It’s amazing that the Mac is now 30 years old! I will never forget my first Mac. It was a lime green iMac and it replaced an old Mac Performa I inherited from my Dad. It went with me everywhere. From my Appalachian State apartment to my job at the photo lab to vacations at the beach. It was so portable.
That lime green iMac out hustled the PC my photo lab boss and his ditzy wife had built prior to me showing up. Some computer geek convinced them to spend untold amounts of money just so he could build a computer. Problem was the stupid thing never printed true color. It was probably the first time I ever said those immortal words, “shoulda bought a Mac.” I’ve said it countless times ever since. From that point on, I hauled my iMac in to the photo lab everyday. Photoshop ran smoother and I never had a problem printing any of my digitally restored photos again.
The practicing of taking my Macs with me on the go continued with what I considered to be the best iMac ever made. I received a beautiful white flat panel iMac as a college graduation gift from my Dad. Not wanting to leave it behind on my study abroad trip, I actually had it shipped to Keele University in England. While it may have not been the most economical decision, it did help me make friends fairly quickly. Everyone was impressed with its design and the ground breaking OS X software that made Windows look like stale bread. From my 3 A.M. listening of the infamous Duke-Carolina game where Coach Doughtery threatened fisticuffs to my endless ripping of CDs for all my dorm-mates, that iMac helped me settle in quite nicely. I’ll also never forget explaining to one of the network engineers at the Keele library how I got my Mac to work with their backwards Internet protocol. He responded in a toasty English accent, “I’ve never seen a Mac before!” Makes me laugh to this day. That and the fact that I saw that very same iMac model enshrined at the Clinton Library in Little Rock.
These days, I carry a Macbook Pro everywhere I go. While it’s not the same as strapping in an iMac with a seatbelt, my new Retina model packs way more punch than those old CPUs. While I hope to write a full review someday of my new machine, for now I’ll just say it represents the most seamless computing experience I’ve ever had.
Funny thing is, all my family’s old Macs still work. My Granddad inherited my lime green iMac but he now prefers to work off an old MacBook Pro my Dad gave him. I’ll never forget him showing me the Baltimore Orioles homepage and asking me if I had ever seen it before. The man loves baseball and that computer brought it right into his living room. My brother still has an old bondi blue iMac and G4 tower that have yet to breathe their last breaths. The white flat panel iMac I mentioned is operating in my office and it can still kick out a jam or two. Best of all, my Dad’s old MacPlus still works to this day. You can even insert his MacPaint floppy disk and make cool retro art!
What a great 30 years of computing. And according to MacWorld and the Apple Executive team, the Mac is here to stay. Check out their article, Apple executives on the Mac at 30: ‘The Mac keeps going forever.’ What else is there to do but say, “Thank you Steve Jobs! Thank you Apple.”