[HN Gopher] Apple I Advertisement (1976)
___________________________________________________________________
Apple I Advertisement (1976)
https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Apple...
Author : janandonly
Score : 150 points
Date : 2026-02-01 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apple1.chez.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apple1.chez.com)
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:
|
| "APPLE Computer Compagny"
|
| "Palo Atlt"
| chocochunks wrote:
| Probably OCR'd with no editing.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it appears to be a website in the french tongue
| amelius wrote:
| The full sentence:
|
| > And since our philosophy is to provide software for our
| machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying
| for access to this growing software library.
| titzer wrote:
| They forgot to mention that the growing software library is
| also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions
| and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat
| binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware
| platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
|
| "Growing software library" it ain't.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's been half a century of Apple. At this point if FireWire,
| Flash, and a half dozen other things didn't convince you that
| Apple deprecates then removes old functionality pretty
| rapidly I don't know what to say.
| titzer wrote:
| If only those trillions of dollars of market cap and
| hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue could
| support...a couple dozen small teams maintaining legacy
| support. For the old hardware, pretty decent open source
| emulators exist that can run older versions, like all the
| way back to MacOS 7. It can't be that hard to keep the
| pilot light on for those old things.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's a product choice. If you want long-term backwards
| compatibility, Windows is probably the best option,
| perhaps the Win32 API on Linux via WINE. Overall,
| backwards compatibility is a drag on future development.
| In general, I prefer to drop it myself unless that's the
| crucial feature. In this case, I'd say I'd make the same
| choice. Those last few bps of users can simply remain on
| old software/hardware.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You just can't imagine my lost from not being able to use
| my 7 device deep SCSI chain including my Zip and Jaz
| drive
| al_borland wrote:
| I don't think dropping legacy support is due to boredom. It
| what allows them to keep moving forward without being saddled
| by every decision from the past.
|
| How long should they have kept PPC or Classic support?
|
| Microsoft is in a funny position. Backward compatibility is
| seen as a competitive advantage, especially in the enterprise
| market. However, it's that very compatibility that makes
| people avoid adopting new technologies, because why bother?
| We see Microsoft throw so many things against the wall, and
| almost nothing sticks. Meanwhile, Apple tells devs to jump
| and they ask how high. Devs know Apple is going to cut
| support, so its update your apps or be left behind.
|
| To really make a change, a person needs to be all-in. Dual
| booting Windows and Linux/macOS, for example. This is a sign
| a person isn't all-in and they don't really make the change,
| or it takes significantly longer. When a person goes all-in
| and burns the boats, they are forced to find new solutions
| and make the changes needed to make the new thing actually
| work.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The ARM chips in later iPhones and all M series Macs
| physically don't have the hardware to run 32 bit software.
|
| Should they still be supporting PPC software? 68K software?
| Why not old Apple // software for good measure?
|
| Right now the last time I counted in 2012, there were _12_
| ways to define a string in Windows and you had to convert
| back and forth between them depending on which API you are
| calling. There are so many one off hacks to keep Windows
| running (see Raymond Chen's blog) it's a house of cards
| thisislife2 wrote:
| I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never
| considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap -
| the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by
| telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it
| includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course,
| now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you
| will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
| ece wrote:
| Locking you into the software when you buy the hardware is
| still considered giving it away.
| gignico wrote:
| At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| More devilish
| esafak wrote:
| Same thing.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of
| release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get
| an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-
| or-take.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| But very really if you bought it and kept it until now.
| chocochunks wrote:
| Part of the reason the Apple I is so rare, is that Apple
| offered an Apple I trade in program. Apple would destroy the
| boards of Apple Is that were traded in for Apple IIs.
|
| * Not that there was really many to begin with.
| biofox wrote:
| What was the reasoning behind that?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Probably to reduce support costs.
|
| I recall my junior high school had only Apple IIs in
| 1995.
| gignico wrote:
| Even better, what if I had invested that money in Apple stock
| instead? :)
| whartung wrote:
| I use to muse if I put the money I spent on computer gear
| back in the day instead into woodworking tools, I'd not
| only have a bigger, better shop than Norm Abrahm, all of
| the tools would probably still work.
| CharlesW wrote:
| ~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.
| chungy wrote:
| Why, for $3800, you can now get a brand new Apple computer
| with a million times the RAM!
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Including 8K of "RAM memory", brought to you by the DRD
| Department!
| al_borland wrote:
| This was because Woz liked repeating digits.
|
| https://youtu.be/pJif4i9NRdI @2:05
| seydor wrote:
| It would be a cancellable offense today
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business
| models. There have been times between then and now they charged
| for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's
| been a good business model for them.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which
| (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent
| to $200-250ish today.
|
| Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new
| OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing,
| but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
| subtlesoftware wrote:
| "Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play
| vast amounts of information simultaneously."
|
| The beginning of the end.
| enzosaba wrote:
| Really. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of
| time end up doom scrolling
| dlcarrier wrote:
| I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of
| every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have
| any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but
| someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and
| the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers
| or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a
| computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within
| the license requirements.
| bryogenic wrote:
| The Mac of Theseus
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Except int this case, we pulled a single plank off of ship of
| the ship, burned the rest of it, and nailed the plank to a
| brand new ship built in a competing ship yard.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| These sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well
| in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the
| essence of it!
| dlcarrier wrote:
| The UK has been slowly codifying laws over time,
| transitioning from common law to written law. In the
| Americas, we kind of jump started that processes, and are far
| more focused on the law as written, to the point that the
| positioning of a comma can have million-dollar implications:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25.
| ..
|
| If a literal interpretation of what you wrote allows for
| something, even though it's clear that you hadn't intended to
| do so, then it is going to be allowed.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I would love to hear more about the exact license wording that
| allows this.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I believe it
| says something along the lines of "Apple-branded systems".
| Putting an Apple logo sticker on a Hackintosh was a common
| thing to do for this reason.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Haha, excellent timing:
|
| I opened HN _just now_ because:
|
| 1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
|
| 2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
|
| 3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance
| form (it's been 10 days).
|
| And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA,
| without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
|
| I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an
| example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for
| posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
|
| * (sunk cost fallacy)
| echelon wrote:
| > the whole thing could be a PWA
|
| Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use
| their rails.
|
| I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a
| better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to
| make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single
| binary blobs.
|
| A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the
| younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a
| YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you
| could send those to friends.
|
| You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the
| apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of
| complexity that can't even match the feature set.
| titzer wrote:
| Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a
| constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss
| the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some
| utopian thing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just like Microsoft before them.
|
| But flash specifically deserved to die.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech
| company to take the first material step to actually end the
| security nightmare that was Flash for good.
| as1mov wrote:
| I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried
| them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching
| on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file.
| Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was
| an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept
| thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to
| run it as an application platform with all the concerns it
| entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not
| Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with
| all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has
| much higher entry barrier.
| echelon wrote:
| Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5.
|
| During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was
| accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.
|
| Flash was getting better and better. It could have become
| an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes
| off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery
| and security issues were technical problems and fully
| solvable.
|
| The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple -
| both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a
| successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to
| the plate. It would be impossible now.
|
| Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd
| have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download
| them from the web.
|
| Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer
| held us back.
|
| The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were
| trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and
| flexible.
|
| Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they
| get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down
| tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation
| capital of the system goes to taxation.
| pdntspa wrote:
| > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf.
| We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to
| download them from the web.
|
| No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy
| flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe
| Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied
| the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow,
| and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to
| develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer
|
| As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in
| AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it
| became the de facto platform for crapware
| Bengalilol wrote:
| As a side note, Apache Royale is still alive (or is it?).
|
| <https://royale.apache.org>
| tliltocatl wrote:
| > It occupied the same space that Electron does today
|
| This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a
| well-designed and relatively reliable platform
| (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an
| actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real
| browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.
|
| And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a
| crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or
| just have their core values elsewhere).
| pdntspa wrote:
| > And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for
| a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or
| just have their core values elsewhere).
|
| My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that
| entities like this are forbidden from participating
| tliltocatl wrote:
| pls dont
|
| - Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web
| viable and competitive against traditional media.
|
| - You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping
| that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.
|
| - Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any
| gatekeeping.
|
| - Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care.
| Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to
| their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire
| someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent"
| also rarely care. Still better than having no access to
| the timetables.
| pdntspa wrote:
| No, there was gatekeeping, it was knowledge. You had to
| be knowledgeable enough to work the system. You had to
| have the time to dedicate to learning the system and how
| the internet and how computers worked. Those twin gates
| kept the internet as it was in its early days.
|
| Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and
| began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge
| required to build things has been on a steady decline,
| and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it.
| Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able
| to act on them but now they act like they are as good as
| the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same
| level through years of study and hard work.
| comex wrote:
| The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than
| Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time:
| Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari
| has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010,
| possibly from day one.
|
| But the creation tools and the culture never really lined
| up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps
| instead.
|
| For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior.
| iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but
| it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place
| even on desktop.
|
| I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate
| universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile
| instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of
| openness, and the downsides of worse performance and
| platform integration and the lack of an easy payment
| rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on
| desktop today.
|
| We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early
| App Store, which happened in large part because of the
| ease of _making money_. There would probably be more
| focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind
| Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place
| (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this
| confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but
| in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe). Adobe's
| mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of
| letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem
| and what a relief!
|
| (I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal
| experience isn't really an argument).
|
| ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash
| could have been.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The battery and security issues were technical problems
| and fully solvable.
|
| Seriously? Is that why I ran all my desktop browsers with
| flashblock even before the iPhone was out?
|
| Dare to tell me Adobe was feverishly working in secret on
| reducing pointless CPU usage and saving my battery?
| hyperhello wrote:
| The security issue could have been addressed by simply
| running it in a sandbox.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of
| control over the web?
|
| Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as
| portable.
| echelon wrote:
| Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any
| control back then. They were even opening the standard,
| IIRC.
|
| They learned this much later after learning the game from
| Meta, Google, and Apple.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of
| software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the
| ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and
| deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe,
| it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been
| open sourced.
| ajross wrote:
| > I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a
| better platform for non-technical folks
|
| Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just
| wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never
| been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds
| here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into
| hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way
| about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This myth that Apple "killed" Flash on mobile should die.
| When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a
| phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on
| that.
|
| The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it
| couldn't even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast,
| you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to
| render. An iPhone with those specs didn't come out until
| 2011.
|
| Adobe was always making promises it couldn't keep. The
| Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the "iPad Killer" that could
| run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable
| position that you couldn't go to the Xoom home page on the
| Xoom at launch because it required Flash.
| pcl wrote:
| Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I
| put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for
| my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what
| it is.
|
| And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a
| Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to
| generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to
| remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of
| it.
| shreddit wrote:
| I have the exact same problem. It's saying something about
| not being able to confirm my identity? I took a look at the
| dev tools and it's apparently making a request to a server
| which returns an error.
|
| It only works in incognito because it's using a different ip
| address there...
| alt227 wrote:
| Sorry, how is it that you make Chrome incognito window use
| a differnt IP address?
|
| That sounds like a good magic trick.
| shreddit wrote:
| Beats me. Same computer, same browser. Don't know whether
| it's the exact same address though. Cleared cookies
| already. Still only working in incognito.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Exact same problem, exact same error. Glad to know I'm not
| alone!!!
| stringtoint wrote:
| Funny, I had this problem yesterday when I tried to login
| to Apple Business Manager. Thought I had messed up but
| worked fine in incognito.
| eptcyka wrote:
| You cannot even change the password of an apple ID without
| logging into a macOS or iOS device.
| andoando wrote:
| Ive made an apple developer account, paid $100 and then it
| kicked me out and after logging in still said I didnt pay
| yet. I paid again until realizing it actually charged me. It
| also took me an hour to try and figure out how to get it to
| send OTP to a phone instead of an old broken macbook.
|
| Google also gives me a ton of issues with having multiple
| accounts. Go to calendar app with account 2, switch to
| desktop mode so I can actually click on the meeting invite,
| now Im logged back into account 1. Similar issues trying to
| use any other google service and have to use
|
| I don't understand how these kind of things aren't priority
| #1
| mistrial9 wrote:
| a few years ago a lot of legacy "AppleLink" email accounts
| where culled without remorse
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've got this with some sites. How long have you had that
| Chrome profile? They seem to collect cruft somewhere and it
| stops some sites from working. On my main Chrome profile I
| can't use one of my banking sites, any OpenAI site uses 100%
| of CPU, other sites only hold the login cookies for a few
| minutes. I've tried disabling every extension.
|
| None of these issues on my other profiles or in incognito.
| epistasis wrote:
| I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the
| original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into
| creating an app store.
| graemep wrote:
| Who pressured Apple and why?
|
| I had nor even heard of app stores before then IIRC unless
| you count Linux repos.
| epistasis wrote:
| > While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling
| in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-
| party developers build native apps for iOS, instead
| directing them to make web applications for the Safari web
| browser.[10] However, backlash from developers prompted the
| company to reconsider,[10] with Jobs announcing in October
| 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit
| available for developers by February 2008.[11][12]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
| bartread wrote:
| And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the
| app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps
| with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just
| so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and
| Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as
| an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with
| compared to other languages and stacks.
|
| So PWAs would have been more than fine but,
| unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple
| make way too much money out of the app store for a course
| change.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App
| Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win
| games. The only money Apple is making from these "could
| have been a web app" apps are for things like Uber where
| you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has
| the same credit card fees regardless.
|
| If it's only mean old Apple, where are all of the great
| Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native
| Android apps?
| graemep wrote:
| It looks from the cited sources that developers wanted to
| write apps, Apple chose to do this in a way that allowed
| it to keep control of what was installed.
| alt227 wrote:
| Less than a year?
|
| Doesnt really sound like Jobs was putting up much of a
| fight there.
| al_borland wrote:
| They didn't have much of a choice. In that time people
| had already developed jail breaks and Cydia, an app store
| in its own right, was thriving.
|
| Before Apple's App Store launched, my iPhone was running
| all sorts of other apps and alternative launchers.
|
| Apple had to move fast to keep things from getting too
| out of control.
|
| Over the years, as the vulnerabilities in the OS were
| closed and iOS added features, the need or desire to
| bother with jailbreaks and 3rd party pirate app stores
| dropped. I haven't thought about it in many years.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| This week Bruce Perens (who wrote the original Open
| Source definition) remembered talking to Steve Jobs about
| Open Source back in 2000.
|
| https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-
| took-...
|
| _Perens had accepted a position as senior Linux /Open
| Source Global Strategist for Hewlett-Packard, which he
| describes as leaving Apple "to work on Open Source. So I
| asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux
| stuff, do you?'" And Perens still remembers how Steve
| Jobs had responded._
|
| _"I've had a lot to do with building two of the world's
| three great operating systems" -- which Jobs considered
| to be NeXT OS, MacOS and Windows. "'And it took a
| billion-dollar lab to make each one. So no, I don't think
| you can do this. '"_
|
| Perens says he later "won that argument" when Jobs stood
| onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We
| Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser."
| xquce wrote:
| That's interesting! However I would argue Jobs sadly won
| that argument, as there really didn't come any open
| source os for neither phones or major push on PCs in the
| almost 30 years since that exchange.
|
| While yes some software have come in that format, it took
| the big 3 to push the server Linux based clouds, Google
| to push it on phone, tablets and laptops and now Steam to
| make a push for the average gamer.
|
| This is not to discredit the work being done outside
| those lab's which very much build on the work for free or
| by foundations, however the first versions just don't
| capture a majority of the available markets which the
| OSes Jobs mention very much did and the others by the
| billion dollar labs since.
| ajross wrote:
| A PWA on iOS is just a cached web page. Safari remains pretty
| crippled with regards to the APIs (bluetooth, usb,
| filesystem, etc...) that make local apps attractive in the
| first place. Apple is fine with letting people cache web
| pages, they're not fine with stuff that might displace the
| app store.
| epistasis wrote:
| And for that I'm quite thankful, if all the stuff that apps
| could do were _possible_ on the web it would make the web a
| far far scarier place than it is.
|
| I avoid apps as much as possible due to all the nefarious
| tricks they play, even with all the sandboxing and review
| they go through. Without those constraints, I can't imagine
| the hell that we'd be in.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Not really, as long as they need permission granted
| ajross wrote:
| Which is fine, for the 90% of people that spend their
| time on the 70% of common features and interact only with
| the screen and headphones and internet.
|
| But sometimes people like to do stuff like configure
| their QMK keyboards or load new firmware for their EdgeTX
| drone radios or make bootable USB sticks, all tasks that
| work just fine in easily deployed PWAs _on every client
| platform in existence, except iOS_.
|
| For small developers of small-yet-oddball clients apps,
| PWA's are an absolutely magnificent platform. Write once,
| deploy once, run... everywhere-but-an-iPhone. It really
| sucks that Apple's devices are crippled like this.
|
| Edit to reply to this bit:
|
| > Without those constraints, I can't imagine the hell
| that we'd be in.
|
| Again, that hell is literally every other platform on the
| planet. It's only Safari that is "protected". In point of
| fact browser permissions management on this stuff tends
| strongly to be stricter and less permissive than app
| permissions, which are much less visible.
| zahlman wrote:
| > the orange book
|
| ?
| wmf wrote:
| There was discourse in the 1970s about whether software should
| all be free or if paid software would be better. Apple and Micro-
| Soft had different perspectives:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me,
| and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-
| limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their
| platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at
| odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS
| versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18
| on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This
| can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared
| customers of mine and Apple's.
| cwicklein wrote:
| Expandable to 65K. I don't recall seeing SI units used in this
| context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
| zweifuss wrote:
| The text was mangeled by some OCR-software. This ad can be found
| as image on Wikimedia:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisemen...
| jnpnj wrote:
| Makes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
| yashasolutions wrote:
| > "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing
| software library."
|
| Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with
| the years...
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Interesting to think that:
|
| >If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the
| front page today
|
| >If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and
| nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page
| today
|
| >If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than
| make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
|
| If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it
| might make setbacks feel better.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Which is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of
| billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost
| much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested.
| Not to mention that Apple
| MaxPock wrote:
| Heard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids
| barely out of teenage.
| cellover wrote:
| Not related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very
| first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| That was my first surprised as well...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Green PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843037
| divbzero wrote:
| This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of
| Apple's iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled
| with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-n...
| lisper wrote:
| What do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement
| for the Apple1?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I know people are rightly amazed by Woz's engineering prowess,
| but it's fascinating to see Steve's fingerprints all of Apple I.
| Look at the product commitments and they'll ring a bell:
|
| - It's all in one - Hassle free to set up - Something that
| usually doesn't work (cassette board) now just works
|
| They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker)
| was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems
| obvious in hindsight. It wasn't obvious then.
| bwoah wrote:
| https://archive.is/dJvc
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