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Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

I never wanted or bought one, but the original iMac was pretty interesting in hindsight.

- The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.

- The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get in "cheap" molded plastic.

- The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.

- The stacking of the internal components and the location of the vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated airflow to cool the CPU.

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The iMac was not particularly underpowered. Could it have used more RAM or hard drive? Sure. But the CPU, as others here have said, was pretty solid. It could run top of the line games at the time like Quake 3.

And one thing I don’t read much about for these original iMacs is how nice the screen was. It was a CRT, but it had a nice anti-glare coating and could have the resolution increased to 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.

So the feature set was very nice… ignoring the hockey puck mouse!

It was underpowered for its price compared to windows machines.

The fact that it could run Quake3 is kind of the point as it didn’t need “all that power.”

The complaint I had was that for the price I could get a more powerful wintel box.

Comically this is no longer true with mac laptops and it’s kind of weird to see it flipped where MacBooks have powerful processors and decent levels of ram (although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram rather than saving the $9 for 16 or 32).

Is that true though? Could you get a Wintel machine with better hardware including the little things like USB, FireWire and Ethernet and even WiFi? 15 inch screen capable of 1024x768?

In the iMac form factor? Probably not.

Of course. You had to wait a year for the eMachines clone. But remember the iMac didn't have FireWire or Wifi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines_eOne

And Compaq had the all-in-one form factor back in 1995

https://twitter.com/InsaneWardy/status/841219290539970560

the iMac did have wifi and Firewire a year later, not at launch.

Wifi was kind of useless until 802.11b was agreed. I used one of the early Cisco(?) wireless adaptors circa 1997 and 1998 and…it was mostly unpleasant except for the fact that it was wireless (I don't know if it was 802.11 or a predecessor protocol).

I would like a Unix-based laptop. So I won’t consider a windows or chromeos laptop, but would a Linux.

It’s not so much how bad the windows os (I have to admin my kids gaming pc) but it’s inability to run many dev packages that are first or only on Unix. It’s possible to run WSL or Cygwin or other Unix interfaces and get stuff working. But it’s extra steps and I want to simplify.

Wrong thread? This is about the 1998 iMac.

As mentioned elsewhere, you couldn't get WiFi on basically anything, since 802.11b wasn't really available yet. I would strongly argue Apple was the leading force in popularizing wireless internet on laptops and desktops, and they didn't have it on the iMac because their AirPort 802.11b product wouldn't be available to anyone for another year.

Instead, it came out the following year with the introduction of the iBook. [1]

FireWire did not exist on the iMac right away though... but it also was not at all common on Wintel machines at the time.

10/100 Base-T Ethernet, something standard on even the original iMac [2], was also not commonplace on Wintel machines. Packing a 56k modem in from the start was also a nice move on Apple's part to ensure you had the chance to get the fastest internet possible over a standard landline, which is how the majority of internet users accessed the internet at the time.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3

The only time I saw Firewire on a PC it was on a Sony VAIO, which makes sense as their cameras had it. Even then I think the same machine had ethernet from a PCMCIA card with a dongle... later we had some Xircom (spelling?) PCMCIA cards that could take up two slots and deliver a full size ethernet jack without a dongle.

> although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram

I think it's part of the product line differentiation. I do all my development on a macbook air (well, some of the compilation is done on a remote machine, fr code that will run there). It's great: conveniently very light and with plenty of power.

Sure, some people need a ton of VMs, but I don't. But Apple points out that if you're a "professional" you ought to be using a "Pro" machine and the RAM is one way they do it.

They aren't really. There are faster Intel and Ryzen CPUs for far less than what Apple asks for an M2 Max. You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100, the same price as a 13" M2 MBA with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. The i9 13900H will outperform the M2 Max too. Really the only place the Mac wins is efficiency and against Intel rivals GPU performance. And if you don't care as much about having as nice a screen you can usually find something with a better discrete GPU at the same price.

> You can get an Asus Vivobook S with an Intel i9 13900H, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, HiDPI 15" OLED screen for $1100

Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.

And there are very few laptops that can compete on metrics like fan noise and ability to run at full performance unplugged without nuking the battery.

It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.

It really depends on the workload. I was working Sysops for a Mac-based shop during the Apple Silicon announcement, and we had a lot of broken Docker containers on ARM. When I left, your options as a Mac dev was:

- Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production

- Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system

Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.

That’s just the natural outcome of needing to emulate anything. x86 machines running any OS have similar issues emulating other architectures — see how much muscle it takes to competently emulate the now-ancient Wii U for example. It just so happens that emulation of other platforms on x86 isn’t necessary all that frequently. There’s other issues with Docker on macOS, but those can be worked around (see OrbStack for some such improvements).

This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.

To be fair, I find using docker on anything but Linux to be an awful experience lol

If I don’t care about a laptop with a better screen, battery life, not running so hot that it ensures that there will never be in little Scarfaces if I put in on my lap and it sounding like a 747 when I open three Chrome tabs…an x86 laptop is fine?

You can get an Asus...

If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there.

That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!

It has a 120Hz 2880x1620 15" OLED screen. That's 220 PPI. If that's "fuzzy" then the $200 more expensive 15" MacBook Air is "fuzzy" too with worse blacks and no per-pixel backlight and only 60Hz refresh rate. Unless 4 PPI is the difference between fuzzy and not fuzzy.

And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?

I was still using the keyboard from an iMac G3 up until 2019. It felt fun to type on, and had a passthrough USB which was very convenient for low-power devices.

The built-in hub was one of the best features of Apple boards for a long, long time. It started with ADB ports on on late 80s/early 90s boards and extends all the way into the 2010s when the wired aluminum board finally dropped the USB ports its predecessors carried.

It’s such an obvious little quality of life improvement, and yet the only other board I’ve come across with the feature is the HHKB Pro 2 (Pro 3 drops the hub) and some variants of Das Keyboards.

I started with an apple keyboard. I bought a Das in the early 2010s. When the das quickly ran into issues, I got an HHKB pro 2, which I’ve taken in my bag every day to every job I’ve had and I use at home[0]. Your comment just made me realize that USB hubs aren’t on every keyboard!

[0] the swappable USB cable is so handy! Just leave one plugged into each machine.

Strong agree on removal cable, to the point that I wonder why any desk peripherals nicer than a $10 K120 have permanently attached cables.

The original iMac came a perch slot that could beused for internal expansion. I installed a SCSI card and hung all my SCSI devices off it.

That was the secret expansion port that some third-parties made accessories for anyway. I recall it was gone by the Rev-B model.

Yes, I still have it with a CD-RW, DVD-RAM, Scanner, APEX 4.6 Optical Drive.

I haven't booted since maybe 2005 and I'm starting to wonder if there is battery on the motherboard I should remove.

The late 90s Sun Sparcstation machines at my uni lab also had keyboards with mouse passthru connectors.

It did run Quake III rather slowly ( < 20 fps in a timedemo) compared to PC based competition.

https://books.google.com/books?id=2Zt0sZTS_0IC&lpg=PP1&dq=oc...

This was a problem on most Macs of the era. The ATi Rage chips used in most Macs of the time was not powerful enough for Quake III. They were ok for less intense games but Q3 was pushing the envelope.

I ran Quake III Arena on my Bondi Blue iMac B but had to run it at a very low resolution to get it to be playable. Unreal Tournament wasn't bad.

> ignoring the hockey puck mouse!

The mouse was the first laser mouse I ever used and I believe it connected with USB, which was novel at the time. It was probably the most impressive thing about the iMac for me personally.

The original hockey puck mouse had a ball (I had to Google it to confirm my memory, since otherwise it's just your memory against mine!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse

I remember the later G3 education models my school had having a "laser" (I assume LED?) mouse.

Likely the iMac went the same way.

Ok, so my memory is a little foggy. Looks like the laser one didn't come out until 2000, but the hockey puck was USB at least!

I remember the hockey puck mouse had a ball because it was a pretty fantastic ball: it was dual toned, one hemisphere white, the other Bondi blue. As you rolled the mouse, you'd see the ball turn and have a neat color display through the translucent plastic of the hockey puck mouse.

That was my favorite part of the hockey puck mouse - it was one of those little moments of "surprise and delight" from Apple. And alas, I can't find a good video of it online.

> 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.

I double-take at statements like this. I forget how much variation in experience there was. But, being in the SF Bay Area, we were able to read Computer Shopper etc. and carpool to the South Bay to get whatever we wanted. I recall trips to will-call doors at warehouses, as well as private sellers in small apartments. I guess I was spoiled for choice.

I distinctly remember having a 15" monitor that did 1024x768 around 1992, and working out the X modelines to use it with Slackware by 1994. I went higher from there as I got my hands on bigger 17" or 21" monitors. I'm pretty sure my 21" Nanao was usually running at 1600x1200 a couple years later. I always felt that image quality and keyboards were worth investing in, since I would spend so much time exposed to them.

As far as I recall, we often had to trade off lower color depth for higher resolutions, since framebuffer VRAM was usually limited. A lot of time was spent in 8-bit psuedo color palette modes with XFree86 before eventually using 15/16 bit "true color" modes. I don't think 24-bit made much sense until later with 3D accelerators that had more VRAM.

Oh it was definitely possible to find monitors like that, but my experience of using Macs in my school's computer lab and having a Performa at home, 800x600 was a big deal, and 640x480 was still the standard well into the 90s.

And wow, "true color" modes - now I remember having to make that choice, too! 8-bit with higher res, or 16-bit (I think it was described as "thousands of colors" at the time... and it looks like there was some scandal around the phrase "millions of colors" that Apple used: https://lowendmac.com/2018/millions-of-colors-vs-thousands-w...

The screen was OK but a premium monitor at the time would have been an aperture grille Trinitron (or similar implementation).

The iMac had a fairly dim shadow mask display that shipped with most budget computers of the era. They were also one of the more common components to prematurely fail in iMacs.

> The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.

...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3, and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks it beat whatever Pentium II was current then.

That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's highest end tower".

The G3 was more powerful per cycle than a Pentium II.

Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.

But intel (and AMD) scaled up MHz/GHz a lot further. Motorola was stuck at 500MHz as the Athlon and PIII were already racing to 1GHz.

The G4 at 800 MHZ was still much more powerful than a Pentium III, or at least on par.

"much more powerful" is not anything like "on par". So what if that beautiful and expensive chunk of metal and plastic was slower in games and such?

I had a dual-866MHz G4 (MDD) and in most things my Tualatin P3-1200 at the time absolutely beat it. But the G4 was worth using until it literally caught fire just after the warranty ended.

Motorola?

Motorola has a long history of making processors, such as the 68000-series. They powered Macs (and Amiga)

From Wikipedia:

> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)

Supplier of the CPUs we're talking about (alongside IBM).

Motorola was one of the companies behind the PowerPC, but those found in the iMac was made by IBM.

No one saying it competed with high-end machines of the day. But it was quite powerful compared to PCs targeting a home audience.

The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.

Barely powerful in early mid-90's. From 1996 an the multimedia PC and a bit later witht the Pentium MMX, the power gap from a 286 based DOS PC from 1991 was something else.

It's completely wrong that the hardware was underpowered.

The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.

It didn't have a SIMD unit. Although x86 only had MMX at the time, which wasn't much better.

Also MMX was basically the first mainstream use of SIMD so adoption was glacially slow since you had not only limited compiler support but also no libraries and little programmer familiarity with the style. That took a long time for knowledge and tools to improve, especially in the nascent internet era where people couldn’t just look things up on a comprehensive reference site or get help on GitHub.

I'd say there's still limited compiler support for MMX. Because of the strange way you have to use it (it trashes the floating point registers until the next `emms`) compilers won't use it even if it's beneficial, so no autovectorization.

A lot of the performance complaints came from software that was built for the 68k and ran under emulation. As software built for PPC came out, that complaint went away.

What is funny is that macOS 9 was so snappy on the GUI side but you had to start employing RAM disks and given different names to the same application to run them simultaneously. It could really scoot but occasionally a dialog box might bring everything to a halt until hitting OK or Cancel.

The CMD640 IDE chipset used was utter trash and most of the bottleneck. It wasn't until the G4 series that apple stopped slapping it in everything. A system with the CMD640 only used for cdrom, and a bootable SCSI PCI card performed a lot better.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/28/silly-rabbit-q...

It was a bit of a sore spot For a while there.

Was the performance true on Apple marketing benchmarks or in actual use?

Apple has a looooong history of cherrpicking benchmarks, especially when their arch wasn't as fast as competing Intels.

Actual use. You’re probably thinking of the G5/PPC970, which was on introduction more of a case of “the fastest, provided absolutely the only thing you care about is vector operations”.

I'm mostly asking because as much as I remember the G3s weren't really noticably faster than my (then) Windows machines... but memory can mislead.

It may also have changed while you owned one: the stuff which was optimized native code ran quite well but there were also plenty of rushed ports or things running under Rosetta. I don’t think it was Photoshop but I remember some of the designers I knew commenting that one app shipping a true optimized port was like getting a new computer.

Two big things that affected the cross platform experience and perception of speed at the time were the twin pillars of the late 90s web, Internet Explorer and Flash, both of which had superior optimization for Windows and x86.

The introduction of Safari is an underrated milestone in changing that, and I would suggest the Mac didn’t really match the Windows browsing experience inclusive of Flash until the introduction of Intel Macs.

As someone that bought a 603e based all in one around that time, I remember the introduction of the G3 being almost comparable to the intel->apple silicon transition.

That was definitely my impression one generation later when they released the G4. To this day I still miss that chassis design.

Sometimes I wonder how different the world would look today if Apple had become large enough to justify the investment the G5 required and macs were running on those.

I suspect even if the Intel transition hadn't happened, assuming the Mac survived it probably still would have been destined for Apple Silicon once the ARM platform became powerful enough.

The G3 was a beast compared to the 603. IIRC it was about 30% faster clock for clock. By going with a G3 in the iMac seriously beefed up the capabilities of their consumer machines. The iMac was more than twice as fast as the similarly priced Performas sold the day before the iMac's introduction. It was even more powerful than even higher end Performas approaching twice the price of the iMac.

One of the more tragic examples, from the perspective of laptop buyers, was the WallStreet PowerBooks. They started at $2300 and was easily 30% faster than the high end 3400s that were $4-5k. The original G3 PowerBook (Kanga) was over $5k. It was a huge boost in power for half the price and honestly much better industrial design. The 3400 was a chonky boi.

No it is not true. Especially relative to Macs. The original iMac also discontinued serial and SCSI with the use USB.

>...is that actually true?

It is not.

Stock iMac had 64Mb RAM, 5400 RPM based hard disk, and a poor 2D ATI based video card. And Mac OS 8.1. I actually purchased it (I was young and naive), and the Mac version of Unreal (game) to network play against my homegrow PC (Pentium 200, with Voodoo Rush video card), and the game performance was night and day (in favour of Wintel). MacOS 8.1 was so bad, I ended up installing YellowDog Linux on it, collected dust, then eventually gave it away.

I think mostly people think of "games" when they think of performance.

> The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.

Chic. Not geek.

The marketing claim during the introduction couldn’t have been more fitting and for everything that followed after coming out of apple.

I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs because 'it's a UNIX system', and for a while their hardware was relatively consumer-friendly (battery, RAM and disk were user-replacable/upgradable on my 2009 MacBook).

> I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs because 'it's a UNIX system'

Yes to this!

I was in academia when I switched from Windows to Mac, and UNIX was a big factor.

Incidentally, my first Mac was an iMac G4.

Paradoxically I did the opposite move at the time, I was a teenager who grew up with MacOS and knew it inside out. All my knowledge was basically voided with MacOS X, so if I had to start from scratch anyway, I might as well switch to Windows where I don't need to check the box to know if a game or hardware will be compatible.

I kind of wonder if this whole 'Macs and Unix' are some post-purchase rationalization. This makes more sense than it seems, Apple is best in class when it comes to hypnosis.

Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since they have us by the balls.

Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be until the end of the semi-replaceable era.

Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.

Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old computers can do that)

The out of the box ssh experience on Linux is far superior to windows, ssh mounting of disks, easy scp and rsync access without jumping through hoops. To me, thinking of doing my job from a windows box sounds painful.

I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta? Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed, supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the appeal.

This is why in hindsight it was a bad idea for Microsoft to never been serious about POSIX subsystem on the Windows NT linage.

That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.

OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like experience.

Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.

For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years, it only brings the convinience of one product less to care about.

Speaking for myself, I went to CompUSA to see what they had that I could use to build my next home Linux box. I didn’t expect to buy anything, just was window shopping.

I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.

As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX. Terminal and everything.

So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I’ve never looked back.

Not at all, back when I was at CERN that was exactly the reason many researchers were going for OS X, as the Solaris workstations were being decommissioned, there was a pile of them stacked at my office.

The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.

I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I left in 2004.

In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was OS X.

People wanted all the CLI goodness of unix (linux) with a gui that functioned. Windows had cygwin, but was otherwise anemic at the CLI. I had a solaris and later a linux desktop next to my Windows desktop, but linux on laptops was a huge PITA. I got a G4 Powerbook and had the best of both worlds, able to run something like Lightroom, and have all the familiar unix tools.

The G4 Powerbook was my first exposure to Apple as well. Just having an ssh client on the command line was very nice.

The only time I see people using windows for dev work is when they are a .net shop or they have no choice.

I switched from Linux to macOS a decade ago, and the underlying UNIX-like system meant that I could continue to use all the same development and shell tools I've used my whole career, and most of the time I don't even notice I'm on macOS.

I also prototype natively and locally even though I eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche languages all work perfectly fine.

The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is still a lot of open source software that is not working well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and libraries.

It was approachable Unix.

If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web development or other stuff you had a supported consumer platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.

That’s not it. The first place I saw large Mac adoption was all the long time Linux and Unix nerds in my CS dept. Suddenly there were heaps of G4 MacBooks all over CS. I got one based off the recommendation of a friend who was a FreeBSD user.

Same thing! All of my professors were using Sun Ultra 10s in 2000. OSX was the logical next step vs futzing with Linux GUIs etc for many.

It was definitely a huge selling point for anyone doing web development. Suddenly you had a consumer machine that was close to what was running in production.

You have to remember - there was no docker back in the day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche group of hard core people.

I think I spent more days fighting with Linux power management than actually using my laptop back then. My first Macbook was a dream.

It definitely was not post hoc rationalization. Anyone doing Unix or open source development - not as dominant then but still big - had been faced with paying huge sums for a proprietary box with increasingly uncompetitive hardware or dealing with desktop Linux’s driver and stability challenges (I did that for years).

When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office, Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because you didn’t have to disable power saving to avoid kernel panics. That wasn’t perfect, of course, but a ton of early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on Linux or Solaris.

I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed that in addition to traditional markets like design, I was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It’s hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty speculative since their finances were still lean in the pre-iPod era (if I’d been willing to make a bigger gamble I’d probably be writing this from a yacht).

It was depressing reading Horace Dediu’s analysis of Apple’s accounting practices in the year or two after the iPhone’s release, knowing that Apple stock was significantly undervalued, and not having the means to take advantage of it.

I put in one market order on 9/10. It wasn’t processed until after the market reopened but went in at like $17/share. I remember thinking I should buy more but 9/11 and the dotcom crater made me decide to save my cash.

Oh man, so much this. I made a college roommate so much money by telling him to put all the money his parents gave him in Apple stock after the iPhone was released. He didn’t agree (he was also a massive anti-Apple pro PC guy…he owned a Zune) until I explained Apple’s subscription accounting and what it actually meant.

I still don’t understand why investors didn’t understand Apple’s subscription accounting and how it meant that their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th their actual iPhone profits.

I don’t think “macs are unix” applied to iMacs since they didn’t run osx for the years where they mattered.

But I really only use Macs because it’s the easiest unix machine for me to use. I don’t know of another laptop where everything works and I also natively have a shell and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but they are all one more step and I don’t care enough to bother.

If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and packaging manager I never had to think about that cost the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.

With Apple, you get the marriage of great hardware with (what I consider) an okay operating system. I VASTLY prefer Linux and use it daily. Since it's Arch, and since I'm currently using Hyprland as my desktop, I sincerely doubt that would meet your criteria. Battery life is nowhere near what a current Apple product can achieve.

I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.

Why does being unix based matter?

If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.

https://infinigeek.com/assets/apple_unix_ad-s.jpg

Boy do I miss this era of computing. From the advertisements to the competition to the innovation that was happening at the time. It all felt so exciting.

There are a ton of dev tools that are Linux/Mac only.

MS didn’t rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for the love of open source. They did it because most dev work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available on Windows many years after they were available on Linux/MacOS.

Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many years you couldn’t use it if you were on Windows.

Well, as a lifelong unix sysadmin, it matters, but I'm not sure how much it matters for a typical developer.

Mac was a lot less painful for installing open source software than Windows was at the time (and still is in some ways). A compatible tool chain makes porting Linux software much easier. Installing is also easier when you’ve got Bash and a file system that resembles Linux.

And having a Unix shell out of the box was/is easier than dealing with Cygwin and its alternatives.

Windows is better these days because the cloud dragged Microsoft into doing something about its shell experience. But even now Windows versions of things like Curl are half-assed versions.

The iMac came out in 1997. OS X came out in 2001 and wasn’t usable into 2002-2003.

You should repost this comment at top level. It's an important point, not a nitpick.

Yes, but GGP specifically mentioned "everything that followed after coming out of apple [sic]", which I took to mean "all following machines up to the current day."

There was Mac OS X server 1.2 which was a NeXT foundation with macintosh system 9 gui.

The primary reason macs are popular for development is that they’re Unix based.

Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs and doesn’t on Windows (or didn’t initially at least…heck it wasn’t even available on Windows for many years until MS itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).

NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was available on Linux and Mac from the outset.

> Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs

It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).

Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's why I switched to macs... from linux.

It's still not accepted, by the way. If you meet someone and they don't start looking around the room for an escape route when they find out you are a "computer person" then they are probably a computer person too.

The money part of tech is accepted. If you have enough of that, people will at least be courteous to your face, even if you're the stereotypical computer person.

> The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person"

A huge part of the mac user base at that time were writers/editorial staff and graphic designers. I don't know if we lump them in the "computer person" crowd as they basically spend their day in front of a computer, but yes, to them the colors were really well received, as a salvation from the beige world they had to deal with.

The same way people covered their macbooks in stickers and skins to get away from the uniform metallic gray canvas.

I look at all the rainbow RGB blinkenlight cases of your average PC gaming setup and conclude that they too tend to enjoy colourful computer.

– "We're not so different you and I"

The RGB features on PCs are glued on and honestly rather ridiculous.

There's a difference between glued-on extras - which are more like car customisation - and stylish integrated design.

A friend of mine used to joke about design-for-men being anything that was black and ribbed - which most PC cases are. If you add RGB to something black and ribbed, it's still black and ribbed - but now it has RGB stuck on it.

The curves, colour wraparound, and white translucent plastic of the iMac were the opposite of that. Everything was integrated into a whole - which was actually a nice metaphor for where Apple were trying to go in general.

I think at no time did we have as much choice as now for case styles. Classic and stylish wooden cases, colorful cubes, lab like half transparent white boxes, trapezoidal snow themed open cases [0], basically everything under the sun in a tower format.

Ironically, except for macs. Macs only come in solid metalic colors, at best.

[0] https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555409345.html

That’s a relatively new thing, and probably actually influenced by the old iMacs, by way of Alienware.

The bright colours and curvy design were absolutely critical to the iMac.

PCs and older Macs were boring, and so were the people who used them and talked about them.

So what if it had 253 Megasnerds and an extra fast blibbyblop? It was boring and beige. No one cared.

The iMac was exciting and fun, and so was anyone who bought one and used one.

You could get a row of them in different colours for your design office, and they'd look stunning. Clients would walk in and literally say "Wow!"

The magic worked in any SME office that wasn't trying to look boringly corporate - which turned out to be a lot of offices.

Absolute marketing masterpiece to make the design a marketing statement - not just for Apple itself, but for any creative or service provider who bought one.

Let's not ignore the stoner college kid demographic.

You're sitting smoking up in a tiny dorm and the most dominant item almost certainly was your computer. Having it be Bondi Blue colored with beautiful curves made that experience much nicer.

I think the shock to the industry was that the outside, not the inside, is what made this computer successful.

People forget how it launched a complete craze of transparent plastics. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, disk drives[1], printers... EVERYTHING became colorful and transparent.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/256182420094

Underpowered for what? As a personal computer for home use and as an Internet device?

Not that I can remember.

> Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.

One cool thing about the appliance computing revolution (phones and vg consoles) is that now most people don't have computers again and "being a computer person" is a thing again.

Yeah, the "computers for non-computer persons" evolved from iMac to iPhone to iPad (plus the Android variants). But the risk is that being a "real computer person" with a real computer might become as outlandish as being a "real photographer" with a real camera has already become.

It never evolved to iPads or tablets. Phones are the only computing device for most people.

True, unless you consider watching... uh, ASMR videos... as "computing". "I was meditating!"

Apple make more money selling iPads than HP and Dell make on PCs combined [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/07/19/apple...

That just shows that both tablets and desktops are a tiny market.

I'll happily take the tiny market that is $26 billion a year [1].

https://mspoweruser.com/ipad-statistics/

This is already the case. In 2019, I was startled to find that some incoming software engineers at my work didn't own a desktop or laptop... they just expected they'd use whatever computer their work provided.

Do you mean for work use, or for all their computing needs? I’ve never used a personal computer for work.

Everything that wasn’t doable on their smartphone. They would use their work computer for personal things because they just didn’t have a “personal” computer other than a phone. Hence my startlement.

Yeah, I'm seeing this with new hires as well.

Several of them don't own computers and rely entirely on smartphones for their computing needs.

It's frankly a worrying trend. Smartphones are consumer devices that do not allow the kind of automation, tinkering, scripting, and ownership that computers do.

On the flip side it means that I will be more competitive in the job market as I grow older than I was expecting.

I’ve always been a computer person and I loved mines, especially the graphite one. One of the best looking machines ever.

The G3 was one heck of a CPU.

The only thing these machines suffered from was USB 1.1. ZIP drives, CD burners and scanners were all much faster in their SCSI versions. You could see USB was clearly the future, but not an immediate one.

The iMac was most definitely not fanless. I wouldn’t even describe it as particularly quiet.

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