My first Mac was supplied by my employer and was an SE. It replaced my IBM PC. At first I was upset at the switch thinking the Apple was a “toy” but I quickly realized otherwise.
The first Mac that I bought was the LC II to write my dissertation. It was underpowered so I eventually replaced it with a Quadra 610.
My main app was MS Word 4 but I ran into limitations and upgraded to Word 5 – and finished the dissertation.
In 1988 I got a job doing publications for a small college. They had a Mac SE with an external big screen (black and white), a laserwriter, a Dest sheetfed grayscale scanner, and Aldus PageMaker. These had all been donated to the college by a generous alumnus. But the school needed someone to run all this equipment and so I became the publications department! Minimum wage, but I got to use a Mac, so I took the job.
Best decision I ever made! I taught myself everything about graphic design and Macs and made a living with them ever since.
The kicker was I had a non-Windows PC compatible at home (a Sanyo 550 I bought in high school), but I found myself going to work in the evenings to do stuff on the Mac because I was so much more proficient. I could literally drive to work, do a project on the Mac, and drive home in less time than I could half the job on the PC. And the Mac quality was 100x better. I decided I wanted to buy my own Mac.
It took me until Christmas 1989 to get all the money together. I used savings, got a $2,500 bank loan, borrowed from my uncle, put some on a credit card, and somehow scraped up $6,000. In those days, that was a lot of money for 22-year-old with a minimum wage job! (Internet says that’s $15,738 in 2026 dollars.)
The Mac I got was a Macintosh II with an Apple 13-color RGB monitor and 40MB (not GB) hard drive. It was used and two years old, but I upgraded it with a Daystar 68030 accelerator. That price included $999 for a RasterOps 24-bit video card – which ones of the first full-color ones the market. I could actually display full color pictures on the screen! (Except I had no color pictures. It wasn’t until a few months later at the Seybold Convention in San Francisco that a guy at the RasterOps booth gave me a floppy disk with a dozen 640x480 24-bit color JPG images on it. They were stunning!)
At the time of purchase I almost didn’t have enough money to include the hard drive. I seriously debated buying it with just a floppy drive, even though I knew that was stupid. I finally managed to get the extra money and included the hard disk. 40MB sounded like an insane amount of storage, but just six months later I splurged for a 100MB external drive (I think it cost $700).
A year or so later I upgraded to 16MB of RAM (for $600 I think). But I paid for that with money I’d earned doing freelance graphic design – I wrote the check out of my new business checking account!
That first Mac was a lot of money, but a priceless investment, as I’ve made a living using Macs ever since. (I never did bother to graduate from college even though I’m only a few credits short. 
)
I used that Mac II as my main Mac for almost decade. I bought other Macs, like a PowerBook 160, for portable use, but the Mac II was my workhorse. I eventually replaced it with a PowerMac 8500. By the 2000s I was mostly using laptops. I think the last desktop I bought was a 17" iMac back in 2005.
I still have that Mac II. I could never bear to part with it. I don’t know if it still works. I’m sort of afraid to try it as I’d be disappointed if I couldn’t get it working. (I know it will need a new battery on the motherboard.) Reading Pogue’s new book has gotten me inspired – all those memories of early Macs – and I’m thinking of actually trying to set up that Mac II. Maybe this summer. We’ll see.
(I’ve got a whole garage of obsolete computers. Even a pizza-box NeXT! Sigh. I’m a pack rat.)
Your intro to Macs is a lot like mine. I was working for a small consumer research company, producing materials for offset printing using various primitive implements of torture. Lots of rubber cement, wax, Rapidographs that clogged out of pure malice, transfer lettering for anything larger than 12 pt. In 1986, we went from an IBM Electronic Selectric Composer (page and a half of memory) to a Mac Plus (no HD), ImageWriter, PageMaker 1.5, a Linotronic RIP, and an insanely finicky processing unit for the RIP’s output. We pretty quickly had to get an SE, and then a LaserWriter for proofing because the ImageWriter could not handle Postscript. At one point we had a black and white “Moniterm” monitor connected to the SE to make working with tabloid size pages easier. After that two Mac II’s (40MB hard drives!!!), a IIci, and eventually, in 1995 or so, a PowerMac 7500. I wish I had kept the last Mac II when we moved to a smaller office space. I had put a IIfx logic board in it, and it was our print server. I imagine it would be dead by now, but it would be fun to play with if it still were alive.
I was fully in the Windows camp in Med school, using Javelin and Mark of the Unicorn’s music software, but when I moved to University of Michigan for residency, they were going full in on the Macintosh, as it was known then. In my small office they had an 512K and later the great Mac SE/30 with hard drive! I switched my home computers over to the SE/30, used DiskDoubler to optimize my space, and began to connect to the internet. As a university, we had ethernet connections which connected me to the world through Gopher and later, Mosaic. I used Newsgroups extensively to connect with interest groups and stole the weekly InfoWorld (I think that what it was called) from the staff mailbox, read it quickly and returned it. Most of the computer people there were IT people and only one was a passionate Mac user like me and she gave me access to look at new things as they came in to the medical school (the Color Mac! Laserwriter!).
I have stayed with Mac since that time, through the low points and the heights. I remember when I had my Windows machine, and having to buy cards for the slots and toggle tiny switches to get it set up “right” that when I saw the Mac without all that, I stayed.
Not sure I remember all the Apple products I have owned, but have included: SE/30, Duo portable, Power Mac, Newton, eMate, many iPhones including the original (which I still have in a box), Candy iMac, round base iMac, titanium portable, and a favorite the Powerbook G3 with the side bays you could put in an extra hard drive, battery, or even a disc drive (still have as my serial port access device for the Newton). Thank you MacTracker for triggering my memory on ones I had forgotten.
For me, it was an Apple //c bought around December 1986.
But by the second half of 1987, I had moved up to a Mac SE, dual drive version.
I sold off both many years ago, but still have the third Apple computer I owned – an SE30 from 1989. It’s up in the attic. Won’t boot, though… I think it’s the capacitors…
An SE with an SE/30 in the gallery I ran.
I had two Amigas, a 500 and a 2000HD, with a colossal 5Mb ram and a 40Mb HD. These were my main computers. I also had a PC, twin floppy and 512k ram and a Toshiba T1000
This was all at the same time, I put all my money into it, probably should have bought a house but I was obsessed and, heck, I wouldn’t have had the career I did.
I still have the 2000HD and the T1000 and the SE. All still working.
My first Apple products were a 512K Mac, an Imagewriter, and an exterior floppy drive, after watching my then 6-year old daughter use one at the Boston Computer Museum and talking with Cary Lu. I upgraded the 512K Mac to a MacPlus and added a 30 Meg hard disk. We still have it.
My first Apple product was an Apple II+, purchased in 1979 or 1980 (not sure which). I used it with a cassette deck an color TV for a while before I later splurged on 80 column green on black monitor and a floppy disk drive.
You had an Apple I in school? Where was that?
My first Apple product was a double-floppy Macintosh SE that Tonya and I bought just before our junior year at Cornell. The funny thing was that we actually had to get a friend to buy it for us from Cornell because we wanted to get it over the summer, when we both had summer jobs at Cornell but weren’t taking any classes. Because we weren’t enrolled as students, we couldn’t get the student discount at the time, so our friend Laura, who was taking a summer session class, was our go-between.
My first Apple was an LC computer with a 40 MEGABYTE hard drive! It was running Systerm 7. (Remember that?? ) I was teaching kindergarten in 1990 and the school emphasized technology. I brought the LC home and read the manual cover to cover and performed whatever it said, but the LC wouldn’t work. I kept seeing TWO System 7 settings and took the LC back to the store.Turns out someone at the Apple Mac Store had programmed System 7 in TWICE!
I miss the days where I could install a new hard drive, memory, etc… Now I don’t know how to fix any thing. Thank you, Tidbits people!
Sounds like I’m a relative newcomer - my first Apple product was a fruit colored iMac DV in the spring of 2000, followed by an iPod in November 2001 (my first release day purchase).
Mine as well. I still have it, along with the ImageWriter printer I used with it. I used AppleWorks on it to generate payment cards for my high school paper route (for those not old enough to remember, back then the customers paid their carrier directly rather than being billed by the paper).
My first Mac that I owned was a Performa 636CD. I still have that one too. The first Mac I used was a Mac Plus at my high school. I used it to layout my high school newspaper (all the other computers in the school were Apple //es). Fun times.
A Mac Plus with 1 MB RAM purchased on December 10, 1988, along with an ImageWriter II printer and a 30 MB off-brand SCSI hard drive. I saved the receipt. 
A Macintosh 512K Fat Mac and an ImageWriter. I was just out of college, working in my first software engineer job, and I had to decide between buying a car or a Mac.
I took the bus for a couple years.
Mac SE, late 1987 IIRC
128k original Mac. Ordered 1/24/84, took delivery 2/6/84. Few, if any, had a Mac before that…
SE/30 with 4 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard disk, along with an ImageWriter II. I was in college; I have no idea how I talked my dad into buying it.
Oh, fun! Actually, my wife bought our first Mac, the original Mac. I finally bought my own a few years later, an SE/30.
Mac Plus and an ImageWriter II in 1986. Almost 40 years of Apple tech.
The first Apple product I got with my own money was an ImageWriter 2. A gal in the room across from mine in the dorms had a Wang word processor (hand-me-down from her her mom) with a ball-head printer that we would use to output papers for submission in our classes, and it had a special cachet (with an accent, not with a storage capacity) b/c it was capable of justified right margins, yet the impact of the ball-head was clearly visible on the back of the sheets of paper, so you could imagine a TA or prof marveling at how we took the time to type out a justified copy.
By comparison, the Apple printer was two steps backwards, especially if you left the printouts near anything warm. I also had a Brother electronic typewriter that had one line of lcd-visible memory, so if you wanted to correct or change anything you needed to do it before hitting the return key.