Mac 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.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

• Article by Bambi Brannan • Published on Thursday, May 1, 2008
• Category: Polls • 96 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

Grumpy says:

I got my first Mac, a Mac II, in 1986. Since then, Powerbook 140, Power Mac 9500 (horrible case design), Powerbook 2400, Dual USB iBook, Mac Mini (early G4), and a Mac Pro (early 2008).

— Posted on Sun May 04 at 6:33 pm by Grumpy

Karl Cook says:

The first Mac I bought was a Classic II 4/80- that’s 4 megs of RAM and an 80 megabyte HD. My how times have changed! I replaced that with a IIvx bought at auction that was upgraded with a 68040/30MHz card and 16MB of RAM. That one later got donated to a good friend going off to university and was replaced with a Mac clone- a PowerComputing PowerCenter 150 Desktop model running a PPC604. That one was replaced by another PPC 150 Tower that’s been upgraded with a G3/275 card and a USB Card- I still use that one for old games under OS 9. The machines I work on now are a MacBook Pro Core Duo 1.83 and a Mac Pro 2.8GHz Dual Core Xeon. There’s also an Onyx TiBook/550 and an AlBook/1.6 for streaming music and internet radio. I’ve worked in IT departments for the last 12 years and picked up a fair amount of “retired” Macs as well- a Duo 280 with dock, PB5300, PB1400, Quadra 6100, all now unsued or unusable.

— Posted on Sun May 04 at 12:35 am by Karl Cook

C.Simmons says:

1. PowerMac 6100
2. PowerMac 7600
3. PowerMac G4 400
4. PowerBook G4 Titanium
5. PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0
6. MacBook Dual 2.0 (black)

— Posted on Sat May 03 at 7:33 am by C.Simmons

jobaron says:

After a number of deaths in my immediate family, I found myself on the verge of severe depression. A friend suggested that I get a computer, as a means of taking my mind off the tragedies. I bought a used Fat Mac, together with an ImageWriter printer. All worked beautifully, as well as doing the trick of saving me from depression!

This was back in 1986 and I’ve been a Mac user (addict?) all these years. Macs are not just computers, they are therapeutic as well…

— Posted on Sat May 03 at 2:09 am by jobaron

GuyGene says:

1. ‘86 Mac Plus
2. ‘91 PowerBook 180 gray scale screen - still works!
3. ‘95 LC III, my last desktop.
4. ‘98 PowerBook Kanga - still works.
5. ‘00 Pismo, using right now.
6. ‘01 800 MHz iBook 12” - it just died last week, inverter cable, and probably logic board also.
7. ‘02 700 MHz iBook 14” - died twice with logic board, first time under AppleCare, next time last April, now dead until I can try to fix it myself.

I think iBooks were the worst ever Macs made, Pismo, the best. MUST get wife a new Mac soon; she has seen the MacBook Air, and that did it. It’s all she wants now…

— Posted on Fri May 02 at 4:19 am by GuyGene

Reed Richmond says:

Bought the original Macintosh when they first came out (1984). I was told at the time that I had bought the third Mac sold in Ft. Worth, Texas (lived near there at the time). Got a dot matrix printer at the same time and an Apple Mac carrying bag ($90.00 - I still have it - the Mac fit snugly in it with that bulky keyboard and there was a pocket for the mouse and boy was it heavy to lug around). I upgraded to a Plus (skipped the Fat Mac) from there. Since then I’ve had an SE30, Mac Portable, Mac TV, original bondi blue iMac, eMac, another iMac, and a G4. Bought my daughter a MacBook for college and I use a MacPro at the office (only Mac among 100 plus PCs).

— Posted on Thu May 01 at 2:39 pm by Reed Richmond

Eric Johnson says:

I worked for an early Apple dealer (Computerland - remember them?) and did training on Apple II’s in the basement of a hotel in Cherry Hill, NJ. I was at Computerland until just prior to the release of Lisa. When I returned to the computer business in 1986, I was introduced to the Macintosh Plus (and LaserWriter and LaserWriter Plus) and the Macintosh 512e. In 1987 when the Macintosh II and SE were introduced, I bought an SE (couldn’t justify or swing a Mac II). I’ve had five other Mac’s since then. I currently have a 2008 Mac Pro (2.8GHz x 8, nVidia 8800, 8GB, 3TB). I make my living as a MSDN developer, but my personal computing (digital audio and video these days) has been done on Mac’s for over 20 years now.

— Posted on Thu May 01 at 10:40 am by Eric Johnson

tpm says:

I had Mac 512K (about $2000) and upgraded it to the “Fat Mac” with 4 meg of memory (not gig but meg!!). I also bought the 20 meg hard drive that cost about $1500. How many terabytes would that buy today?

And who can forget how many times you had to swap the floppies in and out to save a word processing document.

— Posted on Thu May 01 at 9:54 am by tpm

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