30 Years of the Mac

[Muirium]

Today's 30 years precisely since the launch of the Macintosh. Apple's turned its homepage over to the occasion, with a rather nice interactive guide to the ups and, um, not so ups of the Mac's 30 years:

http://www.apple.com/30-years/

Unlike them to celebrate the past in anything as much detail as this. Includes a ton of testimonials and pictures, like these.

Spot the M0110:


And of course an AEK II:


Demongolate this if this isn't sufficiently news of course…

[Muirium]

That was fast. iFixit tore it down:

The repairability score is totally bogus, though. The Mac's an appliance. Not much to do inside of one of those…

[davkol]

derp

[JBert]

The Mac's an appliance. Not much to do inside of one of those…

Are you turning into a drone? That's what they want you to think!

Granted, the newer ones use way too much glue, but those older ones should be fixable in some way.

[Elrick]

Granted, the newer ones use way too much glue, but those older ones should be fixable in some way.

They sure are, in the days of 8500/8600 powermacs (I still have some) all were made in Singapore and were literally bullet-proof. They weighed like tanks and always worked, you never heard of static-discharge because the parts themselves could be dropped onto the floor and picked up again to use.

I missed those older Macs that were indeed built to last. The newer stuff is basically planned obsolescence in action. It never lasts and when it breaks down cost a fortune to fix so your forced to buy an 'upgraded' model. I hate Apple now .

[Muirium]

Well, okay, things picked up after the Mac II. But the original Macintosh was a sign of things to come. Steve wanted it sealed and unupgradeable. The Mac team went to some lengths to try to sneakily deny him this. But he basically won in the end.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?pr ... c_Port.txt

Meanwhile, here's some authentic January 1984 reaction to the Mac launch, via NPR. The expert they interviewed was hilariously wrong on some points (he didn't see 3.5" floppies taking off while 5.25" was already standard) but was right about the Mac being an almighty risk for a company coming off the high of the Apple II.

https://soundcloud.com/ahsilverman/maci ... puter-is-a

[bhtooefr]

I'd argue that in modern terms, a 7 actually is fair for a piece of consumer electronics with that level of serviceability.

However, in 1980s terms, the score would've been far lower for a computer like that. Soldered chips everywhere, no daughterboards, just whole board swaps.

In any case, somewhere there's an interview from 1983, of what Steve Jobs wanted the Mac to be... and he described the iPad.

[Muirium]

Exactly. I remember it (something at a future of education conference, I think) and wireless communications and paper thinness were mentioned. He'd heard of Alan Kay's Dynabook concept (which the GUI pioneering Xerox Alto was the first step in making) and wanted it hooked up to remote databases. Essentially iPads and the basis of the internet today.

[bhtooefr]

The interesting thing, however, is that not all of his computing concepts were in that vein. Look at the Lisa (which, admittedly, was taken over and he was kicked off the project), or better yet, NeXT.

And, I'd argue that today's Mac is far closer to a NeXT machine (maybe not the most expandable hardware, but certainly capable, with good industrial design, and running hackable software) than his Mac vision, whereas the iPad is almost exactly his Mac vision.

[Muirium]

Everyone who remembers the early OS X days can agree that the modern Mac is the descendant of NeXT. A few Mac traditions were brought over during the transition — per app menu bar at the top of the screen, all the keyboard combos, AppleScript, QuickTime — but the Dock has its roots in NeXTSTEP and was just one of many alien additions to the bizarre pinstriped world that was the early versions of Mac OS X.

iOS has the same NeXT built foundations, but lower down, further from the interface: things like Cocoa, Objective-C and the Darwin core. There's really no end to NeXT's legacy in Apple today. But the iPhone interface was a refreshing reset, based entirely around touch instead of the mouse pointer, which has shaken things up a bit, evidently.

[bhtooefr]

And I'm not even talking in a technological sense, even though OS X really is the latest version of OPENSTEP in a lot of ways (hell, IIRC, it's possible to build one program that runs with native UI in both OPENSTEP and OS X on x86).

I'm arguing that the modern Mac isn't just the technological successor, but also the spiritual successor to the NeXT machines, and arguably the Lisa to an extent.

[mr_a500]

I got a NeXTstation before I got a Mac running OSX - and you could easily see the similarities. The problem with NeXT is the same problem with the original Macs ("classic") and the same problem with early OSX: not enough speed/memory/capacity/refinement to do the thing properly, resulting in horribly frustrating user experience. They all looked amazing in screenshots and sounded amazing in what they could do, but they were basically demos requiring years of refinement and major speed/capacity increases before they could comfortably do what they promised. The vision was there, but technology wasn't ready. ("beauty and hype" to make sales over actual user experience)

All three: "classic" Mac, NeXT, OSX (pre-Tiger), looked extremely desirable to me before I tried them, but once I actually used them, I hated them. A half decade of processor speed increases and another half decade of OS refinements (and some price lowering) and OSX was finally comfortably useable.

(...of course, now Apple is locking-down the OS, forcing users to "stores" and totally screwing things up, but that's another story...)

[Muirium]

I was all in agreement with you (as I am with Bhtooefr who's quite right about the iPad's status as Steve's purest vision) until that last paragraph. It applies perfectly to iOS – which gains more from its lock down than it loses – but OS X isn't the walled garden hellhole you infer. There's no "force".

Yes there's an App Store, and yes there's Gatekeeper which makes running arbitrary downloads from elsewhere sound scary to nontechnical users. But defaults matter. By default, your Mac is mildly inconvenient to run random software on (control / right click on an app, select open) but nowhere near as hard as doing the same on an iPad, which is indeed locked down. Compare with what Microsoft did with Windows: throw up a hundred nag screens a day, training you to ignore them and always click yes. At least Windows 2000 and XP were more efficient at installing adware.

I've got to say I've been waiting for Gatekeeper for years! Nontechnical Mac users do still exist (try switching my dad to an iPad, which he really, really should…) and I used to have to tighten the Parental Controls straightjacket nice and hard to stop them from punching enough monkeys to ensure a miserably confusing mess of random junk installed on their Macs. These days Gatekeeper deals with that for me, safe in the knowledge that right clicking on an app icon is three levels of abstraction beyond the exact kind of people who will believe every ad they see on the internet.

The fact that Apple has two platforms and no interest in forcibly merging them is what keeps the Mac a different beast. Besides sensible defaults, out of the box, the Mac is the machine for coders and "not the rest of us" to get our complex stuff done. Most people need never know of its existence. But with the Windows Everywhere unification thing that Microsoft's doing (whatever they're calling it this month) you really do have to suffer when stuff like this is altered. Software design decisions have collateral damage.

[mr_a500]

Well, I just went from 10.5 to 10.9, so the changes came as a jolt. I was getting quite comfortable with 10.5 (with all the hacks I needed to make the OS work the way I wanted) and with 10.9, I'm suddenly not allowed to do lots of things. I can't even change the damn titlebar clock format!

You say there's no "force"? I was forced to create an App Store account to get upgrades to programs supplied with the computer I paid for. Also, if you've got a program like Little Snitch, you'll see Apple runs loads of processes that regularly contact Apple without telling you - and there's no easy way to turn them off. They didn't do that in 10.5.

The latest iPads are beautiful, but that locked down iOS just sickens me.

[Muirium]

Typing this on 10.5 just now, so I know what you're on about. 10.7 Lion was the worst of it. 10.6 Snow Leopard was just the Intel continuation of the Leopard days (minus Rosetta, to Microsoft and Adobe's upgrade revenue hungry delight) until the Mac App Store was added on in a late point release. There was nothing special about apps then, but it was the preferred way to get Lion. Either that or a USB stick from Apple, I think.

But then Lion! Yikes. It truly was Scott Forstall's version of OS X. Spruced up default UI (good) with skeuomorphic overload (not so). Never before had Mac users talked so much of rich corinthian leather and green felt! Save As was history (whuh?) and if app sandboxing didn't come in then, it certainly felt like it because TextEdit and Preview and such would forever close as soon as you switched away from them. The pitch was "Back to the Mac". The reality was a shitty first draft of unification.

Fortunately the direction changed. What you're noticing is the parts that haven't, such as OS X's App Store dependent update mechanism. It's not that they went completely 180º after they showed Forstall the door, but that the new stuff is about power saving (you've seen how keen Mavericks is about that) and other things that don't rub people up quite as badly as "why can't that be more like this?"

Steve's understandable infatuation with iOS, his final love, was a problem for the Mac in recent years. Fortunately the tide has turned since the shakedown that kicked out Forstall (the force behind the iPhone) and put all software development at Apple under his former Mac deputy Federighi, with Jony Ive (Sir to you!) in charge of look and feel. The Mac's feeling more like an independent idea again.

[matt3o]

You say there's no "force"? I was forced to create an App Store account to get upgrades to programs supplied with the computer I paid for. Also, if you've got a program like Little Snitch, you'll see Apple runs loads of processes that regularly contact Apple without telling you - and there's no easy way to turn them off. They didn't do that in 10.5.

The latest iPads are beautiful, but that locked down iOS just sickens me.

I hear you, pal.

I've been a long time mac user. I should still have a G3 somewhere... but this new lock down philosophy made me switch to linux a couple of years ago. I still have a MBA now, but it's just for testing and for XCode.

Gosh every time I connect the iPad to the mac I have to authorize it! Jeez! I don't want to authorize it. It's mine. I bought it!

[mr_a500]

I still have a MBA now, but it's just for testing and for XCode.

I assume MBA is "MacBook Air", not a "Masters in Business Administration". You don't usually get a Master's degree just for testing and XCode.

[matt3o]

Macbook Air, indeed.

also, why the heck do I need an iCloud account? I don't want it, I said "NO" every time the OS asked me to set it up... but no way. I have an iCloud account anyway.

[mr_a500]

To keep my sanity, I try to limit the Apple programs I use. I don't use iTunes. I've got a Sansa Clip and I organise my music in folders the way I want, and simply copy to and from it with the file manager. I don't use Finder. I use VLC instead of Quicktime to play music and videos. I don't use Safari or Mail or iPhoto. I don't even use the default Home directory to store content. I store my documents/music/images/videos on a separate partition and organise it the way I want.

I basically just want a good OS that will let me do things the way I want and let me choose which program is the best to do what I want.

[Muirium]

I use the oldest VLC that works. The later versions drive me nuts, trying to be iTunes. Or I guess Windows Media Player, really.

It's all right, Matt, there's still hope. The iStormtroopers haven't taken away all the Samsung and Assus hardware. Yet!

The sure bet is that there will always be Linux (for all practical values of forever) and enough stuff kicking around for homebuilds. You've already switched, so you're fine. A500 just needs to learn to let go of quality hardware beyond his keyboards…

[mr_a500]

I used the oldest VLC that works. The later versions drive me nuts, trying to be iTunes. Or I guess Windows Media Player, really.

I know exactly what you mean. There is a way to get it to work the old way. You just uncheck "Show video within the main window" (might be a couple other settings I forgot about). I managed to get it nearly exactly the way I had it, pre-"twoflower" version.

The latest VLC has some annoying problems on Mavericks - minimizing and maximizing for no reason, "ghost windows", not remembering positions. I'm hoping it's fixed soon.

[Muirium]

Being cross platform, it might take a while. I've used VLC since literally the first day I had a Mac (12" PowerBook in 2003) and needed my anime .avi and .mkv files to work! It still looks after the oddball format stuff I encounter to this day.

On the broader point, I'm not at all anti-homebuild / hack-friendliness in principle. I do some of it myself when necessary. But for the 99% of people who use computers, Apple's current approach is more or less ideal. Only some of us even perceive liberty in the computing realm. But all of us had to be vigilant when every computer was wide open to every binary it encountered, whether the user was aware of this or not.

Different tools for different jobs. Ugh… ngh… fighting urge to capitalise the last word of that sentence…

[davkol]

derp

[Muirium]

If most people are "idiots" then exactly!

We're computer guys. We like the detail and the power of a naked system. But you can say the same for the other kind of propeller heads (aviation enthusiasts) who would be appalled just how little the likes of us know about the jet we're boarding, and why we aren't saving up for a Pitts Special or even going gliding. What are we?

Idiots. Everyone is, at almost everything.

[mr_a500]

Oooh... Pitts Special! I'd like one of those. I don't think I'll ever be able to save up enough though.

I'm busy at the moment just saving up for one of these:

(talking about the paraglider, not the guy unnecessarily going "wooo!")

[matt3o]

people are not idiotic, are simply lazy. And I don't blame them, laziness drives to very unpleasant situations though.

13 pages EULA to install an application on a smartphone. that is insane, and nobody cares to read them. The truth is that 90% could use linux and they would not even see the difference.

this is not just a problem with Apple products anyway, Google is doing the same if not worse.

I strongly recommend watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QCBzQ0aNc

[Muirium]

Also, re: the infinite EULA singularity.

If it can be sued, it will be.

[matt3o]

it's not a matter of lawyers, even linux has licenses but they mainly are MIT or GPL. nobody is reading your emails to push ads or using your data for god knows what (appstore eula: "You agree that Application Provider may collect and use technical data and related information, including but not limited to technical information about Your device, system and application software, and peripherals").

[Muirium]

I have an iCloud email account that Apple knows about (obviously, that's their service) and which my hardware is registered to. But it gets next to nothing from them, as I opt out with a single checkbox. The main emails I get from Apple are now notices like "a new Mac Pro has been associated with your AppleID". Which is ironic as the Mac Pro in question is the oldest 2006 model I was given recently when it was retired!

Google's surely better at being creepy. I try not to give a shit about that either, after years of them taking every one of their services that I like out back and putting a bullet through its head for no reason at all. (Yes I used Google Browser Sync! Dead circa 2005. They turned bad early for me.) Google Reader was their last service besides Gmail that I actually had anything invested in.

[matt3o]

if you are aware of what your data is used for and you willingly agree at using those services anyway (I use gmail myself) I see no harm. The problem is that most don't have a clue.

That being said I'm doing all I can to detach to those services/companies and raise awareness in the less technologically savvy (which you are not of course).

Again, I strongly suggest to watch the video I mentioned above.