Wild Apples: The 12 weirdest and rarest Macs ever made | Hacker News Reader

Wild Apples: The 12 weirdest and rarest Macs ever made

arstechnica.com

25 pointsmariuz10 comments

I’m stunned that this list overlooks the amazing PowerBook Duo and it’s Duo Dock, which mechanically injected and ejected the Duo like a VHS tape.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Duo_Dock

I'm surprised the Portable is counted as "rare", it's much cheaper and easier to get than most of those (even with recently rising prices). That and I own far too many Macintosh Portables...

I think they were dipping a little deep in the pool for "rare" machines toward the end. I'm literally writing this comment on a trashcan Mac that I paid $400 for less than a year ago.

One interesting fact regarding that price though is that until Apple officially stopped supporting it with new OSX releases, you'd probably have had to have paid at least $1000-1500 for the same machine. It's a solid machine (I got mine with 8 cores and 64GB ram, and it comes standard with dual GPUs).

These machines even have a pretty decent following still. See, for instance, https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2019/05/07/the-definitive-ma...

>One interesting fact regarding that price though is that until Apple officially stopped supporting it with new OSX releases, you'd probably have had to have paid at least $1000-1500 for the same machine.

This is a great point and kinda stings given my situation... I've got a 5 year old iMac that is still a beast by its specs, but is ancient by Mac standards. No OS updates anymore, so functionally obsolete for anyone who wants to use it as a Mac. Wondering if I should install linux and give it a second life.

In case it wasn't entirely obvious, that's what I'm doing with my trashcan Mac. The choices at this point are basically to install Ventura via an unsupported hack[0] or Linux. I chose Linux, because when the inevitable problems arise, I'd rather have the volume of resources for troubleshooting Linux s to able to me rather than just forums dedicated to said unsupported hack.

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[0]: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/SONOMA-DR...

My nomination for weirdest: The Power Macintosh 6100. <https://blog.pizzabox.computer/img/powermac6100/front.jpeg>

See that button below the floppy drive? It's not an eject button. One guess on what people used to PCs routinely did.

The JLPGA PowerBook 170 would be a sweet random find at some thrift store or estate sale. I could imagine it'd be overlooked easily by people who don't know what it is. Would it be worth buying? Nobody knows.

Interesting, only a 10-year gap between the 68k portable Mac and the 68k TI-89

I guess it shows one's age, when I remeber to see magazine ads and reviews to most of those models.

I clicked hoping to read about feral McIntosh apple cultivars.

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