Macs, OS X And My Passion For Apple

It’s only fitting that only the release day for Leopard I share my story of my long love for Apple and their products. I may be older than a lot of bloggers but my life pretty much mirrors the development of the personal computer and the Internet. Even though my vocational passion is now with technology it has not always been that way. When I was in high school in the early ’80s I took a computer class that for practical purposes put me off on computers for quite some time. The machines we learned on at the time were Radio Shack TRS-80s also know as “Trash 80s”. A few years later I was taking journalism classes in college and we were one of the first classes at the college to use Macs. They even had sales flyers around campus selling the machines to the students at a reduced price but at the time Macs really were more expensive even with a good student discount. The only computer I used for a while during and after college was a Panasonic word processor. It’s was basically a typewriter with a screen and you saved your documents to floppy disks. think of it as a machine that for all practical purposes only did “Microsoft Word” and nothing else. It wasn’t Word but you get the idea.

Later in the mid ’90s I started shopping for my own computer but at the time Apple looked like it was dead in the water. I purchased my first machine, A PC running Windows 95 and an obscure brand called, Inteva that I bought as Sam’s Club. Needless to say I was faced with a lot of challenges but I did learn a lot. Not too long after I got the computer, went online I soon learned that their was hope for Apple. In 1997 Steve Jobs was brought back and his company NeXT was bought by Apple. I had started to learn about Linux in my local PC User’s group but I found out Apple was going to be changing their operating system to something called, OS X. I was totally fascinated. A Unix back-end with the user friendly interface and quality Apple was known for.

Year after year I watched the progress Apple was making with their refined computer line and OS X. Around 2002 I bought my first Mac, One of the first white iBooks (Now called the MacBook). My wife is still using that computer but the hardware and software limitations of a slower G3 computer is forcing her to upgrade in the near future. The next machine we purchased as one of the first Intel iMacs. I love OS X but I’m so glad Apple switched to Intel chips as I do need to run various Windows programs like Explorer (for checking web sites I work on) and Publisher (files that some customers have I need to convert). I’m currently typing this on my MacBook Pro and I will have to say it is one of the best purchases I have ever made. I look forward to upgrading to Leopard and taking advantage of the collaboration features of iChat, Finder improvements, etc.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, PC, Windows, Explorer, Intel, MacBook Pro, iMac, Publisher, iBook[/tags]