[HN Gopher] How the iMac Saved Apple
___________________________________________________________________
How the iMac Saved Apple
Author : CharlesW
Score : 184 points
Date : 2023-08-15 13:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| erickhill wrote:
| The noseless Steve Jobs, in such a detailed illustration, was a
| curious choice by the illustrator.
| [deleted]
| indigoabstract wrote:
| I remember seeing an iMac in a Cher video around '98 or '99.
| There weren't that many computers on TV in those days and this
| was the first time I'd see one in a music video.
|
| I thought it looked like a bubblegum toy computer for kids so I
| didn't want one. I was a kid myself, but hey, all the computers I
| was familiar with were serious beige boxes and this didn't seem
| "professional" enough. But I was intrigued.
|
| I'm also intrigued about the "Princess Bride" analogy in the
| article, I'm still processing that. Is SJ being compared to Cary
| Elwes or am I missing the joke?
| neogodless wrote:
| > he rapidly ran down a list of the company's assets and
| liabilities. Apple didn't have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust
| cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been
| experimenting with colors and translucent plastic
|
| There's a scene where the Man in Black is barely alive / awake
| after taking The Miracle Pill, while Fezzik and Inigo are
| telling him he has to help them stop the wedding and rescue the
| princess. He says "and our assets?" As little as they have, it
| just happens to be exactly what they need to give them an
| advantage.
|
| I suppose if Steve Jobs came in and asked someone at Apple to
| list their assets, then yes, he's being compared to the Man in
| Black, as he's asked to save the day!
|
| > With Jobs' brains, Jony Ive's designs, and the new PowerPC G3
| chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I never wanted or bought one, but the original iMac was pretty
| interesting in hindsight.
|
| - The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer
| person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not
| as accepted as it is now.
|
| - The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little
| bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer
| case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get
| in "cheap" molded plastic.
|
| - The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed
| that computers had already reached the point at which they have
| more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything
| you needed a computer for.
|
| - The stacking of the internal components and the location of the
| vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient
| cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated
| airflow to cool the CPU.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed
| that computers had already reached the point at which they have
| more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything
| you needed a computer for.
|
| ...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3,
| and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically
| pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks
| it beat whatever Pentium II was current then.
|
| That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of
| "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's
| highest end tower".
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Stock iMac had 64Mb RAM, 5400 RPM based hard disk, and a poor
| 2D ATI based video card. And Mac OS 8.1. I actually purchased
| it (I was young and naive), and the Mac version of Unreal
| (game) to network play against my homegrow PC (Pentium 200,
| with Voodoo Rush video card), and the game performance was
| night and day (in favour of Wintel). MacOS 8.1 was so bad, I
| ended up installing YellowDog Linux on it, collected dust,
| then eventually gave it away.
| detourdog wrote:
| No it is not true. Especially relative to Macs. The original
| iMac also discontinued serial and SCSI with the use USB.
| MrScruff wrote:
| As someone that bought a 603e based all in one around that
| time, I remember the introduction of the G3 being almost
| comparable to the intel->apple silicon transition.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The G3 was a beast compared to the 603. IIRC it was about
| 30% faster clock for clock. By going with a G3 in the iMac
| seriously beefed up the capabilities of their consumer
| machines. The iMac was more than twice as fast as the
| similarly priced Performas sold the day before the iMac's
| introduction. It was even more powerful than even higher
| end Performas approaching twice the price of the iMac.
|
| One of the more tragic examples, from the perspective of
| laptop buyers, was the WallStreet PowerBooks. They started
| at $2300 and was easily 30% faster than the high end 3400s
| that were $4-5k. The original G3 PowerBook (Kanga) was over
| $5k. It was a huge boost in power for half the price and
| honestly much better industrial design. The 3400 was a
| chonky boi.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| That was definitely my impression one generation later when
| they released the G4. To this day I still miss that chassis
| design.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how different the world would look
| today if Apple had become large enough to justify the
| investment the G5 required and macs were running on
| those.
| tjakab wrote:
| I suspect even if the Intel transition hadn't happened,
| assuming the Mac survived it probably still would have
| been destined for Apple Silicon once the ARM platform
| became powerful enough.
| anthk wrote:
| The G3 was more powerful per cycle than a Pentium II.
|
| Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/28/silly-
| rabbit-q...
|
| It was a bit of a sore spot For a while there.
| threeseed wrote:
| It's completely wrong that the hardware was underpowered.
|
| The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty
| rudimentary OS by today's standards.
| astrange wrote:
| It didn't have a SIMD unit. Although x86 only had MMX at
| the time, which wasn't much better.
| acdha wrote:
| Also MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD
| so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only
| limited compiler support but also no libraries and little
| programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long
| time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in
| the nascent internet era where people couldn't just look
| things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help
| on GitHub.
| astrange wrote:
| I'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX.
| Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes
| the floating point registers until the next `emms`)
| compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no
| autovectorization.
| indymike wrote:
| A lot of the performance complaints came from software
| that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As
| software built for PPC came out, that complaint went
| away.
| ido wrote:
| But intel (and AMD) scaled up MHz/GHz a lot further.
| Motorola was stuck at 500MHz as the Athlon and PIII were
| already racing to 1GHz.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Motorola?
| 90sguy wrote:
| Motorola has a long history of making processors, such as
| the 68000-series. They powered Macs (and Amiga)
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| _> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation
| 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured
| by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor
| bought by NXP Semiconductors)_
| mrweasel wrote:
| Motorola was one of the companies behind the PowerPC, but
| those found in the iMac was made by IBM.
| ido wrote:
| Supplier of the CPUs we're talking about (alongside IBM).
| anthk wrote:
| The G4 at 800 MHZ was still much more powerful than a
| Pentium III, or at least on par.
| beebeepka wrote:
| "much more powerful" is not anything like "on par". So
| what if that beautiful and expensive chunk of metal and
| plastic was slower in games and such?
| simondotau wrote:
| No one saying it competed with high-end machines of the
| day. But it was quite powerful compared to PCs targeting a
| home audience.
|
| The other thing to remember, is that computers were only
| barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt
| powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last
| CPU cycle we could get.
| anthk wrote:
| Barely powerful in early mid-90's. From 1996 an the
| multimedia PC and a bit later witht the Pentium MMX, the
| power gap from a 286 based DOS PC from 1991 was something
| else.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I think mostly people think of "games" when they think of
| performance.
| krger wrote:
| >...is that actually true?
|
| It is not.
| izacus wrote:
| Was the performance true on Apple marketing benchmarks or in
| actual use?
|
| Apple has a looooong history of cherrpicking benchmarks,
| especially when their arch wasn't as fast as competing
| Intels.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Actual use. You're probably thinking of the G5/PPC970,
| which was on introduction more of a case of "the fastest,
| provided absolutely the only thing you care about is vector
| operations".
| izacus wrote:
| I'm mostly asking because as much as I remember the G3s
| weren't really noticably faster than my (then) Windows
| machines... but memory can mislead.
| acdha wrote:
| It may also have changed while you owned one: the stuff
| which was optimized native code ran quite well but there
| were also plenty of rushed ports or things running under
| Rosetta. I don't think it was Photoshop but I remember
| some of the designers I knew commenting that one app
| shipping a true optimized port was like getting a new
| computer.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Two big things that affected the cross platform
| experience and perception of speed at the time were the
| twin pillars of the late 90s web, Internet Explorer and
| Flash, both of which had superior optimization for
| Windows and x86.
|
| The introduction of Safari is an underrated milestone in
| changing that, and I would suggest the Mac didn't really
| match the Windows browsing experience inclusive of Flash
| until the introduction of Intel Macs.
| callalex wrote:
| The iMac was most definitely not fanless. I wouldn't even
| describe it as particularly quiet.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I think the shock to the industry was that the outside, not the
| inside, is what made this computer successful.
|
| People forget how it launched a complete craze of transparent
| plastics. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, disk drives[1],
| printers... EVERYTHING became colorful and transparent.
|
| [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/256182420094
| karmelapple wrote:
| The iMac was not particularly underpowered. Could it have used
| more RAM or hard drive? Sure. But the CPU, as others here have
| said, was pretty solid. It could run top of the line games at
| the time like Quake 3.
|
| And one thing I don't read much about for these original iMacs
| is how nice the screen was. It was a CRT, but it had a nice
| anti-glare coating and could have the resolution increased to
| 1024x768 which wasn't typical for a 15" screen at the time.
|
| So the feature set was very nice... ignoring the hockey puck
| mouse!
| bluedino wrote:
| It did run Quake III rather slowly ( < 20 fps in a timedemo)
| compared to PC based competition.
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=2Zt0sZTS_0IC&lpg=PP1&dq=oc.
| ..
| bigtex wrote:
| I ran Quake III Arena on my Bondi Blue iMac B but had to
| run it at a very low resolution to get it to be playable.
| Unreal Tournament wasn't bad.
| giantrobot wrote:
| This was a problem on most Macs of the era. The ATi Rage
| chips used in most Macs of the time was not powerful enough
| for Quake III. They were ok for less intense games but Q3
| was pushing the envelope.
| zumu wrote:
| > ignoring the hockey puck mouse!
|
| The mouse was the first laser mouse I ever used and I believe
| it connected with USB, which was novel at the time. It was
| probably the most impressive thing about the iMac for me
| personally.
| rconti wrote:
| The original hockey puck mouse had a ball (I had to Google
| it to confirm my memory, since otherwise it's just your
| memory against mine!)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
|
| I remember the later G3 education models my school had
| having a "laser" (I assume LED?) mouse.
|
| Likely the iMac went the same way.
| prepend wrote:
| It was underpowered for its price compared to windows
| machines.
|
| The fact that it could run Quake3 is kind of the point as it
| didn't need "all that power."
|
| The complaint I had was that for the price I could get a more
| powerful wintel box.
|
| Comically this is no longer true with mac laptops and it's
| kind of weird to see it flipped where MacBooks have powerful
| processors and decent levels of ram (although sticking with
| 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the
| principle that you don't need lots of ram rather than saving
| the $9 for 16 or 32).
| mattl wrote:
| Is that true though? Could you get a Wintel machine with
| better hardware including the little things like USB,
| FireWire and Ethernet and even WiFi? 15 inch screen capable
| of 1024x768?
| bluedino wrote:
| Of course. You had to wait a year for the eMachines
| clone. But remember the iMac didn't have FireWire or Wifi
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines_eOne
|
| And Compaq had the all-in-one form factor back in 1995
|
| https://twitter.com/InsaneWardy/status/841219290539970560
| epc wrote:
| Wifi was kind of useless until 802.11b was agreed. I used
| one of the early Cisco(?) wireless adaptors circa 1997
| and 1998 and...it was mostly unpleasant except for the
| fact that it was wireless (I don't know if it was 802.11
| or a predecessor protocol).
| mattl wrote:
| the iMac did have wifi and Firewire a year later, not at
| launch.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| In the iMac form factor? Probably not.
| gumby wrote:
| > although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are
| just sticking to the principle that you don't need lots of
| ram
|
| I think it's part of the product line differentiation. I do
| all my development on a macbook air (well, some of the
| compilation is done on a remote machine, fr code that will
| run there). It's great: conveniently very light and with
| plenty of power.
|
| Sure, some people need a ton of VMs, but I don't. But Apple
| points out that if you're a "professional" you ought to be
| using a "Pro" machine and the RAM is one way they do it.
| goosedragons wrote:
| They aren't really. There are faster Intel and Ryzen CPUs
| for far less than what Apple asks for an M2 Max. You can
| get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD,
| 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100, the same price
| as a 13" M2 MBA with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. The i9 13900H
| will outperform the M2 Max too. Really the only place the
| Mac wins is efficiency and against Intel rivals GPU
| performance. And if you don't care as much about having as
| nice a screen you can usually find something with a better
| discrete GPU at the same price.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I don't care about a laptop with a better screen,
| battery life, not running so hot that it ensures that
| there will never be in little Scarfaces if I put in on my
| lap and it sounding like a 747 when I open three Chrome
| tabs...an x86 laptop is fine?
| mikestew wrote:
| _You can get an Asus..._
|
| If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something
| Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then
| we can just stop right there.
|
| That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-
| end commodity machines will always have a better price
| than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like
| a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and
| your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen,
| hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!
| goosedragons wrote:
| It has a 120Hz 2880x1620 15" OLED screen. That's 220 PPI.
| If that's "fuzzy" then the $200 more expensive 15"
| MacBook Air is "fuzzy" too with worse blacks and no per-
| pixel backlight and only 60Hz refresh rate. Unless 4 PPI
| is the difference between fuzzy and not fuzzy.
|
| And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?
| p_j_w wrote:
| > You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H,
| 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100
|
| Yes, but then you're stuck with an Asus. Having been
| there before, that's a hard pass. The real comparison for
| Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.
| jwells89 wrote:
| And there are very few laptops that can compete on
| metrics like fan noise and ability to run at full
| performance unplugged without nuking the battery.
|
| It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It's
| disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee
| when I'm pushing it, and my 16" M1 Max MBP doesn't. It's
| also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a
| desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are
| apparently hard to come by.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It _really_ depends on the workload. I was working Sysops
| for a Mac-based shop during the Apple Silicon
| announcement, and we had a lot of broken Docker
| containers on ARM. When I left, your options as a Mac dev
| was:
|
| - Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle
| temps of 70-80c when building for production
|
| OR
|
| - Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get
| slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler
| system
|
| Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet
| laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was
| simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
| jwells89 wrote:
| That's just the natural outcome of needing to emulate
| anything. x86 machines running any OS have similar issues
| emulating other architectures -- see how much muscle it
| takes to competently emulate the now-ancient Wii U for
| example. It just so happens that emulation of other
| platforms on x86 isn't necessary all that frequently.
| There's other issues with Docker on macOS, but those can
| be worked around (see OrbStack for some such
| improvements).
|
| This should become less of a problem as it becomes more
| normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups.
| There's also the possibility that "shipping the jungle"
| will fall back out of favor, which would fix various
| other papercuts that result from Docker's tight coupling
| with Linux.
| WWLink wrote:
| To be fair, I find using docker on anything but Linux to
| be an awful experience lol
| [deleted]
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| I was still using the keyboard from an iMac G3 up until 2019.
| It felt fun to type on, and had a passthrough USB which was
| very convenient for low-power devices.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The built-in hub was one of the best features of Apple
| boards for a long, long time. It started with ADB ports on
| on late 80s/early 90s boards and extends all the way into
| the 2010s when the wired aluminum board finally dropped the
| USB ports its predecessors carried.
|
| It's such an obvious little quality of life improvement,
| and yet the only other board I've come across with the
| feature is the HHKB Pro 2 (Pro 3 drops the hub) and some
| variants of Das Keyboards.
| finitestateuni wrote:
| I started with an apple keyboard. I bought a Das in the
| early 2010s. When the das quickly ran into issues, I got
| an HHKB pro 2, which I've taken in my bag every day to
| every job I've had and I use at home[0]. Your comment
| just made me realize that USB hubs aren't on every
| keyboard!
|
| [0] the swappable USB cable is so handy! Just leave one
| plugged into each machine.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Strong agree on removal cable, to the point that I wonder
| why any desk peripherals nicer than a $10 K120 have
| permanently attached cables.
| bzzzt wrote:
| The late 90s Sun Sparcstation machines at my uni lab also
| had keyboards with mouse passthru connectors.
| detourdog wrote:
| The original iMac came a perch slot that could beused for
| internal expansion. I installed a SCSI card and hung all
| my SCSI devices off it.
| tjakab wrote:
| That was the secret expansion port that some third-
| parties made accessories for anyway. I recall it was gone
| by the Rev-B model.
| saltcured wrote:
| > 1024x768 which wasn't typical for a 15" screen at the time.
|
| I double-take at statements like this. I forget how much
| variation in experience there was. But, being in the SF Bay
| Area, we were able to read Computer Shopper etc. and carpool
| to the South Bay to get whatever we wanted. I recall trips to
| will-call doors at warehouses, as well as private sellers in
| small apartments. I guess I was spoiled for choice.
|
| I distinctly remember having a 15" monitor that did 1024x768
| around 1992, and working out the X modelines to use it with
| Slackware by 1994. I went higher from there as I got my hands
| on bigger 17" or 21" monitors. I'm pretty sure my 21" Nanao
| was usually running at 1600x1200 a couple years later. I
| always felt that image quality and keyboards were worth
| investing in, since I would spend so much time exposed to
| them.
|
| As far as I recall, we often had to trade off lower color
| depth for higher resolutions, since framebuffer VRAM was
| usually limited. A lot of time was spent in 8-bit psuedo
| color palette modes with XFree86 before eventually using
| 15/16 bit "true color" modes. I don't think 24-bit made much
| sense until later with 3D accelerators that had more VRAM.
| [deleted]
| steve1977 wrote:
| Underpowered for what? As a personal computer for home use and
| as an Internet device?
|
| Not that I can remember.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I've always been a computer person and I loved mines,
| especially the graphite one. One of the best looking machines
| ever.
|
| The G3 was one heck of a CPU.
|
| The only thing these machines suffered from was USB 1.1. ZIP
| drives, CD burners and scanners were all much faster in their
| SCSI versions. You could see USB was clearly the future, but
| not an immediate one.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| > The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer
| person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not
| as accepted as it is now.
|
| Chic. Not geek.
|
| The marketing claim during the introduction couldn't have been
| more fitting and for everything that followed after coming out
| of apple.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs
| because 'it's a UNIX system', and for a while their hardware
| was relatively consumer-friendly (battery, RAM and disk were
| user-replacable/upgradable on my 2009 MacBook).
| lapcat wrote:
| > I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs
| because 'it's a UNIX system'
|
| Yes to this!
|
| I was in academia when I switched from Windows to Mac, and
| UNIX was a big factor.
|
| Incidentally, my first Mac was an iMac G4.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Paradoxically I did the opposite move at the time, I was
| a teenager who grew up with MacOS and knew it inside out.
| All my knowledge was basically voided with MacOS X, so if
| I had to start from scratch anyway, I might as well
| switch to Windows where I don't need to check the box to
| know if a game or hardware will be compatible.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The iMac came out in 1997. OS X came out in 2001 and wasn't
| usable into 2002-2003.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Yes, but GGP specifically mentioned "everything that
| followed after coming out of apple [sic]", which I took
| to mean "all following machines up to the current day."
| gumby wrote:
| You should repost this comment at top level. It's an
| important point, not a nitpick.
| detourdog wrote:
| There was Mac OS X server 1.2 which was a NeXT foundation
| with macintosh system 9 gui.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I kind of wonder if this whole 'Macs and Unix' are some
| post-purchase rationalization. This makes more sense than
| it seems, Apple is best in class when it comes to hypnosis.
|
| Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are
| doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing
| C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you
| are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since
| they have us by the balls.
|
| Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be
| until the end of the semi-replaceable era.
|
| Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing
| windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.
|
| Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted
| and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are
| still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only
| time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might
| SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old
| computers can do that)
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| There are a ton of dev tools that are Linux/Mac only.
|
| MS didn't rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for
| the love of open source. They did it because most dev
| work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use
| that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support
| NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available
| on Windows many years after they were available on
| Linux/MacOS.
|
| Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many
| years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many
| years you couldn't use it if you were on Windows.
| macintux wrote:
| Speaking for myself, I went to CompUSA to see what they
| had that I could use to build my next home Linux box. I
| didn't expect to buy anything, just was window shopping.
|
| I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and
| asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had
| connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.
|
| As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an
| Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial
| software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX.
| Terminal and everything.
|
| So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local
| Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I've
| never looked back.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not at all, back when I was at CERN that was exactly the
| reason many researchers were going for OS X, as the
| Solaris workstations were being decommissioned, there was
| a pile of them stacked at my office.
|
| The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one
| was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.
|
| I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific
| Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I
| left in 2004.
|
| In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT
| official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even
| Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the
| only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was
| OS X.
| matwood wrote:
| People wanted all the CLI goodness of unix (linux) with a
| gui that functioned. Windows had cygwin, but was
| otherwise anemic at the CLI. I had a solaris and later a
| linux desktop next to my Windows desktop, but linux on
| laptops was a huge PITA. I got a G4 Powerbook and had the
| best of both worlds, able to run something like
| Lightroom, and have all the familiar unix tools.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The G4 Powerbook was my first exposure to Apple as well.
| Just having an ssh client on the command line was very
| nice.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Why does being unix based matter?_
|
| If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money
| on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.
|
| https://infinigeek.com/assets/apple_unix_ad-s.jpg
| no_wizard wrote:
| Boy do I miss this era of computing. From the
| advertisements to the competition to the innovation that
| was happening at the time. It all felt so exciting.
| infecto wrote:
| The only time I see people using windows for dev work is
| when they are a .net shop or they have no choice.
| txs wrote:
| I switched from Linux to macOS a decade ago, and the
| underlying UNIX-like system meant that I could continue
| to use all the same development and shell tools I've used
| my whole career, and most of the time I don't even notice
| I'm on macOS.
|
| I also prototype natively and locally even though I
| eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the
| odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche
| languages all work perfectly fine.
|
| The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is
| still a lot of open source software that is not working
| well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and
| libraries.
| acdha wrote:
| It definitely was not post hoc rationalization. Anyone
| doing Unix or open source development - not as dominant
| then but still big - had been faced with paying huge sums
| for a proprietary box with increasingly uncompetitive
| hardware or dealing with desktop Linux's driver and
| stability challenges (I did that for years).
|
| When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first
| time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would
| run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office,
| Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because
| you didn't have to disable power saving to avoid kernel
| panics. That wasn't perfect, of course, but a ton of
| early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than
| on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on
| Linux or Solaris.
|
| I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed
| that in addition to traditional markets like design, I
| was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and
| seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It's
| hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty
| speculative since their finances were still lean in the
| pre-iPod era (if I'd been willing to make a bigger gamble
| I'd probably be writing this from a yacht).
| macintux wrote:
| It was depressing reading Horace Dediu's analysis of
| Apple's accounting practices in the year or two after the
| iPhone's release, knowing that Apple stock was
| significantly undervalued, and not having the means to
| take advantage of it.
| acdha wrote:
| I put in one market order on 9/10. It wasn't processed
| until after the market reopened but went in at like
| $17/share. I remember thinking I should buy more but 9/11
| and the dotcom crater made me decide to save my cash.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Oh man, so much this. I made a college roommate so much
| money by telling him to put all the money his parents
| gave him in Apple stock after the iPhone was released. He
| didn't agree (he was also a massive anti-Apple pro PC
| guy...he owned a Zune) until I explained Apple's
| subscription accounting and what it actually meant.
|
| I still don't understand why investors didn't understand
| Apple's subscription accounting and how it meant that
| their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th
| their actual iPhone profits.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It was approachable Unix.
|
| If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web
| development or other stuff you had a supported consumer
| platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode
| that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| That's not it. The first place I saw large Mac adoption
| was all the long time Linux and Unix nerds in my CS dept.
| Suddenly there were heaps of G4 MacBooks all over CS. I
| got one based off the recommendation of a friend who was
| a FreeBSD user.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Same thing! All of my professors were using Sun Ultra 10s
| in 2000. OSX was the logical next step vs futzing with
| Linux GUIs etc for many.
| Libcat99 wrote:
| The out of the box ssh experience on Linux is far
| superior to windows, ssh mounting of disks, easy scp and
| rsync access without jumping through hoops. To me,
| thinking of doing my job from a windows box sounds
| painful.
|
| I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server
| dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not
| installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta?
| Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed,
| supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the
| appeal.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is why in hindsight it was a bad idea for Microsoft
| to never been serious about POSIX subsystem on the
| Windows NT linage.
|
| That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.
|
| OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a
| large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself
| is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like
| experience.
|
| Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX
| management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.
|
| For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years,
| it only brings the convinience of one product less to
| care about.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| It was definitely a huge selling point for anyone doing
| web development. Suddenly you had a consumer machine that
| was close to what was running in production.
|
| You have to remember - there was no docker back in the
| day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche
| group of hard core people.
| csixty4 wrote:
| I think I spent more days fighting with Linux power
| management than actually using my laptop back then. My
| first Macbook was a dream.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think "macs are unix" applied to iMacs since they
| didn't run osx for the years where they mattered.
|
| But I really only use Macs because it's the easiest unix
| machine for me to use. I don't know of another laptop
| where everything works and I also natively have a shell
| and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but
| they are all one more step and I don't care enough to
| bother.
|
| If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and
| packaging manager I never had to think about that cost
| the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.
| nobleach wrote:
| With Apple, you get the marriage of great hardware with
| (what I consider) an okay operating system. I VASTLY
| prefer Linux and use it daily. Since it's Arch, and since
| I'm currently using Hyprland as my desktop, I sincerely
| doubt that would meet your criteria. Battery life is
| nowhere near what a current Apple product can achieve.
|
| I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this
| but, we're a long way off.
| rconti wrote:
| Well, as a lifelong unix sysadmin, it matters, but I'm
| not sure how much it matters for a typical developer.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| The primary reason macs are popular for development is that
| they're Unix based.
|
| Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs
| and doesn't on Windows (or didn't initially at least...heck
| it wasn't even available on Windows for many years until MS
| itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).
|
| NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS
| having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was
| available on Linux and Mac from the outset.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and
| Macs
|
| It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM
| and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead
| (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).
|
| Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a
| unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's
| why I switched to macs... from linux.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's still not accepted, by the way. If you meet someone and
| they don't start looking around the room for an escape route
| when they find out you are a "computer person" then they are
| probably a computer person too.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| The money part of tech is accepted. If you have enough of
| that, people will at least be courteous to your face, even
| if you're the stereotypical computer person.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer
| person"
|
| A huge part of the mac user base at that time were
| writers/editorial staff and graphic designers. I don't know if
| we lump them in the "computer person" crowd as they basically
| spend their day in front of a computer, but yes, to them the
| colors were really well received, as a salvation from the beige
| world they had to deal with.
|
| The same way people covered their macbooks in stickers and
| skins to get away from the uniform metallic gray canvas.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Let's not ignore the stoner college kid demographic.
|
| You're sitting smoking up in a tiny dorm and the most
| dominant item almost certainly was your computer. Having it
| be Bondi Blue colored with beautiful curves made that
| experience much nicer.
| Y-bar wrote:
| I look at all the rainbow RGB blinkenlight cases of your
| average PC gaming setup and conclude that they too tend to
| enjoy colourful computer.
|
| - "We're not so different you and I"
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The RGB features on PCs are glued on and honestly rather
| ridiculous.
|
| There's a difference between glued-on extras - which are
| more like car customisation - and stylish integrated
| design.
|
| A friend of mine used to joke about design-for-men being
| anything that was black and ribbed - which most PC cases
| are. If you add RGB to something black and ribbed, it's
| still black and ribbed - but now it has RGB stuck on it.
|
| The curves, colour wraparound, and white translucent
| plastic of the iMac were the opposite of that. Everything
| was integrated into a whole - which was actually a nice
| metaphor for where Apple were trying to go in general.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think at no time did we have as much choice as now for
| case styles. Classic and stylish wooden cases, colorful
| cubes, lab like half transparent white boxes, trapezoidal
| snow themed open cases [0], basically everything under
| the sun in a tower format.
|
| Ironically, except for macs. Macs only come in solid
| metalic colors, at best.
|
| [0] https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555409345.html
| rsynnott wrote:
| That's a relatively new thing, and probably actually
| influenced by the old iMacs, by way of Alienware.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The bright colours and curvy design were absolutely critical
| to the iMac.
|
| PCs and older Macs were boring, and so were the people who
| used them and talked about them.
|
| So what if it had 253 Megasnerds and an extra fast
| blibbyblop? It was boring and beige. No one cared.
|
| The iMac was exciting and fun, and so was anyone who bought
| one and used one.
|
| You could get a row of them in different colours for your
| design office, and they'd look stunning. Clients would walk
| in and literally say "Wow!"
|
| The magic worked in any SME office that wasn't trying to look
| boringly corporate - which turned out to be a lot of offices.
|
| Absolute marketing masterpiece to make the design a marketing
| statement - not just for Apple itself, but for any creative
| or service provider who bought one.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as
| accepted as it is now._
|
| One cool thing about the appliance computing revolution (phones
| and vg consoles) is that now most people don't have computers
| again and "being a computer person" is a thing again.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yeah, the "computers for non-computer persons" evolved from
| iMac to iPhone to iPad (plus the Android variants). But the
| risk is that being a "real computer person" with a real
| computer might become as outlandish as being a "real
| photographer" with a real camera has already become.
| closewith wrote:
| It never evolved to iPads or tablets. Phones are the only
| computing device for most people.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| True, unless you consider watching... uh, ASMR videos...
| as "computing". "I was meditating!"
| grecy wrote:
| Apple make more money selling iPads than HP and Dell make
| on PCs combined [1]
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/07/1
| 9/apple...
| closewith wrote:
| That just shows that both tablets and desktops are a tiny
| market.
| grecy wrote:
| I'll happily take the tiny market that is $26 billion a
| year [1].
|
| https://mspoweruser.com/ipad-statistics/
| [deleted]
| randallsquared wrote:
| This is already the case. In 2019, I was startled to find
| that some incoming software engineers at my work didn't own
| a desktop or laptop... they just expected they'd use
| whatever computer their work provided.
| ssully wrote:
| Do you mean for work use, or for all their computing
| needs? I've never used a personal computer for work.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Everything that wasn't doable on their smartphone. They
| would use their work computer for personal things because
| they just didn't have a "personal" computer other than a
| phone. Hence my startlement.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm seeing this with new hires as well.
|
| Several of them don't own computers and rely entirely on
| smartphones for their computing needs.
|
| It's frankly a worrying trend. Smartphones are consumer
| devices that do not allow the kind of automation,
| tinkering, scripting, and ownership that computers do.
|
| On the flip side it means that I will be more competitive
| in the job market as I grow older than I was expecting.
| piperswe wrote:
| This acts as a reminder that I should fix the G3 I have sitting
| on my shelf with what's probably a screwed up flyback
| transformer... but I'm kinda scared of working on a CRT (never
| done it before)
| someNameIG wrote:
| > When Apple's next-generation Power Mac tower arrived in a blue
| and white coating, professional users rebelled. (Subsequent
| models were a more stately gray, and to this day, Apple prefers
| to release all of its "Pro" products with little to no color.)
|
| One thing I'd like is that Apple would have their pro product
| line offer more colours.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Was it that successful? I don't recall having seen many of those
| in the wild. I mean not more than the beige mac they replaced.
| Same households, same businesses.
|
| The white ibook G4 was really the one I saw starting making dent
| at the pc market, especially with students.
| twoodfin wrote:
| It was hugely successful. They sold millions at at time when a
| highly successful computer model would sell a few hundred
| thousand boxes.
|
| It's absolutely accurate to say the iMac is the product that
| launched the modern era of Apple. Had it been a flop the
| company likely would have gone under.
| prmoustache wrote:
| "millions" is a big vague.
|
| Do you have a number of units solds for the first gen imac G3
| compared to say, the combined sales of all the Macintosh
| PowerMacintosh/Performa models of the generation before and
| the global growth of regular PC at the time?
|
| My perception, and I emphasize in the word perception,
| because I lack numbers, is that the early imac and ibook were
| quite ridiculized for their appearance and the
| imac/ibook/probook series started being fashionable and
| successful items the generation after those: white ibook,
| flat LCD panel imac G4, titanium powerbooks...Those were the
| ones you would see elsewhere compared to the aquarium looking
| imac g3 and the clamshell "toilet seat" ibook that nobody
| wanted to be seen with. Hence me looking for numbers instead
| of praising news article written with rose tinted glasses and
| without sales numbers.
|
| And I mean by that it may have saved apple temporarily by at
| least reversing/flattening the curb while not being a mega
| success. Macs were losing market share every year, just not
| losing more market share or gaining a little bit can be
| considered a success even without making a huge dent in the
| PC market.
| twoodfin wrote:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/19/how-apple-went-
| fr...
| prmoustache wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I saw a chart that was showing the revenues and they
| didn't really grow from 1998 to 2000. The real increase
| started between 2001 - 2005 which correspond to the
| second gen imac and more importantly the ipod.
|
| Having said that the apple share stopped declining after
| the first imace release so it may not have generated a
| lot of money but at least gave confidence in the market.
| iddan wrote:
| When I was in high school my art department planned to throw away
| an original iMac blue, knowing the culutral significance of this
| machine I told them I'll take it but because it was public
| property (that was planned to be thrown out but anyway) I had to
| sneak in the end of the day and pick it up. I took it on my hands
| for 90 minutes on the way home (don't let the handle fool you
| this thing is heavy!) but I love it and my friends are always in
| awe I've got one
| somat wrote:
| When I was in high school I noticed my library was replacing
| their vt terminals with pc's. I asked if I could buy a terminal
| and they said just stop by when we close and we will give you
| one. I was expecting one of the beat up ones used for public
| card catalog lookup but they gave me the deluxe setup they used
| behind the desk a vt420 with a dot matrix printer and a wand
| type barcode scanner. What a score.
|
| I wired it up in my little brothers(10) room. He would play
| nethack and make elaborate barcode based auth systems with it.
| A lot of fun. I still have strange dreams of running an entire
| office off terminals to this day. Strangely nobody has taken me
| up on it yet.
|
| But the real lesson is do your part and help a poor high school
| kid.
| wink wrote:
| We had the colorful ones at my first onsite dev job (a design
| agency) and they were constantly crashing, so my experience was
| 100% negative. Honestly surprised about people having good
| memories. OS X was pretty nice when it launched, that would have
| been the time where I had pinpointed some saving.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The experience could depend on the software people were
| running.
|
| Mac OS 8 and 9 didn't even have memory protection. A program
| with faulty memory management, which wasn't uncommon since it
| was before the creation of the wonderful and magnificent Rust,
| could very well destroy the runtime memory of other programs
| and even the kernel...
| wildrhythms wrote:
| We used an iMac G3 for years to run a live production lighting
| and sound system (as late as 2006) and it was very reliable, I
| can't remember it crashing once.
| wil421 wrote:
| I used them for years in school and everyone hated them. Not
| sure if it was the software or hardware. Same issue with my
| friends pre-iMac Mac. We could barely get through a game
| without beach ball spinning forever or crashing.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Similar experience at my school. Almost every computer was
| a PC, but we had a room with 10-15 blue G3 and sometimes we
| had to use them to "research" for school projects. I didn't
| hated them, but we avoided them because they were
| noticeably slower than the PCs we had. I also remember the
| mouse being a bit weird.
|
| They looked nice, but didn't work as well for us as the
| boring beige towers.
| yankput wrote:
| Yeah the original article is a bit of rose tinted glasses.
|
| The iMacs were pretty and started a lot of HW innovation
| but the actual experience of using them was not great. OS
| 8/OS 9 were still bad operating systems, and the first few
| releases of OS X were not very stable either.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > But the rise of online services and the internet in the
| mid-1990s gave Apple a unique opportunity. On the internet,
| nobody knew you were using a Mac. Once you connected, you were
| using AOL or CompuServe or just your local internet provider and
| a web browser or email app. While some sites didn't function if
| you weren't using Internet Explorer for Windows, most worked
| fine.
|
| Contrast with their view of the internet today, now that they own
| the mobile platform that is dominant in the most important
| market.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| I get it that at some point (long time ago) Apple traded colors
| for resolution and had a highest resolution monochrome screen
| among the generic computers. That allowed it to occupy a desktop
| publishing niche. I get it that for certain amount of time iPhone
| had (has?) the best photo / video capabilities among the
| smartphones. But overall the Apple's market success is not
| something that I can easily understand. iMac success in
| particular is a mystery to me.
| LanceH wrote:
| Non computer people were discovering the internet at the same
| time.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Much of my earliest experience with computing was on these,
| because they had them at school. Hyperstudio was my first taste
| of building little interactive applications. EV Override was the
| first game that felt like it contained an entire world. It was
| sad to see them eventually treated as junk - I have one myself
| that I pulled out of an e-waste container a few years back.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| This colorfully compelling ad really hit the spot:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kR6Kwcr6tU
| shon wrote:
| I remember very well when the iMac was released.
|
| I was a fledgling IT Manager in SoCal and went to the local Fry's
| Electronics to check out an iMac. It was the first time I had
| ever seen a line of people out the door with computers in their
| shopping carts.
|
| What made all of this more remarkable is that most tech-savvy
| people knew that both the hardware and software (OS) were sub-par
| as Apple had gone through a long period without great direction.
| But this is the genius of Jobs. He regains control of Apple and
| with minimal resources figures out how to sell a very mediocre
| computer computer by the truckload.
|
| The packaging (not just the box or case) was brilliant. Old
| hardware, mediocre software, wrapped in a beautiful, unique
| package with enough nice features and a low price to make it sell
| very well.
|
| Up to that point I'd never owned an Apple product, and the iMac
| was not enough to sway me. It took OS X, adding BSD to the core
| of the OS, along much more beautiful and much improved hardware
| in the form of the 2002- era MacBook Pro. Still all in all a
| stroke of genius. My main personal computing devices (outside
| gaming and server rigs) have been Apple ever since.
| mikece wrote:
| Not only saved Apple but, in a nutshell, was the summary of what
| Apple would be going forward: ultra user-friendly design, chic
| advertising, and sufficient functionality for all basic to
| intermediate users.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Must be weird how all those intermediate developers flocked to
| Powerbooks and Macbooks soon after, huh?
| secretsatan wrote:
| I still have mine, I power it up every couple of years to see if
| it still works.
| voytec wrote:
| And now we have fifty shades of Space Gray.
| stringsandchars wrote:
| > And now we have fifty shades of Space Gray.
|
| I understand your need to take a dig at Apple, but the current
| iMac comes in orange, purple, pink, yellow, blue, green and
| silver.
| fomine3 wrote:
| I wonder will they leave from aluminum unibody on Mac
| anytime. It's very long lifetime.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > It's very long lifetime.
|
| It's also a timeless design. The 2008 unibody MacBooks look
| like they could have been made brand new yesterday, with
| the only giveaways being the I/O and the bezels on the
| display.
|
| It's safe to say that the design will almost certainly
| (reasonably) never get old.
| einr wrote:
| You could sell the Power Mac G5 from _2003_ today and it
| would still look pretty sleek and modern. Yes, it has an
| optical drive and Firewire ports, but on the whole...
| dontlaugh wrote:
| If only those options were available for the laptops too.
| RulerOf wrote:
| But we get iPhones that come in a plethora of colors that
| you'll never see when looking at the screen, or ever if
| it's in a case.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Just waiting for Flower Power and Dalmatian to make a return
| with the M3 iMacs.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I used a Bondi Blue one to build ISP onboarding CDs, and the puck
| mouse was hideously bad. Nevertheless, the machines were quite
| popular, although I waited for the iBook to seriously get into
| OSX.
| fideloper wrote:
| I was in college when these were popular.
|
| Apple had their hands on education for sure, as most buildings
| had at least one room with rows and rows of the blue iMacs. The
| library and others had publicly available iMacs.
|
| I had a job doing inventory for the schools accounting department
| (not to be confused with Accounting, the education department) -
| I tagged a lot of computers. In competition with departments
| getting iMac's were ones getting cheap, unpowered Dell desktops.
| anthk wrote:
| >Consumers, not creators.
|
| Uh, in my country that was exactly the reverse. Macs were for
| creation people: journalists, writers, audio and video producers,
| press people, cinema, poster designs, comic books... everything
| multimedia related.
|
| If you knew what CMYK/RGB does mean, you'd probably be using a
| Mac at work.
| TillE wrote:
| That was the traditional Mac audience through the 80s and 90s.
| The point is that the iMac was an attempt to reach beyond that,
| to home users who just wanted to browse the internet and stuff.
| mruniverse wrote:
| Yes, at the time it was all about desktop publishing and
| graphic design. It wasn't until the end of the 90s that PCs
| started to make its way into that niche.
|
| Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod
| came out.
| pjmlp wrote:
| PCs were already in that niche pretty much all over the world
| since Windows 95 got introduced, until the Apple recovery
| they were mostly an US focused company, they weren't going
| bankrupt for nothing.
|
| In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big
| cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and
| cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor,
| Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country.
|
| Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having
| them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed
| university, or buying by catalog in the listings from
| computer magazines.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think that was when Jobs was deciding to bifurcate Apple's
| product line into the Pro and Consumer. Obviously the iMac was
| Consumer ... Apple would still cater to the Pro market, the
| creatives, but the iMac was not that machine.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Why in the world do people cut from the article and respond to
| something it didn't say?
|
| Here's the quote from the article.
|
| > But Apple reasoned that most people were consumers, not
| creators.
| grishka wrote:
| This. When I was a kid in the 90s, I was told that "there's
| also Apple, they make Macintosh computers, those are very
| expensive but very good with colors and fonts". The only time I
| saw that first-gen iMac, and classic Mac OS when it was still
| current, was at some kind of computer exhibition. My next
| contact with Mac OS was in the late 00s when I discovered
| Hackintosh and the fact that my desktop at the time can run it.
| epc wrote:
| I bought one in November 1998 ($1299 then, roughly $2400 today).
| It was an upgrade for me from an ancient Mac SE I'd had since
| 1990. The thing that struck me then was how easy the online
| purchase process was. There were very few options to pick from.
| It looks like I ordered it on 10/24/98 and had it by 10/28/98,
| which too was fast compared to other online computer purchases
| I'd done that year.
|
| And...it just worked out of the box. No messing around with IRQs
| and other tweaks that I had to use with my work day systems.
| Software was limited but IIRC Microsoft had updated Office as
| part of the earlier deal with Apple, and between Office, the
| dotMac suite, and web browser you could do most routine things
| just fine.
|
| Apple just totally nailed the end to end experience of buying,
| shipping, and using the system, which was a refreshing change
| from the status quo those days.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I was a kid at the time and they nailed the experience for me,
| too. My parents were shopping in Microcenter but I was drawn to
| the "thunk -- wheee!" noises from the apple store, which turned
| out to be other kids playing Bugdom on a lime green iMac. Just
| look at the comments:
|
| https://youtu.be/Vmp720kBLBU?list=PLBCr5xCUF7KeUlGJRAYFwccqP...
|
| My parents were confronted with a wall of special deals
| competing on numbers and specs... or the computer their kid was
| nagging them to buy. They went with the iMac.
| Palomides wrote:
| fyi, there's a recent rerelease/port of bugdom for modern
| OSes, ambrosia open sourced it:
| https://github.com/jorio/bugdom
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I think it was Pangea, but yes, it's delightful!
|
| Speaking of Ambrosia, it looks like EV Nova is on GOG.
| Maybe I should give it another spin one of these days.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I don't think the Apple store (as we know it now) existed at
| that point. There were resellers.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| There was a room in Microcenter that had a bunch of iMacs
| in it. I didn't know the commercial arrangement. I just
| knew that there was a fun green computer with a blue bug
| and you had to kick walnuts, avoid slugs, and free the
| ladybugs.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Apple was doing the store-in-a-store thing at CompUSA and
| MicroCenter and maybe a few other chains. The employees
| worked for the chain but went to special training from
| Apple to be able to talk up the Mac stuff. Very similar to
| their deal today with Best Buy.
|
| I bought my first PowerBook from such a section of CompUSA.
| That CompUSA was a good half hour drive from me and out of
| my way. I had to make a special trip to go pick it up.
|
| What was cool about these set up is Apple apparently
| directed the stocking so they had Mac compatible
| accessories and Max boxed software. While the Mac had just
| fewer boxed titles in total than the PC the fact few stores
| rarely/barely stocked what existed made the disparity seem
| worse than it was.
| acomjean wrote:
| A lot of stores had "Apple Sections". Cambridge MA
| Microcenter still has an apple room. Or compUSAs (a sort of
| big box computer store, now defunct) had an Apple "Store
| within a store".
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/452599/today-apple-history-
| apple-b...
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Many Best Buy stores have an Apple section to this day.
| tw04 wrote:
| Except for the mouse... that horrible, horrible hockey puck. My
| wrist hurts just thinking about it.
| detourdog wrote:
| For adults (larger hands) it was bad news. I'm convinced I
| injured myself using one.
| usefulcat wrote:
| And even if you didn't injure yourself, good luck keeping a
| circular mouse oriented correctly without constantly having
| to look down at the damn thing. To this day I'm amazed that
| Jobs allowed such an obvious gaffe.
| koalacola wrote:
| The fuck is an IRQ?
| belfalas wrote:
| Just wait until you learn about AUTOEXEC.BAT ;)
| mikestew wrote:
| That's just a script. CONFIG.SYS was where the real damage
| was done. "Now where'd I put that boot floppy?"
| sixothree wrote:
| And win.ini deserves a special place in hell. Interesting
| that the concept of the registry has survived this entire
| time as its replacement.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| It was an essential part of 90's PC configuration hell.
|
| IRQ is short for "Interrupt Request" and each peripheral or
| device that needs to interrupt the CPU for time-sensitive
| processing needed to be assigned one. There were only 16 of
| them with several hard coded for certain things like RTC.
| Since each serial port, parallel port, floppy controller, HDD
| controller, video card, sound card, etc needed an IRQ
| assignment it was not unusual to run out of free ones and
| resort to overloading one or more. This was less than ideal
| as now multiple drivers are waking up unnecessarily for the
| same IRQ.
|
| Originally these were set with physical jumpers on the
| motherboard and expansion cards. Most things switched to
| being configured with software/BIOS when the industry moved
| to PCI bus.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Lack of standards for self-describing hardware and
| negotiating bus resources meant that when setting up old-
| school PCs you had[1] to manually point drivers to their
| devices' I/O ports and interrupt lines (interrupt requests,
| or IRQs) [2] and occasionally resolve conflicts by
| reconfiguring jumpers on the devices themselves (the most
| familliar such jumper is probably the master/slave one on IDE
| drives, obsoleted by those twists in the ribbon cables).
|
| All of this still needs to be solved in a modern system, but
| for the most part the hardware, firmware, and OS will sort
| things out by themselves--even if some of the details of that
| process are liable to give you nightmares[3,4]. The iMac, for
| its part, solved this by not having any expandability at all
| (ISA or PCI), so the settings could be burned into the
| firmware.
|
| [1] See e.g. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html
|
| [2] I don't think this was ever a problem for address ranges
| for memory-mapped I/O, UMA issues excepted,--perhaps because
| MMIO didn't really become popular until PCI won and ACPI
| appeared?
|
| [3] https://wiki.osdev.org/I/O_APIC#IO_APIC_Inputs
|
| [4] https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29558
| pavlov wrote:
| It's part of the holy trinity of MS-DOS hardware
| configuration settings: port, IRQ, DMA channel.
|
| When you installed a card like Sound Blaster so your PC games
| could actually play some passable music and sound effects,
| you'd configure these settings with physical jumpers on the
| card. And then you have to pass those configuration settings
| to the game somehow so it can send data to the device.
|
| You could leave the card to its default settings, but then it
| might collide with another device like a printer or whatever.
| isykt wrote:
| The thing is, Apple is still the leader in the online ordering
| process, even though the competition has had decades to catch
| up. Dell's website is a mess. For years the top result on
| Google for the XPS Developer Edition was a page saying they
| didn't make it anymore, even though I had just read a blog post
| about the new one. Clicking a specific configuration sometimes
| makes the option for a previously available configuration
| disappear. It's maddening.
| detourdog wrote:
| Dell's website went downhill when the dropped WebObjects.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Same for HP and Lenovo. Those sites are such a disaster and
| I'm surprised that nobody in their sales orgs are raising
| hell. There has to be lost sales due to not being able to
| easily find things. Those sites are incredibly slow as well.
| sixothree wrote:
| Just figuring out what Lenovo laptops exist is an
| impossible task using their site. It's amazing just how
| unusable the site really is.
|
| But I'm guessing that's the point - make it confusing and
| unusable to steer people to specific choices??
| jwagenet wrote:
| I would assume for dell, hp, and lenovo, corporate sales
| through other channels drive the majority of sales so
| consumer facing websites are left to rot.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I really like the frame work ordering experience. Despite
| having a lot of options, the interface is uncluttered and
| usable.
|
| I guess part of it is having so few models to choose from,
| but maybe Dell, Lenovo, and HP don't actually need that many
| models in the first place...
| nobleach wrote:
| I was using a similarly spec'ed home-built PC at that time. It
| was an ugly beige box with a 15" beige monitor. I convinced my
| girlfriend to buy that Bondi-Blue box with only USB ports as
| she needed a new computer for her upcoming semester. We
| purchased it at the on-campus "Apple Store". It was the
| slickest computer buying experiences EVER. We had a Gateway
| 2000 store in town around that time. Trying to buy a computer
| there was such a nightmare. Apple really figured out the
| "experience" part of buying and owning a computer.
| detourdog wrote:
| The Gateway stores was the example given by every analyst on
| CNBC for why Apple couldn't have a store.
| nobleach wrote:
| I can kind of understand. Apple at that time period wasn't
| very "think different" yet. Gil Amelio still had the
| company in its own "beige box" era. The idea that a store
| would be selling a "less compatible" computer seemed
| insane. Turned out to be a game changer.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I've got kind of a funny story of how I got my first Mac.
|
| I moved from SLC to Portland in 2000, and had it in my head that
| I would join a graphic design firm as their on-hand developer.
| (At the time, I was of the opinion that design and development
| should happen under the same roof, a belief that ultimately
| proved correct, but under the other roof.)
|
| So I spent months shopping around my resume -- with a prominent
| link to my website -- to mostly-confused graphic designers, and
| didn't get a single callback or even an email saying "thanks but
| no." After around six months I sort of gave up and became the UI
| guy at a shipping company.
|
| At the shipping co, I saw a bunch of "smurf" Powermac G4s in the
| corner. "Yeah those are for testing, but nobody uses Macs so we
| don't really care." I decided to take a look at my website on the
| latest version of MSIE just for the hell of it.
|
| Instant computer crash. A bug in MSIE's CSS engine took down the
| whole computer. Not just the browser, the whole thing. All
| graphic designers at the time were still on Mac Classic, OS X had
| no penetration yet. I had been walking into offices, and turning
| off computers with unsaved work for months.
|
| The first thing I did with some spending cash was get a
| "graphite" 400mhz iMac G3, installed OS X as I was becoming
| disenchanted with Windows, and soon found that I liked using that
| pathetically slow machine far more than my tricked-out 1.6ghz AMD
| Athlon.
| Sakos wrote:
| The blue and white Power Mac G3 is still one of my favourite PC
| designs ever. And I never owned a Mac until my current Macbook.
| I've always wanted one and I still want one, even if just to put
| in the corner and admire because it's so aesthetic and pretty.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| One amission that I always see from this period of Apple is the
| impact of Gil Amelio's decisions and how much gets attributed to
| Jobs. This is not to undermine Jobs, he was absolutely the right
| person in the right place and figured out how to really sway
| project into shape and communicate the changes the company was
| making.
|
| Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned
| under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on
| education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later
| attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.
|
| That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the
| iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put
| the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of
| Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under
| Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh
| for internet - 7400E'.
| threeseed wrote:
| But Jobs was the one who partnered with Ive on the design of
| the iMac. If the iMac had launched with a similar design to the
| Power Macs it would have been ignored by the media and
| consumers.
|
| But true that many of the operational changes of the company
| mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian
| etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and
| hardware teams.
| jrmg wrote:
| The 1998 'Power Macintosh G3 All In One' is an interesting
| stepping stone to the iMac. Beige, blockier than the iMac,
| but noticeably curvier than preceding Power Macs. A return to
| the single unit design, and the first use of translucent
| plastic.
|
| https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_All-In-One
| pavlov wrote:
| I believe the first use of translucent plastic by Apple was
| the Newton eMate 300, designed by Jonathan Ive and released
| in early 1997 when Gil Amelio was still CEO:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
|
| The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The
| actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal,
| fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.
| einr wrote:
| If you wanna dig real deep, the first use would have been
| on the Power Macintosh 9600. It's subtle -- you can just
| about see it in the Wikipedia photo -- but it has a
| translucent blue plastic latch button on the top of the
| machine that I believe is the same shade as the eMate. It
| was introduced about a month earlier.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9600
| pavlov wrote:
| Oh, that's cool. Sneaky Bondi button.
|
| Also reminded me that Apple actually sold a dual 604e /
| 200 MHz system in the OS 8 era. I'm guessing the only
| software that could have made use of the second processor
| would have been some specially optimized routines in
| Photoshop or similar.
| yardie wrote:
| Similarly, Apple was experimenting with new metal casting
| techniques and used them to create the Sim Removal Tool
| included with every iPhone. The theory at the time was
| they were going to use this new cast in upcoming iPhones.
| But ended up going with milled stainless steel instead.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I had one and can confirm - it's about the same as bondi
| blue.
| notbeuller wrote:
| There was a huge push around that time for Apple to make a thin
| client style thing. Sun was doing it with java stations and it
| seemed to be "the buzz" and obvious direction. I don't think
| anyone expected a consumer push in response.
| threeseed wrote:
| Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the thin-client model because he
| had been using it full-time at NeXT.
| danieldk wrote:
| Could you elaborate? NeXT machines were quite the opposite
| of thin clients. They were very expensive and had a lot of
| memory etc. for computers of the early 90ies.
| [deleted]
| icedchai wrote:
| NeXT hardware was also massively underpowered, running on
| 680x0 in the early 90's when other workstation vendors
| had moved on to RISC (Sun Sparc, etc.) Sun was actually
| the Unix leader in the thin client space. All their
| systems could network boot, mount home directories off
| NFS, share a common user directory (NIS), etc.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But the Sun UNIX workstations and their thin clients were
| different lines of devices.
|
| The JavaStation ran JavaOS, not Solaris. Not sure about
| the Sun Rays.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes, but the thin clients used the same concepts that
| they pioneered with SunOS / Solaris, like X11. Sun's
| "thin clients" were mostly just X terminals.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But the Sun (and NeXT) workstations were _not_ just
| mostly X terminals, that's the point I'm trying to make.
| They were workstations, pretty much the opposite of a
| thin client.
| icedchai wrote:
| Ok. I view "thin" as shades of gray: example a diskless,
| net-booting Sun is "thinner" than a full blown
| workstation. Those foundational technologies (like NFS,
| NIS, X...) made it easier for Sun to build and promote
| full blown thin clients later on.
|
| To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config.
| (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)
| danieldk wrote:
| But that doesn't make it a thin client I think? Next to
| all NeXT applications ran locally.
| threeseed wrote:
| NeXT didn't have thin clients because the concept never
| took off anywhere other than a few niche banking
| applications.
|
| But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home
| directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular
| with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network
| centric desktop applications.
|
| It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new
| concepts for GUI users.
|
| The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that
| the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-
| grade thin client.
| Someone wrote:
| AFAIK, what Steve had and liked is that his desktop moved
| with him between at home and at work.
|
| That's something that thin clients also promise, but
| doesn't require using thin clients.
| gowld wrote:
| Microsoft Windows Briefcase has enteted the chat.
|
| Its claim to fame was bringing the term Architecture
| Astronaut into common parlance.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-
| astro...
|
| In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps
| and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:
|
| "between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a
| smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures
| and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are
| working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy
| because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow
| at all cost, even though they can't think of a single
| useful thing to build for us"
| mikestew wrote:
| Man, I normally have some respect for Spolsky's writing,
| but this one is overly-dismissive crap. Sure, Microsoft
| really needed to reel in the 13 versions of OneDrive they
| kept releasing and rereleasing, but that's the only part
| of the article that aged even remotely well.
|
| _" And the fact that customers never asked for this
| feature and none of the earlier versions really took off
| as huge platforms doesn't stop him."_
|
| Go ahead, try and _take away_ that feature now, see if
| any customers complain.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Did they have big storage though?
|
| I get what you're saying -- I'm just remembering Jobs
| demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT
| machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became
| "his" computer.
|
| That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe
| that's just "client".
| steve1977 wrote:
| Quite the opposite I'd say...
| philistine wrote:
| The iMac is the first New World ROM. That's most assuredly the
| project that was underway at Apple under Amelio. It was vital
| to allow a Mac to use USB for all its interactions. But it
| means nothing if the marketing of the device wasn't good. For
| that, I'm inclined to believe Jobs and Ive are responsible for
| how they made the device.
| Miraste wrote:
| >the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to
| Jobs once Gil was out.
|
| Amelio simplified the product categories down to four. They
| were still full of garbage--Jobs made the real difference
| there. He got rid of all the trash peripherals and replaced the
| (many) computer lines with only the iMac.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Yeah the GP sounds like it's apologizing a bit much for
| Amelio. The quadrant-based product lines was not _really_ in
| place until the release of the iBook in 1999.
|
| Amelio failed to cut the printer/accessory divisions which
| were mostly just selling rebadged hardware from other
| companies. He kept the Newton division even though it was not
| on a trajectory to success (I say this as a long time Newton
| fan). He _also_ kept around far more Mac SKUs than were
| necessary (Performas, education-only SKUs). That 's all stuff
| Jobs cut when he came back.
|
| Amelio had the unenviable task of righting a sinking ship. He
| didn't necessarily do a bad job at it but acqui-merging with
| Next and getting Jobs back was the best choice he made during
| his tenure.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| My mate's family had one, and I thought it was really cool as a
| kid.
|
| Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it
| for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other
| computers.
|
| And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been
| my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like
| Linux too much to leave it behind.
| mkurz wrote:
| Then I recommend Asahi Linux, using it on a MacBook Pro since
| 12 month now exclusively and it's awesome.
| hoherd wrote:
| I have a similar beginning story, especially with the wondering
| what people actually used it for. "Where's the terminal?"
|
| My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends
| said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please
| make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working
| _on_ my GUI in linux instead of working _with_ it. I just
| wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work
| consistently, I didn 't want my graphics drivers to break or be
| so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted
| a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of
| my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about
| how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do
| what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my
| daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there
| ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of
| unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux,
| and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my
| house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of
| getting out of the way so I can get to work.
|
| Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll
| be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment.
| I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop
| flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to
| macOS.
| Miraste wrote:
| 22 years later, and the only one of those problems I haven't
| seen on Linux recently is broken wifi.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Mostly same, yeah.
|
| I was on Win95 on laptops in the 90s, and that was a complete
| dumpster fire. Sleep never worked, long boot times, etc. But
| at the time, I was mostly producing documents and
| presentations, and Office was file-format-consistent across
| both platforms. I saw how a colleague's Powerbook worked, and
| bought my own. It was a HUGE improvement even though it was
| pre-OSX.
|
| Then the firm tanked, and I went back to coding (LAMP stuff)
| at about the same time OSX was released. I upgraded and never
| looked back.
|
| Having a machine where zsh is a click away and on which I can
| ALSO run Excel is wonderful.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Similar to my story. I've switched to Mac OS X with the first
| public beta.
|
| I was exposed to NeXTSTEP on my job then and loved it. And I
| was using FreeBSD at home.
|
| Then Mac OS X came, basically NeXTSTEP with some FreeBSD and
| a gorgeous GUI. Shut up and take my money...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Is it really fair to compare a macbook without a GPU and a
| Linux with a GPU?
|
| (EDIT: This is HN, we all know that integrated CPUs/GPUs are
| not what is referred to as GPU.
|
| Please don't be pedantic. )
| pjmlp wrote:
| What powers the display on any modern computer?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| At the time they were marketed (if I recall correctly?) mainly
| for browsing the internet; my first experience with a Mac was
| an iMac at the local library, getting 20 or 30 minutes of
| internet, and sitting there with my dad thinking "...now
| what?". I think we went to the Lego website and things like
| that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> mainly for browsing the internet_
|
| That was what the "i" in "iMac" was for. It had a built-in
| 56K modem, with an RJ-11 jack.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I came from the other direction - used windows, admired Linux
| but neither was the sweet spot. OSX's brilliant UI combined
| with the power of a Unix-like system underneath was a perfect
| combo.
| rimliu wrote:
| It is not UNIX-like, OS X was Unix (excepct for Lion), and
| macOS is Unix.
| droptablemain wrote:
| "and pave the way for Apple to become the most important
| technology company ever"
|
| Yikes, that's a hell of a statement about a company with 20%
| global market share on smartphones and 8% on PCs -- as well as a
| negligible enterprise and server share.
|
| Apple's only the most important technology company to the
| professional-managerial class, where the social clout gained by
| owning an Apple product is much more important than the product
| itself.
| itisit wrote:
| You cannot deny the vast positive competitive influence Apple
| has had on personal computing over the last 25 years. They take
| a pass at improving the experience of whatever it is, and
| everyone significantly ups their game thereafter. You don't
| have to like them, but it's foolishly disingenuous to suggest
| their significance is limited to their sales or their
| marketability.
| green_leaves wrote:
| > The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so,
| but it doesn't get enough credit for essentially kick-starting
| the USB revolution
|
| That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac
| release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for
| example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
|
| Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that
| didn't come from them.
| krger wrote:
| >USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A
| quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example
| shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
|
| Yes. USB _ports_ certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac 's
| release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were,
| however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB
| peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and
| ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals
| (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices
| used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and
| look for the mass-market USB _peripherals available for sale_
| and let me know what you find.
|
| Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB
| peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in
| years afterwards, it was actually rather _difficult_ to find
| USB peripherals that were _not_ made out of translucent plastic
| to match iMacs.
|
| Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't
| claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market
| adoption.
| green_leaves wrote:
| USB ports not only existed, but were standard in new PCs. A
| quick search shows peripherals and monitors with USB hubs in
| PC World May-1998 (4/5 months before iMac launch). From that
| months number (Pages 172-184):
|
| "UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth .
| Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware
| companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18
| of these new products"
|
| Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks,
| cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.
|
| >Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't
| claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market
| adoption.
|
| Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95
| OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a
| fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the
| PC.
|
| https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/
|
| Edited to add link and page reference.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| You can attempt to rewrite history all you like but as
| someone who _lived_ it there was a clear shift in the
| market pre-iMac and post-iMac. Less than a year after the
| iMac shipped there was at least an order of magnitude more
| USB devices than had been available previously. Every
| manufacturer jumped on the bandwagon. Funny enough you can
| 't even question it - a ton of those devices used iMac-like
| translucency, color, or both.
|
| I was a diehard PC user way back then but even I wasn't
| shameless enough to claim the iMac had nothing to do with
| pushing USB forward.
| WWLink wrote:
| Usb ports existed on a few high end PCs but before 1999 or
| so they were super uncommon and nobody used them.
| philistine wrote:
| What you're completely sidestepping is that the iMac did not
| just have USB ports, it _only_ had USB ports. They retired all
| the legacy ports at the same time as they moved to USB. Forcing
| all their users to move to USB for peripherals. That was the
| big difference.
| green_leaves wrote:
| I'm not sidestepping it. My point was of mass market adoption
| and innovation.
|
| I remember testing the original iMac at a computer trade fair
| back in it's day, and I was not impressed at all. For me it
| was a cheap looking plastic computer that didn't have a
| floppy drive (but hey they sold you one) and _forced_ you
| into an integrated monitor.
| philistine wrote:
| Your opinion doesn't change the fact that USB was niche
| before Apple went all in on USB. When people give praise to
| Apple for making something mainstream that's all they mean.
| Apple has a tendency to set trends and be rewarded for
| that.
| green_leaves wrote:
| Check my other comment for data and arguments. USB was
| already pretty much standard in new PCs and all kind of
| peripherals were available many months before iMac
| release. By the time the iMac was released the yearly
| computer sales were in the 90 million range >90% PCs,
| easily were 10s of millions of PCs USB equipped by
| Aug-1998. I find it hard to justify that a computer that
| sold 5 million units over 3 years made USB mainstream.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/04/19Apple-
| Ships-5-Milli...
|
| Edit typo.
| sosborn wrote:
| "Kick-starting the USB revolution" doesn't mean the same thing
| as "innovation."
|
| They only included USB on the original iMac, which was a death-
| knell for the legacy connectors, and quite controversial at the
| time given the iMac's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
| green_leaves wrote:
| I pretty much see adoption of technology as innovation. Not
| technical innovation for sure, but innovation in the sense of
| significant improvement over other solutions.
|
| Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5"
| floppy drive as innovation?
| LanceH wrote:
| No, it's forced adoption. You have a houseful of 5.25" and
| need a new computer and have no options now. That's hardly
| innovative.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It's an entirely predictable thing, but I find that at my age
| (53) I've started being kind of stunned at how some aspects of
| computing history have become just that to younger people:
| History, with perhaps no more real bearing on the hear-and-now
| for younger people than, say, the Teapot-Dome scandal.
|
| I've had a number of conversations with people in the last few
| years who didn't work through the 90s, and who therefore had NO
| idea the absolutely stranglehold MSFT had on computing in that
| era. And I get it; it's hard to see today, when we have 5 or 6
| viable platforms to work on (two flavors of mobile; Mac; Windows;
| ChromeOS; Linux). The degree to which being non-Windows in that
| era put you in a bit of a desert, especially as Apple hit its
| darkest years, is really really difficult to grasp now.
|
| If you try to explain the wildly predatory things MSFT did, like
| insisting that every computer sold include a Windows license,
| they just sound like evil overlord plots. "Whoa, that can't be
| right..."
|
| And maybe the biggest one is the fact that Apple itself -- now a
| juggernaut of profitability and stability, and a real leader in
| the industry on several fronts -- very nearly went under, which
| would've taken with it the only other viable desktop OS of the
| time, further cementing Redmond's domination.
|
| Its recovery, starting with the iMac, is absolutely one of the
| greatest turnarounds in American business history.
|
| Obviously, it wasn't all Steve, and required a lot of things to
| go their way, but the results are still amazing to me.
|
| And yet: If you're 25, Apple has ALWAYS been who Apple is today.
| If you're 25, we've always had great options for computing
| environments with near-parity experiences. If you're 25, no
| single vendor has had anything like the kind of market power MSFT
| had.
|
| It's a weird thing to realize the events of your early adulthood
| have become paragraphs in history books but here we are.
| bitwize wrote:
| My wife had a Tangerine iMac. She used to chat with me on IRC
| with it. That's how she met me, online, 25 years ago this year
| (she used a PowerBook before getting the Tangerine).
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| The iMac hasn't had a significant design change since the G5. It
| was almost like the progression was in terms of form factor. Now
| that they've switched to laptop components, they've achieved the
| compactness they wanted.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It is wild how the translucent plastic thing took over. From
| other companies trying to make imac look alikes to totally
| different products. I used to have an ad of irons that came in a
| variety of colors arranged in a circle like the imac ad.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I still have my GameBoy Color with the translucent purple case.
| Amazed me as a child that I could see inside the thing. I don't
| know the dates that well as I was a child but I assume the iMac
| influenced Nintendo.
| mcphage wrote:
| I do too! Honestly: it still looks great.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I love that style; takes me back to my youth. I still have a
| translucent blue extension lead from that era, and it's
| currently used for my home A/V. That marks over 20 years of
| service.
|
| I also remember Nintendo 64s and their controllers coming in
| see-through cases. These cases were available in a variety of
| bright colours. Ref: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/87/ae/
| 3c87ae0913e29c2109cc...
|
| It can't all be rose tinted glasses; the world was genuinely
| more colourful back then.
| nkotov wrote:
| The iMac G3 was the very first computer I got to use. Our school
| district had several in every classroom and a couple computer
| labs. I distinctly remember using Scholastic software called
| Reading Counts, as well as KidPix on OS 9. Eventually, some of
| the older G3s got replaced with the eMac running OS X and then
| the district switched completely over to running Windows XP on
| Dell. That brief exposure to Apple and the creative colors makes
| me miss the times when using computers felt fun.
|
| I think the closest I felt to that later on was around the time
| when Vista came out and everyone was using WindowBlinds to change
| their theme up.
| ericzawo wrote:
| KidPix was a revelatory piece of software for children in the
| 90s.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| xattt wrote:
| One of the first apps I got for the iPad.
| ecf wrote:
| Our school didn't have any in each classroom, but rather a
| dedicated computer lab with enough for the entire class.
| Surprisingly they were loaded with a few games and learning we
| could play Cro-Mag Rally multiplayer over LAN while the teacher
| wasn't paying attention is a core memory of mine.
| nkotov wrote:
| We had Bugdom installed at our elementary school and I was
| surprised to play a 3D game for the first time.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I remember when people lost their minds because Apple dropped the
| floppy drive. And surprisingly, in this thread, people are still
| angry about it.
| tjr wrote:
| https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
| duxup wrote:
| Floppies, not two floppies, headphone jacks. History repeats
| itself as far as what is "needed" to use technology. It's one
| thing after another that vanishes with few if any consequences.
| I always think of this old painting. I don't disagree with
| those folks to some extent, but man things change and rarely do
| they change back:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#/media/File:Boya...
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I guess I was wrong when I wrote this song parody in 2001:
|
| March 22, 2001: "Don't Cry for Me Argentina"
|
| Steve Jobs was back at Apple, the blue iMac was out, Microsoft
| was in big anti-trust trouble and had just invested $100m in
| Apple, Steve had bought out NeXT. But the future wasn't yet
| assured: This won't be easy, you'll
| think it's strange. When we try to explain what we need
| that we now need your help after all that we've said.
| You won't believe us. All you'll see is Apple you once
| knew, although we've crashed down in the dumps
| begging for Microsoft cash. It didn't have to
| happen. We should have won Better software and
| patents than Bill Looking down on Windows,
| staying far from Sun. So we chose NeXT. Running
| aground, trying computers in blue. But nothing revived us
| at all. You never expected it too. Don't cry
| for us, William H. Gates. The truth is we're dead without
| you. We need your dollars We need Mac Office
| You need a rival, for your survival. And as for
| Fortune, and as for Time, We never invited them
| in though it appeared, to the world, they were
| all Steve desired. Even Adobe, they're making
| solutions for Windows right now The answer was here all
| the time. We need you, and hope you need us.
| [chorus] Have we begged too much? There's
| nothing more we can think of to say to you. But all you
| have to do, is look at us to know, we're through
| without you.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Please please tell me you have a recording of its performance.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| You do not want to hear me sing. I was actually asked to sing
| this live on a Bay Area radio station and refused.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Note that Intel machines had been shipping with USB ports for two
| years before the iMac came out, but there weren't any devices
| available to plug into them. (plus Microsoft didn't support it in
| their consumer OSes until Windows 98)
| delphi4711 wrote:
| I used a usb flash drive in Windows NT4 and Windows 95 :).
| Lammy wrote:
| > I can type on a 25-year-old iMac USB keyboard attached to a
| 2023 Mac Mini with no adapters! What stunning longevity.
|
| The keyboard is fine though laptop-sized with cramped arrow keys,
| but the original revision iMac puck mouse is a famous case of
| form over function. It's not actually as bad as its reputation
| suggests, but Apple still silently admitted to the flawed design
| by adding a little centered dimple to the butan on the later
| five-colors version
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
|
| "There's no reason that the Macintosh won't be an absolutely
| perfect gaming platform for anything that you wanna do. [...] The
| only thing that you wanna do with a Mac as a serious gamer -- you
| wanna pull out the silly one-button mouse and plug in a three-
| button mouse pretty quick, but _aside from that_ ..." -- John
| Carmack, 1999 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791
| mewse-hn wrote:
| One funny thing about that mouse quote from John Carmack is
| that he was a proponent of a certain level of minimalism in his
| games - Quake doesn't have a "use" key, you toggle switches by
| shooting them or pushing them with your face
| chasd00 wrote:
| i remember the single button mouse being weird at first.
|
| Apple person: my computer can do anything yours can and better
|
| window person: can you right-click?
| vel0city wrote:
| I was a small child when the iMac and its hockey puck mouse
| came out. I remember being a small kid and thinking the hockey
| puck mouse was actually pretty great, it was way easier for my
| small hands to handle and the single button made things easier
| to click on for the educational software I was using at school
| compared to the Packard Bell or HP or Dell mice I would use at
| home or at friend's houses.
|
| I'm actually looking for a similar kind of mouse for my small
| child today. He can't quite palm a mouse very well, and he
| often gets mixed up with right click and scroll and scroll
| click. When I get him focused on the right mouse button he can
| play some basic mouse-based games but he'll often end up
| getting distracted by the mouse wheel or right click which can
| sometimes drop him out of the games he's wanting to play.
|
| Don't get me wrong the hockey puck mouse was probably atrocious
| for adult hands but as a little kid it was actually pretty
| nice.
| WWLink wrote:
| Get an iMac mouse off eBay then. They're usb and still work
| fine with any computer.
|
| Edit: but there is one concern - they are not optical mice
| and use a ball. So if they're really young you might want
| something more like an apple pro mouse
| vel0city wrote:
| There's a few problems with the puck mouse.
|
| 1) They're all old and are of questionable state second
| hand.
|
| 2) They're all ball mice, as you mentioned there's issues
| with those over an optical mouse
|
| 3) They almost always have ridiculously short cables.
| They're designed to be used with the Apple USB keyboards
| which had the extra USB port on the side of the keyboard
| that they would plug into.
|
| Sure, some of these problems could just be overlooked or
| solved with accessories but in the end I'd rather just have
| something new which I know will work well and won't require
| me to get a USB extension cable or whatever. I'd really
| like something in a similar enough form factor but wireless
| and optical.
| Findecanor wrote:
| The iMac and the return of Jobs really felt like a fresh new
| start for Apple at the time.
|
| However, after a while the design language was picked up by other
| brands ... and you could see translucent and coloured plastic on
| pretty much all types of products for a while: from PCs to home
| electronics to toilet paper holders, and by then it started to
| feel a little tacky.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Doesnt this lend to that it was all marketing/psychology
| tricks?
|
| I hate reading how easily humans are exploited.
| paulcole wrote:
| > I hate reading how easily humans are exploited.
|
| You've commented hundreds of times on a site that is the
| marketing campaign of a VC firm.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| The iMac was a marketing trick? I dunno about that, it might
| have been just the right internet appliance at the right
| time.
| erickhill wrote:
| The "Ruby" iMac was the first Apple computer I could afford to
| buy, and I loved it.
|
| In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the
| CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no
| replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external
| instead).
|
| I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and
| absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac
| at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my
| email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe
| products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's
| when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made
| that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X
| and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do)
| the look and feel and _sounds_ of the earlier OS.
|
| Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The tray loaders are in fact easier to replace than the slot
| loaders. But you can find working slot loader drives too.
| jwells89 wrote:
| > I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience,
| but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds
| of the earlier OS. > > Simply opening and closing the Control
| Strip was a joy.
|
| It's too bad that Classic Mac OS soundsets didn't make the cut
| when selecting features to bring over to OS X. I can understand
| why they might disabled by default but they would've been nice
| to have as an option.
|
| Same for Appearance Manager themes, really. That feature was
| never really marketed much and many users probably didn't even
| know they existed since OS 8.5-9.2 only included Platinum, but
| it was cool to have theming capabilities on par with the third
| party Kaleidoscope (which is unparalleled on modern operating
| systems -- not even Linux can compare) built right in, but
| that's just not something that could've happened worth Jobs at
| the helm.
| erickhill wrote:
| A couple of years ago I discovered a way to make my modern
| Macs produce the "bonnng" chime on boot-up. It's actually
| still there but hidden for some reason. IIRC I had to enable
| it via the Terminal, which seemed really weird. But it was a
| total joy when it sprang back to life.
| glhaynes wrote:
| For a while there it was off by default, but I'm fairly
| sure it's back to being on out of the box on current
| machines. It's also now exposed through the UI: Settings >
| Sound > Play sound on startup.
| erickhill wrote:
| Good to know, thanks!
| wpwpwpw wrote:
| Although the first computer I used was a Macintosh Classic, the
| iMac G3 rev. C was the first I used to browse the internet, and
| the lack of games was a bless as because of that I learned to
| program out of teenager's curiosity. Although I now use Linux in
| a PC and I don't like Apple anymore, in that era up until snow
| leopard it was a pleasure to use.
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