MacBook is Dead, Long Live The New MacBook Air

Ten years ago, I was not a Mac user. I had never owned a Mac. I thought I probably would never own a Mac. I was a Windows guy all the way. Sure, Windows Me sucked, but Windows 95 and 98 were solid. And we were on the verge of Windows XP. The Mac was something I was forced to use at school. I recall riding my bike to the engineering school to see a demo of the new OS that was being put on by Apple. I stood and watched a few demos, but mostly I just played with the new OS. And I remember thinking that I really wished Windows looked like this. But I wasn’t entirely sold. This initial version of OS X Lion called “Cheetah” seemed buggy, and slow. And it was. By September, Apple has already rolled out the first big upgrade, OS X 10.1 “Puma”. I recall going to check the new version out at a CompUSA. Much better. Still wasn’t sold though, Windows XP was coming out the following month. I bought Windows XP the day it came out — exactly one month after Puma — October 25, 2001. I got a free MP3 player with my purchase at Best Buy. It was an Intel one. It sucked, but it was free. The iPod was announced just two days prior, but it wouldn’t launch until November. Even ten years ago, it was a different time. I basically didn’t think about Apple, OS X, or even the iPod until almost three years later when I broke down and bought a 40 GB iPod so I would have all my music with me on a drive out to California. It was the first Apple product I had ever bought. It would not be the last. A few months later, I was working in California, in Hollywood. In case you couldn’t tell from popular television shows and movies, Hollywood is a Mac-dominated town. I had a job at Private Island Trax, where the computer at my board was a Mac. After a few weeks of using it on a daily basis, I bought myself one — the cheapest iBook I could find. It wasn’t for the hardware, which I found slow and outdated compared to my relatively decked-out Dell laptop. It was for OS X — 10.3 “Panther” at the time, to be exact — I was addicted. Follow me on Twitter and Facebook. What are your thoughts on the new Mac OS X Lion? Are you addicted to Apple products as well? Let us know in the comments below!