HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ sz4kerto

That's all I can add to this short movie: http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ap/appleblog/image/doghouse-comic.png

(I am happy to be downvoted for the joke, so just keep going :) )

⬐ marban

I haven't seen a sleeve or cover that addresses this very fact.

⬐ sarreph

You have now: http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.trendhunter.com/cdn....

⬐ kubiiii

The only good reason to burn karma is for the lulz. (i upvoted).

⬐ coldtea

As 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.

⬐ WoodenChair

I'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

I 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.

⬐ icebraining

For 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/

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

There'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.

⬐ thomseddon

Not 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

The latter video literally takes my breath away.

⬐ gilgoomesh

The 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

⬐ Shivetya

well 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

I 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/

⬐ vacri

I 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. :)

⬐ coldtea

>I 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.

Expensive compared to what? Because to do the things you can do with a $1000 PC, you needed $100,000 or more before depending on the field.

Your personal typesetting engine? 128-channel audio recording? With effects? Video editing? Bitmap editing? CAD?

Those are all things that existed only for high end workstations or specialized devices before the personal PC, and the Mac played a huge role in the development of this (it will take years for Windows to catch up.

Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.

⬐ brudgers

CAD?

The Macintosh is largely irrelevant as a platform for CAD. It pretty much always has been.

In the early days this was because it lacked a reasonable facility for floating point hardware. In the middle years it was a combination of small market share, price performance ratios, and limited hardware options leading to many vendors ignoring or abandoning (in the case of AutoDesk) the platform. Things got so bad that even Mac specific software companies such as Diehl Graphisoft and ArchiCad suffered the pain of going dual platform for the sake of survival. Bentley Systems simply dropped Mac.

Today, the Mac version of AutoCAD is gimped, Dessault's big boy toy Catia wants real Unix and their low end Draftsite is still in beta. Here's the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software

Reality doesn't really match the images created via product placement.

⬐ kunai

You do realize most of those features didn't come from the Mac?

Apple ripped all of the features you describe straight from the Amiga. It could barely do sound because Apple Corps kept suing them for trademark infringement.

It's nice to look back at the Macintosh's history with rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, it isn't true, nor is it even remotely indicative of the technology at the time.

⬐ coldtea

>You do realize most of those features didn't come from the Mac? Apple ripped all of the features you describe straight from the Amiga.

Good try, but no. Graphics and DTP professionals used the Mac. Heck, Photoshop debutted there -- it took several years to even be released for Windows, and several more to be used by proffesional studios on that platform.

Very few used the Amiga. It was mostly used for title work in small TV/video productions in Europe.

⬐ chipotle_coyote

The history of both desktop publishing and image processing, at least, is very intimately tied to the Macintosh via Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop, respectively. There really wasn't anything like them before they shipped -- there were typesetting programs like TeX and "paint" programs like Deluxe Paint (and for that matter, MacPaint!), but TeX and competitors used a much more arcane non-GUI paradigm and, as good as Deluxe Paint was for what it was, it was not designed for the kind of image retouching work that Photoshop could do out of the gate.

I see comments sneering about the "democratization" claim, and while I wouldn't have chosen that word, it's worth keeping in mind that Pagemaker and Photoshop enabled Macs to rival $25K+ dedicated, single-task workstations of the day. They really did revolutionize industries. And they both started their lives as Mac exclusives.

I liked the Amiga, too, and it really was ahead of its time in certain respects, most notably video processing. And it kicked the Mac's ass for years in anything relating to multitasking. And it really did revolutionize video production the same way the Mac revolutionized DTP and image processing. But let's not go overboard and claim that everything the Mac was doing by 1986-87 was somehow "ripped off" from the Amiga. The Amiga certainly got capable layout and image software, but that software wasn't creating markets the way the Toaster was -- or the way Pagemaker and Photoshop did.

(As for sound, well. There's no one hardware/software combination that strikes me as a real paradigm shift in the music sequencing or recording field, certainly not in that era; cheap MIDI interfaces drove that across all platforms. Apple didn't make sound software back then but that certainly didn't mean the Mac wasn't used extensively for it with third-party tools.)

⬐ gonzo

Comparing TeX to desktop publishing is pure category error.

⬐ pjmlp

> Those are all things that existed only for high end workstations or specialized devices before the personal PC, and the Mac played a huge role in the development of this (it will take years for Windows to catch up.

In Europe, Atari ST and Amiga ruled in terms of music, DTP, 3D and video production at consumer level, before the PC got widespread.

Mac was always out of reach for most pockets.

⬐ coldtea

>it will take years for Windows to catch up

Actually I meant to write: it took years for Windows to catch up.

⬐ vacri

Stop being so elitist. How much money do you need to be creative? Enough to buy a musical instrument? To purchase paint and canvas? To fossick for trash to weld together? Purchase pen and paper and write a beautiful letter or short story? To grab a stick and draw in the dirt? Macs are quality bits of kit and the prime tool for making digital art, but they didn't democratise creativity, neither were they truly worldwide. The irony is that you have to be particularly uncreative to think that the only [worthwhile] creativity is in digital media.

Macs helped artists be artists, but they weren't 'truly worldwide democratisation' for creativity, not by a long shot. That title in tech goes to digital cameras. The one prolific form of creativity that spreads throughout the wider public is due to the CCD, not Garage Band (the proportion of the public who are musicians has declined over the past century). Digital photography is the democratisation of creativity, if anything is.

Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC. And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs. And your own personal typsetting engine? Seriously? The content of a well-written letter takes a backseat in value to being able to put a crappy starburst on a bake-sale flyer? Even crappy teen angst poetry is more creative than the way the general public used those personal typsetting engines.

As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills. And CAD is far from the domain of Macs, the item being lionised in the video - for example, AutoCad has been on Windows for 28 years, and took an 18-year hiatus on the Mac during this time. I mean, if the argument is "Macs were the original personal computer", then that's wrong too - PCs had been around for years before Macs came along. Macs have been something special, but democratision isn't a strong point - indeed, for a goodly portion of their life, the Mac has been used as a status symbol; hard to do for something that is supposedly democratised.

Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.

Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power". When a minority gains the right to vote, that's democratisation. When an elite social group gathers more professional power, that's something else.

⬐ coldtea

>Stop being so elitist. How much money do you need to be creative? Enough to buy a musical instrument? To purchase paint and canvas?

That's not a relevant question. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to play acoustic guitar on the streets, sure, you don't need much. That doesn't meant that everybody wanted to be creative in that way.

Some people (milions) wanted to make records like the Beatles or Kraftwerk, or Led Zepellin etc. Some even wanted to write orchestral scores like they heard from John Williams.

That you can write a song on a $20 ukelele doesn't mean that wanting to write a 5-piece band with reverbs, compressors, clean sounds and 24 channels is not a valid artistic endeavour.

That you could buy an 4-track and record some demo-quality material doesn't mean that the PC hasn't lowered to barried to entry, to the point that someone can produce in his garage/bedroom songs that could only be produced with tens of thousands of dollars of studio time.

The same with movie/video production. At best you had access to (expensive) 8 or 16mm film and mighty expensive specialist tools. Now you can have a full blown editing suite, and HD or even 4K cameras for a few thousand dollars.

>Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC.

Postdated and made possible by the personal PC. I didn't say it appeared instantly along the PC. First there was cheap MIDI and sequencers, something that helped tens of thousands of electronic musicians.

>And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs.

This is dense. Of course "machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs". NOW THEY ARE. That's my point.

Again you somehow assume that I said that all those things were made possible the very moment the PC was available -- whereas what I said is that were made possible BY the PC.

The $100,000 price tag is the equivalent of what you get, in sound mangling capacity, with a $2000 PC and a $500 DAW -- recording, reverbs, etc.

Actually, there were synths, like the Fairlight that only ultra rich artists could afford, people like Gabriel, and that costed $25,000 to buy. Now you can get the same exact specs as an $10 iPad app.

>As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills.

Perhaps you've been confused. Artist creativity in the sense of what options artists have to create things. Artists including industrial designers and such. Not in the sense of "how creative an artist is", e.g the quality of his output.

This is about how enmpowering the PC has been for lots of artistic endeavours. E.g not if Bach is better than Depeche Mode, but that Depeche Mode could get the sounds they wanted in the first place.

>Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power".

Not really, it just means "more people than before get a go".

If something was available to X and now is available to 1000*X, that's democratization.

May I remind you that ancient Athenian democracy, one of the fullest and most direct examples of democracy in how the election body operated, excluded women and slaves?

⬐ vacri

Your rebuttals are making no sense at all. My criticism was of the copy in a puff piece on the Mac, in the context of the video provided. My original comment makes this clear it's about Macs when it talks of the targetting of the education and media markets in the western world. The Unices and Windows happily moved into non-western markets, and certainly targeted things other than education and media, such as business and gaming markets.

Your rebuttals on the other hand, seem to have retreated into a defence of personal computers in general. I didn't make a comment on that. I said that the -Mac- is not a -truly- -worldwide- -democratisation- when it came to enabling creativity. Those were the words used in the video, in the context of what the video was talking about.

⬐ coldtea

>Your rebuttals on the other hand, seem to have retreated into a defence of personal computers in general.

Well, the personal computers in general were lead into the path by the Mac -- the GUI, the image/video/editing capabilities were first emerged in a usable form there (with the notable mention of Atari (for MIDI) and Amiga (for graphics), though those were more fringe machines.

It's only around Windows 95 that PC people started getting into this game on somewhat equal footing (and worse usability for quite a while afterwards).

⬐ mambodog

If 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/

In some ways it's quite remarkable how little has changed.

⬐ drivers99

That version seems to be from 1991, when I first starting using Macs in school. Don't supposed you could put Think Pascal on it? :)

⬐ javindo

"Everyone is using this one system" - you're still not fooling anyone Apple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

⬐ danabramov

This is true for creative industries (which the video is all about). Most design studios, musicians, 3D artists, etc, use Macs.

⬐ svantana

Graphic 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)

⬐ OverlordXenu

I have friends that work in the audio industry… there's a nice mix of Macs and PCs but everyone uses external audio interfaces.

⬐ daeken

I'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.

⬐ None

None

⬐ danabramov

Yeah. Sometimes even old Macs (with Mac OS Classic), but Macs.

⬐ berkut

Most VFX for Film (at least by the big studios like ILM, Weta, SPI, MPC, Framestore) is done on Linux. Even Pixar are mostly Linux-based.

⬐ pjmlp

There was a time when those industries belonged to Atari ST and Amiga systems.

⬐ pavlov

Certainly not true for graphics, 3D and video. Windows is the majority platform for apps like Photoshop, Maya, Premiere, Avid Media Composer...

(The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers somewhere far away from San Francisco.)

⬐ danabramov

That's why I said “most design studios” and not “all designers”.

⬐ mortenjorck

  The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably 
  because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who 
  have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers 
  somewhere far away from San Francisco.

Out here in the midwest, every design freelancer I've known has had a Mac, without exception. Every small-biz graphic design studio or ad agency I've come into contact with has been a Mac shop.

3D artists, however, have been just as consistently Windows-based. I've never met a single one of them with a Mac.

⬐ itafroma

Here'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

⬐ cristianpascu

25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

⬐ alextgordon

You think that's bad? Try counting Fields medalists!

⬐ adamnemecek

What are you suggesting?

⬐ cristianpascu

Not sure. It just came to mind when scrolling and seeing all those men faces. Can't believe that the Mac could be SO correlated with men's achievements.

It just says: Look, in the past 30 years, the Mac was where men did great things. OR, we selected 30 great things that happened in the past 30 years. And men did them. And Apple was there.

Really?

⬐ None

None

⬐ itafroma

> 25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

Not that it's significantly better, but there are 5 women, not 3: April Greiman, Jane Metcalfe, Noemi Trainor, Es Devlin, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti. However, they did choose Rosetto instead of Metcalfe for 1997's main photo, so there's a case to be made for 4 (though Metcalfe is in the photos when you scroll down).

⬐ cristianpascu

I counted 3 times. Men are bad at math. :) Or recognizing faces.

⬐ bendecoste

All the people OP mentioned are there, all 5.

⬐ wiredfool

There's a machine featured each year if you scroll down.

⬐ joezydeco

Probably the only time Apple will ever acknowledge the Macintosh TV. Hah.

⬐ Moto7451

And the Macintosh XL/Lisa. Was interesting to see that listed.

⬐ ekianjo

If you did a list from the pc world, you would get a much longer one which would eclipse the achievement of these macloving people, who usually happen to be egomaniacs on top of that. Guess it fits with the Jobs image.

⬐ simonh

You forgot to type that in all-caps.

⬐ danabramov

Let us compare mythologies?

⬐ mattthinks

We seldom do anything else, good sir.

⬐ mcormier

Here is an article you should read...

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of...

⬐ bdcravens

I started to read it, but my god, what an atrocious interface.

⬐ gorkemyurt

http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-take-portrait-pictures-like-A...

⬐ WoodenChair

When 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.

⬐ AlexanderDhoore

Forty Years of Unix!

I love writing in C and compiling on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD with the same Makefile!

⬐ stinos

You should try CMake

⬐ csmithuk

Actually 45 years...

⬐ AlexanderDhoore

First production unix system: 1972. I counted from that.

⬐ csmithuk

Fair point although it was 1971 running a nroff typesetter at Bell Labs.

First external to Bell Labs deployment was in 1972 though.

⬐ Void_

Art, art, art... Why can't they show programmers in an ad for once? Apple you can come film me at any time.

⬐ itafroma

The 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

They'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=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8

⬐ kayoone

The thing is, as cheesy and hyperbolic these videos are, i still find them incredibly inspiring. And as an Android user i acknowledge the fact that many of the truly brilliant and well done apps are done for ios. Thats changing, but i am not sure if other platforms will ever be on par with Apple in terms of overall product quality, which is a benefit that comes with limits to the openness of the platform though.

⬐ christiangenco

INT. 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.

⬐ Apocryphon

Bonus points if they use the shell theme from Tron: Legacy.

⬐ Void_

Awesome, Hollywood is waiting for you.

⬐ tambourine_man

Beautiful 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

It's just marketing fluff. Don't worry about it.

⬐ tambourine_man

I'm not alone it seems:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/24/apple-mac-30

⬐ valleyer

I'm pretty sure one day of celebration every ten years is relatively OK.

⬐ KaoruAoiShiho

Oh god the surgeon with the scalpel in one hand and the ipad in the other. Time for glass methinks.

⬐ mynames

"Download QuickTime to view this video". No thanks.

⬐ anaran

All 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

Hmmh, now I can see the Apple Timeline in Firefox (Nightly) at http://www.apple.com/30-years/

⬐ cgh

How are Macs "walled gardens"?

⬐ vacri

No 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?

⬐ kabdib

It'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.

⬐ mironathetin

I 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.

⬐ huxley

Or 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

No, because the parent poster is right. Look into the history of Apple in the '90s, how Jobs came back, NeXT etc.

⬐ kabdib

Thanks. I should have included that part; after The Return, the number of programmers on the Mac do indeed become visible again.

⬐ huxley

I 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.

⬐ shootinputin

How 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.

⬐ icebraining

People did celebrate the 20 years of Linux, back in 2011: http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/

The thing is, Linux doesn't have the PR machine that Apple does, nor the number of fans among journalists, nor the recognition by the public.

⬐ csmithuk

This is normal.

They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ("you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts.

For comparison:

MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one.

Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines.

Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

⬐ keeperofdakeys

Unix may be 45 years old, but only code from the last 30 will probably compile. That isn't even talking about apis that may have changed, etc.

⬐ anextio

> Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts.

There have only been two instances of that: 68k to PPC and then Mac Toolbox to Cocoa. Carbon held the gap for a number of years by porting Mac Toolbox APIs to use modern things like protected memory. Both of those events were necessary and welcomed changes.

PPC to Intel was not a major rewrite for anyone except people who already knew what they were doing.

What's the problem here? Providing new APIs that reflect the advancements in software technology made in the last 45 years is a _good thing_.

⬐ mamcx

> Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

Ergo, mac?

⬐ csmithuk

No. OS X is a bastardisation of Mach, FreeBSD and OpenStep. A completely new Frankenstein's monster.

⬐ mamcx

Almost the description of any unix to date. Is not as if exist a single unix, ever. And OSX bastard?

⬐ peterkelly

Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API.

I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I like that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.

⬐ ksk

Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?

⬐ peterkelly

The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

To quote:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

⬐ ksk

You picked a particularly poor example. The application compatibility layer does not incredibly hamper the OS whatsoever. First of all the ACL is only active when known executables that have problems with the newer versions are running. As an educated guess it would not take more than a millisecond to ID the .exe. Secondly what the ACL does is fairly benign - what it amounts to in simple terms is that it simply uses a different code path for a very narrow set of functions. The cost associated with loading an 'extra library' is so marginal that you would find it hard to measure.

⬐ valleyer

Plus if you don't think every consumer OS does this to a certain extent, you're uninformed.

⬐ None

None

⬐ hayksaakian

Maybe its PR (as in they got paid to publish news about this)

⬐ Doctor_Fegg

That isn't what PR means.

⬐ racl101

Really? Are you really gonna ask why software like Windows or Linux, that don't have the marketing behemoth that Apple has (or is), aren't celebrated with the same pomp and circumstance? Microsoft could put the money behind it, no doubt, but given that their history of commercial and advertising (e.g. Ballmer selling windows 1.0 like your local mattress store salesman as compared to Apple's 1984 commercial), even Microsoft couldn't give Windows the parade it deserves.

⬐ oneeyedpigeon

Linux: 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.

⬐ collyw

Mac users are annoyingly vocal.

⬐ sbuk

No more than any other group. That's just your cognitive bias showing.

⬐ Angostura

I must admit sweeping generalisations like that might just make me so.

⬐ tehwalrus

Please 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

Or 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

I 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.

⬐ machbio

The 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 :)

⬐ zemanel

Back 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.

⬐ hackmiester

Hey! 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

⬐ DerekL

And that picture is “Road to Point Reyes”, created in 1983 by the Lucasfilm division that eventually became Pixar. http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm

⬐ meerita

I 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.

⬐ hnriot

I 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.

⬐ osetinsky

Jon Appleton was my professor at Dartmouth's Electro-acoustic Music Program. He's a great composer, professor and person who cares about his students.

⬐ alagappanr

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?

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/).

⬐ itafroma

> 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

I 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!

⬐ jarjoura

This 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. :-)

⬐ danabramov

Weird. It's the first time I see an Apple use an actual webfont instead of pictures—and it won't load for me.

⬐ adieulot

Same here. Some refreshs did the tricks though.

⬐ hadem

The video felt more like a demonstration of software that works on Macs rather than 30 years of Mac hardware to me.

⬐ ja27

No Mac SE? No clip of the "1984" SuperBowl ad?

⬐ marban

If Apple would still build Macs with soul (i.e. anything before 2002) it wouldn't need a campaign to tell how great they are.

⬐ pavlov

I'm confused -- what big change happened in 2002? The "sunflower" iMac is the only thing I can think of.

⬐ racl101

I 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.

⬐ vacri

The new Mac pro is something beautiful and unique.

⬐ marban

Too fast, beautiful and perfect to be called a true Mac ;)

⬐ runj__

2006 MacBook

It still sort of works but the plastic is all broken off. I should probably throw it away, it was beautiful though.

⬐ lukeman

Loved 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.

⬐ username42

Older 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

Microsoft isn't responsible for terrible OEMs.

⬐ username42

You think so ?

⬐ stephen_g

The 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.

⬐ stdgy

In 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

⬐ joaomoreno

Chrome + Windows can't handle the fonts on the website after the video ends

⬐ bliker

But soon, the peril will be over https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

⬐ None

None

⬐ CGudapati

I am not asking all the names but who are those people behind the various macs?

⬐ None

None

⬐ nly

Pretty sure the musician is Moby.

⬐ itafroma

> 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

I just right arrowed through the whole series of pictures. Thanks!

⬐ thomasfl

Apple has managed to link so many strong feelings to computers.

⬐ octotoad

Yeah, 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

that'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.

⬐ scosman

am I crazy, or is that a touchscreen MBP at 2:19?

⬐ dits59

Good Advertisement

⬐ josefresco

More 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.

⬐ jryle80

Why do you need to be an ass? We celebrate computers every single day. Is it unreasonable to acknowledge a brand that many many professionals feel emotionally attached? Did you complain when we were celebrating VAX, Atari, Commodore, Walkman, PlayStation 2?

Mac brought to the mass many things we take for granted today -- graphical interface, mouse, all-in-one form factor, SSD, etc.

Once popular brands -- IBM, Compag, Gateway, DEC, Sun -- are gone. Mac is still here and going strong. Not remarkable at all?

⬐ scelerat

> switch to Intel changed that

The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all sorts of concerns with architecture, open source/free software, macho "real programmers" insecurities, etc.

⬐ josefresco

I'm referring hardware/performance parity among the platforms. I sat through too many Apple events where they marched out some obscure crazy benchmark proving their (IBM) crappy CPUs were 1 million times more powerful than Intel's. Fast forward a few years and surprise! Apple moved to Intel because of their "superior roadmap" Notice how that implies that moving forward Intel is the performance winner but historically was not.

For fun read this, 2 yeas before the switch to Intel: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/06/23Apple-and-IBM-Intr...

⬐ mbreese

The PowerPC as a processor really was a powerful chip. And it was arguably more powerful than contemporary Intel chips. It's hard to directly compare the two because to unlock the performance for either architecture requires an optimized toolchain. I'm not sure that the toolchain Apple was using was ever quite up to par with Intel. But since they are difference architecture styles (RISC vs CISC), it was really hard to get a good comparison. On HPC workloads, the Power chips were really good. I'm not sure that ever translated to workstations well.

The differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360 processors and toolchains is probably a good analogy. While in theory the Cell of the PS3 is more powerful, it was easier to get the Xbox to work optimally. (Although, ironically, they were both PowerPC based CPUs).

But the reason why Apple changed over to Intel chips had nothing to do with raw performance. It had everything to do with power - as in watts. Apple was beholden to the PowerPC manufacturers (Motorola/IBM) for their chips.

The major markets for PPC chips was either at the very high-end (HPC) or the very low-end (embedded). While Apple was the main customer for the mid-range chips, they didn't have much relative volume, so they didn't have much sway in the chip roadmap. Because of this, it was difficult to get high-performance/low-power chips. Apple went for years with a G4-based Powerbook because they couldn't get a G5 version that would work in a laptop - it required too much power.

The reason why they switched to Intel was that Intel was already working on the high-performance/low-power chips that Motorola just couldn't offer.

The PowerPC architecture itself was very high-performance, but recent years have shown that raw performance isn't as important as performance per watt for consumer use. If you're building a super computer, that's another story. From a pure CPU architecture standpoint, I'm still a fan of RISC.

⬐ usingpond

Jeez I hate sounding like such a fanboy but here goes. They switched because IBM's only option they provided Apple for the future of their laptop line was just straight up embedding G5s into PowerBooks. This wasn't really feasible at all, they were already running dangerously hot and had abysmal battery life. PPC chips were just nowhere near energy-efficient enough. It really had nothing to do with benchmarks or power or whatever (in fact the initial Core Duo chips were much slower than their PPC counterparts).

I mean think about it, Apple makes next to no money on desktops, why would they prioritize power over energy consumption? Every once in a while they'll trump up some weird graph/metric like "24X FASTER" when talking about new chips in their devices, yet just about every keynote they talk up (in concrete numbers) how much longer batteries last. Hell, the latest release of OS X's biggest feature is enhanced energy management.

This is one of the biggest things that makes comparing Macs to PCs kind of silly to me—if you want raw power, you should absolutely go with a Windows box. Apple loses on that every single time, and they are fine with that.

⬐ 72deluxe

Early releases of Mac OSX were pretty bad. Pretty, but pretty bad too. (Too many uses of the word "pretty"?)

⬐ Moto7451

Yup, but it was worth it to escape the various errors that could take down the OS at a moments notice depending on the software you were running. Not loosing my unsaved/unauto-saved Word documents because of an iTunes or IE crash was huge.

⬐ scelerat

Yah I recall that 10.2 seemed like first version of Mac OS X that had a lot of kinks worked out. Each release thereafter got better and faster. Apple had one solid release after another throughout the aughts.

⬐ gaius

It is certainly interesting to compare the full colour, hardware accelerated graphic, multitasking, large memory Amigas of the mid 80s with contemporary Macs... The future could have been very, very different (and arguably computing would be 5-10 years ahead of where it is now, as that was the lead Commodore had back then).

Or the Acorn Archimedes of the time, which was turning in floating point benchmarks 10x faster.

⬐ taliesinb

What was responsible for the Amiga ultimately failing, if it was superior in all those ways?

⬐ jacobwcarlson

It's complicated: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

⬐ simonh

The Amiga OS was very advanced in some ways, but extremely primitive in others. It was basically a hyper-advanced games console with a keyboard. The UI was minimally functional, limited to non-existent support for printers or peripherals, etc. It just wasn't intended to be used as anything other than a games machine and provided none of the features a business machine would need. I speak as a very proud owner of an Amiga 500 since 1989.

⬐ BashiBazouk

Yes, this. My housemate had a 1000. It was by far the best video game console of it's era, and a few after that. As a general productivity computer, not so much. Serious lack of good software and some strange decisions by Commodore. I think the largest mistake was a lack of an internal hard drive. Sure you could buy an external, but at the time we were so new to computing we did not know we needed one and they were half the price of the base computer...

They were good for high end graphics and video of that era but I think SGI quickly caught up and surpassed them there. The other bit about Amiga that seems to be forgotten, just how proprietary the hardware was. We had a floppy drive go out and, to this day it remains as one of the more difficult to get to parts of all the computers I have had to crack open to replace a part in.

⬐ gaius

The A1000, the 1985 original was a conventional 3-box design aimed at businesses who wanted to get into this new "multimedia" thing.

⬐ mortenjorck

The desktop GUI system (Workbench) was more Xerox than Macintosh, and stayed stuck in 1982 for a long time. But the Amiga was far more than just a games machine: Its multimedia capabilities were so far in advance of anything else for a decade that it became to music and video what the Mac was to design and publishing.

The best example of this would be the Video Toaster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster For much of the 1990s, it was the king of real-time broadcast video production, unsurpassed until the advent of hardware-accelerated PC graphics late in the decade.

⬐ gaius

A series of business blunders by Commodore. Apple made similar blunders a decade later and barely survived them.

⬐ hardtke

I was 10 at the time and my father was a typewriter repairman. He purchased a Mac the first day it came out. To that point, the IBM PC had not affected the typewriter repair business because of the archaic document preparation programs then in use (similar to latex). When I hooked up the Mac and started typing a document, my father said "oh shit" and knew that his business was done. I then went to print the document, and the printer didn't work because the first batch of printer cables were defective. Nonetheless, 30 years ago today the office was transformed -- dedicated typists were no longer needed because people could prepare final copies of their own documents.

⬐ aroman

I 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.

⬐ FireBeyond

The Amiga might have something to say to you about modern personal computing.

Well, I should clarify. The Amiga was -demo'ed- in 1983 but not released until 1985.

⬐ sbuk

And that was after the Apple Lisa, which was released in early January of 1983.

⬐ josefresco

It 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

You 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.

⬐ sbuk

Let's not forget the moral outrage at the perceived omission of a floppy drive.

⬐ rapind

It is most certainly not a fact that the "Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public."

The Apple ][ was more popular by far than the original Mac, and even so it wasn't the first definitive PC. I remember seeing a lot of Commodore PETs around when I was young... way more than Macintosh.

⬐ aroman

I was using the term "modern personal computing" to refer to a computer using what would become the standard cross-platform interface for computers: the desktop metaphor[1].

While the Apple II and the Commodore PET were undoubtedly very popular and did put computers into the hands of home users, they really were not "modern" computers. To quote the Wikipedia article I referenced above:

"The first computer to popularise the desktop metaphor, using it as a standard feature over the earlier command line interface was the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The desktop metaphor is ubiquitous in modern-day personal computing; it is found in most desktop environments of modern operating systems: Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor