Friday, January 24, 2014

The Apple Macintosh is 30 Today

As most people who know me know, I've been an Apple "fanboy" for much of my life.  When people have asked me what computer to buy, I always say "Get a Mac".  Anyhow, on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac's introduction, I thought I would put up a list of the Macs I've had over the Years.

The first one was the original Macintosh.  In September, 1984, wife got some friends to get it for me with their college discount, which made it it about half the cost of retail.  I think it was an anniversary gift.  In 1989 I made my best Apple purchase ever.  I bought 100 shares of AAPL at $35 each.


We got our next Mac, a Mac IIsi, seven years later in 1991.  This was purchased with the Princeton college discount.  We also got the 13 inch color display.


After another seven years, in 1998, we got a new G3 desktop with a new 21 inch display.  No college discount but the college discount had pretty much gone away by then.


Seven years later, in 2005, I decided that the computer and the monitor should be separate, so rather than buy an iMac, I purchased a Mac mini and got a Dell monitor to go with it.  After 2 years, I attempted to upgrade the RAM and damaged it such that the fans ran wide open all the time.  Luckily, after a couple of months of loud fan noise, a lightning strike put it out of it's misery.


And so, in 2007, we bought a new Aluminum 20 inch iMac.  This machine was a disaster because it kept shutting down unannounced. After a lot of complaining and phone calls, I got Apple to replace the motherboard and power supply and all was good in the world.  In 2012, I replaced an increasingly flaky internal hard drive with a new 1T drive.


Rather than wait the full seven years, and still feeling a bit guilty about the indulgence since the old one was working fine, I treated myself to a new 27 inch iMac for Christmas 2013.  I reasoned that the stock was doing good enough and I was getting old and it was time and the new one would be a lot faster and, blah, blah, blah.  So I'm just getting it up to speed.  It's a nice toy for an old boy.


So this picture sort of summarizes my Apple Macintosh journey.



Fortunately, the little Apple stock I bought back in 1989 has appreciated nicely enough to cover these purchases along with all the other Apple do-dads we've bought along the way.