This weekend has marked a little bit of a "landmark-event" in our own personal computer history. Saturday morning we said goodbye to our "very first mac". I still remember when, almost four years ago I was thinking about buying my first mac. I had been listening to my very first podcasts (Back then , the Daily Source Code" and was following Adam Curry’s experiments on a daily basis as he brought the simple basics of what was to be a podcasting revolution, online. I had been bitten by the mac-microbe some two months earlier while buying my first Ipod. Listening to podcasts made the itch worse. Everybody was talking about macs, and more and more I was thinking about owning my very own mac. A colleague of mine had been working with macs for some time and he gave me some good pointers. So I went online and started looking for my very first stray of the path of the "pc user". It took for ever to figure out what I wanted. (Well, not really , I looked at what I could afford and that was that) So it was going to be an Ibook. it was small, it looked pretty nice (Girly actually) but it was a mac (AND IT WAS WHITE !) So it took some surfing to find out where I was going to purchase it and I decided to go for a store in Germany, because they gave me a better price then the Apple store. It took forty emails and 10 phone calls to get my hands on the Ibook. (Most of these emails where "is it there yet ?" …"NO" …is it there yett ?" …"NO" …is it there yet ?" …"NO" …is it there yet ?" …"NO" …) So after three weeks of waiting I got the call " Ihren Ibook ist arriviert" said the German shop lady. I jumped in the car (I was working in Antwerp at the time) and drove all the way to Aachen, barely making it before the shop closed ! I was so exited. The first time you unpack a Mac, use it … stuff like that. I’m no apple fan-boy but still, after owning nothing but beige boxes .. your first Mac is something different.
The little Ibook went EVERYWHERE with me. I had a little Hedgren backpack I would use to drag it around and it was awesome. Even when I decided to trade up towards a Macbook, my little Ibook got a second lease on life. My wife loved the thing. And again the little Ibook followed her around for two years. It has always been treated with care, never dropped, never had its lid snapped shut in frustration. It was never yelled at .. It just always did what it supposed to. After it came mac mini"s and Macbooks and Imacs but It came and saw them all but continued to preform its duty.
But it was time to move on. With a G4 1.2 gig processor and 758 megs of ram it became one of the slower models in the house. And since I had my eye on a Macbook Pro for a few years now, we decided to see if we could find a good home for the Ibook (at a good price, otherwise we would hold on to it unitl it was absolutely obsolete). But after a few days a buyer turned up and handed over 400 euro’s for this 4 year old Ibook (good deal) and our little white friend was handed over to a young gentleman for whom it was going to be "his first Mac". Cool huh ! I’m not one to get mushy over hardware and stuff, and seldom have emotional ties to laptops. But your first Mac is a little bit like your first car, and so I hope it will have another nice new lease on life.
Now .. where did I leave that bookmark about buying my Macbook Pro.