I do remember seeing Apple's "1984" commercial that introduced the Macintosh during Super Bowl XVIII -- that was the first Super Bowl I remember paying attention to, seeing as how it was taking place in Tampa and my father and uncle were at the game. However, at the time I was using an Atari 800XL, so who cares about Apple?

Once I was in college, I didn't have a computer of my own my freshman year (sometimes I used my roommate's, and sometimes I used lab computers). At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, my grandfather gave me a Macintosh LC II, which he had bought about a year earlier but hadn't used much. It had a 16 MHz processor, a 40 MB hard drive, and 4 MB of RAM. That was in the fall of 1993.

In the spring of 1996, I suggested to my parents that they could give me a new Mac as an early graduation present -- the rationale being that I could buy it at the campus computer store and get the educational discount. What I bought was a Power Macintosh 7500/100, with a 100 MHz processor, a 1 GB hard drive (apple-history.com's stats are incomplete in saying it came with only a 750 MB drive), and if I recall correctly, 16 MB of RAM (apple-history.com is very incomplete, since it says it came with 0 MB of RAM).

In the summer of 2000, that computer was starting to feel inadequate, especially when The Sims came out for the Mac. I had to use my own money this time and couldn't get an educational discount, and what I bought was a Power Macintosh G4/400, after the February 2000 speed bump, so this was the low-end model. That's a 400 MHz processor, a 10 GB hard drive (again, apple-history.com's stats are incomplete on hard drive sizes), and 64 MB of RAM. Over the years, I added 128 MB of RAM, and then another 512 MB of RAM, for a total of 704 MB; I also added a 120 GB hard drive and then, years later, replaced the 10 GB hard drive with a 200 GB hard drive for a total of 257 GB (because this computer could only handle a 137 GB maximum on hard drives).

And that computer started to feel inadequate in 2004, but various life events conspired to keep me from getting a new computer until Monday, August 7, 2006, when I purchased the brand new Mac Pro on the day it was released -- and if you paid attention to the original release dates on the other three Macs I've had, you may notice that I didn't get them until relatively late in their product lives, something I deliberately tried to avoid here. I didn't actually receive it until Wednesday the 9th. Apple-history.com doesn't have a page for it yet, but here's what it looks like...



Well, you know, it's shiny and looks like a cheese grater. What more do you need? It's the "stock" configuration (no build-to-order options from Apple's web site, which is how I got it in only two days), with two 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon dual-core processors, for a total of 10.66 GHz, plus a 250 GB hard drive, plus 1 GB of RAM. Once my wallet recovers from this hit, I'm probably going to add another hard drive -- I can't use any of the hard drives that were in the G4/400, because they use old-timey parallel ATA connections, but the Mac Pro uses the newfangled serial ATA. It's all a conspiracy between Apple and the hard drive manufacturers, I'm sure of it.

You may think that (what is effectively) four 2.66 GHz processors would be a lot faster than one 400 MHz processor, and you would be absolutely correct -- heck, I don't think I've even taxed the computer enough to make it use more than one of the cores at a time yet. Now the big bottleneck is my DSL service, which tops out at about 500 Kbps. (My only other option is cable, which would be a little pricey for me, especially since I'm not getting my TV that way.) And the other problem is this multibutton Apple "Mighty Mouse" that it came with -- I'm so used to having a one-button mouse on the Mac that I keep pressing on the right side of the mouse, which causes a right-click to happen. Yes, I could change the settings and turn it into a one-button mouse, but I want it to act like a "real" mouse for when I eventually get the hang of it.

It's nice, for once, to have the best personal computer on the planet, at least for a little while, when the people who ordered the upgrade to 3 GHz processors start getting their Mac Pros.

Oh, and extrapolating, I can predict that I will get my next Mac in 2015; it will contain four quad-core 5 GHz processors (for a total of 80 GHz), plus a 2 TB hard drive, plus 8 GB of RAM. No prediction on what it will be called. Hopefully, it'll do a reasonably good job running The Sims 4 -- which will of course be true virtual-reality software, and which I will of course use solely to create female sims who live in a sorority house and have lots of pillow fights.