My Apple, Part 1
I’m happy to say that I’m an Apple person. Most of you, readers, would immediately understand that that doesn’t mean that I really like apples. Just seeing the capital ‘A’ explains that I’m not talking about the fruit. My life took a turn for the better when I bought my first Apple laptop computer.
When my kids had finished school, I said that the first computer I’d buy for myself would be a laptop. I really didn’t need one at home, because I had access to a desktop computer at school and in the public library. I wanted something compact and easy to bring with me on my travels. In the late 1990s, my daughter was planning a trip to Asia, starting in Thailand, and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I wouldn’t hear from her unless I got an email account. So I did, and I learned how to use Yahoo. Occasionally, she managed to send back emails and I responded. I later discovered that it was easy to find an Internet shop or to stay at a youth hostel that had computers for people to use for a small price, and I used those services when I traveled to Japan for the summer of 1998.
Fast forward to the summer of 2005, that I spent in Germany. I had visited my friend in Paris on my way to Munich, and her husband worked for Apple. It didn’t take much for him to explain how their laptops worked and to convince me that I wanted the model he suggested—small and easily packed in my luggage. He ordered a PowerBook G4 from Cork, Ireland; I paid online; and it was sent to him. When it arrived, he set it up with the necessary, user-friendly programs for me, and then sent it on to Munich. I had all summer to get used to it. I was IN LOVE!
In Munich, I bought my first digital camera, a Panasonic Lumix with an amazingly big lens. With my new laptop, I could transfer my digital photos to it so easily and crop them in Apple’s iPhoto application. On the contrary, in the summer of 1999, on a 6-week trip to Paris and Munich, I captured memories on 17 films and never saw the results until I got back home and paid a big bill to print them. It took FOREVER to identify the 500+ prints by location, date and occasion! So you can imagine my thrill to be able to see my photos immediately. Not only was the quality of the camera outstanding, but the PowerBook G4 was so ‘cute’! And I had a zippered case the exact size for it, plus a combination cable lock.
Finally, in 2005, I had moved into the worlds of Apple laptops and digital photography that worked together seamlessly.
Fiona