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Very good post. I was very much a PC-user and actually vowed never to use an Apple product until around the time the iPod started gaining widespread acceptance in the 2003-2004 period. As a music fanatic, I could no longer resist the notion of carrying all my music around with me in my pocket. I had owned a couple of competing MP3 players up to that time (a Samsung and a Rio) but was very disappointed with the limitations of those products and their clumsy interface to add music.

I discovered the iPod in much the same way you discovered the Macintosh. A co-worker of mine, who had recently bought a newer iPod, let me borrow his original iPod for a trip I was going on. Even though I had to listen to his music (that version iPod would only work on a Mac), it only took me about 30 seconds to realize I must own one for myself.

Fortunately the newer iPods were PC-compatible and I can still remember taking home my first iPod - a 40GB model that had no problem sucking the thousands of digital music files I already had on my PC into it. I was hooked from day one and as with yourself, I started re-discovering music in my collection that I had long forgotten about.

I should comment also on the way that Apple packages their products. My first iPod was so carefully packaged that I immediately became obsessed with cleaning it of all fingerprints so that it would always have the same pristine appearance of when it first came out of the box. The packaging for Apple products is so perfect that I was never able to throw it away. In the back of my closet are still the original boxes that all my iPods, iPhones and MacBook Pro came in.

This is a contrast to how most electronics products are packaged - in that horrendous hard plastic packaging that require knife and scissors to open (with potential injury to both yourself and product).

So over the course of the past 7 years, I have gradually replaced all my PC-based products with Apple products and have become convinced of the superiority of the OSX operating system over Windows and iOS over Windows Mobile (which is a joke, by the way).

With respect to Steve Jobs, it is sad to see him pass on. He has been very ill for a number of years now and it just goes to show that wealthy and successful people know what they are talking about when they say they will happily trade in all their millions for good health.

I've read some biographies on Steve Jobs over the past few years and in general was never that impressed with him as a person. However, as a businessman, a perfectionist and a visionary, he had no peer. It is a rare thing for all those traits to come together in one person and for those who worked at Apple since the early days, it must have been one hell of a ride.

I agree with nearly everything in your post, SamAdams76...

I find your comments about packaging completely accurate-it hasn’t always been so, but sometime in the late Nineties, something changed, and they began to focus on it.

My brother, who fixes PC’s for a living, now loves Macs after watching me use them all these years, and I gave him one of the older laptops when I got a new one.

He says it is like taking money out of his own pocket to recommend macs, but he absolutely loves going over to a customer’s house and opening all his “purchases” and getting it set up for that user.

The last thing I got was an iPhone because my other one had stopped working, and was still under warranty (Applecare is GOOD for laptops and iPhones!)

I walked into the Genius Bar, handed the guy the phone, he looked at it, tried a few things, verified my Applecare plan and just handed me a brand new one.

When I took it home and unpacked it, the box tolerances were so tight that it wouldn’t open...the suction prevented me from pulling the top off!

Everyone I know loves Apple packaging. Like you, I keep all my boxes...:)