10 Apple Products that I Would Buy Today or Again

Most people that know me know that I like my PC and that I am not one that would migrate to a MAC anytime soon. Mostly because I live in the IMB PC world and I like to change my hardware from time to time and I like many choices. Going to different stores and getting different items to install into my computer is important to me and I like to have freedom in my choices. With that said, there have been some good Apple products that would even tempt a PC person such as myself to purchase. Let me know if you agree with my top ten list, in no particular order.

Apple has given the world many nice products over the years, and they continue to amaze us each day. I think one of the biggest achievements that Apple has made was bringing computers into our homes. They offered computing devices that we could all afford and use and that were fun. I think this really opened the doors to the entire computing world. Before this time, we mostly thought about computers being for work only, and at the time they were big and expensive and took a scientist to understand. Apple took that image away and opened our eyes to a completely new world.

In today's world, I think that we all call any MP3 playing device an iPod. Even though there are so many variations these days from dozens of manufactures, the iPod name just explains it all. Instead of saying I have an MP3 music player, one just says... "Got iPod!" and we all magically know that they have a music device. Apple has always been deep into multimedia products, so it is only rational that they would being about the iPod. What a great way to listen to your music and to be able to take it with you and even let others listen in on your favorite song.

What made the Power Mac G5 stand out from the crowd was that it was using a 64-Bit CPU. While the rest of the PC world was stuck in 32-bit mode, this unit dared to go beyond the traditional to bring us better CPU utilization and greater speed.

The Apple II was the first computer marketed for the masses. One of the things that help to make this product stand out is that it was also marketed to schools. Therefore, for many people their first time using a computer was at school on the Apple II. This allowed a whole generation to see how easy it was to use a computer as well as allowed them to become comfortable with using technology.

Macintosh SE was the first Macintosh that had space internally for a hard drive. How we all saved documents would be changed forever. Prior to computers having hard drives, we all saved our files on floppy disks. These Floppies could be unreliable at times and cause issues. This unit also had a special PDS slot that allowed one to increase the memory and CPU speeds.

If you are like me we have all drooled over the iPhone, this great product just keeps growing in popularity. The iPhone has the ability to connect to just about everything and if it does not have the application that you are looking for, just wait a week as many new apps are being created daily. Talk about a cellular phone with all the bells and whistles. From running multimedia to the ability to use as a level, I think this phone does it all. It even allows you to make phone calls when you are through playing around with all the other useful toys and tools.

Powerbook G4 brought about the first consumer widescreen laptop. When companies were trying to make laptops smaller and smaller, Apple went wide screen, and somehow still made it lighter and thinner than other laptops. This unit also sported an internal wireless network card so getting connected was made easier.

If you have been using computer as long as I have then one must remember the LaserWriter Printer. When most laser printers were big, bulky and priced for the office; this unit was smaller and sleeker. I wish I could say that it was priced better, but because of its use of PostScript drivers this unit was quite expensive. However, using PostScript drivers allowed it to handle renderings and graphics better than the traditional PCL print drivers.

I spoke earlier of the product iPod, well I cannot mention the iPod without mentioning the software iTunes. This software allows users to listen to and download new songs, videos and other multimedia. But what makes this product stand out is that it does all kinds of multimedia. Don't get me wrong, Windows Media Player does different types of media as well, but iTunes did it first and made it easy.

The MacWrite program was the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processing program. This programmed allowed you to choose fonts and styles, formatting options and print layout all using a new thing called a mouse. This one program changed the way we wanted to run computers. For once, we can use an input device other than the keyboard and we could see what was going to be printed before we printed the page.

Apple has provided us with a large number of great products from hardware to software. Their products that have changed out view on computing to changing the way that we do things. They have sparked out imagination and their products allow us to create things that spark others. I think that the new iPad will have that effect on us as well. Especially as we move away from the hard copy world of newspapers and magazines to online subscriptions and online reader programs.