25 years of Mac

The Macintosh computer is 25 years old, and in its honor I want to share my memories of the different Macs I’ve used.

Way back in the 1980s, I was in elementary school and my family’s computer was a Mac Plus. The Mac Plus was a hell of a machine for its day, though I didn’t know it at the time, since my main concern was playing very crude games, making birthday cards for people with a program called Print Shop, and word-processing in Microsoft Word while all of my friends were still using WordPerfect.

Approximately corresponding to my middle school years, we had an LC-II. When I looked it up today, I learned that the LCs were Apple’s low-end consumer Macs and that they were the exact same thing as the Performa line. The funny thing is that we had Performas in school and I hated them, though I never had any negative feelings about the LC at home. This was also the era when Apple had a whole confusing variety of lines like the Quadras, Performas and Centres (Centrises?), which I barely remember.

As I started high school, I got a reconditioned LC 475 for word processing. Around that time, we got an actual Mac clone. If memory serves me correctly, it was a Umax SuperMac, and it was very noisy. This was the computer I mainly used for going on AOL, reading and responding to emails, and participating in chat rooms. We of course had a 14.4 Kbs modem, though later we got a lightning fast 28.8 Kbs model to replace it. It was on this computer that I first surfed the web (and made my first web page).

When I went to college in 1999, it was with a new iMac (my brother had gotten an iMac a year earlier when they first shipped). I don’t remember all the specs, but I am positive it had a six gb hard drive and perhaps a 350 or 366 mHz processor. The iMac was a good computer for sure, but it didn’t have a CD-R drive or a DVD player, two essentials for the day. It also didn’t have enough RAM to run OS X when it came out in about 2001, which meant I spent 2002-2004 using a pre-modern operating system and still didn’t even have a way to watch a DVD.

Then in 2004, when I was preparing to move to Israel, I got a PowerBook. I’m still using it today, so I’m sure I can describe it accurately. 15″ screen, SuperDrive (CD-RW and DVD), 80 gig hard drive, 1 GB RAM, 1.25 mHz processor. Back in the day, this was a pretty serious computer. Today, it is not. Though I’ve managed to stay up to date in terms of operating systems, I will not be able to run the next version of OS X, Snow Leopard. My PowerBook is too slow to run the latest MS Office suite, let alone something like Photoshop or Aperture. I don’t have enough space on my hard drive to store my music collection or my photos, so I have to keep both my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on an external hard drive. Firefox usually takes several minutes to load. I commonly read articles and respond to emails on my iPhone instead of my computer because of the time it takes to load a web page or an email.

What will my next computer be? I’ve thought seriously about getting another iMac or perhaps a Mac Mini (or two) with the intention of using them for less than five years. I’ve also thought about a low-end laptop. But most likely I will end up getting a MacBook Pro 15″, basically the up-to-date version of my current PowerBook. Since I can’t afford it now, it will have to wait a while – probably at least until Snow Leopard, which is expected this year.

By the way, I also currently have a Mac Plus, just like the one my family had all those years ago; an iMac that’s one generation newer than the one I took to college; a third generation iPod with 20 gigs that I use as a handy portable hard drive; a new silver fifth generation iPod with 160 gigs; a 2G iPhone; an AirPort Express and an AirPort Extreme. That is a boat load of Apple paraphernalia.

I suppose the craziest thing about looking back upon 25 years of Mac history is the amazing extent to which Macs, and Apple products in general, are now everywhere. There was a time when I was pretty much the only Mac user I knew. Sure, a family down the street also had Macs (I think they had a Mac Classic when we had the Mac Plus), but I don’t remember knowing even one other Mac user when I was in high school. In college, I worked during my freshman year for a stock photography company that used Macs, and there was a girl on my floor who had a G3 tower – she was into art and design – but that’s pretty much it. Fast forward nine years, and suddenly everyone seems to have a Mac. Friends of mine who used to taunt me and tease me for having a Mac are calling me with questions about Mac software. My roommate has a Mac. A fellow dog-owner in my neighborhood got a Mac from her Australian cousin and I showed her how to use it. At my last job, my boss used a Mac at home.

It’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like Apple has decisively turned the corner from when the company had a 1-2% market share. Apple and Mac have firmly entered the public consciousness, even in a place like Israel, where the president’s son’s company owns the rights to deal Apples exclusively in Israel (note: most Israelis still have never used a Mac or even seen one in person, and at my previous job, my manager asked me: Is the company called Mac and the product Apple, or is it the other way around?).

Unfortunately, getting a lot of Macs into a lot of people’s hands means that quality has suffered. I’m referring specifically to hardware quality, and while I don’t have any real proof that this is so, my experience troubleshooting my friends’ problems and my own indicates that people who buy MacBooks and MacBook Pros simply have more hardware issues with them than the people who used to buy iBooks and PowerBooks. I hope Apple does not let QA slide any further than it has.

I don’t know what kind of computer I’m going to be using in 25 years. I could promise to stick with Mac forever and ever – but if Apple in the 2030s is like the IBM or Microsoft of decades past and present, I’ll probably be using something else. Of course, since we’re only six years away from cars that fly and hoverboards, microwaves that hydrate food and enlarge it to edible size, and engines powered on common garbage, who’s to say the computers of tomorrow won’t be implanted in our brains or our fingertips? I can’t wait…