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My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.

Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.

(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)

I'm curious what her hypothesis is, I don't think there is a correlation at all personally, seen a ton of people who know nothing about their computers regardless of Mac/Windows as their primary os.

I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It's not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.

I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker.....I don't know crap about any of that. I've simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I've had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I'm guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.

I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.

Sometimes it's fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.

I suddenly vividly remember putting my mom’s Chromebook into developer mode and installing crouton on it so I could play Minecraft.

I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.

Started on Mac. Still use one as my (not so-) daily driver. In the ~30 years in between, I've (professionally) been a PC field service technician, mainframe operator, datacenter tech, enterprise monitoring administrator, and a whole slew of other tech hats. In my personal time, I learned OS 7-8 inside and out (ResEdit ftw), built PCs out of spare parts (throwing Linux on some just to do it), turned an old tower into an external SCSI enclosure, built VM stacks for fun (DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, Win95 all on the same Mac box decades ago, just because I could), half-wired my parents' house for ethernet, built them a Hackintosh from parts, stuck a Linux VM on an old laptop to host Citrix so I could remote into work and have that one extra layer between personal and business, and gotten completely disillusioned with tech as a hobby and as the framework for modern society.

I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?

But... I started on a BBC Micro.

Should've written "Mac PCs" just to mess with people.

Some people are just naturally computer savvy. My class and I were taught on how to use command prompt, but only few of us could get it. We just wanted to play Command and Conquer and DOTA, and leave the tweaking to the nerds.

Can confirm. Started on a Mac. Was using terminal, hex editor, resource forks, and squirrel basic to modify my Catz installation before I was 10. Windows peers seemed to think computers were made of rainbows and unicorns

Was taught using Apple2 then Macs in Jr High.

I built my own PC in high school (late 90s), upgraded it through college, then switched back to Mac’s when they went Intel.

I can’t muddle through Ruby, Python, Perl, Php C/C++, Objective-C and Swift. But wrote Actionscript, JS, and HTML/CSS for a living for 15 years.

How you start doesn’t matter and Mac’s are still better than Chromebooks. They have Unix shells FFS.

I started on Mac and installed Linux on a PS3 just to see if I could, where does that put me on the spectrum