Ah yes, a Mac tends to invoke strange feelings. I can still recall the feeling of being connected with the whole universe when I hugged my Mac Classic. Kidding folks, kidding!
Anyway, I am always amazed by the comments on Windows vs Mac vs Linux etc, here elsewhere. It seems that life inside one OS is incomplete if you haven’t made degrading mark on another OS. They’re just tools, folks. Use anything that works for you be open minded to other ways of doing things.
(I use Linux, Mac Windows. The ordering is alphabetical)
I just bought a //c from a garage sale for $20 a few weeks ago. It boots perfectly, with monochrome green monitor intact. It’s very hard to describe the rush of pleasure I get from turning the thing on.
So many memories flood back, on cold winter nights staying up late to keep plugging code away to create my castle drawing, all in hres (or was it hgres? i can’t remember anymore!), of playing Rescue Raiders, of writing a clock application counting seconds and minutes…and then realizing that I couldn’t really do anything else with the computer while it was running…but I didn’t care. It was mine, and mine alone.
I could make it do some amazing things just with my mind and fingers. I wrote programs to do my math homework, thinking I was cheating the system, not realizing that by designing an algorithm to solve the issue, I was internalizing the process far more than just doing the problems alone.
Now, my wife would never forgive me for spending $2500 for this pleasure today, but I still know deep down the feeling is priceless.
Now, with that being said, Jeff, could you PLEASE post something else so that little Phil Collins’ lookalike moves down the page a bit? There’s something unwholesome in his grin…
Who the fuck buys a $1300 computer and doesn’t open it for $23 years? Plus $1300 in the stock market twenty years ago would be worth a LOT more than $2553 paid for it on E-bay.
I received my first computers as hand me downs from a math teacher (I am forever grateful). First it was a Commodore 64 - but it only used cartridges and we only used it for games. Then it was an Apple II followed by a II+, IIe, and IIgs. Along the way somewhere another Commodore 64 (that I spent many hours programming) and a IBM 286 SX were thrown in (with DOS and a window manager). Ahhh…the good old days.
My first was an Atari 800 w/48k RAM, no disk drive, no monitor, and an Atari BASIC cartridge. I had used computers before that (VIC-20, C-64, Atari 600, time-sharing, etc.), but the Atari 800 was the first one I bought and owned. I think it cost me well over $1500 with the 48k RAM and a cassette tape drive, and software. Great computer for its time.
Your history is somewhat off. While Mac prices were definitely on the high-side in the late 80s, that situation changes in the early 90s. In October of 1990, Apple introduced a series of low-cost Macs: Macintosh Classic, Macintosh LC, Macintosh IIsi. These units were priced favorably with name-brand PCs of the era with similar capabilities. From that point onward, Macs continued to be competitive with name-brand PCs with similar capabilities.
Certainly the taint of “overpriced” stuck with the Mac for the next 15 years or so!
There were definitely personalities involved here. Sculley convinced Jobs to raise the introductory price of the Mac from $1999 to $2495. Jean-Louis Gassee openly opposed the low-cost Macs, and left the company shortly before they were introduced. Gassee was certainly most focused on more and more powerful (and way more expensive) computers. The Macintosh IIfx was probably the most expensive next to the Lisa – at around $8,000.
Just because a piece of USB hardware doesn’t work on a particular Apple doesn’t mean Apple has intentionally done anything. It’s just an incompatability. They’re no more guilty than any other hardware manufacturer, and to be fair, they seem to have a pretty good record.
It sucks bro, but there’s no conspiracy.
I have a Fujistu laptop that was pretty high end at the time. It has an SD reader, but for some reason it rejects just one of my cards. This card works everywhere else and Fujitsu denies there’s anything wrong. Is Fujitsu conspiring against Memorex? Doubt it.
With regards to hard drives running off USB, many laptops don’t supply enough power to run them. The Mac must supply ‘enough’ because the iPod is just a hard drive.
I have a black 13" macbook. Laughably the only compatability I’ve had is the stupid thing corrupts my PC formatted iPod if I plug it in and I try to write files to it.
Read a very angry post on Aria’s webstite (they sell hardware). If you’ve got a USB powered device (in this case an external HDD) they won’t run on Macs (or at least the laptops) because they have done something non-standard with the USB and it doesn’t give enough power.
I think I’ll go down the 2-year-old machine with Ubuntu Linux on it route… everything will just work.
Another point, heard a very interesting podcast from Guy Kawasaki on Conversations Network (URL no idea) who used to work for Apple in the old days. If it hadn’t been for Quark Express and the birth of desktop publishing the Mac would have died. They were lucky.
PC’s weren’t the only thing expensive in the 80’s, and even the early 90’s. It wasn’t uncommon for people to spend $4,000 on a loaded PC.
I found opening and using the PC right away kind of strange. I guess it’d be like buying unopened toys (sorry, collectibles) on eBay, then wrapping them up and opening them, re-living Christmas morning of 1971.
I don’t think the price of used/vintage computers would track inflation. New computers are way more powerful, so old computers tend to drop in value, and drop pretty fast.
I’d think that the price of used computers would more closely track with used cars. Used cars tend to drop in value fast… until they become rare antiques, where a running one is becomes worth a whole lot more as a collectible.
That seems to apply here more than inflation. I have to agree with above, the fact that it tracked with inflation is a fluke.
Somehow, this reminds of that scene from the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper” where the guy ends up 200 years in the future and finds a vintage Volkswagen Beetle in a cave. He turns the key and it starts right up.