7 ms·
Thirty Years of Mac [video]
- runj__ 13y ago2006 MacBook It still sort of works but the plastic is all broken off. I should probably throw it away, it was beautiful though.
- username42 13y agoOlder macs were more robust. I think this is one reason of the failure of apple against microsoft: when you have a computer that enables you to do your stuff without problems or failures, you do not need to replace it by a new one. Microsoft has understood how to earn a lot more money by selling half broken products that people want to replace by better ones. Maybe, this was not intentional. btw, this post is risky for my karma, but I am always suprised to see very old mac still frequently used.
- poolpool 13y agoMicrosoft isn't responsible for terrible OEMs.
- username42 13y agoYou think so ?
- stephen_g 13y agoThe aluminium Unibody MacBooks are extremely robust in my experience. I've treated my early 2011 MBP pretty badly and all it has to show are two tiny dints... The glass covering is way easier to clean than my old plastic Mac laptops, and most of their plastic cases are cracking.
- lukeman 13y agoLoved my CrackBook. The black matte finish was pretty great. Used it for years—everything from doing .net dev in a VM, getting into Django, to shipping an iPhone game in the early days.
- javindo 13y ago"Everyone is using this one system" - you're still not fooling anyone Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
- danabramov 13y agoThis is true for creative industries (which the video is all about). Most design studios, musicians, 3D artists, etc, use Macs.
- svantana 13y agoGraphic designers, yes. But music and 3D is mostly Windows in my experience. Because how are you gonna fit a high end graphics card or audio interface into your mac? (and don't tell me about firewire please)
- daeken 13y agoI'm in and out of recording studios all the time. I haven't seen anyone running a Windows rig in probably 8 years. Everyone I know is running Pro Tools or Ableton on a Mac. And even back when I saw people using Windows in that role, they used external audio interfaces, just like they do now. Except with Thunderbolt, you get the expandability with effectively no latency. I love Windows, but the recording industry lives on Macs.
- danabramov 13y agoYeah. Sometimes even old Macs (with Mac OS Classic), but Macs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- OverlordXenu 13y agoI have friends that work in the audio industry… there's a nice mix of Macs and PCs but everyone uses external audio interfaces.
- sz4kerto 13y agoThat's all I can add to this short movie: http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ap/appleblog/image/doghouse-comic.png http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ap/appleblog/image/doghouse-comic.png (I am happy to be downvoted for the joke, so just keep going :) )
- kubiiii 13y agoThe only good reason to burn karma is for the lulz. (i upvoted).
- marban 13y agoI haven't seen a sleeve or cover that addresses this very fact.
- sarreph 13y agoYou have now: http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.trendhunter.com/cdn.trendhunterstatic.com/thumbs/ipad-toilet-paper.jpeg.pagespeed.ce.eO9G5LJuUg.jpg http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.trendhunter.com/cdn....
- coldtea 13y agoAs if shitting isn't important? We can live without wind turbines and scuba diving, but shitting and having something to read on the crapper is essential.
- dits59 13y agoGood Advertisement
- meerita 13y agoI remember my first contact with a Mac: Power Macintosh 9600. I was so in love with it that I used it until G4 Powermac was released. I hacked it so much that reseting the machine and power on was lighting fast as well running many apps. I loved all, then switched to a Powermac G4 Cube.
- machbio 13y agoThe video captures the essence of what apples users intend to do, well almost.. Apple speaks of stories of creativity and flexibility - also mentions you never know "how users are gonna use this in the future".. So why the hell does apple play this game of closed autocrat and keep the creativity out of the hardware buffs who want to tamper with their macs.. I am happy with Linux :)
- thomseddon 13y agoNot sure if it's just me but I find this video remarkably uninspiring. It just seems to lack real content? Now I'm more than willing to accept that I'm not the exact target for this video, and that the subject matter of the following video makes it a slightly unfair comparison, but the contrast to the quality of the Steve Jobs tribute video is vast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2WpieYRks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2WpieYRks The latter video literally takes my breath away.
- Shivetya 13y agowell its all about people being creative and how the Mac helped them achieve it. Surprisingly, well maybe not, it never showed anyone using it for typical business work which pretty much sums up why Macs (OS X) never made it in the real business world.
- frogpelt 13y agoI noticed on the timeline, that in 2013 the 2nd largest usage circle was for Business/Finance. There are no details about those circles but numbers would have been too ugly I guess. Link: http://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/ http://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/
- gilgoomesh 13y agoThe video is relatively bland but its just a series of 30 (one for each year) endorsements by creative/engineering professionals. I actually prefer the timeline view (of the same people): https://www.apple.com/30-years/#timeline https://www.apple.com/30-years/#timeline
- vacri 13y agoI burst out laughing at "truly worldwide democratisation of creativity". Yes, that expensive personal computer, intentionally aimed for most of its career at media and education in western markets. That was a bad bit of copy. And, more the fault of my mind than the copy, but "a tool for exploring new fields [that I otherwise couldn't]" - the same could be said of a machete. :)
- CGudapati 13y agoI am not asking all the names but who are those people behind the various macs?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- itafroma 13y ago> who are those people behind the various macs? If you scroll past the video to the timeline, then click on any of the sections, it'll expand and say who the person is and what they did.
- CGudapati 13y agoI just right arrowed through the whole series of pictures. Thanks!
- nly 13y agoPretty sure the musician is Moby.
- shootinputin 13y agoHow come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter. I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.
- hayksaakian 13y agoMaybe its PR (as in they got paid to publish news about this)
- Doctor_Fegg 13y agoThat isn't what PR means.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoLinux: I think because it's less of a 'concrete' thing (e.g. so many distros, very steady 'word of mouth' growth rather than a big launch) Windows: People just don't have the same affection for Windows: it tends to be something that's used, grudgingly, often for work, rather than something that people are genuinely pleased by. I'm sure people will disagree, of course, that's just a big generalisation. Also, since Windows is available on a whole range of hardware, it suffers (in this specific regard) from the same fragmentation as Linux: there's isn't so much one single thing to get attached to.
- icebraining 13y agoFor people who don't know it yet: "Folklore.org: Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it" http://www.folklore.org/ http://www.folklore.org/ I don't own a single Apple device, but I still find the stories fascinating. It makes me wish I could've worked with those engineers.
- pavlov 13y agoThere's always a new frontier. Today there are new people somewhere trying to do something that seems difficult, maybe impossible, and certainly rather pointless to the outsiders looking at it from the comfort of the establishment's balcony. I'm pretty sure it's easier to look for those people today than it was in 1980, when you still needed to be physically in the right place.
- mynames 13y ago"Download QuickTime to view this video". No thanks.
- anaran 13y agoAll they are trying to say is they don't want new customers. Either you are inside their walled garden, or out (the better place for me).
- anaran 13y agoHmmh, now I can see the Apple Timeline in Firefox (Nightly) at http://www.apple.com/30-years/ http://www.apple.com/30-years/
- vacri 13y agoNo quicktime here, video loaded first time, after that it won't load when I'm on the timeline page clicking 'watch video'. Where's my captive frontend dev to explain this to me when I need him?
- cgh 13y agoHow are Macs "walled gardens"?
- KaoruAoiShiho 13y agoOh god the surgeon with the scalpel in one hand and the ipad in the other. Time for glass methinks.
- marban 13y agoIf Apple would still build Macs with soul (i.e. anything before 2002) it wouldn't need a campaign to tell how great they are.
- vacri 13y agoThe new Mac pro is something beautiful and unique.
- marban 13y agoToo fast, beautiful and perfect to be called a true Mac ;)
- pavlov 13y agoI'm confused -- what big change happened in 2002? The "sunflower" iMac is the only thing I can think of.
- racl101 13y agoI think he's talking about the companies focus from desktops to ipods, macbooks, iphones and ipads, which, its sort of true as reflected in the marketing behind their website. Still, I don't think that the Macs became any less of a product but it certainly stopped becoming their flagship product.
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoForty Years of Unix! I love writing in C and compiling on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD with the same Makefile!
- csmithuk 13y agoActually 45 years...
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoFirst production unix system: 1972. I counted from that.
- csmithuk 13y agoFair point although it was 1971 running a nroff typesetter at Bell Labs. First external to Bell Labs deployment was in 1972 though.
- stinos 13y agoYou should try CMake
- danabramov 13y agoWeird. It's the first time I see an Apple use an actual webfont instead of pictures—and it won't load for me.
- adieulot 13y agoSame here. Some refreshs did the tricks though.
- joaomoreno 13y agoChrome + Windows can't handle the fonts on the website after the video ends
- bliker 13y agoBut soon, the peril will be over https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- WoodenChair 13y agoWhen I was a little kid we had a Mac II and a Mac LC. I spent so many hours with them... The software I used and the machines themselves inspired so many interests. The computers themselves eventually became a life long passion. I've heard of Commodore users having that affinity for C64s and Amiga owners and a few other manufacturers... I've never heard a person say they fell so in love with their Compaq Q2150... There's something special about the Macintosh. I think it's that it's so clear that the manufacturers really cared about the user experience that they inspired the same in the software developers for the platform.
- Void_ 13y agoArt, art, art... Why can't they show programmers in an ad for once? Apple you can come film me at any time.
- christiangenco 13y agoINT. VOID_'S ROOM - DAY CLOSEUP OF FINGERS TYPING VOID_0 I love Macs because they have the unix core, so you can compile anything written for linux servers natively without using a virtual machine. CLOSEUP OF CODE BEING TYPED CLOSEUP OF TERMINAL COMPILING CODE VOID_0 So yeah, that's pretty neat I guess. I mean it's not that flashy or anything, I'm really just using it as a fancy text editor. The build quality of these things is pretty good. All my friends are doing the same thing on cheaper linux computers, but I don't like those as much.
- Void_ 13y agoAwesome, Hollywood is waiting for you.
- Apocryphon 13y agoBonus points if they use the shell theme from Tron: Legacy.
- itafroma 13y agoThe first 20 seconds of the ad features John Maeda, who is a programmer, and there are a number of other programmers featured in the ad and on the timeline: Theodore Gray, John Knoll, Craig Hickman, Rand Miller, Philip Jackson, Nicholas Felton, Dr. Maki Sugimoto, Ryan Bubinski, and Daito Manabe.
- sandis 13y agoThey've done it twice with their "one app at a time" videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOUfzyAEQHk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOUfzyAEQHk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8
- kayoone 13y ago
- itafroma 13y agoHere's the list of people and things featured: - 1984, original Macintosh - 1985, Jon Appleton, pioneer in electro-acoustical music and key figure in the development of the digital synthesizer - 1986, April Greiman, seminal figure in the New Wave graphic design movement - 1987, Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research - 1988, Ahn Sang-soo, pioneer in Korean typography - 1989, John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop - 1990, Craig Hickman, creator of Kid Pix - 1991, John Maeda, artist and pioneer of motion graphics - 1992, David Carson, graphic designer and art director of Ray Gun magazine - 1993, Robyn and Rand Miller, creators of Myst - 1994, Hans Zimmer, composer - 1995, Dave McKean, comic book artist and filmmaker - 1996, Tinker Hatfield, Nike shoe designer - 1997, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, creators of Wired magazine - 1998, Alex Townsend, creator of the Computer Bus that helped bring computer access to Manx schools - 1999, Moby, electronica artist - 2000, Nick Knight, prolific fashion photographer - 2001, Takagi Masakatsu, musician and filmmaker - 2002, John Stanmeyer, photographer for TIME and National Geographic magazines - 2003, Philip Jackson, founder of Sportstec that makes sports analysis software - 2004, Noemi Trainor, principal of Mexico's Varmond School which is spearheading a digital-first educational program - 2005, Jürgen Mayer H., architect - 2006, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, co-creators of the Radiolab podcast - 2007, Nicholas Felton, prolific graphic designer known for his "Feltron Annual Reports[1]" and supposed progenitor of Facebook's timeline - 2008, Es Devlin, prolific costume designer - 2009, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, pioneer in genetics research and bioinformatics - 2010, Dr. Maki Sugimoto, surgeon who uses 3D printing to model patients organs to help prepare for surgery - 2011, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, co-founders of Codecademy - 2012, Daito Manabe, artist who specializes in electronic and holographic installations - 2013, Éric Fournier, Sakchin Bessette, and Dominic Audet, co-founders of Moment Factory - 2014, the new Mac Pro [1]: http://feltron.com http://feltron.com
- cristianpascu 13y ago25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.
- alextgordon 13y agoYou think that's bad? Try counting Fields medalists!
- tehwalrus 13y agoPlease add [video] or something to indicate autoplay to the title - I just blared out the music to my office! I normally put in headphones before clicking on videos...
- coldtea 13y agoOr you know, you could keep the volume down at all times. Besides HN links, where one might indicate "autoplay" there are also popup pages that play music and tons of other sources of unwanted audio.
- tehwalrus 13y agoI do normally, but I forgot this one time. and I didn't expect it to make noises, because it didn't say [video] and I have adblock et al. I have seen it on some posts before.
- WoodenChair 13y agoI'm surprised by all of the hate on this thread. This is clearly a tribute for the faithful... not the uninitiated. Sure, there's some level of marketing to it - but I think it was meant more as a piece of appreciation for current longtime users than it was meant as a switcher style campaign. A "keeper" campaign as opposed to a "switcher" campaign.
- eludwig 13y agoI agree completely. I also think its a subtle(?) affirmation of Apple's commitment to the Mac and the Mac OS as a separate entity - separate from iOS, that is. It is also really, really hard for those of you too young to have been there for the Mac's introduction/launch to understand just how amazing this piece of tech was in comparison with the popular alternatives at the time. It was so unbelievably alien and so intimately familiar at the same time. I am a long time gadget/tech lover and there has been no single event that I remember with such vivid clarity. Also, there is no single piece of tech that I have ever wanted to own so badly. I actually switched careers (design/illustration > programming) so that I could afford to buy one! I think it's okay to have a moment like this for the faithful. Yes, it's a bit indulgent, but it will be over in a day or two.
- mambodog 13y agoIf you're interesting but perhaps never got the chance to use the original 1984 Mac OS, then you might want to check out this in-browser emulator port I put together: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ In some ways it's quite remarkable how little has changed.
- drivers99 13y agoThat version seems to be from 1991, when I first starting using Macs in school. Don't supposed you could put Think Pascal on it? :)
- octotoad 13y agoYeah, Apple, among many other companies, helped usher in a new era of personal computing, but most of the use cases in this video can be achieved with a generic Wintel setup.
- jnazario 13y agothat's true now, but it wasn't at the time (1984). apple didn't invent a lot of the technologies they're famous for - the mouse, the windowed GUI, postscript, desktop publishing, etc. they did, however, make it accessible. they took it from the research labs - PARC especially - and let us mere mortals use it. i recall in the late 80s going in to my dad's engineering offices in middle school to type up papers and have them laser printed. that was revolutionary, a truly transformative moment in computing. it took MS quite some time to come to parity.
- thomasfl 13y agoApple has managed to link so many strong feelings to computers.
- josefresco 13y agoMore 30 like years of personal computing...just dub "Mac" for "PC" and it's wouldn't be inaccurate except for the smiley faces. Just because these artists and engineers are talking about a Mac does not make their functions exclusive to the platform. Also, going back 30 years you have to endure some turd-Macs along the way (some brilliant ones too). Many jokes were had at the expense of our Mac brothers in the late mid to late 90's (even early 00's) about their platform of choice as we ran circles around them in gaming, graphics and pretty much any other benchmark besides money spent. It's not the case now (switch to Intel changed that) but I would love to see a similar piece in praise of the PC. And no I don't mean just Windows, I'm talking about the generic term. Computers are awesome, let's not fall in love with a corporate brand and think it's fundamentally something different when it's not.
- aroman 13y agoI think you missed the point. 30 years from today (January 24th, 1984) is celebrating the release of the original Macintosh, which was the first modern personal computer. Of course there have been "bad Apples" along the way — the Apple computer line sucked during much of the 90's, as you pointed out. But the simple fact is that Apple's original Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public. It's not an arbitrary "30 years of personal computing"... it's commemorating a watershed moment.
- josefresco 13y agoIt certainly comes off better if you frame it in that way. It's probably my bias which lead me to read too far into some of the quotes used about the Mac bringing new capabilities that didn't exist for the consumer previously. The 1984 machine is/was an amazing thing, but the 90's and even the early 00's Macs were anything but.
- usingpond 13y agoYou really don't think that the iMac was a crazy influential product? Even by computer nerd standards that we have, a 1024x768 display and USB-only ports were a very bold move that changed a lot. Not to mention the design of the damned thing and it's focus as a PC dedicated to the Internet in terms of a consumer product.
- tambourine_man 13y agoBeautiful site, nice memories and all, but I find this a bit worrisome. The Mac's 25th anniversary went by rather unremarkably under Steve's management, if I remember correctly. He famously gave the Apple's museum to Stanford as soon as he returned. A company as old (for this industry) and successful as Apple must always look relentlessly to the future in order not to fall too much in love with its own accomplishments to prevent it from reinventing itself.
- scotth 13y agoIt's just marketing fluff. Don't worry about it.
- tambourine_man 13y agoI'm not alone it seems: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/24/apple-mac-30 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/24/apple-mac-30
- valleyer 13y agoI'm pretty sure one day of celebration every ten years is relatively OK.
- kabdib 13y agoIt's interesting (based on the poll "tell us about your first mac") that the Programming category essentially disappears in the early 90s. This roughly corresponds to the decline and near extinction of the Mac. Having programmers leave your platform is a very, very bad thing.
- huxley 13y agoOr you could read it as programmers being only subset of all people and computers were finally becoming mainstream enough that the ratio began to reflect that?
- 4ad 13y agoNo, because the parent poster is right. Look into the history of Apple in the '90s, how Jobs came back, NeXT etc.
- kabdib 13y agoThanks. I should have included that part; after The Return, the number of programmers on the Mac do indeed become visible again.
- huxley 13y agoI wrote extensively for a number of sites and magazines about NeXT technologies in the mid to late 1990s, I can give you chapter and verse on the history. The number of developers increased in absolute terms just as they did when the iPhone came out, but the ratio of developers to regular users didn't, because the technologies mainstreamed and the sales to regular users were very high. Back in the pre-acquisition NeXT days, the ratio of developers to users was incredibly high because overall sales weren't that great.
- mironathetin 13y agoI started investigating java on my first personal Mac, which was a blueberry iBook. This was end of the 90s though. In my physics lab, we used Performas to develop our software. In physics labs, Macs never really disappeared. Still, I liked the colorful Macs a lot. They cheered up daily work. A pity, that we are back to gray boxes.
- ja27 13y agoNo Mac SE? No clip of the "1984" SuperBowl ad?
- osetinsky 13y agoJon Appleton was my professor at Dartmouth's Electro-acoustic Music Program. He's a great composer, professor and person who cares about his students.
- hackmiester 13y agoHey! Those floppy icons are from Mini vMac! This could be seen as Apple condoning the emulation of their products and software... https://www.apple.com/v/30-years/a/images/1989/closeup.jpg https://www.apple.com/v/30-years/a/images/1989/closeup.jpg
- DerekL 13y agoAnd that picture is “Road to Point Reyes”, created in 1983 by the Lucasfilm division that eventually became Pixar. http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm
- hadem 13y agoThe video felt more like a demonstration of software that works on Macs rather than 30 years of Mac hardware to me.
- zemanel 13y agoBack in August 2010, coughed 80% of my cash on a 15" MBP when i started to freelance because a) had the cash at the moment b) wanted a reliable machine and a motivation boost for the rough times ahead, which i eventually upgraded to 8GB non-Apple memory and SSD disk (replacing Superdrive with the old HD). It's Jan 2014, still my power horse and going rock solid, i'm quite happy.
- jarjoura 13y agoThis video seemed to celebrate the software that ran on the machines more than the actual hardware itself. I get that they are trying to market the emotion behind the experience but I almost feel as if the emotion they are conveying is misplaced here. The actual photos and stories following the video are MUCH better and I enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane. :-)
- alagappanr 13y agoIt is interesting to see that the gaming circle has decreased considerably in size over the years from 1984 to 2013 and has almost disappeared now. What could be probable reasons for the same? I'm referring to the 'What they did with it" section in Your First Mac page (https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/ https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/).
- itafroma 13y ago> It is interesting to see that the gaming circle has decreased considerably in size over the years from 1984 to 2013 and has almost disappeared now. >What could be probable reasons for the same? The circles for each year are generated off of the results from the three-question survey Apple is conducting on that page (click the "Tell us about your first Mac" button below the lede). The questions are: 1. Which Mac was yours? (which determines the year) 2. Where were you? (which ostensibly determines which localized site your responses will count towards) 3. How did you use your Mac? So the size of the gaming circle in a particular year is determined merely by the number of people who filled out that survey, self-reported that they bought their first Mac in that year, and said they used that first Mac for gaming.
- Haul4ss 13y agoI like Mac. I'm typing this comment on a Mac. My first computer was an Apple IIc, before there even was a Mac. But sheesh, this ad is schmaltzy even for me!
- scosman 13y agoam I crazy, or is that a touchscreen MBP at 2:19?
- stdgy 13y agoIn case anyone is interested, here is the music in the background of the video: 0:18 -- Air Review - H 1:10 -- Moderat - Bad Kingdom 1:56 -- Air Review - Young
- hnriot 13y agoI like the video a lot and am glad Apple continue to make these kinds of high budget videos, but it started out with the claim that in '84 a computer with pictures and not the size of a mainframe was something new, but I had been using a zx81 for 3 years by then, drawing pictures, writing games and playing "music" (albeit very CTFTPA) I found this also annoying reading iWoz, it was as though there were no other computers out there at the time, but the Tandy Trash80, the Pet and Sinclair's computers were all doing very nicely when Woz was "inventing" the computer.