[HN Gopher] Vintage Apple
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Vintage Apple
Author : freediver
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-09-17 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vintageapple.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (vintageapple.org)
| wilkystyle wrote:
| I've always loved that serif font they used on marketing
| material, e.g. from the "Insanely Great" book thumbnail on this
| page. It seems like an 80s/90s font, but yet still classy and
| aesthetically pleasing to me today.
| cglong wrote:
| It makes me sad that the last post was a swan song from a year
| ago
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just browsing the Mac Programming book's took me back in time. So
| many books I recognized by the cover, books I had forgotten that
| I had once owned and learned from. This was pre-Internet (well,
| pre-Web) and my copies of the books became well worn.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I owe my whole career to learning BASIC on my Apple IIc as a kid.
| My first program was an implementation of Mad Libs. I loved
| playing Lemonade Stand.
| trentnix wrote:
| LOVED Lemonade Stand. It was Economics 101 for a second grader.
| glimshe wrote:
| My dad bought an Apple II back in the day, and I remember a lot
| of fun times playing games such as Choplifter and Conan. Apple
| always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more
| "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning; but
| the Apple II wasn't anything like the Macintosh, it was a geek
| computer built by an engineering genius (Wozniak) which was
| successful due to its vast and diverse software library rather
| than its looks.
|
| I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better
| taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an
| evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of
| Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.
| nemo wrote:
| Steve Jobs at the start of Apple was inspired by Sony and
| wanted to market Apple's consumer electronics as high-quality
| consumer electronics. Jobs was always very keenly interested in
| marketing and for Apple a central part of marketing and ads is
| building a story around people rather than technology which is
| something Apple's held to from the start, though their approach
| did evolve. The "premium" marketing was a seed planted from the
| beginning, but later it became a response to becoming a
| minority player in personal computing, Apple had to
| differentiate to survive and that was the way to do it, though
| it was always nascent, since Jobs wanted Apple to be like Sony
| from the beginning, a premium consumer electronics company.
| amelius wrote:
| Meanwhile Samsung has learned to play the premium game and is
| beating Apple in innovation, with their $1800 flip phone, Z
| Fold 5.
| pvg wrote:
| _I don 't remember people thinking they were cooler or had
| better taste because they owned an Apple II._
|
| They very much did, just like lots of buyers of different
| competing consumer products. As to the image, Apple cultivated
| it almost from the start.
|
| If anything, old Apple required more suspension of disbelief
| than current Apple - you bought something that was sold to you
| as a luxury item but wasn't built like one.
| Someone wrote:
| > Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a
| sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the
| beginning
|
| I don't think so. They wanted to be better, but not more
| expensive. Certainly, a lot of Woz's hardware was dirt cheap
| for what it did and sacrificed programmability.
|
| For example, the Apple 2 graphics modes _"were peculiar even by
| the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s"_ (https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_...), and
| Personal Computer World wrote _"no-one has colour graphics like
| this at this sort of price"_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception)
|
| Similarly, WOZ's disk controller cut corners to be cheap
| relative to the competition
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview: _"The
| approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak
| 's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM
| (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy
| disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard
| circuit configurations."_)
| majormajor wrote:
| > I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had
| better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was
| an evolution in the image that happened after the "second
| coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.
|
| There was quite a bit of pre-Jobs snobbery. RISC-vs-CISC was
| one, "pro designers and artists [aka people with taste] use
| these!" was another common one, "have fun with DOS and viruses"
| was one...
|
| It was born out of badly losing on marketshare for years. It
| was also somewhat invisible if you weren't an avid Mac user or
| Mac hater since at 3% marketshare or whatever, most people
| didn't know many people to hear it from in the first place!
|
| From what I saw, the iMac/Aqua ("Fisher Price" if you weren't a
| fan) era didn't even turn around the cool factor for the
| general public nearly as much as the Intel Macs - "now I can
| just boot Windows if I have to, at least" to get a lot more
| curious people to give Macs a shot. Then they were cool for a
| while. Now they're common enough that I don't think "cool" is
| the right word vs just "pricey/status-y".
| appleiigs wrote:
| The pre-iMac snobbery was when Mac were considered to be the
| BMW of computers - "it just works". When the iMac came out
| the snobbery change when color iMacs showed up on TV shows.
| The snobbery become more younger, urban and hipster with the
| iPod.
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| Whats hilarious is Apple support considers an i7/16GB/1TB mbp
| "vintage" too
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(page generated 2023-09-17 23:00 UTC)