PCMag Staffers Reflect on 30 Years of Mac

Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the first Mac, days after the famous "1984" ad aired during the Super Bowl. We have a full rundown of the Mac's influence on the industry, but the device also had a personal impact on many current PCMag staffers.

Sascha Segan, PCMag's Lead Analyst for mobile, got his first Mac 27 years ago, "and it's guided me to create ever since," he said in a Thursday column.

Joel Santo Domingo, PCMag's Lead Analyst for desktops and laptops, said he has "been lucky enough to make a career out of PC technology, from retail sales and service, to IT tech support and management, to my current gig, where I get to see new PCs and technologies and review them on PCMag.com. Along the way, I got to witness the Mac's flashy introduction, early successes, midlife doldrums, and its later successes heralding an immensely successful Apple, Inc."

For more, check out Joel's In the Trenches With Macintosh for 30 Years and Sascha's 27 Years Creating With the Mac. But we also polled the staff for their memories of the Mac over the years. See what they had to say below.

"My Mac obsession began 30 years ago, but not with an actual Macintosh. It was the spring of 1984, I was 11, and my parents opted for the Apple IIe to replace our TI-99/4. It was our first home computer that didn't connect to our television. And our first Apple. My parents being, well, my parents, made it very clear that there'd be hell to pay if any damage was done to any part of the very expensive package complete with 12-inch monochrome Apple monitor and ImageWriter dot-matrix printer. But having a wicked stomach virus when we got the computer wasn't going to stop me from playing Frogger and printing silly PrintShop banners 24/7. I ended up puking all over the integrated keyboard of our new Apple IIe. And, despite a maniacal cleaning and hiding effort, it had to be replaced less than a week after we got it. Since then, it's been all Macs for me." - Wendy Sheehan Donnell, Executive Editor, Reviews

"My first computer wasn't a Mac, but it had Apple ties; my high school graduation present was a luggable Laser 128. It was Apple II compatible and ran the AppleWorks Office suite so I could write papers for classes. To me, in my small hometown, it seemed state of the art even though it was 1988, four years after the Mac came out. Thankfully, in college I was introduced to the actual graphical user interface of the Mac, and became a huge advocate of all things Macintosh. I even worked for the college computer services to help others on the Mac. The first computer I bought myself: a $3,000 Mac IIsi. So imagine my horror when my first job out of college, going to work for Ziff-Davis Publishing–the publishers of MacUser!–and I ended up working for a mag called ... Windows Sources. It felt like a betrayal. But it was a betrayal that put money in my pocket." - Eric Griffith, Features Editor, writing on a Windows 8.1 desktop

"My first Mac was a used Apple Classic II. In fact, it was my first computer of any kind ever. Having come from using typewriters to write my papers (yes, dating myself), the Classic II was a revelation. So compact! No more Wite-Out or ribbon replacements! Even then, Apple's GUI was intuitive for any user. No code to remember, no computer language to master. Just a few keyboard shortcuts, and you were good to go. I still miss that little guy. Hated the beige, though." - Laarni Ragaza, Managing Editor for Hardware

"I've mostly used Apple products on the job. The only Apple product I've ever owned personally, is an iPod shuffle, which I've had to replace three times after getting sweat all over it at the gym. While I can admire Steve Jobs and his vision for Apple, I feel the products, for the most part, have been highly over-priced and overrated. I always felt that Apple targeted people who did not understand or desire to work with the underpinnings of tech, or those who did not want to try to swap out parts, or learn about components. The closed nature of Apple's system was always a turn-off for me. I like to explore my tech products, and take them apart and put them back together easily, if I want. My view of Apple changed a bit with the iPad. It's simple a gorgeous, little machine for doing daily computing tasks. It's the only Apple product this fierce Windows user would ever purchase. Steve Jobs's best accomplishment was not the desktop; it's mobilizing tech for the masses in very much the same way Bill Gates did the desktop." - Samara Lynn, Lead Analyst, Business Networking

"Though I've always used Apple computers, it was years before I actually got a good one. Our first was a Performa 631CD, but it took me awhile to get the hang of using it (and I was young enough to not really understand why it behaved differently than Windows computers). My second Mac was the first-generation Bondi Blue iBook, which had a measly 2GB hard drive in it. This led to some strange situations where I would have to delete all my music if I wanted to play Diablo II, or delete all my games if I wanted to rip a CD. I started with an external floppy drive, but quickly had to move up to an external CD burner as digital video became more of a thing. Though the iBook was a real challenge, I do have some fond memories. Like teaching myself to play StarCraft: Brood War on a trackpad, with my feet." - Max Eddy, Junior Analyst, Software

"The biggest thing we tend to forget is how poorly the original Mac really worked. The base system—with just one floppy drive—was a nightmare; you ended up switching disks constantly. Almost everyone immediately went out to get a second drive. Even then, it was a hard system to get any real work done on in the first year or so. It was only later, with faster hardware, better displays, internal hard drives, laser printers, and software like Microsoft Word and Excel and Aldus Pagemaker that the Mac would turn into a machine you could call productive. Yet, many of us loved those early machines anyway, both for what we could do on it then, and the promise of where it was pointing, which became the mainstream way of doing computing that continues to this day. Thus, it's a milestone well worth celebrating." - Michael J. Miller, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005; see his full reflection on Mac via Forward Thinking