before elementary school, DOS was running in our house. our soundblaster sound card came with a talking parrot demo that let you test out the microphone. the most intense graphics were a black and yellow circle that would zip across the screen, leaving a trail of dashes while flight of the bumble bee played in MIDI. dad corrected me when i called the 5 1/4-inch disk a "floppy disk", while calling the newer 3 1/2-inch disk a "hard disk". first we were on prodigy. then aol. then compuserve. then aol bought compuserve, so we went for the wide open internet. i still remember telling my dad not to switch from windows 3.1 to windows 95 (i was right). our compaq running an intel 386 carried us for more years than it should've. after that, we tried hp, gateway, then settled with dell.
the control panel was my basement. full of all sorts of tools that could fix the many problems that inevitably arose during the operation of a windows machine.
everything you could ever want to do with the computer was somewhere in there. you just had to find it.
all the way through grade school, windows was all i knew. it was great for gaming and you could get a relatively cheap machine with incredible specs. i was well aware of apple - in every group project there was that single mac user who couldn't read our emails or contribute to attached files. so i hadn't spent any time seriously considering the brand.
i brought one of the family's dell desktops with me to college, but once there my needs changed a bit. i essentially stopped gaming - or when i did, it was on the ps2. i was writing more - lots more (often 10-15 pages, which was unthinkable in high school). web research (and web procrastination) took over significant portions of my computing experience, as citation lists grew beyond a single page. i was taking classes i was actually interested in (unlike in high school), so i wanted to take notes. but since the lyme, my hand and wrist would cramp up too easily. sometimes the end of a line of notes would just fade off into a squiggle. so a desktop wasn't going to carry me through four years. and i stopped caring about tech specs. i was still obsessed with the abilities and concepts of technology, but the raw numbers stopped meaning anything to me - probably because i had stopped reading the horserace-reporting pc magazines dad would bring home from work.
when my sister needed a desktop for high school classes, i was a year into college. without spending $4000 (which mom and dad weren't really interested in helping me pay, in exchange for a 2 yr old desktop), i wasn't going to get the speed, weight and battery i'd need to make the machine useful in class, at the library, and in the dorm. most laptops are heavy enough that you might bring it with you on your commute, but you won't (or, imho, shouldn't) walk around with it all day, in a bag already loaded up with half a dozen texts. if real-world battery life is only four hours, you won't last through a morning of classes without throwing a clunky charger into your bag. turning a pc on and off can take forever. meanwhile, putting one into "hibernation" or sleep is always unreliable in any number of ways (will everything be working when i wake it up? will it stay awake and eat my battery instead of going to sleep?) and i knew i'd have to constantly wrestle with programs running in the background to keep the fan quiet and the battery healthy. i only needed to spend a few months with a borrowed sony (yes, even the pretty vaio suffers from general pc suckiness) to realize that finding a laptop to use day and night wasn't especially likely.
at 1.5 ghz, the baseline powerbook was not the fastest thing around. cheaper, faster was available from dell. i'd have to forget about a decent collection of games and other programs. there was no right-click. and there was the library of knowledge that I had been amassing for more than a decade. but when you're in love, you are in love.
it was quiet. light. easy to use. snappy when performing the basics. and exciting. it was lacking in stunning (if, to most, gibberish) performance claims, but it more than compensated with a plethora of gadget-like features spread throughout the operating system and a solid battery life.
so i gave in. i have no problem admitting that it was a design thing. not just the physical machine. osx is fantastically stripped down while windows bulges with unused features. i asked every powerbook and ibook user in class if they were able to read and send attachments easily. finally, the answer seemed to be a solid yes. i wandered over to the apple store and fell in love with a powerbook.