I saw Jon Gruber’s 40th Anniversary of the Macintosh topic list last week, and I decided to share my own.
First Mac owned
My first Mac was a 2005 Mac Mini G4.
Favorite/best Mac
I have always had good luck with my MacBook Pros, but my latest Mac Studio is my favorite. It’s low/no-frills but has many ports, CPU cores, memory, and a headphone jack. It’s a powerful and fast joy to use.
Favorite/best Mac software ever
Bartender and Alfred are two of my favorite Mac apps. Both address shortcomings in macOS.
The overall quality of most Mac apps is what won me over. My Default Apps 2023 article contains many of my favorite apps.
Favorite/best Mac accessory or hardware
Apple’s Magic Keyboards are great. The iPad is a close second because it doubles as an external display.
Hall of Shame: worst accessory, Mac, or moment
Hand down my 2005 Mac Mini G4 shipped with Bluetooth support, which meant a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse would be with them. Not so much. I even paid way too much money for Apple’s keyboard and mouse.
My keyboards were PS2 then, so I had to travel to Best Buy to pick one up. Even once I had them working, the Bluetooth input lag was so slow and unresponsive that neither input device was stable. I still hate Apple mice to this day.
I can’t wholly blame the Mac Mini’s Bluetooth support because that Mac Mini was so underpowered and had such a slow hard drive that it was barely usable. I wanted to use TextMate on it and have a decent development machine, but that was a challenge.
