business, own advertising agency in 1978, now living in Spain, Costa del Sol since 1998 and still active at my home office (clients in four EU-countries).

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[Perry]

Welcome aboard Charlie! Enjoy your Macs and enjoy TimeNet.

[only120xs]

I guess I was born into this culture..  :p

The first computer I can remember having at home was a Mac Classic (color?), then at some point my dad moved up to a Quadra 840AV (with 'tons' of RAM that he paid ungodly amounts of money for). After high school I went to the USAFA where we were required to purchase brand new PCs through them (~$2000 in 1998!). I suffered through that for the 2 years I was there and kept it after I left cuz I was broke 
I fiddled with it and upgraded it a little until the summer of 2001 when I purchased a G4 450 AGP off of ebay. That was my workhorse until last summer when I bought my first ever NEW mac, an iMac G5 20", which I love. 

[Guest]

:p Well gee that's quite a history! No doubt you've enjoyed them all.

[Perry]

Very cool. Jeez I've probably had a dozen or so Macs over the years. Definitely nice machines.

[ReesesPissos]

Let's see...

My first experience with a Mac was when my sister went off to college, and, being a music major, was required to use certain software which was only available on a Mac. My dad went out and bought an iMac, took it to her dorm, and spent hours installing software. His biggest catch was that when he installed a certain piece of software, he couldn't find it. He got angry and went outside for a smoke. I sat down, and in the time it took him to finish his cigarette, found every single one of the programs he had installed. Ever since that first day, my dad hated the machine. He refused to ever touch my sister's computer, and told her if she needed help with it, to call someone else.

Then I go off to college with an old Aptiva. It lasted about a year and a half when I decided it was way too slow for what I was doing. So I got in the market for a new computer. My dad was pushing Dell, as he had just bought his own. And my new boyfriend at the time, who just happened to grow up on Macs, was pushing for me to buy a Mac. I was probably just like any other switcher when I kept putting off actually learning the Mac because I figured it would be way too complicated to learn and I thought it would just be easier to buy a system I was already familiar with. So I bought a Dell. (My father also was just short of threatening to disown me if I bought a Mac.)

So I go on using my Dell, and dating my Mac guy. Over the months, my Dell and I grew apart while Rich and I grew together. My Dell just seemed to get slower by the day. It also got to the point where I had to wipe the hard drive so often because it kept screwing up.

Then, seeing as how I was about to marry my Mac guy, I broke down and decided to finally learn all about OS X. I loved it. I loved every minute of the 20 minutes it took him to show me everything on it. I couldn't believe how simple and straitforward it was. It was amazing.

The next problem was convincing him to buy me one. It didn't take long... four months after we were married I had my new 12" PowerBook G4 in my hands. Two weeks after that I had made my first movie.

I still have my original PowerBook, now set up with two 320 GB external hard drives. I have made 8 movies using iMovie and iDVD, and am currently learning Final Cut Express.

Since my switch I have converted my sister, who also has a 12" PowerBook G4, and am working on my mother. (They both started out owning iPods; my sister was an easy switch, but my mother is resistant because she thinks my dad will kick her out of the house if she buys a Mac! But since she got the iPod she hates her computer, which is my sister's old Dell. She only uses it for iTunes, but it took about 6 months to get my dad to fix the computer enough to where it would work, and even then Rich had to go in and do it himself.)

Okay, so that was probably more than you needed to know. But I'm in the mood to type!

BTW, I got here via Richard (only120xs), my husband of a year and a half!

~Heather

[Guest]

Aw, that's quite a cute story!

Another Mac couple! How cute is that. ^^ Now Perry and I aren't the only one.

[Perry]

Aw. Yes, very cute. If you recall though, Grant is another couple that came together with Macs. We should start a club.