The Macintosh turns 25 today.
How’s the old machine doing after all this time? Mac sales increased year-over-year in 2008, when the industry as a whole suffered some worrisome shrinkage. That’s especially impressive when you stop and consider that Apple refuses to compete in the “value” (ie, plastic craptastic) segment of the market.
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Wrote my thesis on one of those 20 years ago. 20! years! ago!
The amazing this was you had a word processor you could just USE without having to learn how. AND you could draw diagrams, write equations and put them into the document.
Its amazing how far we haven’t come since then.
I bought one of the new MacBook Pros a month ago, and this is hands down the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
The keyboard has ruined me for all other keyboards.
John –
My first Mac was the first Intel-based iMac in early ’06. Although it’s almost three years old, it’s still a great machine.
In my PC days, I’d usually get the New Computer Itch after two years. By that point, hardware advances and Windows patches (and, usually, shoddy manufacturing) would conspire to make my machine feel slow and old. After about 30 months, the urge to scratch that itch would become unbearable, and I’d buy a new computer.
Keep in mind, I was usually buying top-specced machines. Maxed-out CPUs, speedy memory, ginormous hard drives, the works. I was spending three grand or more every thirty months or so — NOT including midlife upgrades like new graphics cards.
My iMac still zips along just fine. The only time it shows its age is when I’m ripping DVDs — that 2ghz Core Duo takes a while. Oh, and it’s getting time to replace that once-voluminous 250GB hard drive with something terabytish. Otherwise, after 33 months, I’m still happy with my $2,200 iMac. If I replace it before it’s four (or maybe even five!) years old, it will only be because the siren song of running a 30″ monitor has finally driven me into the arms of a Mac Pro.
With Mac, I can go longer on a middling-range computer than I ever last with a top-of-the-line Windows box. And check eBay — you can still get some pretty serious coin selling three or four year old used Macs. You can barely *give* away a Windows machine that old.
Yet people will tell you that Macs are “too expensive.”
Steve,
You can drive a 23″ external monitor (non-mirrored, no less) with your first-gen Intel iMac.
Yes, the ROI with Macs so blows away anything you get with a mainstream Windows box, you would think that people arguing for the “cheapness” of PCs basically lived in caves with no connectivity. It’s remarkable how dense people can be when wedded to an untenable position.
And, no, a 23″ monitor is not the same as the 30-inchers that Apple sells, but I figured this might be a suitable stop-gap play until you are simply overwhelmed by the need for the mondo-screen.
After all, bigger really is better!
I still have a 128k Mac, purchased in 1984. It still works. My son asked me how I connected it to the internet and got an immediate laugh.
I’d wait on the Mac Pro, Steve.
Are you familiar with this site?
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
John–
I’m in no rush, and I’ve read all about the new Xeons…
Steve,
Thanks for the heads up on this post. My experience after 18 months with an iMac is very similar to yours. Still feels like new, zips right along on the tubes of the internets, and I have no real feeling that the computer is slow, outdated and in need of upgrading and/or replacement.
Contrast that with my thoughts from about 6 months into the Dell we had previously, where I promised my wife that if we were unable to get it faster performance, I was going to throw it against the basement wall. Not a day went by from that point to hooking up the iMac when I didn’t loathe that PC.
My previous Mac 9500 served me well for seven years, my current G4 is entering its sixth year and still going strong. I figure if you’re going to spend a dollar, spend two and get something for your money.
I bought what the called a clone PC that year. I splurged and got two megs of mem and a color monitor. I had dos/windows on one partition and sco unix on the other.
Back in the early 80s I was Economic Coordinator for a middle-Florida county and we purchased 4 computers.
2 Macs to be used by our zoning department (the graphics, of course!) and
2 Zenith boxes…one with a 20 meg hard drive, and one with only twin floppies. These we used with Lotus (v-1 DOS) to work loan packages for potential industry to locate in our county.
Our operation was the envy of every other county near us.
Long ago and far away!
Duke
p.s. I also still have sitting under a table to my right as I type this, my very first computer….a KayPro which used an operating system called CP/M and had twin 5 1/4 floppies using single-sided 180,000 byte capacity disks and had a small green screen. WOW! I am getting old.
I remember that Kaypro. My father bought one so that he could try out those new-fangled things called “word processors”. It was the source of both much delight and massive frustration for him. Gee, who’da thunk it?
I remember turning in a paper written on that machine, only to find, after the fact, that the printer had skipped a line on the third page. Got a B+, rather than an A, ’cause I hadn’t completely proofread the final product. Boy was I pissed. Equal measures with the teacher, for being such an asshole; the computer, for screwing it up; and me, for not catching it.
CP/M. Wow. And here I am, reading a book on multi-processor programming. What an amazing journey.
Stephen Green:
If a decent PC starts feeling old after a couple years you’re either a gamer or you’re not protecting your PC properly.
Either Linux or Windows (XP, not Vista) with Spybot and a non-monstrous antivirus like AVG and a normal person can be content with a single core and only occasionally wish for more than a gig of memory. Well, okay, maybe I’m not normal. Maybe normal people buy games before they hit the bargain rack.
I can’t ever imagine getting a Mac. There’s no Mac only software I’d want, and I play some Windows games that, though now dated, are too new to run under emulation. I’m sure that a Mac would drag as badly as a PC if you put a Windows partition on it.
Wow, Nate — I barely know where to start with all your misconceptions.
I did put a Windows partition on my Mac, briefly, using Apple’s Bootcamp. Deleted it after a few months after realizing I’d booted into Windows exactly once. I’d also picked up a copy of Parallels to let me run some Windows stuff without rebooting, but it’s still in the shrink wrap. Apparently, there is software for Mac.
I don’t know what this “emulation” is you’re speaking of. You can either boot directly into Windows on a Mac and get native performance, or run a virtual machine and get close to the same thing. Although why someone who doesn’t buy new games is concerned about this at all strikes me as willfully disingenuous.
That said, gaming is the only thing I can imagine wanting a Windows box for. But that’s OK — I have an Xbox 360 I use only slightly more often than that old Windows partition. But even if you add on the once-every-four-or-five-years expense of buying an Xbox, my Mac STILL comes in cheaper than the Windows machines I was buying.
And you’re just plain wrong about antivirus protection. Typically, they take 10% right off the top of your processor. More during scans, of course. Add in malware protection, Window’s greater graphics overhead (at least for Vista, and probably 7 as well), and you’re talking a serious performance hit.
Your results may differ, but I assure you your results aren’t typical. The needs and usage you’ve described for yourself really don’t seem to add up. But suit yourself.
Wow! I bought a Mac SE in 1987 while I was a self-employed printer and publisher of a small town weekly newspaper. One meg of ram and a 20-meg hard drive with the 9-inch B&W screen. Using PageMaker, we actually laid out full-size newspaper pages and printed them out on overlapping 8.5×11 sheets on an Apple Laserwriter, trimmed them and taped them together to make camera copy. Obviously, we weren’t able to process photos, so we placed black boxes where the photos needed to be and shot separate half-tone negatives to attach to the page negatives.
In 1995 I shut down that operation and went to work for a friend of mine who had purchased a regional agricultural publication. He bought all new equipment, as the previous owners did not own a single computer of any kind. It was a dream to move up from the SE to a PowerMac, scan photos and run them through PhotoShop and produce entire camera ready pages.
I’m still with that publication, despite an ownership change, and drive a dual processor G4 (I’m about 3 years overdue for an upgrade that has been in the budget, but not yet materialized). Now, after laying out our pages in InDesign, we produce a PDF of each page and forward the files to our production facility directly to a machine that produces press-ready printing plates.
The daily newspaper that owns us now uses all Macs for ads, graphics and page production purposes and all PCs on the news and editorial side. I suspect that is a common arrangement for publications.
Nate, bragging about your lack of imagination is not going to score you any points around here.
I thought only stinky liberals and hippies bought Macs…
I tend to think that Macs are well build and that software is nice, but I don’t agree that they’ll last longer than a PC. Here I can buy a basic Mac Mini for 500 euro. It has a dual core 64 bit cpu @ 1.8 MHz, 2 GB and a smallish 80 GB HD – and no keyboard, mouse or screen – not to mention a very poor graphics card.
About an year ago I’ve built a quad core (Q6600), 8 GB, with a NVidea 8800 GT graphics card and 2*250 GB HD for about 800 euro – also excluding screen, keyboard and mouse. True, I had to search for the hardware and assemble it myself. Also true, it is a lot bigger and noisier than my Mac Mini. Also I didn’t care for wifi or bluetooth (it would add 75 euro more). The only thing that I’ve upgraded were the hard drives – I’ve added 1.5 TB more, and the machine is still performing very fine.
Macs are fine machines, very well engineered, very well built, but they’re certainly very expensive too.
By the way, I still remember using a Apple II sporting a Z80 card and running CP/M back in the early 80′s (’81 or ’82). Good old times. Apps were Wordstar, DBase II and Multiplan.
Regards.