Oh man, I remember my first Mac very, very well. It was my college days so I was practically living in MS Office on Windows at the time. I tend to think of those days as "old Apple" (vs. new Apple today), the culture was a little different--Macs were more the outsider machines, everyone else was on WinTel (e.g., Dell, HP, Thinkpad, Toshiba, etc.) machine.
I had a middle of the road HP Pavilion that had a DVD drive, PIII 700Mhz, with (a whopping!) 256MB of RAM that I bought from CompUSA (yes, that old). I remember it had Windows ME so this really takes me back. Anyway, the HDD died on it ca. '03 so I took it back (under ext warranty) to CompUSA for them to repair the drive. I had the modem replaced on that machine 2x (yes, dialup was life back then) and this was my 2nd HDD replacement. The techs at store ultimately broke the machine...not a little...but literally snapped the bottom case across, big crack across the bottom. Not sure if it was dropped or what but when I came to pick it up, I decided to open it right there on the counter and I saw the crack. To their credit, I didn't get the "Oh, it was like that!" treatment but an "OMG, we're so sorry!" and I got a full store credit dollar-for-dollar towards any computer in the store + my ext warranty. Anecdotally, the computer didn't even boot up when I was told it was "ready for pickup." All it did was make the loud-as-in-a-fire-alarm-BIOS-error-sound. Yeah....yeah.
So, I walked over to the then-new Apple Mac section in CompUSA because I was thinking of switching to the 12" Powerbook (the 17" was just too big) that just came out. I decided to get the 12" PB, paid the difference (it was about $100 or so, I think) and when I got home, it had a dead pixel right in the center of the screen. I left it in the box, brought it back to CompUSA the next day and they swapped it out for another one. On the return visit, I also bought AppleCare, MS Office v.X, and a small saddle bag to go with it. I remember it was the 867Mhz G4 (1st gen), it was all metal (aluminum) and I had or used anything like that before--felt like the future, really. The only issues I had with the machine (which was under a repair extension, I was told) was with the display hinges (1st month or so--screen couldn't sit up), followed by the HDD going out somewhere around the 3rd year I had it. The 12" was a lot of fun to take with me on trips, I miss it sometimes.
On that note, something I thought that the Powerbook never got enough love for at the time was the battery life. I loved the battery life on that little machine, I could watch a whole DVD on it without worrying about the battery. On the HP, I had to lug an extra battery with me (plus charger) but the 12" PB only needed a full charge and I got easily 3-4 hours of full time use on it (at the time that was insane). For me, the big flex was taking that PB to classes and it fit on those little lecture hall desks that are about the size of a shoebox lid, quietly working away. My PC would easily hang over the sides, fan running, and I had to swap batteries after about 2 hours.
