Postcards from the Mac faithful

When CNET News.com asked readers to tell us how Apple's products have affected their lives, dozens of devotees from around the world wrote in with stories and pictures. Here's a sampling.

Grant Reighard of Perkasie, Pa., works on his PowerBook and listens to an iPod as greyhound Charisma keeps him company. This fall, Reighard heads to college, where he'll major in computer and information science. "My goal is to do an internship with Apple during the summer after sophomore year, and ultimately work there, creating the products that creative professionals--and creative individuals, too--want and need," he says.

Credit: Grant Reighard

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Grant Reighard listens to one of his favorite bands, Kasabian, on one of his favorite gadgets, the iPod.

Credit: Grant Reighard

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Jody Whitesides, a musician from Burbank, Calif., poses with his 15-inch PowerBook and two of his four iPods. The MP3 players, he says, have come in handy when people ask to hear his music. "I'll just whip it out, dial up one of my songs and let them groove," he says. His latest iPod is video-capable, which lets Whiteside show off his music in living color. "Because of having the video iPod, I met a guy who is getting me connected to some heavyweights in the music business, just because he loved the video," he says.

Credit: Jody Whitesides

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Igor Vereschagin, a Moscow photographer who bought his first Mac, a Classic, at a flea market in the early '90s, submitted this picture of his granddaughter Alina with Linda the cat and two of the family PowerBooks.

Credit: Igor Vereschagin

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Hans Bots of Wouw, Netherlands, made sure to bring his first iPod along on a vacation to Portugal in July 2002. Bots, who works in sales for a large Dutch printing company, has been working on Macs for years. "Apple gives me a lot of joy," he says.

Credit: Hans Bots

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Photographer and self-proclaimed "Mac freak" Caesar Lima has turned his Los Angeles digital-imaging studio into a museum of the Apple technology that helped make him a success. Here's Lima and his collection of Macs, more than 30 in all.

Credit: Felipe Silva

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Tor Rafsol Loseth, a computer science student in Bergen, Norway, decided to show his love for the company by having an Apple-centric acronym tattooed on his arm:

Our
Apple
Where
(e)Xellence
Ensures
Perfection

"Now if anyone could make me a drawing of Steve in the style of Che (Guevara), I'd put that one on my other arm," he says.

Credit: Tor Rafsol Loseth

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Allen Jerabeck, a 16-year-old from Skaneateles, N.Y., calls himself a "Mac head."

"About two years ago I got my iMac G4, the cool one with the floating monitor," he says. "I slowly had been becoming one of those Mac enthusiasts with the T-shirts and the bumper stickers: 'Mac this, Apple that.' And then for my birthday, I got it."

Jerabeck's parents also give him a $20 monthly iTunes allowance.

Credit: Allen Jerabeck

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Teenager Allen Jerabeck has devoted a section of the bulletin board in his room to Apple newspaper clippings and magazine cutouts.

"I have a subscription to Macworld magazine, and when Tiger came out, I went to the mall first thing after school so that I could be first in line," he says. "As they opened the store, I got to run in with 'Eye of the Tiger' in the background, and received the first copy of Tiger sold at that Apple store."

Credit: Allen Jerabeck

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Omar Yacoubi, a college student in Richmond, Va., didn't start out as an Apple lover. "I used to hate Macs, especially before OS X," he says. "When OS X first came out I thought it was a pretty toy, but something not for me. Same with iTunes. How could something so simple prove so useful?" Then Yacoubi got an iPod, he says, "and I started to realize that the simplicity is the beauty of Apple."

Credit: Omar Yacoubi

Postcards from the Mac faithful

"I unfortunately have to use a PC at work, and have had to for the last eight years," says Hugh Donaghy, a youth worker in Glasgow, Scotland. "However, I go home at night and use my beloved Mac." Here's Donaghy in 2001 with his first laptop, a Blueberry iBook.

Credit: Hugh Donaghy

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Brandon Kelly, a Web designer/developer from San Jose, Calif., uses a picture of his friend Tim as his PowerBook desktop image. Tim took a break from shaving during a recent trip around the world, and Kelly, playing on Apple's "Think Different" motto, added a "Think Savage" tagline to the bottom of the photo.

Kelly switched to the Mac in 2004, he says, "after realizing the importance Apple places on design, ease of use, and innovation."

Credit: Brandon Kelly

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Aaron Thompson of Crystal Lake, Ill., uses Apple's iChat AV and a pair of iSight cameras to keep in touch with his dad, who lives in Pennsylvania. "I feel like I'm right there with him...as opposed to only hearing his garbled voice through a telephone," the 18-year-old Thompson says.

Credit: Aaron Thompson

Postcards from the Mac faithful

J.D. Andrews, a Hollywood, Fla., video producer and director, proposed to girlfriend Kathryn McCollister via an iPod Nano engraved with the big question. The wedding is set for Dec. 2.

Credit: J.D. Andrews

Postcards from the Mac faithful

During a visit to New York earlier this month, Moscow photographer Igor Vereschagin aimed his camera at a snow-shrouded iPod ad in midtown Manhattan.

Credit: Igor Vereschagin

Postcards from the Mac faithful

Sal Horsfall's loyalty to Apple products started with a strawberry G3 400 ("the family vote was 3:1 over lime," he says). These days, Horsfall's 5-year-old uses the G3 to play her "I Spy" games, while his older kids use their dad's 17-inch flat-panel G4. Horsfall himself now computes on an iMac Core Duo.

"Apple makes products with the end-user in mind, and that has made all the difference for my family," says Horsfall, a Fairport, N.Y., resident who works as a territory business manager for a formula-manufacturing company.

Credit: Sal Horsfall