Mac360 Poll: How Long Have You Been A Mac User?

An Encore Poll: It’s hard for some of us to think about it. Macs have been around for over 20 years. When did you get your first Mac? 1984? 1994? 2004?

Was it a Performa, an iMac, a PowerBook (early 90s), or a PowerMac? Or a Mac before there was power?

That original Macintosh was something else. I saw a Lisa in 1983 but thought $10,000 was a steep price to pay for a computer of any kind, let alone one with an apple icon embedded in the body.

The next year, Apple launched the original Mac. It’s been history ever since. I had an original Mac SE, a few Mac IIs, a couple of Performas (575), a handful of early PowerMacs with the first PPC chips, more iMacs than I can remember, eMacs, a few iBooks, a PowerBook, and an office of PowerMacs—including a few G5s. Even a sunflower iMac (which continues life though doesn’t do much).

When did you get your first Mac? Take our reader poll and share a little of your history with other Mac readers.

It’s probably a good thing that we can’t (and don’t—it’s our choice) keep more information from our reader polls. Each year Apple sells between three and four million Macs and it’s been about that number for each of the past 10 years or so.

Surprisingly, many older Macs (even those running Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8 etc.) are still running. Even early iMacs will run Mac OS X provided there’s enough RAM.

So, let’s take this reader poll in two steps.

Step One will be simple. Click on the “Click Here” below to take the Mac360 reader poll. There’s a list of years from 2005 back to the Mac’s launch in 1984. Over 21 years. Included in most years are a couple of “hints” to jog your memory.

Step Two will be Comments. Don’t hesitate to click Comments below and share your first Mac experience with other readers.

Tera’s was an original 128k RAM Mac. I also forked over nearly half as much money as that for an original iMac—128 megs of RAM. It was a screamer at 233 mhz.

When did you get your first Mac? Take the poll. Alll you have to do is Click Here>.

To see the results on when other readers got their first Macs, just Click Here.

Jack D. Miller
My first Mac was recent; a PowerMac G5, dual CPU at 2ghz. I still have it and it runs great. Just add more RAM and as big a hard drive as you can afford.

Carol Mary Miller
I’ve been a Mac user longer than Jack; dating back about 10 years and early PowerBook days. I have an aluminum PowerBook now. The machine never gets turned off.

Alexis Kayhill
I have a PowerBook and plan to get a new iMac with 20-inch screen. After Macworld in January. There might be ‘one more thing’ to spend money on.

Tera Patricks
Bambi, what’s the deal about telling everyone my first Mac was a 128k. I feel old enough already. Regardless, what an underpowered toy that first Mac was; especially compared to Macs today, and what they may be in just a few years.

Better yet is the advancement in operating systems. That first System 1.0 crashed all the time. OS X, the latest version, hasn’t crashed yet.