Steve declared the floppy drive dead.  Steve declared the CRT dead.  And eventually Steve would declare the CD/DVD drive dead as well.  At this point in time I got into custom building PCs and built my first PC system from scratch.  I also cleared the deck on most of the systems I owned and eventually end up buying a flat white iMac.  I believe this was still in the G5 series of things as well.  This was an interesting time with OS X being built on top of BSD, me really getting into Linux and starting to hate everything Windows.

One thing to note, I still have yet to purchase a “brand new” system since back when I got my PowerMac 6100.  When I look to purchase a system I still go to Apple’s refurbished site and buy from there.  I’ve never had issues with the systems I’ve bought and it’s a pretty good price for the items.