Apple

I still have a whole lot of spare "Ready for PowerPC upgrade" stickers I need to deface the local Apple Store with.

i have probably used every mac model for one reason or the other and i’ve owned lots of them throughout the years. since jose made a list:

josehill wrote: [*]PowerBook Duo 270c - includes interesting stuff like Aldus Pagemaker and Aldus Persuasion

was this the one that used to come /w a pimped dock (including a screen) that turned it to a full desktop back then? a good friend of mine used to design+publish a whole magazine on it (w/ pagemaker) for years

josehill wrote: [*]PowerBook3,1 - (G3 Firewire/Pismo) upgraded with ZIP drive.

pound for pound & inch by inch this is the best laptop i’ve owned and used by far. a truly professional laptop (no matter what each ones profession was), repairable/upgradable in 30 seconds and all of the expansion ports were on the rear. hello apple!? not on the bloody left/right sides of the machine. did everything i could to keep it as my main driver (maxed out everything, upgraded the cpu to a G4) but the early versions of OS X were an experiment of hardware specs and software transitions.

from the classic era, my favourite was the quadra 840av, great “home” desktop with video capabilities way beyond its time. can’t recall the specifics but it included a bunch of extra DSP chips that did handle audio/video properly. it also required a customised version of MacOS due to its special hardware.

josehill wrote: Oh, yes, and a Newton MessagePad 130!

dang! don't know how i got that lucky back then, my handwriting is probably the worst on the planet but i've owned the last newton 2000 or 2200 something and its handwriting recognition would work great for me. due to its looong size, i have fond memories where friends would ask me why do i carry a flatbed scanner

today, after a few experiments with some macbook air models (and their fixed ram) this “old” macbook7,1 cuts everything i do (16GB ram / SSD) and what cannot be done on it gets done in the studio not at home.

fu wrote:

josehill wrote: [*]PowerBook Duo 270c - includes interesting stuff like Aldus Pagemaker and Aldus Persuasion

was this the one that used to come /w a pimped dock (including a screen) that turned it to a full desktop back then? a good friend of mine used to design+publish a whole magazine on it (w/ pagemaker) for years

Yep. I have the fully pimped Dock and a ginormous external 14" RGB display, too.

fu wrote:

josehill wrote: [*]PowerBook3,1 - (G3 Firewire/Pismo) upgraded with ZIP drive.

pound for pound & inch by inch this is the best laptop i’ve owned and used by far. a truly professional laptop (no matter what each ones profession was), repairable/upgradable in 30 seconds and all of the expansion ports were on the rear. hello apple!? not on the bloody left/right sides of the machine. did everything i could to keep it as my main driver (maxed out everything, upgraded the cpu to a G4) but the early versions of OS X were an experiment of hardware specs and software transitions.

Yes, the Pismo is a terrific machine. The points you raise are a big reason why Apple continues to sell a pile of mid-2012 non-Retina MacBookPros! My Pismo was a freebie I got from a digital prepress guy when he switched all the systems in his shop to x86. It's nicely tricked out with Panther, Quark, Adobe CS, and a huge number of professional fonts -- no crappy fonts from those "1000 Fonts for $20!" blowouts.

fu wrote:

josehill wrote: Oh, yes, and a Newton MessagePad 130!

dang! don't know how i got that lucky back then, my handwriting is probably the worst on the planet but i've owned the last newton 2000 or 2200 something and its handwriting recognition would work great for me. due to its looong size, i have fond memories where friends would ask me why do i carry a flatbed scanner

It's too bad that the later Newtons were so badly tarnished by the flaws of the early models. By the time the 130 came out, it really was a solid platform. The iPad could learn a few tricks from it!

fu wrote: today, after a few experiments with some macbook air models (and their fixed ram) this “old” macbook7,1 cuts everything i do (16GB ram / SSD) and what cannot be done on it gets done in the studio not at home.

Great machine. I'm really not looking forward to the day when the only options left are iThingys with everything soldered in.

f10d4 wrote: What Apple hardware do we have?

Mac Classic with 4MB of RAM, external 100Mb hard drive, and Apple 600e CD-ROM drive. I use it as a terminal for my IRIS systems (serial connection) if they're broken. It runs OS 7.5.3

B&W PowerMac G3 with 1.5GB of RAM and a couple of 20GB hard disks. It dual boots Mac OS X 10.3 and Mac OS 9.2.2. I find myself partial to the case design and color. On the 9.2.2. side it has a lot of old Mac games. 10.3 runs well on it. I also consider 10.3 the first version of OS X that was responsive enough for serious work to be done.

josehill wrote: Yes, the Pismo is a terrific machine... My Pismo was a freebie I got from a digital prepress guy...

if you have some space, treasure it jo :)

i’ve done loads of projects on it and i miss its functional glory every single day. pete once helped me with shipping a “portable” firewire array from cali to hampstead theatre where i used the pismo to do lots of straight-to-disk recording via firewire. the pre-press guy’s setup is still capable of doing lots of damage, i’designed 2 pop-up books on the pismo while it was on its MacOS 9 days. dtp-wise, you can still do anything you like and pass it on to the press in pure .ai/.eps format.

josehill wrote: I'm really not looking forward to the day when the only options left are iThingys with everything soldered in.

i understand that some engineering/industial design cases will introduce certain changes over time. what i cannot get (and is what pissed me the most after using apple machines ever since they came out) is the psychosis of “no user-replaceable parts” in the “professional” line-up. for the work i do, most interesting locations won’t have an apple store round the corner; how come i cannot change the bloody battery? i should be able to ring a reseller and have a damn battery fedexed over not the other way round (fedex the whole laptop in order to replace its battery). you all have similar points coming from your work’s pov.

SPSDOD wrote: I also consider 10.3 the first version of OS X that was responsive enough for serious work to be done.

i’m terrible with model numbers (some times i remember the cat’s name, other times the numeric version) but iirc, yes 10.3 was getting up to comparable (MacOS 9) responsiveness and it also brought back the colo(u)r labels, something we used to tag our projects ever since, what was it guys? MacOS 6 or something.

Apple machines at type of posting:

• Macintosh SE (800k, not SuperDrive)
• Macintosh Portable (Backlit)
• 2x iBook G3 Clamshells
• iMac G4 800 MHz
• Power Macintosh 6100/60
• iMac G3 350 MHz
• PowerBook G3 Pismo
• Power Mac G5 (2x2.0 GHz)
• Black early 2008 13 inch MacBook
• Mid-2012 13 inch MacBook Pro (cracked screen and other issues, got for free from a friend)
• 15 inch PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz
• 350 MHz Power Mac G4 (agp)
• Various iPods, iPhones, etc.
• It doesn't count but I use my ThinkPad T420 as my main Mac machine if I need OS X. It's running Sierra.

edit: Forgot AGP G4 Power Mac... whoops.

LarBob wrote: Apple machines at type of posting:

• Macintosh SE (800k SuperDrive)

The SuperDrive was the 1.4MB floppy drive. 800KB was the model in the 512KE, the Plus, and the basic SE, as well as Mac IIs without the drive upgrade.

robespierre wrote:

LarBob wrote: Apple machines at type of posting:

• Macintosh SE (800k SuperDrive)

The SuperDrive was the 1.4MB floppy drive. 800KB was the model in the 512KE, the Plus, and the basic SE, as well as Mac IIs without the drive upgrade.

Oh. my bad. Was kind of distracted. Meant to put not SuperDrive, lol.

Apple Machines at the moment:

2x iBook Clamshell G3's
Powermac G4 Sawtooth
Powermac G4 Quicksilver
Powermac G4 Mirror Doors
Powermac G5
Mac Pro 2013 Trash can (currently in daily use)
27" Cinema Display
iPhone 4s
iPhone 6s+ (currently in daily use)

All machines are spotless cosmetically speaking.



It was the Powermac G4 that first sparked my interest in Apple and it's the reason why I collect computers today!

Irinikus wrote: [...]
All machines are spotless cosmetically speaking.
[...]
It was the Powermac G4 that first sparked my interest in Apple and it's the reason why I collect computers today!

Nice. Did you actually buy them new when they were current and took much care to preserve them? Or were you lucky to get the machines in pristine condition?

Mine were all bought used, starting a few years ago. I recently added a Power Macintosh G4 Yikes! board to the collection and was hoping to get it installed in one of my Sawtooth based "barebones", but the backplate can no longer be easily removed on the G4 (AGP) cases, so I'll either have to remove it the hard way or have to wait for a G4 (PCI) case or just "upgrade" my G3.

johnnym wrote: Nice. Did you actually buy them new when they were current and took much care to preserve them? Or were you lucky to get the machines in pristine condition?

I wasn't lucky enough to have the pleasure of using one of these machines when they were current! These were my "Dream Machines" when I was younger!

Besides my 486 which I've had since new (my first computer), the G4's were the first "vintage" machines that I collected.

In order to get the spotless example's I've got, I had to buy multiple machines and combine the parts to constitute cosmetically perfect machines. That was a rather expencive and time consuming task, but it taught me allot about the processes involved in restoring vintage machines and now I'm addicted!

Some of the donor machines were bought locally and some from the US. I very quickly found that there are loads of these machines around, but its hard to get one thats in good shape, so I had to choose my donor machines carefully!

As soon as I had finished with the G4's my eyes very quickly turned to SGI, as I had also seen an O2 and I thought that it looked interesting and that got me into collecting SGI machines.

You tend to learn a great deal about machines when you literally have to build them up from carefully selected parts, and I find it to be a very enjoyable learning experience!

Irinikus wrote: Mac Pro 2013 Trash can (currently in daily use)

Do you like it? I was planning to get one to replace my 2006 mac pro, but because they were never updated, the resale prices never really dropped, I couldn't practically afford a new one, and the prices on ebay got more ridiculous every month (I mean, the prices stayed the same, but the machines aged). Surely now if I really needed one I would buy new from apple, no question.

I see much more value in a machine built and sold in 2017 vs. a machine built and sold in 2013 even if the spec is the same. Call me crazy...

They'll probably be fairly rare in the future and maybe valuable to a collector? Probably on par with a G4 cube.

guardian452 wrote:

Irinikus wrote: Mac Pro 2013 Trash can (currently in daily use)

Do you like it? I was planning to get one to replace my 2006 mac pro, but because they were never updated, the resale prices never really dropped, I couldn't practically afford a new one, and the prices on ebay got more ridiculous every month (I mean, the prices stayed the same, but the machines aged). Surely now if I really needed one I would buy new from apple, no question.

I see much more value in a machine built and sold in 2017 vs. a machine built and sold in 2013 even if the spec is the same. Call me crazy...

They'll probably be fairly rare in the future and maybe valuable to a collector? Probably on par with a G4 cube.

My experience with the Mac Pro 2013 has been a very good one, sure you can get a more powerful machine for less in the PC world, but just as in cars, there is far more to a car than simple straight line performance!

It's small and very portable, it's whisper quite and it has more than enough horsepower to perform the daily tasks that I require from it, and it''s extremely well built!

It's not the best for gaming under Mac OS, but it doesn't need to be! Get a PeeeCeee for that!

Unless you're into gaming, this machine has more than enough horsepower! you always find people on the net complaining about the fact that the tech in this machine is antiquated and in need of an update, but in my opinion, there haven't been significant enough advances in computer technology during its life to warrant an upgrade (the various revisions of the i7 have plateaued in performance from a "core for core" performance perspective - we need to see the Next-Gen core before a new Mac Pro will be necessary, logically speaking, as far as i'm concerned) - It performs beautifully!

The only gripe that I have with this machine is more of a problem of service from apples side, in that there have bee no GPU upgrades made available for this machine. GPU's seem to be the component in a system which becomes obsolete the quickest and an upgrade offer in this area would have been nice!

However with that being said, a GPU upgrade would only have real relevance to those who would want to game on the machine!

I would definitely recommend it, its been an absolute pleasure to use!

Irinikus wrote: sure you can get a more powerful machine for less in the PC world

Ummmm you do realize that you are at an SGI-based website, correct?

But the GPU in this machine is at least competent when it was new. I think the bigger issue was using two weaker units instead of one bigger chip, which made the software support awkward to say the least, and it is worse in MacOS than Windows. That, coupled with supposed reliability issues with overheating and crashing, and the fact that the IO is stuck in 2013 (no TB3, 10Gbe, limited 4k support, etc) make it a really tough sell when the imac pro is already announced.

My MacPro shipped with the Geforce 7300GT which was barely adequate in 2006. With the Radeon 5770 upgrade I was able to hack the machine to OSX 10.10 and used it until early 2017. Ram was plentiful and even the pair of Xeon 5150's I had no issue with. What ultimately did the machine in was simply old age, it started crashing randomly every few weeks and was replaced by a Synology because all it was doing was fileserving at that point. I could have swapped parts, suspecting the aftermarket ram that was installed before I purchased it, but at some point it's better to cut your losses.

guardian452 wrote: But the GPU in this machine is at least competent when it was new. I think the bigger issue was using two weaker units instead of one bigger chip

I agree with you completely SLI and Cross Fire are both farces! Micro-stutter is a huge problem with these configurations.

Nowadays for gaming I make use of a large single GPU with loads of frame-buffer, and wouldn't suggest making use of anything else!

As far as the Mac pro 2013 is concerned, I was lucky enough to get the machine in January of 2014, so I managed to get good use out of it.

My machine has been very reliable.

I intend using it as a multimedia machine for music,series and Netflix in the future.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer separate computer and screen configurations!

If your're happy with an all-in-one, then the i Mac Pro is your machine!