Hard News: Steve, 1999
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Russell Brown, in reply to
to the LC575 with its CD-ROM drive
One of the best Macs ever. I sold mine to Chris Bourke, who used it to write his Crowded House book.
Sadly, it was followed by some of the biggest stinking piles of shit the company ever released. I had a black Performa 580 that basically was not fit for sale. There were some dark days before Steve came back.
When I became producer of Shortland Street, I introduced Mac computers to all the sets. This was in 1997 when Apple was at a very low ebb. I did it because I wanted to give the underdog some exposure, and because the colourful Apple computers looked cool. I know that medical facilities are unlikely to run Apple gear in the real world, but this was my little evangelical opportunity.
That was you!? Nice. As you say, it was completely unrealistic that the receptionist at a medical clinic would have the latest Mac, but it did look cool.
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Sacha, in reply to
And the market works
Apple also had a lot to learn about the business side of their industry from Microsoft and others.
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Sacha, in reply to
One of the best Macs ever. I sold mine to Chris Bourke, who used it to write his Crowded House book.
However I seriously don't recommend trying to use one to lay out a photo-intensive house of the year magazine. Not a fond memory.
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Also, "Halo." Look what happened there.
(It's okay, though. I can now play "Marathon" on my iPad.)
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I'm trying to remember what model we had at home during my late Dad's brief stint as editor of the New Zealand Model Railway Journal - one of the early beige PowerPC separates I think. And I dearly loved the ancient ex-VUW Color Classic I had as a student - coming from my Mum's animal physiology lab, it was preloaded with all sorts of useful early-90's dataviz software. My assignments had a distinct retro feel.
But as much as I admire Macs and respect their technical and design prowess, I can't imagine ever buying one nowdays - I'm too used to getting my software for free, and being able to do what I want with it. But then I'm hardly their target market (in fact any company for whom I am a target market would go down the tubes pretty quickly).
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
. . . it was completely unrealistic that the receptionist at a medical clinic would have the latest Mac, but it did look cool.
It was the receptionist's Apple //c at a pretentiously overdecorated Auckland dental practice that fatally undermined my trust and drove me to seek treatment elsewhere. This was at the time when the thing had been obsolete for about 5 years, they'd obviously chosen it because it "looked cool". Much like whoever lumbered Roy Scheider with one in 1984's godawful 2010.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
And the market works. Apple do their thing brilliantly but there's also a big demand for cheaper commodity hardware, not so pretty but more open/modular so good for hacking, pimping and shipping on to keep up to date with changes in specs. People who like to do that don't buy Apple.
And yet, at Webstock, Foo, etc, there are a lot of people who can and do hack code, who carry a Macbook as their personal machine. At least three quarters of the conference circuit regulars seem to have them nowadays -- which does not, of course, prevent them from cursing Apple.
I am somewhat worried about the iOS-ification of the Mac. It suits me to have a more managed environment on a phone and a tablet -- but I still want my computer to be a computer, not an appliance.
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remember I said that "Apple eats its young" ... the fact that it has its eyes on a percentage from everyone who writes software for its platforms now seems to me to be an indication that, well, programmers are next ....
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Oh god let the fan bois have their moment. I mean who really cares which mega corp rapes yer wallet, thanks chiefly to abusing the loopholes which their lackeys insinuated into the plethora of insane bi-lateral trade agreements our pols foist upon us.
In a moment of utter stupidity I bought an Apple II sometime in the late 70's. There was a shop at street level in the Swanson Towers building where I worked.
After a particularly dull morning with the drongos who ran the Labour Dept back then, I splurged out a couple of grand (you could still buy a house on the less salubrious parts of the Auckland isthmus for that).
Never again.Like so much that continues to this day with this company's products, marketing buzz was more important than utility. It worked OK as a typewriter oops sorry "word processor", but couldn't match the contemporaneous x86 processors that were being put out by IBM or, most importantly; Wang who used a 16bit data bus on the 8086 based system. It was a killer word processor and Multiplan was great if incompatible with everyone else.
However the special 16bit lotus 123 run on that slayed every other iteration of that spreadsheet app.
I used to do all my grunt work on a Wang in multiplan, import the csv's into Lotus then export the result into an IBM to edit and add graphics. And no, one Apple could not have 'done it all' Number crunching was slow and precarious on apples back then.Since the Apple II I have never used Apple; not because its products are made in concentration cum work camps, but because I know that whatever they are selling will always be available in better a form factor (ie free from restrictive conditions) for less elsewhere.
As Henry Ford pointed out a long time ago, you can make a reasonable quid shooting for the top end of the markets where dilettantes fret over matching their keyboard to the drapes, but the most profitable business is that which considers the masses, the hoi polloi, to be their number one customer. Apple appear to be going after us plebs at the moment so doubtless the form ahead of function types will find someone else to adore. -
Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Sure helps if you remember what monochrome command line interfaces were like; must mystify the young just like the wifi demo in Russell's story.
I'm juuuuuust old enough to really remember when having a computer with 256 colours was a Big Deal. I think there were a few computers running DOS at my school when I started. Apart from that...
The wifi demo still seems like a big deal when I think about it, though, That didn't really become a commonplace home thing (in houses that can afford it, anyhow) until relatively recently - kids would have to be fairly young to not remember when it was unusual.
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Sacha, in reply to
matching their keyboard to the drapes
not a metaphor?
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Sacha, in reply to
kids would have to be fairly young to not remember when it was unusual
it's like telephones being attached to the wall #notnatural
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Sure helps if you remember what monochrome command line interfaces were like; must mystify the young just like the wifi demo in Russell's story.
Ah, the halcyon days where 20 GOTO 10 was the height of sophisticated wit in the school computer lab.
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James Butler, in reply to
it’s like telephones being attached to the wall #notnatural
Recently at MOTAT I tried to show my kids how to use a dial telephone. It was HARD.
Also, my kids are very used to me staring intently at a screenful of indecipherable scrolling text, followed by tapping out weird hieroglyphics. Cue disbelieving, slightly distasteful looks: "Dad, why do you always make the computer do that?"
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Sacha, in reply to
keyboards are going to seem so ridiculous
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James Butler, in reply to
keyboards are going to seem so ridiculous
Hmm. Consider that in the 80s and 90s, most of the people who bought home PCs were people who wanted to get stuff done - people who wanted to crunch numbers or process words, and realised that a computer was the most efficient way to do it. Now a computer has become for most people a device for consuming data, then sure, it's just an historical accident that they have keyboards and come preloaded with Office; and the devices we see now which are purpose-built for consumption, iPads and smartphones, are a better fit for this model. But the core PC getting-stuff-done market still exists, and is still a significant (and, I suspect, increasing) percentage of the population; and I think it will be some time before we see a better input device than a keyboard for those uses.
OTOH for accessibility reasons I hope someone does come up with something better soon...
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Sacha, in reply to
the machines are just catching up to our standard human modes - gesture and voice
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Sacha, in reply to
which raise different accessibility challenges and possibilities
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James Butler, in reply to
Well IMHO the written word has become as much a native mode of human communication as either of those...
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Sacha, in reply to
For sure, but it's more recent and still less widespread. I expect the proportion of time spent pointing and talking (especially via Skype, etc) to increase as interfaces and supporting infrastructure like affordable genuine broadband mature.
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HORansome, in reply to
Not according to the research; reading and writing are still hard to learn skills which we have no natural inclination to pick up (children only do well at it because their brains are much more plastic than adults).
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Since the Apple II I have never used Apple; not because its products are made in concentration cum work camps
I’ll be brief, because I’ve gone through this ad nauseum, but Foxconn, which does most of Apple’s assembly, almost certainly also manufactures the components in your computer. Or your gaming console or router.
but because I know that whatever they are selling will always be available in better a form factor (ie free from restrictive conditions) for less elsewhere.
Which is fine if “freedom from restrictive conditions” is your primary requirement.
As Henry Ford pointed out a long time ago, you can make a reasonable quid shooting for the top end of the markets where dilettantes fret over matching their keyboard to the drapes, but the most profitable business is that which considers the masses, the hoi polloi, to be their number one customer. Apple appear to be going after us plebs at the moment so doubtless the form ahead of function types will find someone else to adore.
Sorry, but this really is bullshit. Apple’s growth products are its phones. Apple makes 28% of the revenue and two thirds of all profits in the mobile phone business. Compare and contrast to Nokia.
It will have a 75% share of the global tablet computing market in 2011.
It has been able to do this because it genuinely innovates, which allows it to define, or redefine, product categories, and to make those products compelling by presenting them as part of an ecosystem that actually works. I certainly don’t like everything Apple does – I actively dislike the iTunes Music Store – but the idea that that Apple succeeds because it puts form before function simply isn’t true.
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Peter Darlington, in reply to
And yet, at Webstock, Foo, etc, there are a lot of people who can and do hack code, who carry a Macbook as their personal machine.
Oh yes, I was really referring to hardware hacking, i.e. overclocking, disk configurations etc...
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Russell Brown, in reply to
the machines are just catching up to our standard human modes – gesture and voice
I suppose I’ll have to have a crack at driving Mac OS 10.7 with that multi-touch pad thing. My cheap mouse from Dick Smith still seems to work pretty well.
Unlike, it must be said, almost any freakin’ mouse that Apple ever makes. I find Fiona’s “magic” mouse almost unusable. What’s with that, I do not know.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Oh yes, I was really referring to hardware hacking, i.e. overclocking, disk configurations etc…
Ah yes. That would be the member of the household who just had to have two graphics cards ...
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