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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder. What would it take for Mac the tech to have this sort of feel/appeal again?

Would a full wintel+nvidia gpu daughterboard move any needles? Or something oddball and hardware like the lamp imac, idk.

Basically, computing nowadays feels very well baked and staid at times. Stuff like a unixy subsystem feels experimental in ways computing hasn't in decades.

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> Makes me wonder. What would it take for Mac the tech to have this sort of feel/appeal again?

We tend to forget that, but Macs are the last standing members of the Unix workstation family, and quite good ones at that.

This! I've probably said it here before, but Apple won the Unix workstation wars in the most awesome way possible. You can now buy an insanely powerful RISC Unix workstation at the mall! How awesome is that?

NeXT acquiring Apple for less than one Steve Jobs (receiving about $400 million as change) was nothing short of brilliant. They got their great OS, attached it to their own bespoke hardware, focused the product line, and now they pretty much rule the world.

I don't think the last decade has been completely uninteresting.

ARM Macs with unified memory, and on the software side WSL on Windows (maybe even Proton, although Wine has been a thing for more than two decades now) felt experimental enough for a while.

Sure, nothing as crazy as running Unix on an Apple ][ (http://web.archive.org/web/20230122214955/http://www.gno.org...)

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