Happy Anniversay iMac
Once upon a time I had a Geocities website. Go ahead and laugh. I’ll wait… seriously I’m patient… alright already shut up! What with Macworld doing a nice little write-up on the iMac’s introduction ten years ago today and even going so far as to post their original reaction. I was put in a nostalgic mood and went googling for the old site.
I had a reaction too. Oddly enough I posted it to the ol’ Geocities site. I think I actually had some interesting stuff to say as a senior in high school, but I may be flattering myself. My spelling and grammar are just as bad as they were then only now I have auto-magical spellcheck.
I made the poor decision once upon a time to use frames in the Geocities site so I’ve copied and pasted the article so you don’t have to fish for it or get lost in Geocities hell.
Warning: This seems to cast a negative light on the iMac. If you have one of those Bondi Blue Beauties, your awsome. You have the best consumer computer on the market today. My deal is not that the iMac is bad or Apple screwed up. Merly a thought that Apple can, and shouldn’t hesitate, to do even better.
Apple recently did a wonderful thing. They released their best consumer oriented machine in years. The only problem, it doesn’t deal with all their consumers. As stated above I don’t doubt the iMac’s greatness. I know several friends and a few coworkers who own them and love them. The adfirm I interned at this summer has deployed about 20 so far. They’ve kept up right alongside G3 300 workstations.Artistic types love ‘em! Inside and out. My problem is that I’m not your average creative mac user. I’m the geek kid whose average mac user mom bought a Mac IIsi to run her home landscape design buisness. I’ve been hooked on Macs since we got a classic for home use in ’91. I’m using a Peforma 6290 to write and upload this article.
11/98 Where is myMac?
Those of you reading this article, who share my pasion for the hardware side of the machine, know that the IIsi my mom bought was (and is) a great Mac. The si was less of a wallet buster than the IIfx, but not a featureless workhorse like the IIci. The Classic was less of a great machine, but still a good Mac. I have never seen a well designed Performa. The 5200 series macs at my school, and the 6290 I own, are the worst designed Macs I’ve ever used. That still makes them better than any Widows machine I’ve ever used, but come on Apple you can do better.
Well Apple has repented for the Performa. The iMac more than makes up for the pitiful consumer Macs of late. It addresses the needs of the average Mac user. But what about the children of these users? The friends of these users? The people who asked their friends in the publishing industry what the best machine out there was? There is a whole population of Mac users out there who are luckier than average computer geeks. Instead of being hipped into going the frustrating rode of the PC geek, we get the joy of being the Mac geeks. The people who see a better machine and use it. Not for their livelihoods (at least not at first), but simply because they’ve found a better machine. These users (many still in highschool) are children of the revelution. We don’t have the same ideals as are parents had when they created the mac communtity, but we still love what they’ve created and want to be a part of it. We are ready to begin the new revolution in personal computing, and it’s us that Apple has left in the cold. We are the users that drool over Apple’s new Pro lines. We dream of owning our own PowerBook G3s, not so we can creat Quark layouts, or photoshop tiffs, on the road. We want a great machine for mobile browsing, gaming, paper writing. We want a great computer to go with us anywhere. We want a demon on our desks and we want it for under a thousand bucks!
(That would be what’s known as:the rub .)
I’d love to own a Powermac G3 300, but I can’t afford it. If I scrimp I can afford an iMac, but next fall, when I go to college, and I see the new G3 400s and G4 500s and my iMac is still poking along at 233mhz, I’ll just go nuts. I’ll sell my iMac for $500 and buy the machine that was meant for me. (Apple has to release it by then!) Meanwhile I’m out $800 I don’t have. Apple has always promised that great Mac for me just around the corner, and they’ve released it too! For $5000 I could have had a PowerMac 9600 when it was the fasted workstation not running unix. I could easly afford a stripped down 9600 now, but why bother. It can’t even outrace the iMac, nevermind that in a year it’ll be unable to run the latest greatest version of the Mac OS.
This is important stuff to Mac geeks. Average users, like my mom, will be happy with there first and second gen Macs until they refuse to ever boot again. My mom still uses System 7.01. I can’t do that–except for my Classic but that’s like that favorite childhood toy you wouldn’t give up till you were twenty–I need my speed demon.
Steve this article is for you. Don’t just make the next iMac faster for newbies going online. Make the next iMac myMac; a machine I can finaly dig into. If it’s not the fastet, I want to make it the fastet myself, without voiding the warenty, or loosing OS X support. Even if you don’t, I will not become a windoze user, but I will not join the new gaurd until Apple makes a Mac that’s ready for the third computing revolution to begin.
Apple computing began the personal computer market in the late 70′s with the Apple II. They then revolutionized the market in the 80′s with the Macintosh. We at Hi! are now waiting, impatiently, for them to, once again, show the personal computing industry how it’s done.
Those of you who clicked through may have noticed that I used to do all my writing in the recently deceased GoLive Cyberstudio back before Adobe picked up the company.
Apple certainly did do better with future iMacs. The current crop are fabulous home and office computers. What’s funny is that they still aren’t the perfect Mac for me. That was the 12″ Powerbook G4.
Note to self: let it go.
I’ve discovered that the mobile macs are where it’s at. Work provides with me a great MacBook Pro and while it’s too heavy by about a pound I’m hopeful that by the next time I need a new machine, either the MacBook will have slimmed down, or the MacBook Air will have hit specs that do what I need. Oddly, I need a lot less than what I thought I needed from a computer when I was 17 years old. Of course the MBP at work and the G4 Powerbook at home both smoke the crap out of that old Performa…