I guess being in the technology field I should have expected the immense amount of news regarding Steve Jobs’s death to flood every channel of communications I have available to me. This news has actually interrupted my process of finding, reading, and writing about various articles of interest so you’re dealing with less than optimal posts today. In luie of having normal A Geek With Guns content to post I’m going to perpetuate a meme that’s been going around, I’m going to talk about my first Apple computer.
While others can talk about their experiences with an early Apple II or one of the first Macintoshes, I only jumped on the Apple ship after they shipped OS X 10.4. Before that I really had no use for Apple computers as I found their operating system lacking and the available software sparse. When 10.4 shipped I finally believed the operating system to be a competent and fully featured UNIX system and I had been looking for a good laptop running some flavor of UNIX for some time by then. At the time Linux was still unusable as far as I was concerned for laptops (suspend never worked correctly, battery life was usually half of what you could get in Windows, driver support for various Wi-Fi cards was non-existent, etc.).
Needless to say I ended up buying a PowerBook G4. My first PowerBook was one of the last in the line (model identifier was a PowerBook5,6) and came equipped with a measly 1.67GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive. The bloody thing ran though and gave me few headaches. I used it for most of my school work and eventually it filled the role of everything except gaming (which I used to do far more of when I was young). While I still own the machine it really is of little use considering how woefully underpowered it is. Still, it’s fun to bring it out of storage once in a while and power it up for nostalgia sake.
Still, from that humble laptop I eventually purchased the first model Mac Pro to replace my aging desktop. While I spent most of my life vehemently hating Apple computers the quality of their new operating system and hardware won me over. Now most of my machines are Apple manufactured and I can say they have given me far fewer headaches than previous machines I have owned. Hell Apple won me over in the phone market even though they perform practices that I find detestable (yet their phones do what I need which is what is really important in my opinion).