(This is the first of a nine part, self-indulgent series about  me and Apple Macs. Strap in, and please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. You’ve been warned.)

The recent 30th anniversary of the Mac and all the surrounding commentary and reminiscing made me think about my Mac history. Whilst my Mac experiences don’t go back thirty years (only a little over ten, in fact), I thought I’d add my noise to the signal and muse upon my Mac back-catalogue.

2003 – iBook G4

This is where it all started for me. My computing experience until this point had been building PCs and loading them with either Windows (pre-University) or Linux¹. My friend James had studied art at University and had come home from there a few years prior with mad Photoshop skills and an old Mac clone machine with System 7 or Mac OS 8 (I don’t remember which) on it². I was terribly intrigued by its strange, unfamiliar GUI, its love of SCSI-based peripherals (what, you can just daisy chain the printer and the ZIP drive? Amazing…), and the peculiar one-button flipper mouse. How altogether odd.

Sometime in mid-2003, I’d just bought my first digital camera and first iPod (the 3rd generation of what is now called the ‘iPod classic’), and was having no fun whatsoever attempting to sync both of them with a Linux PC. With lingering thoughts of James’ peculiar Mac clone, I decided to take the plunge and pick up a Mac, given its claim of being at the digital hub of one’s life (or some other such nonsense; I forgot the ad campaign of the time). I picked up a couple of Mac magazines to try and suss out which model would be most appropriate, and read a number of columns excitedly mentioning the upcoming iBook G4, apparently a league apart from its predecessor’s G3 processor. It was due out in October 2003, which nicely coincided with a trip to the USA that I had planned. The dollar was at a favourable exchange rate back then, and given the alleged premium we in the UK had to pay for technology in general, and Macs in particular, it seemed a no brainer.

So I found myself in Computer Advantage on the North Tamiami Trail, just north of Sarasota, in November that year, gleefully picking up my new iBook G4. And holy hell, what a machine. It was unlike anything I’d used before. I’d prepared myself for it to handle like the old clone I’d inherited, but it came loaded with the just-released Mac OS X Panther, chock-full of shiny, sparkling gems like Safari and iTunes and Exposé and oh-my-god-did-you-see-the-dock-do-that-magnification-thing. It was an unfamiliar, exotic beast that I instantly fell in love with, if you’ll permit me to be so tragic.

I was still rocking my 3rd gen iPod at that stage, and decided to just plug it into my sparkling new laptop and see what happened. It should be unsurprising to hear that it just worked. Same with the digital camera I was toting. No need to recompile my kernel to get the Firewire drivers working. No need to compile crappy, half-baked open source applications to load songs onto my iPod. It just worked. It was, quite literally, amazeballs.

I loved that machine. Sure, it had a girth to it for a 12″ laptop. My current machine, a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Air, weighs, at 1.34 kg, around half of what that iBook weighed. And yes, the white matt plastic keyboard surround got quite grimy from my fat, sweaty wrists, but these were all matters that were by-the-by. That iBook, even with its plastic case and early-in-its-lifetime version of Mac OS X, instantly converted me, away from bloated old OSes³, or OSes with parts I had to rebuild from scratch every time I changed my digital camera, or uninspiring beige cases with all the aesthetic sensibility of a Brutalist concrete monstrosity in 1970’s Birmingham. It was the meeting of form and function, with neither sacrificed to the other, existing in harmony. The design wasn’t how it looked; it was how it worked. And it worked like a fucking dream.