OK, I’m a little late to the party.

Apple is celebrating 30 years of Macintosh this year. I was late to that party too. Growing up, the family computer was a clone of the IBM XT. It ran at a whopping 10 MHz, was kitted out at 640K of RAM, and had a massive 30 MB hard disk.

I played around with DOS 3.3 and GWBASIC. And I liked it.

But when it was time to get my own computer, my parents didn’t give me a choice. It was a Mac, or it was nothing. They were teachers and they got a great deal. So my first personal computer (rather than the family computer) was a Macintosh Peforma 638CD. I didn’t expect to like it. But when that big box of computer and monitor arrived and I discovered what 8-bit color and stereo sound was like, I never looked back. I loved that machine.

It’s been 19 years since I opened that box. So since Apple is looking back at 30 years since the beginning, I thought I’d at least look at my own history of interaction with Macintosh.

I started with my Macintosh Performa 638CD in 1995. 33 MHz of Motorola power. It lacked the Math Coprocessor of the 68040, which mattered in 1997, when MP3s became popular and my poor little Mac couldn’t keep up. I had the TV tuner card, which was a really cool gimmick, but I didn’t really use it much. I eventually maxed out the RAM (36MB) before I moved on.

By 1997, the PowerPC had really stabilized and Apple had stopped making truly terrible designs. I upgraded to the Power Mac 6500/225. The 603e was a consumer chip, but it was still quite capable. The tuner card in my 638 was still compatible, so I transferred it and continued to use it until I broke the coax connector during a move. With 2GB of storage, I thought I’d never run out of space. And I didn’t. Simple times. This particular machine had a bad L2 cache when I bought it; I could remove it or run an extension that disabled it under Mac OS 7.5, with reduced performance. When I updated to 7.6, the cache control extension no longer worked and I had lots of troubles; it was only after complaining to an enthusiast website that Apple made me whole and the machine was fully corrected.

I kept the 6500 for a few years before it was again time for an upgrade. By this point, Apple had moved on to the G3 and was producing the second generation of the Power Mac G3, in a delightfully colorful case. By this point, I was quite settled into the pattern of letting Apple release a new generation of hardware, then buying the second revision of that hardware. The 6500 had replaced the 6400, the Blue and White G3 replaced an earlier beige G3. Like the 6500, the G3 served me well.

But two years later, I replaced it with a G4. I was programming and dabbling in video by that point, so the Altivec engine was a big deal. Before Apple moved to Intel processors, I bought two more G4 based Macintoshes.

The first was my very first PowerBoook G4, in 12” form. I remember dropping it the very first day I had it, dinging the aluminum case right at the power supply. It wore that dent for the rest of its life. The combo drive was great for watching DVDs or burning CDs, and the machine was a joy to use. But when I finished school in 2013, the 12” screen grew to be tiresome, so the next upgrade grew to a 15” display and a significant improvement in performance.

By 2005, the G5 was released, but I was fully in the world of portable computers. I had decided that when I bought the 15” Powerbook G4, I would not upgrade it until the G5 laptop existed. It was not to be. In 2006, Apple released the first Intel Macs, replacing the iconic “Powerbook” brand with “Macbook Pro” (a decision I still feel was unjustified and inappropriate). Like I’ve done in the past, I skipped the first generation of Intel Macs. It wasn’t until 2008 that I finally upgraded my trusty Powerbook. I ordered a brand new MacBook Pro 15” 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo in February 2008. It’s now 2014 and I still have and use that laptop on a daily basis.

I would have replaced it a while ago, but in January 2010, I returned to the desktop fold. I realized that I wanted a large monitor and the portability of a laptop was still nice, but not really needed for my everyday use. So I went to the closest Apple store that very day and walked away with a new iMac.

That’s my history of the Macintosh. 8 computers in 19 years. I have been considering replacing my current iMac, but the new one just isn’t quite enough to sway me. Perhaps in a couple years I’ll feel differently—Lightroom is a bit slow on my current now 4 year old computer. But not just yet.