A bit late to the anniversary, but:

My first Mac was the very first. My dad insisted my sister and I be exposed to computers, and made sure we went to computer camps when we were barely out of kindergarten. Turtle Graphics in Logo and BASIC were my jam.

As time moved on, my family switched to PCs as they were less expensive, and my dad cared more about the use of the computer than the company that made it. That lasted until my first job on campus, when I was issued one of the Macs in the office, and I’ve stuck with them ever since.

I lived and breathed through the OSX renaissance, hand-coding table based layouts in Dreamweaver while finding joy and community in being a Mac user. PCs always had more flexibility, and my gamer friends loved to rag on Macs, but for me it was an elegant tool that let me work on what I loved while being part of a community that cared about design and user experience. The web always interested me more, but you couldn’t do nearly as much on it back then, as you can today, and when you needed to do something the web didn’t support, the Mac was the better option.

Now days, I have my M1 MacBook Pro, my iPhone 12, my Apple Watch, my iPad Air, and my Apple TV. I’ve wandered away from the community somewhat as my interests and my boundaries with tech and work have evolved, and I now strongly prefer apps and tools that are cross platform, on principle. The company sometimes makes me scowl and knit my brow (see the recent app store opening shenanigans). The Apple ecosystem remains the best way to use tech as a tool, though, and here I’ll stay.