Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 40. IBM hasn't been even remotely relevant to me since I was in elementary school, and only then because we had IBM-brand machines in the computer lab where we pretended to work while surreptitiously playing Oregon Trail. I honestly don't even know what they do any more. Whatever happened to IBM happened eons ago in tech years.
They haven't been relevant to anything user-facing at all since they sold the Thinkpad line, and their "golden age" was over by ~2000. Their hardware was awesome in the '80s and '90s, truly great stuff, but they've been mostly out of that game for about 25 years, and totally out for what, almost 20? Quite a few people on this site were born after the last piece of IBM hardware they might have appreciated was manufact…
Rank the 50 best Apple products
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#52I think the MacBook Pro 2015 was probably unrivalled as a laptop for around 6 years, in terms of build quality, specification and… sheer love. I had a work issue machine and absolutely worshipped it, so I was sad not to see that here. I remember when Apple unveiled the first ever MacBook Air. That was one of Jobs’ all-time greatest presentations, and it was a huge step forwards that still influences the laptops we us…
That's the trick Apple during the second Jobs tenure was most brilliant at: turning consumer electronics into a fashion accessory. Literally, making the sound of the earphones a secondary consideration, relative to their earring value.
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#53QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
There’s a reason it was a standard. It made video playback available to systems without accelerator cards, allowed for synchronous DV import and more.
A lot of these technologies seem quaint in hindsight but at the time they were big deals.
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#54I think this list is lacking without the iPod Socks. Clearly the highest rank textile product Apple ever sold, which has to put it somewhere on the master list, no?
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#55Old guy, here. This ranking is fun and the as-of-now results mostly track. 1. Original iPhone 2. M1 Chip 3. Original iPod 4. Original Macintosh 5. Mac OS X Though I’d put them in a different order.
Whatever model Classic Mac that supported the Apple ][e expansion card, Apple DOS expansion card, and Apple Unix install (getting you System 7? 8?, DOS, original Apple, and a commercial Unix) has got to be up there at least for the novelty for me.
A/UX didn’t run on the original LC (68020, no MMU) but it may have worked on later LC series machines.
Edit. LC 630 DOS Compatible wasn’t Nubus, but it was a different PDS type than the original LC
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever model Classic Mac that supported the Apple ][e expansion card, Apple DOS expansion card, and Apple Unix install (getting you System 7? 8?, DOS, original Apple, and a commercial Unix) has got to be up there at least for the novelty for me.
Pretty sure there wasn’t one single model that did all this. The IIe card was for the LC PDS, but the DOS card was Nubus. A/UX didn’t run on the original LC (68020, no MMU) but it may have worked on later LC series machines. Edit. LC 630 DOS Compatible wasn’t Nubus, but it was a different PDS type than the original LC
And I get that the Apple DOS and Apple U/X performance on this machine might not be very good. Early 90’s computers and needing to be wrangled to even support normal, supported operations and configurations wasn’t uncommon.
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#57Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure there wasn’t one single model that did all this. The IIe card was for the LC PDS, but the DOS card was Nubus. A/UX didn’t run on the original LC (68020, no MMU) but it may have worked on later LC series machines. Edit. LC 630 DOS Compatible wasn’t Nubus, but it was a different PDS type than the original LC
I thought there was a Mac Performa or Quadra (like 2 or 3 very specific models only) that supported both Apple DOS and ][e cards. And I get that the Apple DOS and Apple U/X performance on this machine might not be very good. Early 90’s computers and needing to be wrangled to even support normal, supported operations and configurations wasn’t uncommon.
Apple never made a x86 DOS card for the LC PDS. Maybe a third party like OrangePC did, but I can't find a definitive confirmation online.
The only Apple II card was the Apple IIe card (LC PDS). All the machines with a LC PDS had only a single slot, so even if there was a DOS card you wouldn't have been able to use it and the IIe card simultaneously.
According to this thread, A/UX never supported any LC model due to significant hardware differences from the supported IIs and Quadras: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/is-there-a-known-understood-te...
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#59While they were groundbreaking, as actual products they kind of sucked (eg too little RAM, missing very key features, etc). The original made for great demos, but the second or third iteration was actually the great product.
The Mac Plus was where things really took off for the Mac, the iPhone really hit its stride with 4, the iPad 2 was way better than the iPad 1, etc.
Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
These subjective evals are why community reviews are garbage. Personally I think the 3GS is a better product. I know a few folk who returned their original iPhone because the headphone jack didn’t allow their headphones to connect, and there were obvious limitations that weren’t addressed until the 3GS The iPhone was revolutionary no argument. But that doesn’t mean later revs were not better products for their time.
I think you're derive specificity from the data that simply isn't there. That's not a data problem, that's an interpretation problem. The survey didn't ask about reliability, success, or functionality.
I stand by my interpretation. Who is going to prefer the OG iPhone to the refined and improved version? Nobody that I knew at the time.