Yes I remember the shift around that time. I had my first contact with a Mac at school in ca 2001. OSX was just released and the school received a new order of iMac G3’s as lab computers. What can I say. I hated the machines. Everything was so weird and ugly. It didn’t help that the teachers had to run OS9 for compatibility reasons with the school software. I had a brand new WinXP desktop machine at home which was miles and leaps ahead of the iMacs ;) well for me anyways. The only thing I really liked was iTunes. That is a story on it own ;). It took a few more years for me to come around. It was with the release of snow leopard that I saw that macOS was way better than windows. I switched in 2011 professionally to mac and use it still as my daily driver. But my love for the system that sparked with snow leopard dwindled. I didn’t want to update to Catalina (was forced in the end due to a new machine I got and well Xcode) and still refuse the UI of BigSur. I switched to Arch Linux on my personal machine but have to stay on macOS professionally as the only other option my company IT can support is Windows. Well macOS is no longer the highland for developers, WSL and Apple itself saw to that. But Windows is still a no go area as a daily driver for me.
Apple pumping iBooks into schools was a big coup for them in the early 2000s. A lot of people my age got into Macs and never got out of them, just because of that early exposure.
Yep. For me, I always “dealt” with Windows at school. Computers were just a device you were meant to wrestle with to get a job done and that was just an immutable truth.
Then I moved to a new middle school that would bring in carts of iBooks for us to do work on. Some things were weird (lack of a right click for one), but other things just felt incredibly natural and the design didn’t scream “soulless device for office drones.”
When my parents got me my first computer the next year, it was a Mac, and I’ve stuck with Apple for 17 years since then.
I'm from germany. Here Apple was never a huge player. I learned very late of its existence. My school was a so called OSZ (Oberstufen Zentrum) which is something like school a where you can gain work related diplomas. I'm really bad at describing this. They had a design and print department and they run all on apple.
