25 years of Mac - the good, the bad, and the cheese grater
Confessions of a dangerous fanboi
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Opinion On Saturday, January 24th, the Apple Macintosh turns 25. Over the short history of personal computing, no machine has inspired so much love and so much loathing, so many fanatical fans and so many frothing detractors.
And so many opinions. So very many opinions.
No doubt, you have your own. And I have mine. Here, I give you the five best and the five worst Macs of all time.
First, a disclosure: I'm a Mac fan, a fanboi, a Mactard, a Mac addict - depending upon your point of view.
And I have been since before Steve Jobs pulled the first one out of its carrying case 25 years ago. In the early weeks of 1984, when I was working at the Exploratorium, a museum of science and art in San Francisco, we obtained a schematic and drawing of the much-rumored Mac.
I remember poring over those stolen sheets taped above our office coffee machine, joined by a crowd of the museum's artists, scientists, designers, and techies. We were uniformly shocked at how different the Mac looked - different from both our expectations and our experience with previous computers.
And we were hooked.
Now, 25 years later, as I write this using BBEdit 9 on my eight-core Mac Pro, I'm still a Mac junkie.
Keep that in mind as you peruse my best and worst picks from the more than 300 Mac models Apple has released over the past 25 years.
Next page: The Five Best Macs of All Time
COMMENTS
@Mike Gravgaard
Yup. Some mysterious benefactor sent me a Amiga Forever 2006 around my birthday a couple of years ago. Anyway, interesting stuff.
I assume, then, that you are also familiar with the book "On The Edge." Depressing stuff.
As far as not firing up that bad boy, even if it works, if you never try it, does it really matter? The only way to prove it works is to fire it up eventually, I would assume it is better to do so in pursuit of the interest you define than any other.
Let everyone at Amiga.org know how it goes :)
Paris, she wants you to fire it up!
What's with the CC-by-sa on the image?
The SE/30 image is tagged as "Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License."
So where's the attribution? You've used someone's copyright image, how about complying with the licence under which they allowed you to do so and crediting them for it.
I had a Mac Plus
... but I strayed away from the Mac around the Performa days. That said, the original, pre-iMac era was pretty good. I never used the PowerBook 170, but did have a PowerBook 180 and can attest to it being a damn good machine! In fact, it was originally my dad's laptop (circa 1992-93) and passed to my hands around 1996. It remained as my main portable up to 1998, when I switched to the Windows world. I'd still have it, had my dad not given it away sometime around 1999 :(
Our last Mac, however, is still chugging away at my mom's house; one of those Performa thingies (I really forget the series number, but something tells me it's one of the ones mentioned here as "worst"). Yet, it still works, and I still can run my 15+ year old HyperCard apps in there! :)
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