Back in 2003 I bought my first Mac, an PowerBook 12" which I love(d). Nobody else I knew had a Mac, only a professor at my university. A few month later Apple

Back in 2003 I bought my first Mac, an PowerBook 12" which I love(d). Nobody else I knew had a Mac, only a professor at my university. A few month later Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 „Panther“, to be sold still on DVDs in shrink-wrapped boxes. There was only one, small, store in my city which sold Apple stuff. Not an Apple Store, those are still very rare in Germany, but a chain local to Germany (which went out of business this year). For the release of Panther they made an evening party, for enthusiasts. My city has a population of 0.5 million but it is part of a metropolitan region of 5 million people. That local shop would have been the shop for at least half of the region. Including me there were less than 20 enthusiasts there that evening. You felt like a part of an obscure BDSM cult or something. Apple in public opinion then was mostly inexistent in Germany. Partly because of the marketing incompetence of the Apple D-A-CH local organization, but also because Apple then had the image of a computer only for graphic designers with no practical usage for other computing and seen as hugely overpriced. Germany was and still is rather cheap in regard to computers. A big tech store chain at the time was using the slogan “Geiz ist geil” (“Parsimony is sexy”).