And I’m back to continue a little personal computing history sharing! In Part 1 I ended with the smoky goodness that was the iMac DV SE, and today the journey continues into laptops and seeking maor powah!
2003 to 2012 (Mac Years)
iBook G4
The iMac G3 brought me to rich media, media richer than my past Amiga 1200 couldn’t handle. I dove deep into it and finished many media projects including web sites and DVDs of family events. One project I worked on consumed nearly the entire hard drive space of the iMac and rendering was super duper painful taking way too many hours, and that became a signal that I would need to upgrade soon. I also had a big move coming up and needed to make my computing life more mobile, so gave my brother the iMac and got myself an iBook G4.
The iBook G4 wasn’t just a platform to get even richer with media with, but also the perfect fit for really energizing my music writing. I paired it with a MobilePre USB DAC, Ableton Lite (sometimes Garageband), and my Roland XP-60 and I became prolific with ideas and creations. The iBook G4 was a portable beast for this era’s software and USB devices.
I completed the move, enjoyed a couple years of happy productivity and then my career advanced quickly and the salary unlocked access to…
PowerMac Dual G5
Ooooohhhhh maaaaan the PM G5 was the butteriest zone of personal computing of my life! It was gorgeous. It had a presence. And being my first multli-processor based computing experience, it screamed power. I loved this machine so so much I may have licked it.
Everything I was up to got turned up to 11: software development, web development, site management, gaming, music writing, teleconferencing, all of it. I got a few extra niceties too like a newer version of Ableton and a Firewire based DAC (Inspire GT), studio monitors etc.
It was on the G5 that I also started playing World of Warcraft and FPS games like Halo. So…much…fun!
But then some life events happened, material losses, and a retracement. Various things got sold, including the G5. 🙁
RANDOM: IRC Chat Bot server
Intel Macbook
I needed to move again, so it was back to portability. Selling the G5, display, digital piano, and various periphs recouped some costs and left enough for a new laptop. Apple had switched to Intel while I was enjoying the G5, so my next computer was a white Intel Macbook.
What really surprised me about this Intel based Macbook was how much power was in such a small package. Many things I was doing on the G5 could actually process QUICKER on the x86 architecture. The switch Apple had made suddenly made perfect sense.
I spent a lot of time running apps under Rosetta which did dampen things for a while, but eventually software vendors would catch up and release Intel binaries for their Mac apps. This made the computer increasingly valuable and performant over time.
I used Bootcamp on this Macbook to participate in a Windows 7 beta. It was pretty neat getting to run native Windows OS and binaries at full speed.
I really appreciated this machine. It was so nice to use, solid, performant, portable, and still had upgradeable parts. Even when life changes were tossing me about, I still had my little portal into creativity and work.
It was with this Macbook that I wrote some of my most cherished music too:
Could have Should Have
The People That Choose Not To Stay (featuring Eric)
A geek-cat always lands on her feet. From staying with parents for a few months Macbook, to staying a friend for a few months Macbook, to air-mattress in my own new apartment Macbook, I jumped back into work, got the rest of my stuff moved, flowed a new income stream, and then I found myself back on a desk with an iMac.
iMac Core 2 Duo
Equipped with furniture once more, I wanted my laptop-squinty-tired eyes to have a big screen desktop experience. I sold the Macbook to a friend collector, got the iMac, and returned to productive comforts.
I don’t have much else to say about the machine. It was the Macbook experience but bigger, better, faster. This iMac was a solid enjoyable performer that I was happy to use for a good 3 years before work gigs went dry for a while and I found myself needing to sell it.
While this was happening, Apple had become prosumer-hostile. They turned their computers into glued kiosks, essentially big iPads: battery doors disappeared, user-accessible RAM slots disappeared, and drive bays disappeared. Also, Apple had locked us all into their price-gouging upsell model of charging 2-3x more for ram and storage upgrades. Grrrrrrrrr. I became very upset. Screw you Apple!
After selling this iMac, I vowed not to buy an Apple computer again.
2012 to 2023 Various
In between 2012 and 2023 I was content using $400-$600 Windows or Linux machines that have (except Surface 2, a gift from my family) been user upgradeable, and only once did I splurge past that range to build a Windows gaming computer.
All of these computers were fantastic for getting stuff done, and were assets to sell and buy as I navigated an ocean of I.T. gigs in my career. There wasn’t much Apple could give me that every other vendor wasn’t already offering and at a lower cost.
Mac Mini M2
There was a return to Apple, but only as a tool, not a need for a main driver. I began working with video, and the value and power of the Apple Silicon architecture got too good and a Mac Mini’s sub-$1000 entry level price point is amazing value for those kinds of use cases, even if not upgradeable. So….fine. I got myself a really nice tool.
Actually this little thing is pretty amazing for video and content creation. It’s got nothing special for coding, writing and image work, but the M2’s built-in video and audio codecs capabilities are insane (as are any of the M* series of APUs). I can rip and convert my DVDs and Blurays in no time (even faster than my since ugpraded Windows gaming PC) and any occasional music or video project I have gets executed without hassle and zero lag.
In 2025 I discovered that the unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon APUs lends itself perfectly well for LLMs/AI stuff, which my career is forcing me into learning and becoming adept in. Having this Mac Mini has helped with that too. It has more ram to offer a model than the GPU ram of my gaming PC.
So in the end I’m grateful to have this little rounded corner wonder. It’s not my main daily driver because I’m so distributed across this, an iPad, my Galaxy S22 android phone and my gaming PC, but when I hop on I get shit done without much fuss.
FIN
That’s all for now, folks! The retrospectives to follow will be more focused on maybe phones, or iPads, but most definitely will include content on my retro-computing collection spanning the 1970s to the first decade of the 2000s.
