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Thirty Years of Mac [video]

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Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#141

Post by BashiBazouk »

simonh wrote: post #126
taliesinb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was responsible for the Amiga ultimately failing, if it was superior in all those ways?

The Amiga OS was very advanced in some ways, but extremely primitive in others. It was basically a hyper-advanced games console with a keyboard. The UI was minimally functional, limited to non-existent support for printers or peripherals, etc. It just wasn't intended to be used as anything other than a games machine and provided none of the features a business machine would need. I speak as a very proud owner of an A…

Yes, this. My housemate had a 1000. It was by far the best video game console of it's era, and a few after that. As a general productivity computer, not so much. Serious lack of good software and some strange decisions by Commodore. I think the largest mistake was a lack of an internal hard drive. Sure you could buy an external, but at the time we were so new to computing we did not know we needed one and they were half the price of the base computer...

They were good for high end graphics and video of that era but I think SGI quickly caught up and surpassed them there. The other bit about Amiga that seems to be forgotten, just how proprietary the hardware was. We had a floppy drive go out and, to this day it remains as one of the more difficult to get to parts of all the computers I have had to crack open to replace a part in.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#142

Post by usingpond »

josefresco wrote: post #132
scelerat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switch to Intel changed that The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all…

I'm referring hardware/performance parity among the platforms. I sat through too many Apple events where they marched out some obscure crazy benchmark proving their (IBM) crappy CPUs were 1 million times more powerful than Intel's. Fast forward a few years and surprise! Apple moved to Intel because of their "superior roadmap" Notice how that implies that moving forward Intel is the performance winner but historically…

Jeez I hate sounding like such a fanboy but here goes. They switched because IBM's only option they provided Apple for the future of their laptop line was just straight up embedding G5s into PowerBooks. This wasn't really feasible at all, they were already running dangerously hot and had abysmal battery life. PPC chips were just nowhere near energy-efficient enough. It really had nothing to do with benchmarks or power or whatever (in fact the initial Core Duo chips were much slower than their PPC counterparts).

I mean think about it, Apple makes next to no money on desktops, why would they prioritize power over energy consumption? Every once in a while they'll trump up some weird graph/metric like "24X FASTER" when talking about new chips in their devices, yet just about every keynote they talk up (in concrete numbers) how much longer batteries last. Hell, the latest release of OS X's biggest feature is enhanced energy management.

This is one of the biggest things that makes comparing Macs to PCs kind of silly to me—if you want raw power, you should absolutely go with a Windows box. Apple loses on that every single time, and they are fine with that.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#143

Post by racl101 »

shootinputin wrote: post #13

How come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter. I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.

Really? Are you really gonna ask why software like Windows or Linux, that don't have the marketing behemoth that Apple has (or is), aren't celebrated with the same pomp and circumstance? Microsoft could put the money behind it, no doubt, but given that their history of commercial and advertising (e.g. Ballmer selling windows 1.0 like your local mattress store salesman as compared to Apple's 1984 commercial), even Microsoft couldn't give Windows the parade it deserves.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#144

Post by racl101 »

pavlov wrote: post #45
marban wrote: post #21

If Apple would still build Macs with soul (i.e. anything before 2002) it wouldn't need a campaign to tell how great they are.

I'm confused -- what big change happened in 2002? The "sunflower" iMac is the only thing I can think of.

I think he's talking about the companies focus from desktops to ipods, macbooks, iphones and ipads, which, its sort of true as reflected in the marketing behind their website.

Still, I don't think that the Macs became any less of a product but it certainly stopped becoming their flagship product.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#145

Post by mbreese »

josefresco wrote: post #132
scelerat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switch to Intel changed that The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all…

I'm referring hardware/performance parity among the platforms. I sat through too many Apple events where they marched out some obscure crazy benchmark proving their (IBM) crappy CPUs were 1 million times more powerful than Intel's. Fast forward a few years and surprise! Apple moved to Intel because of their "superior roadmap" Notice how that implies that moving forward Intel is the performance winner but historically…

The PowerPC as a processor really was a powerful chip. And it was arguably more powerful than contemporary Intel chips. It's hard to directly compare the two because to unlock the performance for either architecture requires an optimized toolchain. I'm not sure that the toolchain Apple was using was ever quite up to par with Intel. But since they are difference architecture styles (RISC vs CISC), it was really hard to get a good comparison. On HPC workloads, the Power chips were really good. I'm not sure that ever translated to workstations well.

The differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360 processors and toolchains is probably a good analogy. While in theory the Cell of the PS3 is more powerful, it was easier to get the Xbox to work optimally. (Although, ironically, they were both PowerPC based CPUs).

But the reason why Apple changed over to Intel chips had nothing to do with raw performance. It had everything to do with power - as in watts. Apple was beholden to the PowerPC manufacturers (Motorola/IBM) for their chips.

The major markets for PPC chips was either at the very high-end (HPC) or the very low-end (embedded). While Apple was the main customer for the mid-range chips, they didn't have much relative volume, so they didn't have much sway in the chip roadmap. Because of this, it was difficult to get high-performance/low-power chips. Apple went for years with a G4-based Powerbook because they couldn't get a G5 version that would work in a laptop - it required too much power.

The reason why they switched to Intel was that Intel was already working on the high-performance/low-power chips that Motorola just couldn't offer.

The PowerPC architecture itself was very high-performance, but recent years have shown that raw performance isn't as important as performance per watt for consumer use. If you're building a super computer, that's another story. From a pure CPU architecture standpoint, I'm still a fan of RISC.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#146

Post by aroman »

rapind wrote: post #139
aroman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. 30 years from today (January 24th, 1984) is celebrating the release of the original Macintosh, which was the first modern personal computer. Of course there have been "bad Apples" along the way — the Apple computer line sucked during much of the 90's, as you pointed out. But the simple fact is that Apple's original Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to…

It is most certainly not a fact that the "Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public." The Apple ][ was more popular by far than the original Mac, and even so it wasn't the first definitive PC . I remember seeing a lot of Commodore PETs around when I was young... way more than Macintosh.

I was using the term "modern personal computing" to refer to a computer using what would become the standard cross-platform interface for computers: the desktop metaphor[1].

While the Apple II and the Commodore PET were undoubtedly very popular and did put computers into the hands of home users, they really were not "modern" computers. To quote the Wikipedia article I referenced above:

"The first computer to popularise the desktop metaphor, using it as a standard feature over the earlier command line interface was the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The desktop metaphor is ubiquitous in modern-day personal computing; it is found in most desktop environments of modern operating systems: Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#147

Post by scelerat »

72deluxe wrote: post #122
scelerat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switch to Intel changed that The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all…

Early releases of Mac OSX were pretty bad. Pretty, but pretty bad too. (Too many uses of the word "pretty"?)

Yah I recall that 10.2 seemed like first version of Mac OS X that had a lot of kinks worked out. Each release thereafter got better and faster. Apple had one solid release after another throughout the aughts.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#148

Post by cristianpascu »

itafroma wrote: post #127
cristianpascu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

> 25 men. 3 women. 2 machines. Not that it's significantly better, but there are 5 women, not 3: April Greiman, Jane Metcalfe, Noemi Trainor, Es Devlin, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti. However, they did choose Rosetto instead of Metcalfe for 1997's main photo, so there's a case to be made for 4 (though Metcalfe is in the photos when you scroll down).

I counted 3 times. Men are bad at math. :) Or recognizing faces.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#149

Post by bdcravens »

mcormier wrote: post #89
ekianjo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you did a list from the pc world, you would get a much longer one which would eclipse the achievement of these macloving people, who usually happen to be egomaniacs on top of that. Guess it fits with the Jobs image.

Here is an article you should read... http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of...

I started to read it, but my god, what an atrocious interface.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#150

Post by joezydeco »

wiredfool wrote: post #135
itafroma wrote: post #48

Here's the list of people and things featured: - 1984, original Macintosh - 1985, Jon Appleton, pioneer in electro-acoustical music and key figure in the development of the digital synthesizer - 1986, April Greiman, seminal figure in the New Wave graphic design movement - 1987, Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research - 1988, Ahn Sang-soo, pioneer in Korean typography - 1989, John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop…

There's a machine featured each year if you scroll down.

Probably the only time Apple will ever acknowledge the Macintosh TV. Hah.
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