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Can you imagine Macs not being compatible with non-Apple keyboard and mouse?

Kind of.

The Lisa's rectangular pixels would have made the design process problematic.

Not if the icon design tool compensates for the problem. For example, the IBM EGA monitor fit 640x350 pixels into a 4:3 frame, giving each pixel a roughly 3:4 shape. Drawing zoomed-in pixels as 8x6 rectangles would have produced a very nearly square pixel aspect ratio. Likewise, the Lisa monitor fit 720x360 pixels into a 4:3 frame, giving each pixel a 2:3 shape. A 9x6 rectangle would have appeared as a square. When Apple turned the Lisa into the "Macintosh XL" in 1985, it reengineered the video with 608x431 square pixels. (source)

According to http://www.apple-history.com/8... the troll’s specs are correct, it could use up to 1GB of RAM (the last one I worked on had 256MB), and the 300MHz model was actually one of the last PPC604 computers to go into production, only months before the G3.

You're thinking of the ][+. The //e (note, //e, not ][e, and yes, I'm being pedantic) was not quite as open.

So the Enhanced //e was not as open, but how about the original (unenhanced) ][e? (I'm being even more pedantic. ;-) All my 8-bit Apple lit is packed away and hard to get to, else I'd go look. Mine came as a ][e but I converted it to a //e....

http://www.apple-history.com/aiie

http://www.apple-history.com/aiiee

You're thinking of the ][+. The //e (note, //e, not ][e, and yes, I'm being pedantic) was not quite as open.

So the Enhanced //e was not as open, but how about the original (unenhanced) ][e? (I'm being even more pedantic. ;-) All my 8-bit Apple lit is packed away and hard to get to, else I'd go look. Mine came as a ][e but I converted it to a //e....

http://www.apple-history.com/aiie

http://www.apple-history.com/aiiee

For years they pushed AppleTalk over TCP/IP, even after OS X. Apple supported Windows networking and Samba

SMB support has been built in since 10.3

Firewire over USB.

I have firewire ports on both my Dell and Sony. Firewire is not "Apple's" standard, it is an IEEE standard and Apple is part of the licensing pool. Just as there is a licensing pool for USB.

They have a custom Dport connector (proprietary connector on open standard)

What is a DPort? Do you mean DisplayPort? The mini-DisplayPort that Apple uses was accepted by VESA.

iWhatever has a proprietary USB connector.

So what "standard" is there that is able to duplicate this functionality cheaply?

http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml

Or do you expect a $20 boom box to implement a USB host controller?

Apple's been actively rejecting the standards other people use, open or otherwise. There is no HDMI on Mac products,

The Mac Mini has an HDMI port. All other Macs have DisplayPort. DisplayPort is not an Apple proprietary connector. Dell and other manufacturrers have been selling monitors with DisplayPorts for years.

No VGA ports (every projector has a VGA port, mac users just couldn't connect to them without headaches),

You mean "headaches" such as using a DVI to VGA connector? In fact it has just been recently that at least Mac Minis didn't come bundled with DVI to DisplayPort adapters.

tried forcing ZipDisks when everyone was using floppy disks,

Only a few Macs had optional Zip Disk support. All Macs came with 3.5" disk drives up until the iMacs.

2007 Macs still did not have +/- DVD writers (they choked on -R blank DVD's)

According to this site:
http://apple-history.com/

Every Mac introduced in 2007 had built in DVD +/- drives

Firewire and Thunderbolt are not open standards, they are proprietary and Apple charge a fee for their use.

Apple is part of the licensing pool for Firewire. The licensing pool and operates under FRAND. Just like most other standards (mpeg, mp3, H.264, etc,).

Thunderbolt was created by Intel.

That's why everyone uses USB and the laptop I just bought does not have a IEEE 1394 connector.

Well both my Dell and Sony have firewire. There is also a fee to use USB.

If you want to legally sell something with an Ipod connector (I.E. a car stereo or Ipod dock), you need to pay Apple a licensing fee. So not open, in fact, that's almost as far from open as you can get.

If you want to legally use a DVD Player there is a licensing fee....

I think you need to start taking your medication again, you're clearly seeing things that aren't there.

You're not exactly batting a hundred....

Hey instead of iMac now we have eMac!

It stood for education

Yeah, because Apple has never brought to market any worthwhile technology on its own.

I forget, when did they make a rule that says that geniuses don't make mistakes?

It's rather obvious by your choice of AppleTV that you're just a troll. A legitimate example of Steve getting something perfect to his vision but terrible in the market place would be the Cube, and the flat panel iMac got a reception that was probably underwhelming. Personally, I think the latter is the best design for an all-in-one that I've seen. I remember the way they managed to make a room seem happier without being gaudy (like a lot of the later CRT iMacs).
 
Now Apple's computer hardware designs are all overwhelmingly heartless, reminding me of the Bauhaus exhibit at MOMA -- the aesthetics are academically outstanding, and good as individual works, but being surrounded by them for too long makes you feel like all the blood's drained out of you. It's still a step up from most computer designs today.

Actually, I still like the way the original iBook and iMacs looked, especially the tangerine and later green color. However the flower and polka-dot iMacs were ugly as sin.

Actually, I still like the way the original iBook and iMacs looked, especially the tangerine and later green color. However the flower and polka-dot iMacs were ugly as sin.

It's strange that the early multi-coloured iMac laptops are not on the list.

Given that you use laptop both in the title and body of your post, I assume you're refering to the first generation iBook.

I hope they enter this field

You mean like the Apple eMate from 1997?

Ok, its hardly a "netbook" - but ubiquitous WiFi and mobile internet weren't really on the menu in 1997. Actually, the failure of this, and also the Psion Series 7 might suggest that mobile web browsing was the missing ingredient needed to get the "small, cheap laptop" market off the ground.

As for the MacBook Air, I think Apple were a bit unlucky with the timing: it was clearly intended to compete with other "premium" ultra-compact laptops from Sony et. al. - instead, everybody seemed to put it head-to-head with the (brilliant, but more Fischer Price than Jonathan Ive) EEE PC 701.

He's not even right about Apple either, the first MP Mac was the PowerMac 9500, released in 1995 with the SMP option released in 1996.

Source

I would like a bigger version of the Cube as a Medium Mac I love the way it opened up, kind of like a nuclear bomb or something. http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=g4cube Perhaps in brushed aluminum this time with some cheese-grater type holes in it.

Also when the 7300 came out it started at $1,700 for the 180 MHz model and $2,300 for the 200MHz model.

http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=7300
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_7300

That was based on the developer hardware that Apple shipped prior to the Intel transition (look at the date of the DF article - the first Intel Mac shipped on Jan 2006). Production MacIntels never shipped with TPM support. Apple uses encrypted binaries to prevent Mac OS X from running on non-Apple Intel hardware.

I know it doesn't matter in the context of the iPhone, but I'm just trying to correct the misperception that Apple uses/used TPM on their shipping Macs - they don't

The Mac Plus was introduced in 1986. Most x86 computers back then were a magnitude more expandable in comparison. 8088/86 and 80286 processors were fairly common back then. And yes, you can put these old machines up on the internet using Windows 3.x. So I don't see what the big deal is.

You, sir, are a most remarkable man, given the MacBook's release date.

I was raised on Macs, when I was 2 I remember my dad had an Apple 512k when I was very, very little. Ah, the good old days of B&W.

Oooh, and then when they brought out the Apple IIx. The idea of having colors, that was exciting. I remember the first time my siblings and I booted that sucker up. We all went "WoW" at the pretty colors. It was amazing.

I'd keep going, but my brain would fry from nostalgia.

There were some Quadras in there, a Centris, a Performa, a straight up Powermac or two, and eventually some iMacs of various generations. I still have a mac, in fact there's never been a period of time since the 512k was handed down to me that I haven't been the proud owner of a Mac. There isn't a memory of mine that predates that 512k.

But wait...

What do Cmd-Shift 1 and 2 do?
What's Clarus?

I was raised on Macs, when I was 2 I remember my dad had an Apple 512k when I was very, very little. Ah, the good old days of B&W.

Oooh, and then when they brought out the Apple IIx. The idea of having colors, that was exciting. I remember the first time my siblings and I booted that sucker up. We all went "WoW" at the pretty colors. It was amazing.

I'd keep going, but my brain would fry from nostalgia.

There were some Quadras in there, a Centris, a Performa, a straight up Powermac or two, and eventually some iMacs of various generations. I still have a mac, in fact there's never been a period of time since the 512k was handed down to me that I haven't been the proud owner of a Mac. There isn't a memory of mine that predates that 512k.

But wait...

What do Cmd-Shift 1 and 2 do?
What's Clarus?

The 10Mbps Ethernet (10-base-T) standard was published in 1990. The first Apple computer to offer an included Ethernet NIC was the Quadra 700, released in 1991.

Where exactly was the Microsoft innovation which Apple copied in this area?

Oh, and btw, Appletalk works just fine over Ethernet...

The move to PowerPC was Apple's big mistake. That was the point at which Apple market share dropped, and it never came back. Even today, Apple has much lower market share than it did the day the PowerPC machines were announced. The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.

In fact, when the PowerPC 601 came out, Motorola was shipping the 68060, which outperformed the early PowerPC chips. The 68000 line could have been developed further; there was nothing in the architecture that limited it. But when Apple dropped it, that was the end of the demand for high-end 68000 parts.

The PowerPC transition killed many existing apps. The engineering community dumped the Mac at the PowerPC transition; existing CAD applications like AutoCAD were not ported to PowerPC, and most of the printed circuit board design applications were dropped at that point, too. So Apple lost a whole market segment, and one willing to pay for big screens and good graphics.

Copeland was actually a good operating system. The problem was that applications had to be revised for it, and Microsoft didn't want to bother. Apple no longer had the clout with developers it had had back at the System 7 transition, where all apps had to be revised. But Apple hadn't realized internally that it could no longer order developers around; the developers had the option of going to Windows. So backwards compatibility had become more important.

Copeland (the original "MacOS 8") actually shipped to some developers. It was almost ready to go. Acquiring NeXT delayed the release of a new OS by several years; it took much longer to get NeXT code onto the Apple platform than Jobs said it would. But it saved Jobs' ass financially; he was heavily invested in NeXT, which was headed for bankruptcy.

As for design, one of the coolest Macs ever was the 20th Anniversary Mac, the first Mac with an LCD panel. In 1997, way ahead of everyone else. That was before Jobs took over and "Steved" the product, because it wasn't his.

The iMac clamshell looked like the Lear-Seigler ADM 3A from 1977, which was a very popular low-end terminal in its day. It wasn't an original concept.

Jobs' big contribution was to suck up to Gates and thus keep Microsoft Office on the Mac That's what saved Apple.

So that's what it looks like with the Reality Distortion Field turned off.

When none of the PC manufacturers jumped onto USB, Apple did. The same with Firewire.

Hell, I think they should produce more hardware - like a Newton successor, preferably something small and that can slide into a PCMIA slot to do the syncing and charging.

When none of the PC manufacturers jumped onto USB, Apple did. The same with Firewire.

Hell, I think they should produce more hardware - like a Newton successor, preferably something small and that can slide into a PCMIA slot to do the syncing and charging.

Most don't take it seriously, and Apple has not built many 1u rack mounts, but I guess they have a new product now? I just checked..

Ooo... Like the DuoDock

I think you mean the 20th Anniversary Mac, and Lain was first aired a year after the 20th Anniv. Mac came out, so the Navi might have been inspired by it.

I'm not saying that it needs to be a powerhouse, but the R7500 in my iBook is poor.

todays iBooks (read those that are shipping TODAY, not Tuesday) have Radeon 9550's [source - good until MacBooks ship. source 2 - good much longer]. sure your iBook may have a crappy graphics card, but they don't ship with that bad graphics any more.

It had troubles running UT99 and Q3, that's pretty sad.
i call bullshit. i ran both games on a rage 128 which handled UT99 and Q3 just fine with quality at medium low levels. The Radeon (later renamed Radeon 7500) was built around running those games!

Apple released a sub-notebook in 1992 - the Duo 230. I've often wished for a modern equivalent - I haven't used the optical drive on my iBook since I installed the OS and apps, and I doubt it would be much of a technological stretch to push everything but a USB port and a headphone jack into a Firewire port-extender. The iBook is nice, but it's still too big for convenient day-to-day backpack transport. I'd love to have OS X on something smaller.

That's completely unsupportable reasoning. PowerBooks existed for many years before they had PowerPC chips in them!

I thought the original mac was the 512kE? With 512kB of RAM? And a whopping 512kB of ROM?

Nope that was the 2nd mac. first mac.

If we don't count the Lisa that is

The Lisa's were workstations. A lot more expensive ($10k) and much better. They included stuff like internal hard drives (and for the early models) dual floppies. They ran a different OS though they could emulate the macs.

As far as Amiga dos there are far better systems today that are designed around that hardware. I think you'd be surprised how little those apps actually did if you were to run them and use them for a while.

we'll have a funky new machine.

After how mediocre their 20th Anniversary Mac was, maybe they figured they ought to lay low this time.

Maybe Apple and Steve are not making a splashy celebration this time around because a decade ago, Apple's "big idea" of a 20th anniversay Mac was an utter failure. The machine was nice - sleek design, TV/FM radio, S-video inputs, Bose sound, and was limited to the production of 12,000 machines with a cost of $10,000 a pop that was delivered to and installed at your home by an Apple authorized rep. (If I recall correctly... I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm not)

Eventually after only selling a couple thoasand at that cost... they were sold at the "bargain basement" price of 2 grand.

Some sites for more info:
Wikipedia
Apple-History
Fan club web site

Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2.1 4.03.1212-1214 (4.00.950B) 8/24/96-8/27/97 USB support: yes
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q253756/

When did Macs get USB? Not till 1998 with the iMac
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=i mac&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

You may be confused with ADB vs. USB?
"In my view the bus topology of USB is somewhat limiting. One of the original intentions of USB was to reduce the amount of cabling at the back of your PC. Apple people will say the idea came from the Apple Desktop Bus, where both the keyboard, mouse and some other peripherals could be connected together (daisy chained) using the one cable."

I can't find any information about how the OS used the two processors, though... Was this feature built into OS 7/8/whatever was used back then?

Does he want Microsoft to take out support for obsolete hardware every time they upgrade their operating system?

I beleive Microsoft managed that on their own. Compare that to A G4 from 1999, which can run OS X.IV.III (the current version of OS X) just fine (ignore the 0MB RAM, I have no idea who writes that stuff). Seriously, how many 1999 PCs could possibly handle Vista, with its' 512MB RAM reccommendation, 64 MB DirectX 9 compliant GPU requirement and a DVD-ROM at the least? Don't give me the upgrade crap; if you plan on that it's like building a completely new PC, and how many normal people (read:AOLers) could do it themselves or would really pay someone to fix it instead of buying a new Dell?

I like how in the Building a Botnet graphics, the use images of old Macs.

I don't think this particular botmaster's going to have much luck...

DN

Um, technically, "years" would be "at least two years", wouldn't it? I'm *sure* that would be untrue... all you have to do is check any Apple history website to see that you recall incorrectly. I think that there was a just over a year there where the only 'upgrades' were a price drop and a speed bump, but that counts as an upgrade, right? Actually, from my reading of the timeline, it looks like it was just almost exactly a year. Way to freaking long for a relatively small speed bump, but it was an upgrade. I think they started shipping with more memory for the same price at some point in there, too... usually when the hardware can't really be upgraded, there's at least a price drop or something.

Not that I'm wanting to defend Apple on the Powerbook here. It's been hobbled by the G4 and has not been really great-looking as a result since early 2005, but I'm not sure we can blame Apple for that... Freescale and IBM just failed to produce the chips they'd said they were going to, and both Intel and AMD started cramming P4s and other hot chips into laptops despite their power drain problems, then came up with some decent lower-power chips, which was actually somewhat unexpected I think. It was really just this past year that Powerbook sales started to suffer as a result.

Anyway, all I am saying that Apple does generally update their machines every six to eight months or so, or as changes in hardware allow... it's just that up until now, they've had to wait for IBM and Freescale, and that's grown to be a long, long wait... unacceptably long, so much so that Intel became an inevitable choice. I really *hate* defending Apple like that, but it sucks to see people talking trash about how Apple never updates their hardware when it's just not true, I felt I had to refute those simply incorrect statements. We should be knocking companies for things they *do*, ( like arbitrarily deciding which upgrade release means Quicktime users have to pay another $49 for a Pro version again ) , not stuff they don't do.

Their prices have been dropping slowly over time in absolute terms and faster in relative terms (i.e. adjusted for inflation). If you don't believe me, look at Apple History's webpage. For example, when the first white iBook shipped, the base model was $1499. Now it's $999. The first G4 PowerMacs started at $2499 and topped out at $3499. There are exceptions, but the overall point remains accurate.

Ok; sometimes things are just so bleedin' ignorant that I feel compelled to respond rather than crapflood.

Are you really saying that Unix has been around since 1946?!

Because it seems to me that if unix.org has anything to say about Unix, it's been around since the early seventies. Is that really twice as long as Apple's been in existence? What kind of math do you use where "early seventies" = 2 x 1976?

Damn. And they make MY POSTS negative one.

Are you sure?

No, PowerBook predates the use of PowerPC processors in Macintosh computers. Released in 1991, the PowerBook 100 had a Motorola MC68HC000 running at 16 mhz. Other PowerBooks that year were the PowerBook 140 and 170. I think they were released simultaneously.

http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=1 00&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

It wasn't until 1994 that the PowerPC processor debuted on the PowerMac and it did not appear in portables until 1995.

"For the pro-crowd they just need to stretch their pro-video and maybe throw in some eye candy like 32 inch displays or intel plasma display"

Although many people are familiar with the Macintosh TV and later models with integrated TV tuners, few people are aware that Apple did once trial a TV reciever with a small embedded version of Mac OS. See http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=45 for details.

It was a miserable failure. But times have changed, and Apple are now very much in competition with Microsoft and Sony for control of the living room. It will be interesting to see what is announced at MacWorld.

When the 6502 was a hot processor, Woz was a pretty fair hack electrical engineer. Running the video off the CPU was a cute trick. But he hasn't had anything relevant to say about computers in a very long, long time.


Are you trolling?
1986:
The //gs was the first computer to include a Large Scale Integration (LSI) chip, designed by Steve Wozniak, and called the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine).
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=a IIgs&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

2004:
Wheels of Zeus
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1734857,00.as p

He knows more about modern technology than you do.
Enjoy,

It wouldn't be the first time that Apple would have been in this situation. It would seem that some parties are willing to sue over a code name. Fortunately rationality ensued, and Apple won.

Only in America...