I'm a Very Happy Apple Customer

My first Apple Computer product was a Macintosh II desktop. The year was 1989. I was 19 years old. The user-friendly Macintosh operating system helped our family home-building business make the transition into the age of computing. And that first mouse was really cool.

While an undergraduate at the John M. Olin School of Business, I chose to be an early-adapter and bought a PowerBook 140. This laptop served me well for the next 4 years. I remained a faithful mac guy in the midst of a herd of PC-users. "Pilgrims in an unholy land," as Henry Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery) said in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

And then a sad day came.

I gave in to "the man" and became a PC user in 1996. It was a fast and cheap Gateway 2000 desktop PC that tempted me to leave the macworld. I sold my soul to Microsoft and a few days later a silly cow-themed computer arrived via mail order. My redemption and return to the world of Macintosh would take 11 long years.

The seeds of that redemption were sown during the 2005 Christmas season when my father-in-law gave me a 30 gigabyte video iPod. Soon, podcasts would become my favorite media choice. Music, news, sermons, even videos - all in my pocket and available at the touch of a finger.

Yet sadly, I remained a PC-user for another 2 years. Yes, an iPod/iTunes using PC-user. A confused and conflicted man. A PC user who knew there was a bigger, more beautiful world out there, but who remained stuck in the unstimulating world of windows.

In the late Spring of 2007, I was set free from my employment by "the man". And a few months after that, in the providence of God, my hand-me-down Toshiba Satellite with the broken screen began taking 15 minutes to boot and started making some very strange noises. One fine fall day about a year ago, it stopped working altogether!

I'll never forget walking out of the Apple store with my MacBook that day. "Congratulations, Sir!" "Congratulations!" "Welcome to the Apple family!" The roaming Apple associates were so very encouraging. There and back again. The long journey was over. I had made it home.

Things in MacWorld have improved a LOT since 1989. Pages. iTunes. iPhoto. iMovie. iDVD. Office for the Mac. Time Machine. Boot Camp (so I can run BibleWorks 7.0 on a Windows partition on my MacBook hardrive). Widgets. Simpler email. No more viruses. The fast and beautiful OS-X Leopard. And more stuff that I'm still learning how to use. All in a stylish laptop package.

And to top it all off, today I received EXCELLENT customer service at the Apple Store on the 29th Street Mall in Boulder. They quickly solved my problem of a failing battery on my 3-year-old iPod...for FREE!

I'm saving my money for an iPhone. I'll be back to the Apple Store as soon as possible.

I am a very happy Apple customer.