MAC TO THE FUTURE: 30 years of hindsight and smart-arsery

Regardless of all the geekery, the woman in the '1984' Apple ad wasn't Brigitte Nielsen. That's just, you know, wrong. If you're going to write an article about 'smartarsery' it's probably a good idea to get the basic facts included within it correct.

Every Plane A Fighter Jet

Okay. 1984. Who was making personal computers for sale. 2014. Who remains? There is a story in the Apple story and if a particular version could use more acknowledgment of luck, well, that's a fair point in any historical naarative.

From my personal perspective, in February 1984, my younger brother drove up to an Apple reseller in Solvang, California to get the only one available in three counties. He had access to a clean room and he upgraded it to 256k RAM. For the next few months he also had a business doing the same for the engineers at the place he worked.

As to businesses and general consumers, interest in the Mac was muted at best, and one can easily work out the reasons.

But among people who were into computers — it was my major in college the decade before, but I was a radio announcer those days — it was front page news. Within 24 months, I had bought my brother's Mac (and he became a 25 year faithful DOS/Windows person) and I had transitioned into work doing advertisement for a savings and loan. Desktop publishing meant my Mac and I foretold BYOD in the 80s when I brought all the typesetting of ads, annual reports, brochures, and internal forms in-house, using my personal Mac. Used it at home to develop MIDI parts for the record my rock band made.

So, put me down as among those who think something of note did happen 30 years back. The quality of the telling — as with all things — is the responsibility of the author. Though I left the Mac fold in 1996, I returned in 2001 when OS X delivered Unix without window manager fussery.

And, Bondi Blue under-powered iMacs? Under-powered for the internet-excited general consumer of 1998? No. And a shape and color that said "no fiddly cables" and "I'm fun for the life outside of work?" Yes. Besides, Rin-Tin-Tin has been billed as the dog that saved Hollywood. Clearly the animal's thespian range was beside the point. The iMac turned around Apple's cratering fortunes and as far as I can recall every other computer maker in similar straits went under with barely a trace.

Mouse Hindsight

I certainly don't care to defend the original Apple mouse, but another example of revisionism is the idea that "journalists" of the time were aghast at how bad it was. This was 1984. Most "journalists" had never seen a mouse, let alone used enough to be critical of a specific implementation.

The introduction of the Mac caused everyone else to go out and start building mice, even if you couldn't really do anything with them. Fortunately, those other people learned from Apple's original design mistakes (sharp corners, ouch!).

Yes, the original MS mouse shipped about 6 months before the Mac 128K--remember that MS had Macs before the public did--but few sold as there wasn't much use for a mouse in command line MS-DOS. And the design was nearly as bad as Apple's.

(I'd claim that the original iMac "hockey puck" mouse was an even worse design. No sharp corners, but you couldn't figure out which way was "up" so were always mousing at a diagonal.)

Good troll . . .

if one wants to visits the lowlights of the 30 years, not the highlights.

The 128K was a joke when it came out, but 1986's 1MB Mac Plus was a serious tool for anyone. Add in the Mac's growing base of first-class software -- the recognizable antecedents of all the stuff we use today -- PhotoShop, Excel, Word, PageMaker, HyperCard, PowerPoint, etc and Apple's excellent, shareable LaserWriter series, and you've got productivity streets ahead of MS-DOS and Windows v1~3 (LOL).

Then the next year Apple dropped the bomb on PCs with the Mac II. This machine was so awesome I actually saved money for 2 years to buy one (as a poor college student), and the IIcx I got in 1989 served me very, very well while Atari, Microsoft, and Amiga bumbled their way through the early 1990s.

Then came Apple's standout "Powerbook" line, which got incrementally even better right though 2000's Powerbook G4. As is the state today, you couldn't go wrong then buying a high-end Apple laptop vs. the Windows competition, since Windows sucks so. Sucked on laptops then too, of course.

(While not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Amelio did what had to be done to pull Apple out of its mid-1990s tailspin.)

Apple wasn't first to the PMP party, just as it wasn't first to the PC, GUI (Xerox Star came out in 1981), office laser printer (HP LaserJet, 1983), tablet, or smartphone markets.

But prior to the iPod, you could have a pocketable PMP or one that held more than 1 CD of songs, not both. Xerox was making personal workstations not PCs. For the LaserWriter, Apple had the balls and vision to put in a CPU to render PostScript. The LaserJet was just a glorified LPR until the mid-1980s, with piss-poor font options and very limited ability to render in-page graphics, and no LAN ability, all things 1985's LaserWriter had solved out of the gate.

But it's not that Apple's been so hot these 30 years, for every success they've had a massive fail.

They were just able to innovate a bit faster than everyone else -- albeit occasionally, but to big effect, given how important information technology is to our daily lives.

Personally I still think putting a disk in the original iPod was a mistake. Marketing saved the day though. If J. Random Musiclover had known that you can't realistically expect a hard drive to survive for long when it's reading while strapped to the arm of a jogger the things would never have caught on, but Apple managed to keep that fact out of public knowledge somehow.

I did not read the article

Well, not all of it. Sorry Alistair, I just find your prose a bit monotonous and long-winded (it is said in the spirit of constructive criticism, no offence intended).

However, I can hopefully answer your question about the commandments: In a nutshell, from the point of view of Abrahamic religions, the story is that there is (exactly one) God who told this bloke called Noah to follow seven precepts. Now, because (so the story goes) none of us humans would be here if it wasn't for this Noah lad being quite the craftsman and a passable sailor, this one God considers that the least we could do is obey those same "commandments", and if he catches you being nasty you're toast.

Some time latter another bloke, this one called Abraham (Bram between mates) ill-advisedly went up a hill one mid-summer afternoon and came back down with a couple of tablets which he either scrawled up himself during a heat-stroke and dehydration induced delirious fit or he got given by (the one) God, depending on whose story you believe. Either way, 70% of the stuff written on those tablets is what had already been said to Noah some years prior, the difference being that anything which hadn't been mentioned before applied only to Bram's own tribe rather than the whole of humanity. Afterwards, other people from the tribe kept adding more and more rules, bit like Wikipedia administrators, to bring the total up to 613 or thereabouts, but most of those are not really so important and can be safely ignored unless you get on the wrong side of an admin. Chances are that the (exactly one) Jimbo is not going to punish you for it though, and even then, he's only going to be bothered if you're a member of the tribe to start with, otherwise he doesn't really care.

Anyhow, that's more or less how I remember it. I might have got a few details wrong. HTH.

iPhone was a revolution

I was too young at the time for the Mac to have an impact on my life but it's hard to overstate the significance of the iPhone in my mind.

Since around ~2004 I was sure that phones would take over music, camera, and web browsing duties and I didn't understand why it wasn't happening faster and better. Phones with 3.5mm audio connectors were like hen's teeth. At one point I ended up importing a ROKR E2, which was a disaster of a phone. Phones that didn't have absolute garbage photo quality were also hard to find. I bent over backwards to get a Sony K750i which was one of the first 2 megapixel phones and was said to take "crystal clear" photos. I have a couple hundred photos that say otherwise. And I also had an HTC Windows Phone at one point (the Faraday?) that was supposed to be able to render "real" web pages but did so to the phone's viewport, which was usually beyond pointless to try to read or operate.

Then came the iPhone, which with one fell swoop seemed to sort out the whole situation. Standard 3.5mm audio connector with MP3 software that let you quickly browse through gigabytes of music? Check. Best camera available in a phone without having to import a Nokia N95 from Hong Kong or somewhere, plus software that let you quickly browse through hundreds/thousands of photos? Check. Internet browser that rendered webpages to a normal size viewport and let you zoom by pinching? Check.

Compared to all the phones that came before the iPhone and what abject failures they were at any of these things, the iPhone is nothing short of astonishing and it's a shame that some people might never realize that, or might forget it.

Just on the minature HDD thing...

You might want to take a look at the Nokia N91. I had one of these, it was a great phone with an 8GB HDD in it and fantastic sound quality. So not only were the small form factor HDDs not exclusive to Apple, but there was a company who was also using them in phones. It was not that big a phone, for the time.