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Even if the basis for the law is sound, it's still stupid ( and I'm not picking on Apple). These devices are widely available all over the world and I don't think proof of citizenship has ever been required to purchase one.

That hasn't stopped them in the past from putting export restrictions on cryptography algorithms that were generally available in the rest of the world, and various computers and consoles

They were coasting on Windows XP for over a decade.

Windows XP was released in 2001 and Windows Vista 2006. Microsoft didn't coast, the users sure did though (with many home users and businesses still holding on to Windows XP) and no matter how you cut it five years is not a decade.

It wasn't until Apple starting to pose a threat with Mac OS X

OSX isn't (nor was it) a threat, it has less than 10% of the desktop market share here too, which until recently was less than Vista alone. If you want to compare particular versions of OSX it would be 10.5. Your threat argument might be better if it were referring to iOS on mobile devices. There also seems to be a lot of backlash over Lion.

Similar story with the Zune, Windows phones, and now tablets.

They've had success with the Xbox 360 and hardware. Microsoft had some dud launches and dysmal releases for certain but they're not alone in this. Apple has had its share of defects most recently with their iPhone4 antennas and blaming users for holding the phone wrong. Here is a nice list of some Apple failures.

Sorry, I've had Macs since a 128K in 1985, and seen a lot of them. I even had a 4400, the worst Mac ever built, some of the 81xx series where you have to remove the motherboard to add RAM, and some of the pokey 61xx series, with that wonderful special (as in education) video adapter cable that usually developed at least one broken wire from flexing. The second best Mac I ever had was a IIci, and the third was a Power Tower Pro.

But I'd have to say the G4 MDD (the dual-CPU USB 1.1 version) is probably the best Mac ever. Easy open flip down side door, four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays, four 64-bit PCI slots, runs 9.2 to (I think) 10.5. I've had one for at least eight years now, using it as a mostly-unattended file server and to run a Bit Torrent client on a non-NAT IP address. I've got a Firewire card in there so that external hard drives can have their own channel, and a SATA card. The FSB speed sucks because Motorola didn't care, but its DMA I/O kicks ass. And it was good enough that Apple kept selling the 1GHz model for another couple of years for people who were stuck on 9.2.

Mine had been randomly freezing the past few months, then a couple of weeks ago it finally refused to run for more than a minute or two before hitting an obvious thermal shutdown. Turns out that the heat sink is held in place by 4 phillips screws, easily accessible with the computer still on the floor. I cleaned away the clay-like crap that pretended to be thermal compound, spread on new white thermal compound, closed it up, and it worked. I was surprised how easy that was.

I even have a spare power supply because of the furor over the original power supply being noisy. When Apple finally shipped the replacements out, they decided it wasn't worth the cost to have everyone ship the old one back. And now these things under $200 used.

You need to get a grip on reality since you clearly don't know the history behind your god, Steve Jobs. First off, Steve Jobs didn't do much good, and, in the event he did and I'm just consciously ignoring it, he was able to do so only because he acted ruthlessly and atrociously at very opportune times doing much evil at the expense of others (see this article about Gil Amelio. Second, Steve Jobs treated most of the underlings he worked with like absolute shit, especially the designers and developers who actually did work, and not just directed, and the same really can't be said for Bill Gates, who was one of the more gentle CEOs the industry has ever seen.

Actually, looking at your slashdot handle, Whiney Mac Fanboy, I'm really not surprised. Fanboy, indeed.

Apple has checked for signed firmware in the past. Back in System 6 and System 7, the Apple HD SC Setup and Drive Setup tools only worked with hard drives which had Apple firmware. The patch was to change a single byte using ResEdit, at least for the version I patched. LowEndMac has a page dedicated to it.
Third-party drives came with their own programs to manage the partitions of the drives. It worked, after a fashion. Having Apple's boot software on the drive made updates to the OS much less likely to fail randomly.
I'm not sure when the Apple firmware requirements were dropped; I used the patched programs all the way to OS 9.

They did leverage their position to ensure that non-Microsoft OSes were not distributed on OEM PCs, particularly BeOS which they threatened HP over.

False. There is no actual evidence that they threatened or performed any illegal action. Its merely what the other side claims.

http://lowendmac.com/myturn/02/0403.html

Please don't shill for Microsoft.

Please stop lying and spreading lies.

IMO the NeXT workstations, though clearly based on the Xerox office computer from the 1970s, was far more deserving awe than anything Apple released during the 1980s, including both the Macintosh and the Lisa.

The NeXT Cube was almost an Apple product. Steve was involved in the "BigMac" project to create a "3M" workstation with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and 1 MFLOP of processing power.

See Apple's Failed BigMac Project

Wrong.

Oh, you don't just disagree with my opinion; I'm wrong. Duly noted.

When Jobs came back and saved Apple, he didn't take your approach. In fact, he killed the Mac clone.

Please note that I never said the Microsoft licensing model was the only possible route to success. Please note that I picked 1989 as a good year to try this; Steve Jobs killed off the Mac clones in 1997. Please also note that I said "Apple does quite well as the BMW of the computer industry."

So Steve Jobs killed off the clones, embraced the premium computers concept, and made it work. I never said that was impossible. That would have been a stupid thing for me to say, since the actual history is that he did make it work.

And he cut Apple's endless confusing product line down to four.

I agree; that was one of the good things Jobs did. The endless confusing product line was a bad thing and he was right on that issue.

But Jobs did not cut margins - they are as high as ever.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that you are incorrect on this point. Or "wrong" if you prefer that word.

In the 80's, Apple was making margins of up to 55% on computers. In 1989, there was no model of Mac that cost less than $3000 (in 1989 dollars; in 2011 dollars that would be over $5200). (source)

That's insane. Today Macs are premium computers but they are not that overpriced anymore.

Apple in those days used to do tricks like bundle in an Apple external hard drive, which was also a high-margin item. People wanted to just buy the Mac and buy a less-expensive external hard drive, but they didn't get that option.

I was pretty sure that Dell and the other commodity computer makers must get by on less than 10% margins. I found an article claiming that the industry average margin on a notebook is 2%. (And on netbooks it's more like 0.6%!)

Apple wants to stay out of commodity markets, which is one reason why we won't ever see a "Mac netbook". Apple hates to compete on price and just refuses to do it. (Which is fine; BMW doesn't compete on price either.)

In the 90's Apple was in serious trouble. I personally believe that their strategy of charging the absolute highest possible price they could manage in the late 80's set them up for the serious trouble. Their margins now are high but not crazy high.

But actually, when I did the Google search to try to find a link backing up my claim of the 50% margin on Macs in the late 80's, I found a lot of articles estimating that Apple is making 50% margins on iPhone and iPad. This is 50% on a $500 product instead of 50% on a $3,000 or $4,000 product, which may help explain why this seems to be more sustainable than a 55% margin on a Macintosh.

Even if the competition from Android does force them to lower their prices, they should still be able to make good money.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9150045/Apple_makes_208_on_each_499_iPad

OBTW, Apple is poised to become the #1 PC maker next year.

So, please tell me what part of "They can continue to make good money by selling nice stuff at premium prices" sounds like I'm surprised or skeptical about the above?

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all.

steveha

http://www.lowendmac.com/newsrev/11mnr/1111.html#1
http://www.cultofmac.com/113977/os-x-lion-sandboxing-is-a-killjoy-destined-to-ruin-our-mac-experience/

Why make it so you can't the ability to save changes to files that you do not own? Why have it ask for admin rights when doing so?

Maybe they're just pissed that someone is referring to the reliability and longevity of their PowerPC and Performa lines from back in the day...

At least they didn't name the restaurant "Road Apples"...

Well, I'll be damned. I'm big enough to admit when I'm wrong - sorry to have ever doubted you.

Here's another source:

http://lowendmac.com/coventry/06/apple-project-bigmac.html

add in the classic cracking/yellow plastic on prior models, the crappy 15-bit TN screens they've used in the past (fixed under performance guarantees, IIRC, after legal action), too much thermal paste causing massive overheating, nVidia gfx chips cracking and falling off, exploding batteries, cooling ports blocked by plastic film and numerous HW failures-by-design - well, it's no wonder he's looking for a heavy duty warranty.

Apple's biggest design flaw is that they use the same name ("Macbook") for all of their laptops, year after year. So a Google for "macbook battery" or "macbook screen" returns every rant anyone has ever posted about every Apple laptop ever sold.

All the other manufacturers keep changing names so you can't keep track. HP has added "Envy" and "ProBook" to the "Presario" and "Pavillion" and "EliteBook", plus they add random model numbers like "dv5000." Makes it a lot harder to keep track. Dell does the same thing: What the hell is a Vostro? Is it like an Inspiron or a Latitude? It's certainly not an XPS, right, because that's the line they built to compete with Alienware, except now they own Alienware, and use that name, too.

Changing names often helps to encourage the short memories of consumers. I don't know anyone that's had a problem with a Vostro or an Envy...because I've never known anyone whose owned anything other than an Inspiron or a Pavillion.

add in the classic cracking/yellow plastic on prior models, the crappy 15-bit TN screens they've used in the past (fixed under performance guarantees, IIRC, after legal action), too much thermal paste causing massive overheating, nVidia gfx chips cracking and falling off, exploding batteries, cooling ports blocked by plastic film and numerous HW failures-by-design - well, it's no wonder he's looking for a heavy duty warranty.

I'd recommend a Dell, if you can stand the hardware - their NBD warranties kick ass. You can practically (ab)use the hardware for anything except hammering fenceposts & they'll replace it for you. Plus there's the data recovery option, might be worth it if you're special enough to keep important data on a laptop.

Sure it's been 25 years, but you'd think that Apple would still be pissed about the Unitron Mac 512 debacle.

http://lowendmac.com/clones/unitron.html

Lying is one of apple's forte's. Remember the "can we please use the Apple trademark and we promise never to go into the music business"!

Umm... yeah you got a tiny bit wrong there. It wasn't HP, it was Digital... Apple won that lawsuit.

Please see this URL:

http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/apple-vs-microsoft.html

Oh look, HP NewWave, not Digital GEM. And yes, Apple lost.

Please see this URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#GEM_.22look_and_feel.22_suit

I believe that is what you are talking about. It is not clear from that link whether Apple won or whether Digital settled, but either way Apple didn't lose.

Tell me this isn't a ripoff of Mac OS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gem_11_Desktop.png

It looks like a desktop metaphor GUI to me. I am not clear on how much of that metaphor Apple can legitimately claim to own, but Apple and everyone else were all copying Xerox.

Note that in GEM you don't drag a floppy disk to the trash to eject it, and there are many other Apple-isms not present in GEM. So okay, I'll say it: this isn't a ripoff of Mac OS. Not as I define a ripoff, anyway.

But Digital was forced to make changes, so my opinion doesn't seem to be very useful.

Apple lost but NOT because MS didn't copy Apple...

Offtopic. The topic is that Apple submitted, as evidence, screenshots of HP NewWave running on Windows, and had used the customization features of NewWave to make it look very much like the Mac; this despite the out-of-box look being very different.

And don't make MS out to be an innocent here.

Where did I do that?

Don't be a hater without trying to understand.

Where did I do that?

Apple's no innocent here, but they deserve props for what that have truly innovated.

Offtopic. I was discussing one specific incident, which I thought was sort of related to the recent incident where Apple changed the aspect ratio of an image of a Galaxy Tab to make it look more like an iPad. I was not discussing whether or not Apple "deserves props" for innovation, just their legal shenanigans.

Or is it okay to submit doctored evidence if you "deserve props" for innovation?

steveha

As I recall, Xerox pretty much killed any future noise in this direction by pointing out that they had developed the GUI to begin with and if Apple was victorious over Microsoft, well, that would obviously mean Xerox could beat the living snot out of Apple.

No, that never happened. Xerox didn't keep the case from going to court; the case went to court and Apple lost.

http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/apple-vs-microsoft.html

steveha

Then again, how similar is similar? Just look at how laptops. Modern designs are quite different from those in the late 1980's, so much so that modern laptops look almost identical outside of the branding. Which suggests that all modern laptops have a common ancestor -- a ripped off design. And they probably do.

You just may be right about a common ancestor to all modern laptops.

Actually the benchmarks show that the 2011's are pretty much on par with the 2010's, within 3-4 FPS. I wouldn't call that significant.

http://lowendmac.com/bookrev/11br/0805.html

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/intel-integrated-graphics-not-hampering-sandy-bridge-macs.ars

All the bench marks show the intel integrated graphics are signigficantly worse than the NVIDIA discrete graphics chip in the previous generation of MacBook Air.

Interestingly, Apple before the Second Coming of Jobs had one of the same problems Google does today: too many products, forcing them to spread their resources too thin to support them all. Apple in the 1990s had an incredible profusion of different flavors of Mac; one of Jobs' first big decisions was simplifying it down to four key product lines and throwing the rest out. (Here's video of Jobs himself explaining the situation at the 1998 Macworld keynote.) It angered a lot of people at the time, but that decision was a big part of what started Apple's turnaround.

In 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. This came with USB and FireWire, but with no legacy ports. If you wanted to sell a peripheral to iMac users, it had to be USB or FireWire (mostly USB, since it was cheaper for device manufacturers).

The first few versions of the iMac did not have FireWire, just USB. The iMac first got FireWire in October 1999 with some versions of the "slot-loading" iMac G3:

http://lowendmac.com/imacs/imac-g3-1999.html

Thus, those early adopters REALLY needed USB peripheral, and as you said, for a while it seemed as though the only colours available for USB devices matched the iMac colours.

Apple first with USB? PCs had them a year before the iMac. Plus back in the day, the only portable music player that would dare use firewire was the iPod.

Apple Computer is the new Sony for proprietary f-you lock-in.

Are you still using your Apple Bus Mouse with an ADB connector?

Like when I carry around Apple's first "portable" computer ; )

Not following published specs and best practices will get you exactly what you deserve on any api.

Not if you wrote the specs.

Pretty much continuously:

http://lowendmac.com/hodges/06/0817.html

The article is nonsense.

Apple has had network booting for some time now (hold N while booting, or select "network" as your default startup disk).

To be specific, since Mac OS 8, as in classic Mac OS. And it's been in OS X since an early version of OS X Server.

Best evidence I could find is here. This was part of the reason the classic Mac OS installer would allow you to do an install with a universal set of drivers.

It was reliable, you just had to drop it to reseat the chips every now and then

'You're making it sound like Apple took their iPhone and dumbed it down.'

Yes, I think that's exactly what happened. Take the SIM card out of an activated iPhone and which other Apple device does it most closely resemble? Answers on a postcard, etc.

'You call that a lack of innovation - I call it brilliant! And let me remind you, I don't even like iPhone, but I can appreciate the brilliance of the strategy.'

Apple (like many other companies) has been using this brilliant, fully synergized marketing strategy of 'product differentiation' for several decades now:

http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/lc.shtml

Their iPod is their only "Pod" thing so saying someone is trying to create confusion by calling a projector a "Video Pod" is a real stretch.

Let's see - iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Classic, iPod Touch. Only the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Nano currently qualify as "mp3 players". The other two are most definitely also video players, and one of them also happens to be a handheld computer. I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to consider the possibility that the Video Pod somewhat dilutes the iPod brand, particularly for those members of the general population on the left hand side of the bell curve. The Video Pod's name is close enough to Apple's brand that it can very likely benefit from a halo effect of the popularity of the iPod brand. Whether or not that's enough for Apple to be (legally) in the right I can't say.

As an aside, I googled "video pod" sans quotes, just to see exactly what the "infringing" device was (I can't tell if it's intended as a portable video projector, or what) and I stumbled upon this link from 2005 explicitly referring to the then newly released (fifth generation) iPod as the "Video Pod," (though this site is clear to point out that iPod Video was never it's official name, and I'm pretty sure that "Video Pod" wasn't either, though the first link shows a fairly clear example of an argument to be made in favor of brand dilution in this particular case).

(maybe I'm biased - I owned a Performa 5200)

Yep, I think this entire LC PDS Power Mac line sucked:
http://lowendmac.com/tech/x200.shtml
Why Apple didn't just run the PowerPC 603(e) in 32-bit mode I didn't know. Or at least arrange it better.

Well lets bring it to the point, they exposed the antenna because it looked so cool, now you have to be aware that any change in the impedance of that thing and in the resistance can alter your reception, now you touch it with your fingers and guess what your body is for the phone, another antenna docked onto the original one.
That does not mean you get better reception in about almost all cases your reception gets worse, you have basically shortcut the antenna.

I cannot imagine that there was no engineer which did not warn about this. but given apples track record of Steve Jobs not listening to his engineers because the solution would not look cool: http://lowendmac.com/b4mac/appleiii.html
I assume we have the apple 3 all over again.

People seem to be misinterpreting that commercial quite often. They weren't saying that 1984 was a bad thing, they were just apologising for delays in their product line. It took them another 21 years to ship a working telescreen.

Have you used BeOS ?

Instead of Windows wasting the WHOLE space of the title bar, BeOS had two advantages:
  - they took up minimal space instead of wasting space
  - you can slide them ALONG the top of the window, so you could quickly switch between overlapping windows

Here is a picture...
    http://farm1.static.flickr.com/47/152400976_bef7854aa1_o_d.png

And another description....

http://lowendmac.com/backnforth/010423.html

"For example, a BeOS web site used to advertise itself with the slogan, "Little. Yellow. Different." Instead of having a title bar that covers the whole top of the window, Be used little yellow tabs. The yellow immediately sets BeOS apart from all the grays and blues of other operating systems. One neat feature was that you could slide the tab if you held the shift key down. So you could stack several windows on top of each other with tabs in different places much like the interface of Apple's web site. That would be fabulous, but when you close the window or restart the computer, BeOS doesn't remember where you slid the tab - so they all get stacked on top of each other next time. It is a little detail, but it matters."

Censorship on some of their products.

So, what competitors did Apple destroy?

Also, I might add that apples hardware is pretty much set in stone.

One, that's not destroying competition. Two, Apple is a systems integration vendor, hardware and software are made to work well together.

No upgradability without crippling the OS

Say what? My MacBook Pro came with instructions on how users can upgrade their RAM. That's on a laptop. Lowendmac has the article Know Your Mac's Upgrade Options. Googling upgrading macs returned more than 5 million more results. And while many may be complainers like you complaining Macs are not upgradable I bet many say exactly how Macs can be upgraded. Another one is Upgrading Your Mac's Internal HDD (To An External One), it explains how to replace the internal drive with another then use the old drive as an external one. TFA is dated 5 January 2010, a year before that I replaced the internal drive in my Mac, from the 160 GB it came with to a 320 GB drive, then I bought bought a docking station that accepts internal drives then plugs into a USB socket for use as an external drive. Mac Pros are even easier to upgrade. Now if you mean the all-in-one Macs like the iMac and Mac mini are hard to upgrade try upgrading Dell's XPS One all-in-one. All-in-one PCs are not meant to be easily upgradable.

or paying Apples insanely inflated prices

1999 is calling and wants it's mime back. For years and years Mac prices had been comparable with Windows PC prices. Before I ever got my MBP I made a list of requirements a new computer had to meet, I then comfigured and compared several different laptops with those specs. A couple of laptops were about $100 less and a couple of others were several hundred dollars more than the MBP I eventually bought.

My home built epic-computer can be upgraded whenever I want, in any number of different ways. it is flexible and wonderful, and I don't have to buy a new one just to meet the demands of one newfangled program, until the system is too old to do anything.

Good for you, though I haven't built my own PC I have upgraded and expanded PCs. And the same can be done with a Mac Pro. A new Mac just can't be legally built by anyone other than Apple. People build their owe hackintoches, Hackintoch gives instructions and tutorials on how to do so.

Falcon

Censorship on some of their products.

So, what competitors did Apple destroy?

Also, I might add that apples hardware is pretty much set in stone.

One, that's not destroying competition. Two, Apple is a systems integration vendor, hardware and software are made to work well together.

No upgradability without crippling the OS

Say what? My MacBook Pro came with instructions on how users can upgrade their RAM. That's on a laptop. Lowendmac has the article Know Your Mac's Upgrade Options. Googling upgrading macs returned more than 5 million more results. And while many may be complainers like you complaining Macs are not upgradable I bet many say exactly how Macs can be upgraded. Another one is Upgrading Your Mac's Internal HDD (To An External One), it explains how to replace the internal drive with another then use the old drive as an external one. TFA is dated 5 January 2010, a year before that I replaced the internal drive in my Mac, from the 160 GB it came with to a 320 GB drive, then I bought bought a docking station that accepts internal drives then plugs into a USB socket for use as an external drive. Mac Pros are even easier to upgrade. Now if you mean the all-in-one Macs like the iMac and Mac mini are hard to upgrade try upgrading Dell's XPS One all-in-one. All-in-one PCs are not meant to be easily upgradable.

or paying Apples insanely inflated prices

1999 is calling and wants it's mime back. For years and years Mac prices had been comparable with Windows PC prices. Before I ever got my MBP I made a list of requirements a new computer had to meet, I then comfigured and compared several different laptops with those specs. A couple of laptops were about $100 less and a couple of others were several hundred dollars more than the MBP I eventually bought.

My home built epic-computer can be upgraded whenever I want, in any number of different ways. it is flexible and wonderful, and I don't have to buy a new one just to meet the demands of one newfangled program, until the system is too old to do anything.

Good for you, though I haven't built my own PC I have upgraded and expanded PCs. And the same can be done with a Mac Pro. A new Mac just can't be legally built by anyone other than Apple. People build their owe hackintoches, Hackintoch gives instructions and tutorials on how to do so.

Falcon

Apple itself couldn't even survive without their draconian tying of hardware to their OS. When clones were licensed and they came with cheaper hardware even Apple's customers FLOCKED to the clone makers, nearly bankrupting Apple, because what most of them wanted was MacOS.

Not really, even at the hight of the clone era the clones only sold 15% of what Apple sold. http://lowendmac.com/musings/mm07/0830.html

1997, 2.8 million Macs from Apple - biggest year for clone sales, estimated at 400,000 units.

The problem was they sold 4 Million Macs as well as 275k clones in 1996. The clones simply didn't increase Mac OS marketshare - the fact that the cloners didn't even try to sell them to non-Mac users didn't help a bit.

Safari 3.0.4 runs on 10.4.x
Safari 4 runs on 10.5+

What G4 do you have that you can't install leopard on? I shoehorned Tiger onto an ancient G3 iMac from 2000, surely you can install leopard on a fairly recent G4, and if you can't you could have tried this http://lowendmac.com/osx/leopard/openfirmware.html

Perhaps you simply wanted a new Mac?

I've got an ad from 1984 for a Mac that included a SCSI port.

No, you don't. The first Mac with SCSI was the Mac Plus - released in 1986.

And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces?

Erm, you DO know that Apple and Xerox had an agreement on the sharing of GUI technology?

Here's some of the history:

Since its inception, Xerox had given other companies tours of PARC, showing off the highly advanced Alto workstation, which had a bitmapped display, an object oriented programming environment, was networkable, and was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. (The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders and stopped giving tours.)

Convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the 1980s, Jobs offered Xerox a killer deal: Apple, which was privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 - in exchange for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted and gave Jobs and a team of Lisa project engineers a tour.

Hell, what was so bad about the 5200 even? Seems if the list had to include Performa, the article was reaching pretty hard.

Low End Mac classified it as a "Road Apple":

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/performa-5200.html

Seems like anything from Apple with "TV" in the name is a dud.

My only other quibble with the list is the inclusion of the PowerPC platform. I bought a PowerMac 6100/60 when they came out in 1994 and used it until 2001. Heck, I still had it running (and on the web with Netscape 3.1) in 2005! Overall, PowerPC was a solid platform. The fact that the Performa line used its chips is a completely separate issue.

As someone who has been using Macs since around 1990 I disagree with quite a number of points on this list. First of all, the worst Apple product ever is without any doubt the Performa 5200, but not the whole performa line. I've owned several performas that were very good and compact machines. Regarding the 5200, it is true that just about everything about this machine was wrong: its weight, its design, the built-in monitor, the speed (Powermac, but slower than most 68k Macs). The next point: OS 9 was an absolutely great OS and IMHO only OS 6 was better at its time. At least, unlike OS X, OS 9 is able to remember window sizes and positions. As for the "honorable mention" color classic, this still is a great machine. I once had one and have always regretted that I had sold it. It was completely silent and with a few modifications would be quite suitable for text processing today.

Moreover, given that the author of this article claims that Power PC (especially the B/W Macs) were a failure, I doubt whether he has ever owned a Mac at all. I bought a b/w Power PC Mac just when it came out, it absolutely rocked, and was usable for around 10 years. Generally speaking, the built quality of Power PC Macs was much better (except for the Performa 5200) than today's Macs. (To be fair, the b/w Mac keyboard really sucked.) In fact, the built quality of Macs has declined constantly since the Mac Plus (I have one standing on my shelf, it still boots without problems) and is worse than ever now with the exception of that of the overprized Mac Pro.

To cut a long story short, some of the items in the list are fairly incomprehensible and I suspect the author of the article has never owned or used them.

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Version-10-5-6-Leopard/dp/B000FK88JK

Amazon has a list of retailers who sell 10.5.6. I'm sure you can find other sources. One good place to start a search for older Mac stuff is http://lowendmac.com/

The cut-offs for G4 Macs are processor speed and RAM- 867mHz and 512mb to be precise. This would write-off anything below the fastest single-processor 2001 Quicksilver Power Mac, including its dual processor 800mHz sibling- the installer doesn't care that the machine is technically more powerful, it only goes on CPU speed. The RAM thing is easy enough to solve, but the CPU is a more expensive and frustrating issue, particularly if you're just scraping the minimum requirements.

There are, however, workarounds. I have the aforementioned dual-cpu G4, and found the 'easiest' way to do it was to tinker with the open firmware so that it reports the cpu speed to the installer as faster than it is. I can confirm that Leopard runs as well as Tiger did on that machine with 768mb of RAM. Alternatively you could install Leopard using a more powerful machine and swap the disks around when you're done, but who can be bothered with that? :)

The cut-offs for G4 Macs are processor speed and RAM- 867mHz and 512mb to be precise. This would write-off anything below the fastest single-processor 2001 Quicksilver Power Mac, including its dual processor 800mHz sibling- the installer doesn't care that the machine is technically more powerful, it only goes on CPU speed. The RAM thing is easy enough to solve, but the CPU is a more expensive and frustrating issue, particularly if you're just scraping the minimum requirements.

There are, however, workarounds. I have the aforementioned dual-cpu G4, and found the 'easiest' way to do it was to tinker with the open firmware so that it reports the cpu speed to the installer as faster than it is. I can confirm that Leopard runs as well as Tiger did on that machine with 768mb of RAM. Alternatively you could install Leopard using a more powerful machine and swap the disks around when you're done, but who can be bothered with that? :)

No.. they just created what runs on the them, that's all..
Meh.

Err, not entirely... OSX came primarily out of NeXTStep.

From the article you site explaining the development of NeXT and its origin in Mach: Carnegie Mellon managed to port BSD (a version of Unix developed at UC Berkeley in conjunction with Bell Labs in the 1970s) to Mach, where each part of the system functioned as a server. This structure lent itself well to an object oriented operating system, and Jobs was enthusiastic about the proposition.

Isn't BSD considered Open Source?

No.. they just created what runs on the them, that's all..
Meh.

Err, not entirely... OSX came primarily out of NeXTStep.

Yea, it is just ridiculous. Not to mention that the companies are often probably already using open source without realizing it. For example, a school district banned open-source software without realizing that Mac OS X includes Darwin which is open source:
http://lowendmac.com/hodges/06/1109.html

If I were you, I'd be looking for a way to hook up a flash card to the Performa. lowendmac seems to have the right ideas. Looking around, there appears to be at least one company selling those types of adapters--I got good hits on a search with Acard (though google wants to "correct" the search). This device from reactivedata may be what you are looking for. I don't know, hearing the drive grind away may be what you are missing, but this would make the computer work...maybe you could make a recording of old hard drives on CD and play it while you are at the computer?

Did they stop making the Norton Utilities for the Macintosh? IIRC it had an Undelete program at one time.

This user claims Norton Utilities for the Mac says "You idiot, this is a Macintosh, your file is f***ing gone!"

Maybe this can help review some Mac undelete programs.