Upgrade - 496: 40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 496 today's show is brought to you by vitally delete me and squarespace i would like to welcome you to the 40th anniversary of the mac draft while everybody else is going to be talking about the Vision Pro this week, we'll get back to that next week. Because on this show today, we're going to celebrate this important day in the history of the Macintosh. And for this momentous occasion, we have selected a panel of momentous participants to draft a list of Macintosh accolades.

So please welcome to the show, Shelley Brisbane, public radio journalist and host of Parallel on RelayFM. Hi, Shelley. Hello, it's great to be here. Stephen Hackett from 512pixels and host of various shows here on RelayFM. Hi, Stephen. Thanks for having me. And Dan Morin of Six Colors, host of Clockwise and RelayFM, the rebound of various shows on The Incomparable. Hi, Dan. Hi, Mike.

Pleased to be here. Pleased to be ready to wipe the floor with my competition. Okay. Dan introduced the smack talk. We have John Gruber of Daring Fireball, The Talk Show, and Dithering. Hi, John. Hello. John Siracusa from Hypercritical, ATP, and host of various shows on RelayFM and The Incomparable.

Hi, John. I'm excited to be momentous. Indeed. And of course, my usual partner in crime, Jason Snell of Six Colors, host of various shows on RelayFM, including this one. Including this one. And The Incomparable. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on my show. So here's what we're going to do today. I'm already thrown off. This doesn't sound like Upgrade. Well, in a minute, it's about to because we're going to do today this doesn't sound like upgrade well in a minute it's about two because we're going to draft so we have five themed rounds the order for who is going to be picking first has been selected by random.org bringing random to you each round will then be started by the

subsequent person so we're going to be shifting uh the only person who won't get to start a round is Dan. Sorry, Dan. I don't know what to tell you. We have six participants in five rounds. Singled out so soon. Asterisk next to all of this. I find it very suspicious that he was smack talking and now he's at the bottom of the list. Look, I'm fair, but I won't stand for it.

I just want to say it. Everybody, understand this. You are not allowed to pick the same item as any person who has come before you. You must have backup picks for each round. But of course, please feel free to add any commentary to another participant's pick. The idea of today, while we're going to be talking about specific categories, this is a celebration of the 40 years of the Macintosh. So discussion is encouraged. For round one, we're going to be setting the table with each of the participants,

as I would like you all to tell me a little bit about the first Mac you ever bought. Now, of course, if somebody else selected your Mac, give me your second Mac, but then you can tell me it was your first Mac. I made the rules. I will not stand for it. The rules are, you can still me it was your first Mac. I made the rules. I will not stand for it. The rules are you can still tell me what your

first Mac was, but then I also want to hear your second Mac. We want to get as many Macs in this conversation as possible. So, we go to... The power's gone to his head already. Oh, God. Look, I'm just trying to bring order. There's like a thousand people on this podcast. There's got to be some level of rules.

Shelly, I will come to you first. What is the first Mac you ever bought? And tell me a little bit about it. It was a Mac plus, and I was prepared if I wasn't going to go first, I had my half Mac, not my second Mac, but my half Mac, but because before I got the Mac, I don't think anybody's going to snipe this. So I'll do you do it anyway. Before I got the Mac plus, I rented a Mac 512KE to make sure I liked this whole Mac thing. And I did very much. And I got the Mac Plus with the very meager monies I had available to me and started my little attempt at a desktop publishing business. I loved it very much. I used it in my childhood bedroom for as long as it lasted. I actually still own it because there

was a point when I left California to move back to Texas where I had the chance to give it away with a bunch of stuff we were getting rid of. And I physically restrained my husband from taking it to the car and getting rid of it. So it is in a closet in my third bedroom, the beloved Mac Plus. That's good. I have Lauren's beloved, I think it's a 512 that was upgraded to a plus right behind me but it's still it's still boots so that's her her uh childhood computer and college computer too i'd never thought about the idea of renting a computer right you could back in those there was a guy who had he had uh gone to the university of tex as I had, and he set up a little sort of a Mac shop very near campus, and he would sell you computers, he would rent them.

I think he did maybe some early desktop publishing services. He did memory installations for people. And so I forget how I found out about him, but he had this Mac 512KE available, and all I needed to do was figure out whether I could run and enjoy Pagemaker. And I did, although I distinctly remember the sound of the two floppy drives when I was loading the system in the Pagemaker. Oh my God, memories.

And so I thought the Mac Plus plus a hard drive, which I paid a lot of money for, a 20 megabyte, megabyte, friends, megabyte hard drive would be the way to go. And it was, and I enjoyed it. I couldn't afford a laser printer, but I did have half the desktop publishing experience that I needed. And then I would go to the alpha graphics shop and spend a dollar a page, and I would print things up for people. And that's how one of my first jobs after college. Somebody should get in the Vision Pro rental business. That's the next step.

Right. It's like skate rentals at the roller rink where they spray that stuff on them. They just spray that on the face cushion. Nobody wants that. Used goggles. Thank you. John Syracuse, what was the first

Mac that you ever bought? Despite the dumb rules of this thing, I'm lucky that no one else is going to snipe mine. Although, speaking of renting computers, my first computer was a rented Commodore VIC-20, because again, my parents weren't sure that first, they didn't want to buy an expensive computer, and they

weren't sure computers were worthwhile, but after that, my first Mac was the first Mac, the original Macintosh 128K, and how that came about, it was actually not my doing. I wanted a computer. I got the rented VIC-20. It was not great. We hooked up to the TV, did stuff with it. The Mac came into my life. My understanding of the chain is my uncle, who was a nerd and still is, convinced my grandfather, his father, to get a Mac. And the

first Mac I ever saw was over my grandfather's house on his kitchen table where I sat there and I went through the guided tour, the Macintosh guided tour, which was an audio cassette that came with the computer that you would put in a tape player and play. And then you do stuff on the screen and it would tell you, you know, go to the next chapter when it beeps or whatever and do stuff on the screen. And shortly after that, an original macintosh appeared in our home i know i didn't buy it myself my parents did i was nine years old uh that was my first mac the original macintosh we later uh motherboard upgraded that to a plus which is a thing that apple used to

sell to you for a huge amount of money those were the days and i still have that computer and it's upstairs amazing does it still run john hey last time i turned it on was many years ago it did still run then but now who knows you got to get a floppy emu and then you can you can boot it from a sd card it's pretty i mean all those capacitors have to be blown by now but i have the original box the original macintosh box the all the manuals all the stuff it looks extremely beat up because you know i was nine years old when we got it and I wasn't there to save it, but I have all the stuff. Sure, talking about 40 years of a computer

platform, there's going to be a lot of terms and phrases that sound quite strange today. Floppy emu, I think would be hard to beat. And that's a modern product. Floppy emu is an emulator. It's an SD card reading thing that emulates the floppy port on the classic Mac.

Oh, I didn't know it was called that. I remember I was talking about it. So you can plug it in and boot off of, there's way more computing power. And I think the screen on the floppy Emu is actually higher resolution than on the original Mac, but it'll boot anything on an SD card, which is pretty awesome.

But then you're missing out on the experience, like Shelly said. Oh God, that floppy swapping. It's true. Because I also ran in an external floppy drive because obviously the Mac Plus had, well, obviously to me anyways, had only one,

but you had to have two in order to run the system and PageMaker and, oh, a file or two. Stephen Hackett, what was your first Mac? I actually had to stop and think about this because the first Mac I used as my own was actually from like a job. It was a titanium power book that the owner of the company basically just let me treat as my own machine, which was insane because I was like 17 years old. But the first Mac I bought with my own money was a 17-inch iMac G4 in like 2006 or so got it second hand uh because I needed

something to watch tv on in the little apartment I rented and so uh it makes me sound much younger than the rest of you but uh sorry about that but yeah uh iMac G4 makes a great made a great tv for a long time you are much younger than the rest of us yeah it just sounds i was expecting there to be some age-related uh uh crosswinds here because like the title of this show it's the max uh 40th anniversary so it's like wait a second if the mac is 40 and i have the original mac how old is the children who are John Gruber, what was the first Mac that you ever bought? I got a, in 1991, when I started my freshman year at Drexel University, they had a rather famous policy that the, you know, and they had a program from the late 80s or mid 80s, even where every student at Drexel had to have access to a Mac, they didn't have to buy one, but it was sort of insinuated that you should I mean, and there were labs where you could go. But they sold them to students at a

tremendous discount. I mean, I don't I don't know if they were half off, but it was I don't know, somewhere 30 40% off retail in collaboration with Apple. And my year, so they'd offer three, there were like three choices. And the one was, the bottom one was a Mac Classic. The middle one was the Mac LC. And the high-end one was the SE30. And I went with the Mac LC because it had a color screen and I thought I'd want to play games.

And here I am, what is it, 34 years later, 33 years later, and I still regret not buying the SE30. So that Mac LC was my first one. And as Syracuse has said, in the 80s, for those of us of our era era it was a very common thing for parents to sort of i don't know if i'm going to buy you a computer you're not going to use it but my parents wouldn't buy me a computer i've told this story on podcasts before not because they thought i wouldn't use it but because they thought if they bought me a computer that i'd never leave the house so that was actually the first computer i ever owned was I mean, I had an Atari 2600 game player, but that Mac LC with 4 megabytes of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard drive and the 12-inch color display, not the good 13-inch one, was my computer until, I 1998 when i bought uh when i went and the lc stood for low cost supposedly you know how apple never even back then never explained color yeah

right you never explained what se meant never explained yeah what lc meant but apparently it was low cost color uh which is really what it was. Eventually, I upgraded it to the maximum, the maximum of 10 megabytes of RAM and passed it to my girlfriend, who is now my wife, when I upgraded. My second Mac was a Power Mac 9600 350, which, because it's my second,

it won't spoil it. A little faster. Yeah. Right, which as it's my second, it won't spoil a little faster. Yeah. Right. Which was... Top of the line. Right. So I went from this LC that had frustrated me nonstop from the day I opened it until I maxed out with the greatest workstation class machine available at the time in 1998. And then my poor wife, by the time I passed it to her, she was in law school and trying to use the web like Netscape. I mean, it was people laugh about classic Macs and how they'd crash often or something like that. But man, trying to use

the web in 1997 with 10 megabytes of RAM was pretty dire. Jason Snell, what was the first Mac that you ever bought? So I really started using the Mac in college at my college newspaper. And we had a whole bunch of SEs and one Mac too. And we had a bunch of external displays so we could run PageMaker and see a full tabloid page and lay it out that way and that's where i fell in love with the mac i had an apple 2 before that um and uh intended to run that apple 2 for a while longer and by the end of my that year my

sophomore year in college i uh i had to buy a mac that was it i was completely um around the bend i i'd stopped using the computer in my dorm, the Apple II. I just went to the newspaper office whenever I wanted to use a computer, because I just didn't want to use anything but a Mac at that point. And this was actually at the end of the life of the SE. The Classic was just around the corner, although I didn't know that. And so Apple put the SEs on sale, plus there was the educational discount. And so what seemed like an inconceivably expensive amount of money for Mac in those days, in the spring of 1990, suddenly kind of came within bounds of being affordable for me. And the way my parents set me up in college was that they

basically put money into a bank account from my college money and trusted me with it. Like I wrote the checks for the tuition and all of that. And it was coming toward the end of my sophomore year and I had the money in the bank. So I made the executive decision after much fretting, just myself to go and buy that Mac SE at the UCSD bookstore. buy that Mac SE at the UCSD bookstore. And, um, you know, in hindsight, you know, best decision I could have ever made and, uh, loved having that. And since I knew the SE well, because we had them at the office as well with a hard drive and a floppy drive. So you didn't have to endlessly be shifting floppy floppy disks around. Um, and I love that thing. And I used it for, for, uh, the rest of college and into grad school before I

got a power book here's to buying Macs with your parents money that's the only way to do it I feel like even with educational discounts which were considerably better back in those days than they are now I mean I got a great one on the Mac plus which I bought through the University of Texas but I feel like there are all sorts of stories about how you cobbled together the money for your first Mac. And in my case, it was that my sister, who's younger than me, got a car, a very old, very beat up car when she was, I guess, 16, whenever she got her license. I don't have the vision to drive, so I did not get a car. So it was my mother who, when I was like, I really like this Mac, I really, really, really want it.

And she's the one who said, I'm not buying you a car, but I'll buy you a Mac. It cost about the same. Pretty much, yes. A really old VW Rabbit versus a Mac Plus, yeah, about the same. My second Mac was purchased with my sister's college discount. She went off to college. She's four years older than me. She went off to college, and I convinced my parents, let's use her college discount to buy me a Mac. Because the discounts, look at the savings. You can't afford not to buy it.

They were huge back then. They were really good. Yeah. Yeah. And so she went to college. She went to college with the Mac 128 motherboard upgraded to a Mac Plus. That was her college computer in, I guess, what was that, 1989? I guess, what was that, 1989? Yeah. Yeah, that's basically the same computer that Lauren used in college. So that's fair. No, I didn't. The control of the bank account didn't really bite me until I was a senior in college.

That's when I bought the personal laser rider. Oh, man. That's power. Too many lasers, Jason. I was around the bend then. And finally, Dan Morin, what was your favorite Mac? I'm interested. Are we going to complete a run where nobody had their mac we are we are not we are not i went last so i got sniped uh actually

the education discount thing was relevant to me because my dad worked at a university so we used that to he was a staff member so we got an education discount on my first mac which uh john gruber and i are our brothers here because i also started with the mac lc same era um albeit with um with less ram i think i only had two megabytes of ram i was couldn't even run system 7 had to downgrade to 6.0.7 spent a while before i could upgrade to four megabytes so i could finally have multitasking which was great i did come with uh uh dug up some photographic evidence for our private chat there of the Mac LC and me as a 13 year old using it. I had a style writer.

I had one of those Gravis joysticks. I had a 2400 baud modem that's peeking out there. All the great stuff. Dan, you are robbing the world by not publishing this image. I'll put it up somewhere. I'll put it up online. But yeah, against the the world by not publishing this image i'll put i'll put it up somewhere i'll put it up online

um but yeah against against the rules so i i won't go on about that one although i did uh i did love that mac my second mac was a performa 6300 so i guess i went in the opposite direction from john which is i i feel like i really took a step back with the Performa because that was a not great machine, including logic board on it died at some point. We had to get that replaced. One of the cathode ray guns went on the monitor, so you couldn't see anything that was red, which was real fun. There were a lot of problems with that computer. I was not a big fan of it, but it lasted. That one lasted from the mid-90s all the way to my freshman year of college.

I took it to school with me. i think we did get the monitor fixed at some point um also bought with my with my dad's uh uh education discount that was like for years man i was so sad when i finally graduated i think even then afterwards i worked at a university for a little while and i think i could use the education discount there, but eventually I finally lost access to it and they got worse, which was a real bummer. But yeah, I have really fond memories of that LC. It was a fantastic 40 megabyte hard drive. I remember opening it up, like it was the pizza box, they call them, because they were super long and flat and you could undo a couple of clips on the back and pull up and the whole thing was just kind of laid out there uh i think i was really like trepidatious about opening it the time that we had to like upgrade something else so you know you would open

it and be like full of dust because it hadn't been opened like ever uh those things were just suck dust in so uh but i i it's amazing all the things that computer could do given its relatively low amount of power although i did occasionally run into things where it like would tell you like i think there are games you couldn't run because the resolution on that monitor was weird and like games like i don't remember it's like maelstrom or something like wouldn't run because it couldn't do like 640 480 or anything now maelstrom maelstrom definitely worked i can okay maelstrom or something like wouldn't run because it couldn't do like 640 480 or anything now maelstrom maelstrom definitely worked i can okay maelstrom there was something out there was some game that would not run because it was at a weird resolution yeah there were a lot of them a lot of those sort of uh arcadey games on the early mac especially the color ones demanded 640 by 40 and

from this picture it looks like you have the 12 inch monitor just like yeah yeah yeah you can tell you can tell because the 12 inch monitor fit perfectly in in the silhouette yeah i think the basic problem was circa 19 like right when system 7 came out around 1991 92 there were a lot of seemingly if then statements in games that were like if color assume 13 inch 640 by 480 and otherwise go small and it it was like, no, I need the small 512 resolution, but color. Yeah, right. And there weren't any really. That was the whole low-cost color thing.

There weren't really color Macs that were that dimension. I think the 2s, right? The Mac 2s were the ones mainly. It's part of... I mean, the main reason I regretted not getting the se30 instead is that the se30 was so much faster and i just didn't appreciate at the time how much i would have i did enjoy the the sharpness of the one bit monochrome displays but it was so much faster it was ridiculous yeah yeah my best friend had a had a se30 and that was the one that my first mac that i used and like

you know i the color was attractive, but at the end of the day, I agree. I feel like that SC30 definitely helped. And you could connect a monitor to the SC30. I had a color monitor on my SC30. Well, in fact, I was working at a place where we all had Mac pluses and there was one SC30. So we would just gather around it and stare in awe,

not because it looked any different itself, but because we had a portrait, a radius portrait monitor connected to it because the person who had it was doing page layout stuff and we would all just stand around going oh it also had two floppy drives which was pretty awesome all right now we have reached the end of our first round competitors congratulations we all did really good i'm proud of everyone we got to the end of it. We remembered our first Macs. Yeah, I'm really proud of everyone.

And I expect everyone is shooting daggers at Steven, I think is what's happening. John's going to point out Dan didn't actually pick a Mac. No, I did the performance 6300. It had to be. That was per rules. All right, good. That was per rules. But I'm just wondering, Mike is only the host.

Mike's not playing? Correct. Oh. If you subscribe to Upgrade Plus, you'll get my text. GetUpgradePlus.com. Other than that, no. I mean, look, here's the situation. I came to the Mac way later than anybody else.

I'm not going to make anybody happy with the things that I'm going to be picking. I will tell you, at least this one, the Intel iMac was my first Mac. The first Intel iMac. So that kind of sets the stage for me. Just think about that. Mike's first processor transition was the Apple Silicon transition. You were three architectures in. You were three architectures in.

I want to let you know, everybody, processor transitions, they go pretty well. I don't know. I have a 100% success rate. Really, really, really good. No problems at all. This episode is brought to you by Vitally. Customer success teams today are facing a problem. How do they connect customer data back to their work? Vitally changes this. It's a new kind of customer success platform, an all-in-one collaborative workspace that combines your customer data with

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So we move into the second round now. We're a little bit open to interpretation here. What I want to ask you is what you think is either your favorite Mac ever or what you think is the best Mac ever. You can choose the way that you want to answer this. Again, I would like as many Macs represented as possible in this round.

If somebody else picks what you want to pick, please feel free to tell me, but I don't want another one. And we're going to start this round with John Syracuse. Lucky me. I will snag this one that I know some other people on this panel would also

choose. This also happens to be a computer that I owned some other people on this panel would also choose this also happens to be a computer that I owned when I convinced my parents to let me use my sister's educational discount to buy a computer I got an se30 uh which I think the retail price was starts at 4300 dollars uh and it was worth every penny of my parents money let me tell you because remember I was coming from a plus I had a by that point i had a plus i had the the 20 megabyte hard drive that she only had underneath it because it fit those hard drives fit right underneath it i had an external floppy drive i had an image writer the original image writer not the image writer too um and it was quite a setup but by you know 1989 faster computers

existed i had touched them in the apple you know in the apple retail stores you'd go not the apple stores but like authorized Apple resellers. I'd go in there and I could touch like a Mac two and I could touch an SE 30. And boy, were they faster, so much faster. And I knew that it had even more capabilities. So I got that SE 30 and it was amazing because it looked just like my other computer fit right on top of my hard drive. Same exact size case, but it was, you know, a lighter shade of platinum and it had a floppy

drive and had an internal hard drive plus the one that was underneath it so now i had two hard drives and then i had the external floppy drive it worked with my printer uh and then eventually i bought a rastrops 264 color board for it and connected a 13 inch trinitron monitor so i could play games at six already by 4e i'm like dan and and boy, that system, I use that system until the blue and white G3, uh, that SE 30 had legs. Uh, it was fantastic. It ran all my software. It was a small, it was, it was the best of the classic max, small compact, little classic Mac before they did like the sort of a new Coke thing, Coke classic thing of having the Mac classic,

the Mac classic wasn't it. There was these the original compact Macs that got better and better. And the SE 30 was essentially the end of the line for when Apple stopped making every new computer better than all the other computers. That was, you know, it's the early in the PC industry, like there was the 128. Then came the 512. 512 was better than the 128 or equal in every way. And then came the plus same deal. And then the Mac too. Right. And the SC 30, right. That was the end because right after the SC 30, the LC came out. And that was the first time Apple had said, you know what? We're going to make a computer that is not better than all our previous Macs.

We're going to make one that's low cost and it'll have crappier specs, but it'll be cheaper. And up to that point, Apple didn't do that. Every new computer that came out with was like, what the previous computer let's just make this one better in some way and more expensive probably uh and the sc30 was the pinnacle of that it was like the end of the line for the compact mac the best compact mac they would ever make huge longevity i loved that computer i love that i could expand it and make it do more exciting things i love dragging a window from the monochrome screen onto the color one and having the window half on the color screen and half on the monochrome screen I would blow my PC using friends mind the same window would render in

black and white and in color on that screen fantastic loved it still up in the attic uh I have tested that one about five years ago and it still worked it was a little bit wonky but I did get it to work and boot who knows how it's doing now but uh rip to a real one if it's not working i think there's no more john syracuse opinion than the mac topped out in 1989 like 34 years ago that was it it was like a change in the way apple made computers like in there you know they like the idea that every single new product you make has to best all your previous products is not tenable right for a company that wants to have a reasonable market like we accept that people make products in lines here's the medium range low end or whatever uh but in the in the very early days of the pc era everything was better than what came before

it obviously that was unsustainable i didn't know that at the time i didn't know we had we had hit the peak and apple would start slumming it with those LCs, but and then Performas and the Centris models. And yeah, it became a modern product company and the market matured. But back then it was like every new computer is the best ever. Well, to be fair, it was also the creation of a product line because you had one computer that would supersede another and you might have a couple in the lineup at the same time. But when you have the Classic and the LC and the SI, that's a line. Whatever you think of the individual computers, they have their role to play. And so you're always going to have something that's going to be less than optimal. And that seemed, I mean, for somebody who, I mean, I ended up buying an SI,

I didn't end up buying an SE or an LC, but there was this sort of looking at the line and the options available and going, I really want another Mac. I've got to upgrade my old Mac, but I can't afford the best one, whatever that one is. So I'm glad there was something below it that didn't suck. Yeah. It was product segmentation though. They could, they could charge a bazillion dollars for the Mac two effects because you could buy cheaper Macs. The, uh, some Mac anniversary, probably 15 or 20 years ago, we did a story at Macworld about where

we asked a bunch of people what their favorite, what they thought the best Mac of all time was. And I believe Mr. Gruber, Mr. Syracuse and Adam

Angst, at least three of the like six people I asked all said SE30. It was a lot less varied of a story. I hope this draft that draft format

works. Nobody else can pick that one now. That was the Mac's 25th anniversary. So that was 15 years ago. 15 years ago. I'll put a link to that article in the show notes in case people want to read it. It will be there for you.

And we'll find out today if that will stand. Very exciting. But first, we're going to go to Stephen Hackett. Stephen, what do you think is the best Mac of all time? Best and favorite are two really different questions. That's true. Indeed, but I want you to pick one of them.

Yeah, not both, even though my answers are sort of both. So I'm going to go with best slash most important. I'm taking a third option no steven there's already enough rules you know like yeah i'm i'm gonna say the the late 2010 macbook air uh this was the machine right that yeah the first macbook air right ipod hard drive wacky hinges, the ports were on a little flappy door. Like, what a weird idea. And the 2010 MacBook Air, 13-inch, 11.6-inch, all SSD, Mac safe, regular USB ports. It would eventually get Thunderbolt. It is the template that defined the next 10 years of notebooks, and not just for Apple, but really the entire industry.

You had Ultrabooks on the Windows and Intel side that were kind of aping that design and some of the features. But if you look at even what we have now, right, the wedge design is gone. But so much about that MacBook Air, its DNA is still with us today. And that is a real testament. And I had a couple of these over the years. My wife used an 11-inch for a long time. And I definitely have fond memories of those machines. But it was pretty hard to beat. And it was affordable. When the MacBook Air first came out, it was really expensive. And you didn't get

all that much computer for your money. So it also was a change in sort of the value proposition of the MacBook Air. And Apple said, you know, this is what we think the future of notebooks is like. And they were right. And that's a cool thing. There's also the unibody. I mean, obviously the original MacBook Air was the first unibody and this was like, you know, the second major one, but that unibody thing proven out with the first not so great MacBook Air, it's like, yeah, all Mac laptops would be unibody from this was like you know the second major one but that unibody thing proven out with the first not so great macbook air it's like yeah all mac laptops would be unibody from that point on yeah absolutely yeah that that's the defining mac of the of the 2010s if not all time thanks steven because you stole my pick there yeah i was also on uh yeah it totally changed what a laptop

was and is and and still is it changed the definition of it entirely and it went from being an outlier to being the very definition of it talk about like a model to model change right look at that original macbook air was rough i had both it was not it was just a little bit ahead of its time yeah and speaking of the flappy door it kind of reminds me of the uh the trend in the 80s when you wanted the front of your car to be sleek and you didn't want ugly headlights marring it up you'd put the headlights and they would flip up right and i feel like that thing was like we don't want ports marring the outside of this beautiful laptop let's put them in a flappy door like the headlights on a datsun 280z yeah those things always get stuck you know like yeah one down. My younger brother had one.

It's a similar kind of thing where he had a little bit of money from his parents, from our parents. We had the same parents. And he decided to splurge it in a way that wasn't really responsible. He could have bought a different computer that would have been better for his needs. And he was playing a game on it once and got a burn, like an actual surface burn on his legs. So that machine it's awesome i discovered that the original macbook air uh ran faster in the morning and that's because i

had west facing windows in my office heated up in the afternoon and it would just it would shut down one of its two processor cores yeah in the late afternoon it was knocking off early um that's not a good computer but the but it was replaced with a great one. Real-time follow-up. The dots in 280Z didn't have flip-up headlights. I regret the error. John, you must leave. We move to John Gruber.

John Gruber, what is the best Mac ever made? All right. I feel bad because I feel like I've got to be sniping somebody after me, but screw it. I mean, somebody, you know, I'll go last in some other round. I'm going to go with what's left. I'll go with the original iMac. round, the ones that added the colors, you know, which I know had like, it was like went from 233 to 266 megahertz with the G3, but they, it, it, they kind of came out with, I think within a year of each other. Um, and that was what my wife upgraded to from my old hand me down LC from 91. she got a purple iMac. And it was like going from dying of thirst in the desert to being poolside with unlimited, you know, margaritas. I mean, it was... And not even talking about the machine, it just... We all just went through the anniversary of this machine and celebrated it. So I don't have to say too much, but it really did.

It wasn't just a great computer. It really was. And then my parents got one. My wife's mom got one. I mean, we just bought them for everybody in the house who wanted to like get on this internet thing. And they use them for years. They were great, long lasting machines.

The all in one thing really did help. It made people who'd never had computers before feel pretty good about putting them somewhere in their house where people would see it. And it exemplified the, okay, there's a new regime at Apple and this Performa, blah, blah, blah. We're selling different models at Circuit City than we are at Best Buy and all that nonsense. No, here it is. This is the iMac. They're cool, they're beautiful, and design really matters. And here we are 25 years later, and i think that spirit maybe not the colorful part but i think the hardware design really matters uh ethos still holds true at apple today hey the imax are colorful now the 24 inch imax do come in colors they are all in one they do they do minimize themselves in your environment

so people aren't embarrassed to have them around and i also have relatives who would refuse to buy computers because they looked too computery, even though they were, quote unquote, better computers. Having a computer that people are willing to put in their house that they think looks nice and doesn't look like something that we tech nerds would love is super important. And I'm glad they did come back to it with the 24 inch. I mean, it's ridiculously thin. And we think, why is it so thin? It makes no sense. You got to have a breakout box, blah, blah, blah blah but the thinness makes it hide itself and be more acceptable and the original colorful imax for the start of that regular people willing to have a

computer in view of company yeah and i think i i think these today's imax really are the spiritual descendants of the original imac in a way that the ones that just look like a display for the previous years, the latter years of the Intel era, they were good computers, but they weren't iMacs, right? They were called iMacs, but I think fun and colorful is part of the iMac brand. The iMac came out right when I was leaving Mac users. So it was funny because I had been on the inside and then the iMac came out and I was on the outside looking in. But at the same time, everybody I knew who now knew me as the were artists and creatives and they would look at the iMac and they go, that's fun. I like that. That's a computer that I feel comfortable with as a user, not even so much as how it looks. And so I can't tell you the number of people who got me to help them buy an iMac and got me to help them to upgrade its

memory, which is really fun because you had to turn it upside down and take it apart basically. But it was just, it was a thing. And the people I knew all had different colors. So I would remember who had what iMac by, oh, that's the, that's the person with the Tangerine one. And I just, you know, ran around fixing iMacs and helping them buy better USB mice for them for years and years and years. And there's so much good feeling toward Apple. I felt more on the inside of that group of people who was like, oh, I like Apple now. It's not just that weird company that makes that expensive stuff. They've made a thing that I enjoy and that makes computing, whatever that means to them, mostly internet access, fun. And it came at such a pivotal time, right?

was fun. And it came at such a pivotal time, right? The first iMac shipped with macOS 8.6, if memory serves correctly. Not an amazing operating system. It took a while for OS X to get out the door, and even then, a couple more years to get pretty good. But the iMac helped revitalize interest in Apple before all that stuff could happen, and it helped make that transition possible. And it's just so fascinating that the hardware was so, so far out ahead of the software in those, in that, those few years gap, but didn't it matter? Cause all the reasons you said, Shelly, right? Like it was friendly and approachable and fun,

and you could get the color you wanted and tangerine was the best color. And you could have this computer that felt like an extension of your personality in a way. And that was enough to buy Apple time to kind of get the rest of their technology ready to go. Steven, how can someone who admitted that he's only been using a Mac for, what'd you say, like two years? How are you besmirching system 8.6, Mac OS 8.6? It was actually really good. I'd say 8.5 kind of turned the corner, and 8.6 and then 9 was really good, and better than Mac OS X

until several years into the Mac OS X era. Very true, very true. I retract my statement. Because UI Mac 2 was such a phenomenon i mean i remember i remember people because it came out just as i was graduating high school when i went to my first year of college there were people by like who had those pcs that like they stuck the little blue translucent like plastic on because they're like oh blue that's why everybody loves this you missed the point.

And that was just amazing. Like, I mean, you know, not even getting to like the George Foreman grills and whatever, but like, man, blue plastic for a while. People like, I'm surprised they didn't have like a run on blue plastic and whoever was manufacturing that. To Steven's point about the hardware being out ahead of the software, Mac OS X, the interface looks like the iMac. The pinstripes you see on that interface are the pin being out ahead of the software uh mac os 10 the interface looks like the imac the pinstripes you see on that interface are the pinstripes from the imac the

color the aqua color right and it's you would if you didn't know the history you'd look back and think oh those are made together but not really like it was kind of one inspired the other and then but the fun thing is with mac os 8 that came with the imac or whatever you could in going to the appearance because of the appearance manager, go into the appearance and you could change your scroll thumbs and all your other things to orange to match your tangerine iMac. Like it was color matched to the Mac operating system that came with it. But when you saw Mac OS 10, you're like, oh, it's the iMac operating system. Like I see. And then once that once the, you know, like they just fit together perfectly, they just weren't lined up time wise. Yeah i believe out of the box it would be color matched to your mac right so you'd get like my

wife's had purple scroll bars out of the box and the desktop background and stuff too yeah like the 24 inch iMac yeah they still do that again with the wallpaper too i must also add that my wife who admittedly has relatively small hands and particularly short fingers, loved the mouse so much that she used it for several Macs to come. The little purple hockey puck mouse. I know people who say that, and they're wrong, and I have small hands. Every terrible thing has somebody who loves it. Don't think too deeply about that, John. Jason Snell, what is the best mac ever made well uh i was gonna say again the the macbook air that steven took because i

was sure steven would take the g3 i mac i am gonna be one of those people who unlike john who thinks the best mac the mac peaked a long time ago um i'm going to go off of Steven's pick and say, after a good decade plus run of the MacBook Air, I think the best and my favorite Mac ever is the M2 MacBook Air, which brought a new design language in, but it's still very Apple. It's got the rounded corners. It is flat in the way it reminds me, the laptop it reminds me the most of

is actually the titanium PowerBook. It's got that same kind of vibe. It's a lot thinner because it's many years later, but it is flat and, you know, flat in the one dimension and then got the curved edges in the other dimension. And just how do you take an iconic product like the MacBook Air that really represented the Mac for, you know, obviously the best selling Mac for whatever, 12, 13 years. And how do you replace

it with something at all, let alone something that's better. And I think that the M2 Air hit it out of the park. I think it is a great successor. I bought one. It's very pleasant. I have the midnight color, which I also, I mean, is it a color? It's a very, very, very dark blue, but it is nice to have a Mac that color. And, you know, it's got MagSafe and it's got multiple ports, which is fancy because there was a while there where you couldn't have all those things. And I just, I think it was a great great hard act to follow the first MacBook Air design, that core wedge design. And I think with the M2 Air, they did it. They nailed it.

And it is, yeah, I know it's present. It's a current product, but I also think it is a really great example of a laptop. So much for that. It's so killer. I love that computer so much. Who needs history? Indeed. Forget it. Screw it. Forget it. So that's my choice. It's so killer. I love that computer so much. Who needs history? Indeed. Forget it.

Screw it. Forget it. The best is right now. Dan Maron, what is the best Mac ever made? Well, I had my, I was going to take the 11-inch Air, which sort of got snaked out of me by Stephen, and then I thought about sneaking in the M1 Air

right in between the two of those. That seems a little... So I am going to go with a laptop though because i do think you know for a lot of people the laptop is the preeminent uh mac experience and i'm going to pick my first mac laptop the powerbook g3 pismo which was the first powerbook with firewire uh it also had a d drive which was great was great. And you could add an airport card into it. It was the first PowerBook, I believe, with Wi-Fi. And I added my own.

I did a little thing where you'd pull back these keyboard tabs and you'd flip it over and you'd pop the little airport card in. You had to plug in the little antenna cable and everything. And that thing was awesome. I took it with me when I studied abroad in the UK. And I was telling the story recently about how there was no internet in the dorm I was living in in Edinburgh. And so I had to take it down to the computer lab, which was just another dorm room where they put a bunch of computers. And I discovered somebody after the first couple weeks where I was using these terrible Windows PCs they had there, somebody would just like,

I saw somebody unplug the ethernet cable and just plug it into their laptop. And I thought, aha, that's what I'm going to do. So I sat there down there on my PowerBook with the network cable plugged in there. It had a pretty good, like for the time color screen, it was expandable, right? You could like pop out the drive

or pop out the battery if you need to like put a second battery in. It had a pretty respectable 400 megahertz G3 chip in it. And like I said, it was the first one with FireWire, which was like at the time kind of wild. Like, you know, USB had kind of by that point almost gotten standardized. Although I remember having to bring some like I had to get like a memory card reader because I had a very early digital camera. And getting a driver for that to run on the Mac in that day and age, circa 2001, was really terrible. So I think I had to wait for a while before I could actually download pictures onto this thing because I kept waiting for them to actually have a driver to run this memory card reader. But I really love that computer. It lasted

me, I don't know, five or six years, I think, until I think I had an ignominious death with the power supply going. But for me, I think I was very on the fence about the idea of buying a PowerBook versus the iBook, which was pretty new at that point. And I opted for something with the more power and it it did not let me down it was a great workhorse back when apple's laptops look like they can be used by batman yeah they had a little curved slate right it was curved black two-tone black one but it had that but it had that bronze keyboard too which was weird but awesome yeah yeah the apple logo was upside down on all those notebooks. What was it? Just wild.

What was it, right? I had a friend. I'm always hesitant with ex-Apple people, even 25 years later. But I knew someone who left Apple and took with him a prototype Pismo with a black keyboard that had a sticker on it, like a sticker he couldn't get off that said it was supposed to be destroyed. That's cool. She couldn't destroy the sticker. Yeah. They also had a really cool feature where on either side of the palm tray, there was like a release door. So you could have a battery and an optical drive or two batteries.

Like so many good ideas. I replaced the hard drive in that one i think you could actually pull that out and replace that like like it was pretty upgradable for a laptop yeah shelly what's the best mac ever so i had to lean hard into favorite mac ever because first of all i was pretty sure i was gonna get sniped and i also couldn't choose. Deciding is hard. And I leaned into one that I owned as opposed to one that I coveted. I've coveted various MacBook Airs. I've weirdly never had a MacBook Air of my own. Timing has been wrong and against me. And there are other Macs that I covet that I won't mention because I don't know, they might come up at some point. So I'll just choose one of my two favorite Macs of all time. The PowerBook G4 12-inch. I love that Mac because it's not a MacBook

Air, but it is the first small laptop that's really full-featured. It had all the ports you need. I don't think it was a SuperDrive at that time. I guess it was a CD-ROM. It was a drive, but it was an optical drive. And it had all the ports you required. It had Wi-Fi. It was square, so it didn't have the sort of rounded, nice apple design. But it was not ugly square. And it was compact, and it was considerably lighter in weight. I am a small laptop person anyway, but I never found the iBook that

appealing. I didn't care that it was kind of cutesy and people made fun of the design. That wasn't the thing. It just didn't have everything I wanted. If I was going to spend money on a laptop, at that point, I had probably a desktop and a laptop in my life. And I was like, all right, if I'm going to buy a laptop, it should be a good one. Because the way I would do it was I would alternate. You replace the desktop, and then a couple of years later. And I was like, all right, if I'm going to buy a laptop, it should be a good one because the way I would do it was I would alternate. You replace the desktop and then a couple of years later, you replace the laptop and back and forth. And that way you always have something relatively new. And so if I wanted a laptop, I wanted a good one. And for me, that 12 inch PowerBook was so good. The performance was great too. I think that was

in the time when you could really expect good performance from laptops as opposed to, oh, it's a laptop. I guess it's going to be a little slower. It's going to run hot or burn you to death or whatever it is. And that was absolutely not the case with the 12-inch PowerBook. Lasted me for a really long time. It fit in a little sleeve. I could carry it over my shoulder in a bag extremely comfortably. I had that thing for ages and I ended up replacing it with, comfortably. I had that thing for ages and I ended up replacing it with, you know, a big flat slab of plastic MacBook. And I was not happy to have to do that because just the size of it was absolutely perfect. And small hands, small lap, whatever it was, it just fit me perfectly. I love that machine. The only time Apple brought the keyboard all the way to the edge of the

laptop, there was nothing with the keyboard went edge way to the edge of the laptop there was nothing the keyboard went edge to edge because it was a 4x3 not sort of a 16x9 screen so that keyboard you could see it from the side of the computer they used every inch of the width of that for those nice keys and that was fine with me i'm generally surprised that nobody picked this before you because i just is such a beloved machine it was on my list. And so I'm happy that that got included. 12-inch PowerBook was, yeah, so great. Yeah, it was always, get me the smallest laptop Apple makes for quite a while there. I remember seeing one in a Starbucks, like, years after it was new.

It was like five, six years later. years after it was new. It was like five, six years later. And because of the way I saw it out of the corner of my eye, I couldn't see how thick it was, but I just saw the way that the keyboard went edge to edge. And I had this double take moment where I was like, what is that? And I was like, oh, that's like a six-year-old G4 12-inch laptop. But it really was that good looking. Other than the thickness, for years to come, the design was still like, ah, chef's kiss. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Everyone wants to keep their personal information private.

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we will start with you. Oh boy. This is one that I struggled with a little bit, but I think I'm going to go with but I think I'm going to go with, I think I'm going to go with dashboard. It's my favorite Mac OS feature. Look, widgets are back. People are new. They're not new.

Uh, but Apple put them in the wrong place. They don't belong on the desktop. They belong in the safe little house they can live in and you can go visit them when you want them and, uh, bring it back. That's what I'm saying. Bring back saying bring back dashboard when they arrive they should leave a little water ripple unless you're in college and your titanium power book can't do the water ripple but your college

roommates aluminum power book can and you're jealous just for example would you just not get the effect what happened it just plopped on there but yeah you didn't get the effect what if there was a hack where you could take widgets from the desktop right now and put them in a separate layer there you go there you go yeah just hold down command while you drag it's fine there you go do you have any highlights for dashboard widgets even considering you love it so much i think think the coolest thing, and it was something Apple supported, was I think it was called Web Clips, where basically you could like cut out a part of a website in Safari and make it a widget.

So you could build your own effectively with like drag and drop. And that was pretty awesome. I did that at work. My dashboard on my Mac at work, if you flick the cursor into the corner, all it was was essentially snippets from like the monitoring uh web pages for all the servers at work and everything and i had clipped out exactly

the graphs that i was interested in and arranged them all over so i could just hit my mouse in the corner and see instantly a giant dashboard across many many different web pages just with the graphs clipped out so it was so information dense great it. Surely you all had the Macworld dashboard widget, which showed you the five latest headlines on Macworld.com. I probably did. I probably did. I actually built one using, because you could build them,

I think with like JavaScript and HTML, CSS. So like I made one at the time because I wanted a widget to tell whether or not my friends were on Xbox Live. And there was like a API that you could query. And it was not designed for that. And it did not look great. But it actually worked for a while, which was pretty cool.

So you could just pop open Dashboard and it had my friends list. And it would tell me if people were online or not, which was, again, probably about the closest I ever got to being a developer. John Gruber, what is the best Mac software of all time? Boy, I was hoping I would go last year and that someone would snipe some of my picks. I'm seriously torn. Can I mention the two that I'm most torn between?

That's a pro draft move. You mention things you don't pick. Mention them, but you only pick one. seriously torn can i mention the two that are most torn between draft move you mentioned things you don't pick mention them but you only pick one i'm i'm going to mention i on the one and they are at extremes one's a bit esoteric and one is used by almost every mac user it's bb edit and safari uh is anybody mad if i pick either john i'm just saying i've got a list of four possibilities they are bookended by those two so pick one pick both pick neither i don't care i'm gonna i'm i even went to work at bare bones software which really shows how much i love bb edit but i'm going to pick safari um because Safari because I think it remains to this day the most important app that Apple makes. And I think people can't... There was a time when the web first started and it was called Mosaic. And then the early years in Netscape where the browsers looked like Mac apps

and felt like Mac apps. And then an Internet Explorer for Mac wasn't bad. It could have been so much worse. And then it got bad. Yeah, and then it got bad. And then we had Chimera, which was like trying to put the Firefox Gecko rendering engine into a Mac app. And then came Safari, which was a true Mac app with a rendering engine that was faster than anything else.

And rendered things like form widgets that looked like actual Mac controls. Everything looked like the web was a first-class platform on the Mac because of Safari, right from the first version when it was in beta. And it's been true ever since. And I think because Safari remains such a great Mac app, forget about the rendering part, everything it does with the web, the application itself, the way that the menus are organized, the features that it has, the AppleScript support, everything. It brought tabs to Mac. The way that tabs work in any app that have tabs is defined by Safari. So just from a user interface level,

it is just a terrific app. And I think it's raised the bar for all other browsers. If you use Chrome, I know Chrome is the second most popular browser on the platform and the most popular browser by far in the world. But I think Chrome for mac is way better of a mac app even though it's not a great mac app than it would be if not for safari and we're talking about the mac today i still think it's a great app but all the work apple did with safari to create webkit and i know they started with the the well i forget what the name of it was. Yeah, KHTML. KHTML. But the fact that they control their own rendering engine is what put the iPhone into a position to have a great handheld mobile web browser

from the get-go, which was essential to the appeal of the iPhone in the early years before apps, native apps, became a thing. So I'm going to go with Safari. I had this on my list, and one of the iPhone in the early years before native apps became a thing. So I'm going to go with Safari. I had this on my list, and one of the reasons is I think people who don't remember that era might not remember it, but this is, I think,

the fundamental example of Apple deciding that it needs to control technology that's important to its business, its core business. And if you don't remember that era, it was the era of the iMac, and iMacs and other Macs were getting dinged against Windows because web browsing was worse on the Mac. And the reason web browsing was worse on the Mac is because Internet Explorer was worse on the Mac and there was nothing Apple could do about

it because Internet Explorer was the bundled default Mac web browser and it was controlled by the Mac business unit at Microsoft. And it wasn't sabotage, but there wasn't a priority to make the Mac browsing the best. And so that's why Safari happened is that Steve Jobs basically said, they're killing us here. And it's because of Microsoft and we have to do our own browser. We just have to. As ridiculous, I remember the reports as ridiculous as it sounded that Apple was going to just write its own web browser. They had to, and, and they did. And it has been a cornerstone of their success literally ever since they shipped the first version of it. Yeah. You don't want to rely on your major competitor to, to, uh, you know, cause it's talking about owning and controlling

yourself. It's like, it's not even just like a third and uninterested third party was doing it. Although I do have to defend Microsoft, uh, you know, as internet explorer for the Mac, because the main problem was that it was not the same application as Internet Explorer for Windows. So despite the fact that IE5 had amazing CSS support, industry leading CSS support, it behaved nothing like the product of the same name on Windows. And every single website in that era was made to work with a thing called Internet Explorer that was on Windows. And the thing that was on Mac was not a bad browser, but it just didn't work. And so you'd go to a website and it would be like,

I don't know what browser you're using. It's like, I'm using Internet Explorer. It's like, no, you're not. You're using whatever the hell that thing is Microsoft puts on the Mac, which has lots of amazing features, but doesn't have the exact same quirks as Windows Internet Explorer. And it was brutal. And yeah, if you're Apple and you're like,

can we make it work better with sites that work on Internet Explorer for Windows? No, you yeah, if you're Apple and you're like, can we, but can we like make it work better with sites that work on Internet Explorer for Windows? Like, no, you can't because you don't make the browser. So go beg Microsoft, I guess. It was fundamentally, you know,

the continuation of the idea of the Mac as a second class citizen in this era where it seemed like everything's going to be a level playing field because everything's on the web. It doesn't matter what computer you're on, right? But it wasn't because everything

relied on stupid ActiveX and the Mac version didn't support it and it was never going to support it because Microsoft had zero interest in bringing it to there.

So, you know, I remember those like, oh yeah, you could change the colors of all the little like, you know, buttons and everything and yeah,

but it just, so much stuff just wouldn't load at all. And the sad thing is it was superior in so many ways. That's why if you went to a web developer's website

like homepage, and they had a Mac, it would use CSS instead of font tags. It would look beautiful, but it looked like garbage in Windows Internet Explorer, which is what 99% of the internet was using. My first cover story at Mac user was a shootout between Netscape and the first version of IE for the Mac. And I said that the IE version was better, which I thought, oh my God, everybody's going to hate me. But you know, like a year later, Apple made it the default browser, right? Like it was so much better than Netscape was, but the Mac business unit at Microsoft, those were not bad people. They were trying their best

to make good Mac software, but they were never a priority at microsoft and and they were never going to be and for apple it was an existential priority for them so what do you think so safari yeah to bring it to a little bit into today right just safari like you know there's obviously a lot of talk about what apps are and aren't going to be on the vision pro and like there's a part of me it's just like it's fine we have safari it's gonna be, it's fine. We have Safari. It's going to be okay. Like I can watch Netflix in Safari. Like it will be okay. Cause it's a great browser and it's available.

Jason, what is the best Mac software? Well, uh, John picked Safari. So I will pick BB edit, uh, an app that I have been using for 30 years. I've written about it a lot there's a bbedit tag on six colors because i've written about it so much um and it's it's a weird app whenever i try to explain to people like what what it's not an ide for developers but it can you can do development with it you can do web development with it you i have written you know most of the words i have written in the last 30 years

have been in BBEdit. And then as a text engine, I was just doing this thing the other week. I'm on the same team as Dan. We did the MIT Mystery Hunt. We had a good time. One of the things you end up having to do is like put things in spreadsheets or make calculations.

And I had a weird document that was, it was marching band instructions. And you had to to i had to convert it into x y coordinates this is the kind of thing you do at the mystery hunt and i realized i needed to take it into bb edit because i needed to do a regular expression match on the text instructions to turn them into tab delimited data that i could then run a calculation on and i'm like well bb edit is the answer because what or removing, there was another thing where I needed to remove things that were duplicates and leave only the things that had only appeared once. And it's a, I don't have to script it.

I don't have to build software to do it. It's a feature in BBEdit. And so it is my writing tool. It is, I can open Python scripts that I've written that are running on servers. Python scripts that I've written that are running on servers. I can open them remotely, make changes, save them back with syntax highlighting and even now language server support. And it's my text utility of choice. So I couldn't live without it. And I know that it's not for everyone. As John said, it's esoteric. But the reason it has so much value and has had it over 30 years is that there are so many different little chores that it lets me do. Plus it lets me do my job.

The other thing I want to throw out there is the people at bare bones software. You know, this was written in Pascal originally and now it is a modern Mac OS 10 app on the Apple Silicon era. That's what happens when you have an app for more than 30 years is it just, it is the ship of Theseus of software. It is, it is, it has been through so many different eras, uh, so many different processor transitions on like Mike and yet it, it abides. So BB edit abides and I love it. And, uh, 30 years and still going

strong BB edit. And I think maybe audio hijack or like the two things like, oh man, somebody made me use a windows machine. I could probably get by mostly with it, but no BBEdit and no audio hijack would basically be like, but why? Why is this life worth living without them? I similarly use BBEdit for making a lot of text. And one of the things I do in it, which points out another great feature is its ability to let you do file management. I don't mean like moving files around in the way you would work with the finder, but I mean, with working with multiple files at once, which is, is it's you know, heritage as a, as a coding app, as a developer's app. And what I do is I produce my book every year in as XT,

X HTML files, like 25 files that I have and I manage that all all in BBEdit. And I can do what Jason was talking about before with regular expressions. I can do any number of find and replace actions on multiple files, not just individual files. So I can go through my whole book and say, let's correct that ISBN number on 25 files at once. Okay, no problem. And it's terrific. It's continued to evolve and grow over time. The one big ding on BBEdit that has always existed is that it is not accessible to voiceover. And for a group of people in my life, that is important, but that has changed as of BBEdit 15. So I'm really happy to say that I can recommend

it unreservedly, BBEdit for the win. Yeah, I was going to do the same comparison Jason did with like that it's been around for so long for in most people's estimation when you round off for essentially the whole history of the Mac. And I've also used it since the very beginning. And it's gone through all those same transitions that the Mac has gone through. The Mac is still exists. We're talking about it 40 years later. But the Mac of today is it's so such a far distance from the original Mac, different processor, different operating system, different paradigms. Like it has evolved so much. And the interesting thing about BBEdit is as it evolved from Pascal and going through every processor transition and going to Mac OS 10, going to 64 bit, all of that stuff,

it has made slightly different choices than the Mac itself has, mostly because the guy who's running it is an old school Mac user like me. And so the thing, one of the things I cherish about BB edit is despite it being 30 years old, it continues to let me work the way I've always worked with Mac stuff out of the box. It comes like, Oh, it's all in one window and you've got a sidebar and you do all this things youngsters like,

but you can just go into settings, which I don't have to do because I set these settings, you know, in the nineties and never changed them again. and it lets me have a bazillion windows bazillion unadorned windows no windows with sidebars nothing opening in tabs no projects and i can do that sometimes if i want to but my default mode of operating is the way i've always wanted to work and the mac has not done that as well let's say say. Like the Mac has forced changes due to the cultural shifts in the way software works

from Apple, including the built-in Mac apps. But BBEdit has always said, we will continue to let you work more or less the way you have always worked, even as we still keep BBEdit as a modern application that defaults out of the box to something that a youngster like mike or steven would like dan what is your pick just breeze on by that yeah um i you know i thought about going like feature like like steven i was thinking about expose which

i'm a big fan of and i've used for many years but i think i'm gonna go with a software an app and what it represents which which is Terminal. And not necessarily because the Terminal app is an amazing app. I think it's pretty good. But what it represented when macOS 10 rolled around, essentially, and the fact that you went in from the classic macOS to an app built on these BSD underpinnings, and what that opened and enabled for every Mac user. The fact that you weren't limited, not even just to Mac software, but to stuff that was solely designed for the Mac.

You could get all these utilities. You could do all these things from the command line that had... I mean, there was no command line, right? In the original Mac OS, you could get to a debugger or something, but that was about it. And to this day, I think that made the Mac much more accessible

and much more powerful in what it could do. And I use the Terminal app almost every day for something or other. I mean, we were just talking about BBEdit and I was looking up the language server thing. It's like, oh, that's a thing I should look at. And it's like, oh, go install this Python thing in the command line. I was like, all right, I can just open that up and do this right here. Utilities that are built in the command line from SSH and SFTP and all that stuff was like all these tools that were basically now freely part of the operating system that you used to have to go and get a separate app for, or you were lucky if there was an app to do it. and get a separate app for, or you were lucky if there was an app to do it. FFmpeg and all those sorts of tools that let you do things. It just made a wealth of freely available software,

something that people could tap into, and it just amped up what the Mac could do. And I think that along with the Mac OS X built on top of it really changed the direction of the Mac OS and really helped make it one of the things that like gave it so much longevity because it wasn't just a, Oh, it's that weird little OS sitting off in the corner there that survived is the only thing that survived windows taken over the world. It was like,

well, no, because now we're tapped into all the Linux and Unix and BSD stuff that's out there. So for me, I think that's sort of underpinning on the OS is just, it's hugely influential in the trajectory of the Mac. There was speculation too. I mean, a lot hasn't changed about Apple. We've always had a sense of what, especially the sort of Steve mindset. And everybody knew Next Step was advertised as a Unix workstation and had those Unix underpinnings. But before they officially said, here's Mac OS X 1.0,

I remember there was a lot of speculation that they might seal that off, that everybody knew that Unix layer would be there, but would Apple expose that? And instead, as you said dan they they leaned into it they had a big they made like a uh remember when we used to have those badges on web pages they had a big steel fake 3d looking steel unix unix with a big trademark or a registered trademark whatever the hell it was like yeah it's unix lean into it this is unix i know this yeah i wouldn't um when mac os 10 was coming out we did a special like newsstand issue called total os 10 for mac

world that was just sold on newsstands and i commissioned greg nos our our pal greg nos who was like the person i knew who knew the most about unix and i was like greg just write a bunch of how-tos about how you do things in the command line on the Mac because nobody knows. And that was that moment of like, oh, all the skills that I learned editing stories for my college newspaper in VI my freshman year in college are suddenly applicable again because I'm back at the command line. And like Dan, I'm in there all the time running scripts and doing all sorts of stuff. It's great. I avoid it like the plague.

Shelly, what is the best Mac software of all time? Well, I'm going to have to do a pick and a mention because I was stuck with the parenthetical on this topic, which says best Mac software or feature. And I was like, wait, what? Yeah, you can pull an OS feature out. I've got, I've got one of each. And so my pick is FileMaker Pro. FileMaker has been around the Mac platform forever, like 1985, I think it is. What I didn't know until I looked into it was that it was born as a DOS app and that they decided, the people who had developed it decided that they no longer want to develop

it. And a company called Forethought took it over. And then eventually it became Claris. And FileMaker just grew and grew as a database app on the Mac. And I think for a lot of people, FileMaker was a way you could do mail merges or keep track of your simple inventory or whatever you might want to put in a single level database. But then it continued to grow more powerful. And the reason I pick it is not only because I love it, not only because I've built a million

databases in FileMaker, not only because at some point after I came back to Texas from California working at MacUser, I actually earned a few bucks making databases for other people in FileMaker, but because FileMaker developed this ecosystem, there were people who were doing that, developers who were working in it full time. There were publications that would show you how to turn a template into a full function database. I had a job at a company once where there were about 40 users who were working in FileMaker every day and they would spit stuff out of FileMaker that would turn into web pages. So you could do more than just have a relational database of things that you wanted to count. You could actually turn, you know, create web content out of it. So FileMaker continued to grow and evolve. And it is not at the high level it once was in terms of usefulness to the larger world. There are many other ways to do the things that we once did with FileMaker. But FileMaker, the reason I was so surprised that it was basically a DOS app was that it felt so Mac-like because you could get into FileMaker and create databases very simply, and you could

dig deeper and use formulas to make more complicated calculation fields, and then you could create databases that looked very nice so that you could make something that you would want to have a client-facing database with. And so it just felt very Mac-like. And it felt like because Apple via Claris continued to support it and continued to allow it to have as much space in the ecosystem as it did, it just felt like it was a very essential Mac app and that it was also a way, I think,

that it eventually became a Windows app. But it was also a way, I think, for a lot of people who were Mac fans in corporate or even small business worlds to say, hey, we need a Mac because FileMaker runs best on the Mac and we can have our 20 users run FileMaker databases and they will be much happier

if they're doing it on a Mac happier if they're doing it on a Mac than if they're doing it on a Windows. So on all those levels, I feel like FileMaker really, really has been important for the Mac. Just I'll throw in my mention, because parenthetical feature is important here. So Mac OS X Tiger was the first Mac OS version to include accessibility features.

There had been accessibility features back in the early systems of the 90s, but between the time Mac OS X came out in 2001 and 2004, when Tiger came out, there was no accessibility. Tiger brought it back. Well, that was under a banner of something called Universal Access. It eventually has had different names, and now we have voiceover and Zoom and display and all the various features that we have. But under Universal Access, under the tab stupidly labeled Seeing, there were all sorts of things, voiceover and Zoom, and a feature that I love, a feature that makes my existence as a Mac user possible, It was called black on white at

that point. It made it possible for you to flip it so that you had a negative image and that you had a black background and white text. Now that's called invert colors and it has advanced somewhat since then because now you don't have negative images as you used to. You can actually look at a webpage and see the image as a positive while the rest of the page is dark text on black. And then eventually it became dark mode, but for a long time, it was an exclusively accessibility feature. And I will tell you that it just changed my life. It made it possible for OS X and I to get along because when OS X first came out and I was using the betas and I was actually co-writing a book at the time about OS X, I had quite a time trying to work in a very colorful light background environment when what I really wanted was a dark background with light text.

So FileMaker and black and white slash invert colors. Gotta say, Shelley, you must really love FileMaker. For you to put those two together, FileMaker must be real good it's hey man it is and john syracuse what is the best mac software but a lot of things get sniped bb edit was on my list safari was definitely up there as well i also had mac os 10 on my list but i feel like dan talking about the terminal is like 50 of what i was going to say about mac os 10 because it was the marriage of mac and unix two things that i loved and continue to love so i'm going to set that aside i feel like i would have had to ask you to drill down a little bit rather than like the entire operating system yeah well there's the other aspect of it is mac

os 10 being so forward looking and like the compositing window manager and all that other great stuff right but uh given that i was all half sniped, I'm going to, I'm backed into continuing my role as the crotchety old man, and I'm going to pick the original Mac Finder as the best Mac software slash feature. It's difficult to explain. I mean, obviously I loved it. It's a favorite, but it's difficult to explain the importance of that

to the early Mac. Obviously the Mac was sort of the popularization of the graphical user interface, which is not something people really think about now because people just accept that's the way the computers worked. But the idea that it would draw pictures on your screen and each of those little pictures

would represent something, like they represent files, folders, applications. It was so brilliantly executed because that was a new concept. And for that to work, the abstraction of this little rectangle thing with a corner curled on it, that is your file.

It's not just like a picture of your file or a point to your file. That literally is your file. That was really important for people to discard the abstraction to just start thinking in back in the the old days terms direct manipulation i'm just going to move my file over there they did you

know when you type mv space file name space path like you're doing the same thing but that indirection never goes away the command line indirection doesn't disappear but because people are used to reaching out grabbing something and putting it somewhere. People very quickly discarded the illusion that these were their files. And they really, truly believed that that little rectangle was the file. That little folder icon was a folder. That app was the application. And the Mac worked real hard to make that true. Original Mac applications, they were just one file, that little diamond shaped application.

That was the whole thing. We eventually more or less got back to that with app bundles and Mac OS 10, but there was a long dark period where applications were folders full of messy things or whatever. And, you know, the original Finder, one of the very important things that it did was if we're going to have these little objects that people are going to directly manipulate with the cursor for that abstraction to never come back in their face, they should behave in a way that people are familiar with. And that basically came down to windows and folders and icons, put them wherever you want, size them however you want, and they just stay wherever you put them. And the one-to-one

correspondence between a folder and its window, you couldn't have multiple windows with the same folder. There was no browser interface, obviously limiting in the modern age of having more documents, but because, you know, there was no browser at all. But the, you know, whatever, what I've always called the spatial finder, the finder that had this very strict, rigid one-to-one correspondence with physical reality, let people live in that world of the computer incredibly comfortably. Because once they sort of got settled there and knew how things work, the rules simple they were never violated they were incredibly consistent and it let people discard the abstraction and just mess with their files right and it had some power you could have list view icon view all those other things eventually you got the little disclosure triangles all while maintaining the same the same

paradigm which was difficult especially with the disclosure triangles because now what happens if you have that folder open but then you disclose the triangle and the answer is the window would close and it would go back anyway the the finder maintained that illusion for so many years i was very sad when apple discarded it uh not because browsers are bad they're great but because apple never really achieved uh the marriage of the two they just decided well the old finder is dead and here's the new one that is this weird mishmash and you can't rely on things to be consistently spatial anymore. I really wish they had successfully combined them. But the other reason that's really important and close to my heart is back before the internet,

I would spend hours and hours and hours and hours, kind of like John's parents feared he would, sitting in front of my computer. And this computer was not connected to any network. I had no way to get new software onto it. It was just a computer in my house. No modem, no internet, no BBS, no America Online, nothing. It was just me in that computer. And in that little world, it was just like playing with a tiny, you know, electrical

dollhouse. I was rearranging everything. I was setting things up the way I wanted. I would launch applications. I would use ResEdit to manipulate them. It was like being in a garage with your car and your tools and there's nothing else there. Like once or twice a year, I'd go to my grandfather's house and get a new floppy disk from the Mac user group and I'd have some new software. But for the rest of the amount

of time I try to talk to my kids about this, I would use a computer for hours with no access to the internet and no new software. And like, what were you doing? And a lot of what I was doing was spending time in the Finder, you know, manipulating things, launching new things, moving things around. You know, I'd go into applications, then I'd go back to the Finder. I should still put up on my old computers. I had everything so arranged. All the windows were arranged the way they were supposed to be at custom icons and everything. It's just, it was beautiful. It was a lovely place to live well before we all like lived on the internet i lived inside my computer and the finder was my house i did this too by the way like i did the same thing no internet i used to just click around just go into folders what's

in here like i'll just be digging around oh i did some real damage i did some real damage. I did some real damage. What are all these P-list files? They don't look important. There was a Mac that was given to me when I was a kid. It was a black and white screen. It was a laptop. I don't remember what it was, but I just remember one day after one of these excursions, I turned it on, floppy disk, question mark,

and that was the end of that Macintosh in my life. And my brain just went down a ResEdit hole yeah i was glad john mentioned that because i was on my list res edit was on my list of things to pick because yeah tinkering even the individual application had pieces inside them and it would give you like a graphical user interface to those pieces like little graphical editors i mean you can really mess stuff up one of the yeah one of the first things i did was um uh i love the game escape velocity and i like built a mod for it and like i couldn't draw anything so i just like took the sprites that were in the like original and like slightly recolored them or something and then put them in there and like yeah it was amazing all the stuff

i did the same thing crystal quest i made a copy of the crystal quest application and then i edited and reseted and i read you every single ship. And so then I could play. I could play Crystal Quest, but all the ships were my own creation because it was just monochrome, like not the color version of Crystal Quest. I didn't have a Mac two in my seat there. You didn't have monitor at that point. Just hours and hours of fun. Just crack open that game, redraw every single sprite and then play it. open that game, redraw every single sprite, and then play it. I'm so glad that John picked the Finder, although I did just win money at DraftKings by betting that he would pick the classic Finder, and he can check his... I actually predicted it before he called it. And I'll just say, he said it so well, and that's why I'm glad he picked it. I think he said it better than anyone else could describe the classic Finder. But I'll just say he said it so well, and that's why I'm glad he picked it. I think he said it better than anyone else could describe the classic Finder. But I'll just say, like, if you really just take it at the highest level, the Finder, from the user's perspective, was the Mac.

It was the computer. And nobody had ever done that before. So it wasn't, even today, I honestly think it's, I'm not saying iPhones or iPads should work that way. But now, iPhones and iPads work the way computers did before or the way Windows did back in that era where there was an app that was your file manager. And you go to this app and that's where you manage files.

Whereas with the classic Mac, the Finder was the computer and your files were just there and then what you did in apps was a level above that. It was the base reality and because there was no command line accessible to users, there was no sort of like Windows, the big thing against Windows and it was true, was like, well underneath there is lurking

DOS and so occasionally you would rear its ugly head and occasionally you had to drop down to it and the base reality on the Mac was that pretty graphical, pretty dead rock solid, consistent user interface that behaved in a way that people expected. It was kind of like basic at the prompt on your VIC-20, right?

What happens when you turn the computer on? What is the base reality? It was basic. It was a command line prompt on the VIC-20. On the Mac, you turn the computer on and the finder was there. And that was always underneath there, especially before multitasking.

It was like you'd go up to the app and then you'd go down, back down to the finder, right? And that was always underneath there, especially before multitasking. It was like, you'd go up to the app and then you'd go down back down to the finder. Right. And it was just this, this layered thing. But every time you quit your app, what's left the finder and you couldn't quit the finder, although you could add a quick menu item with res edit, but it would just relaunch. I think that's why my then boyfriend, current husband, and I couldn't talk because he was a Unix geek and I was a Mac geek. And he was like, wait, where's the terminal? Where's, where's the command line? I don't understand your world. Yeah. I love Unix geek and I was a Mac geek and he was like, wait, where's the terminal? Where's the command line? I don't understand your world. I love Unix though. I fell in love with Unix in the 90s at college and I had things like Mac Mint on the Mac, which was a Mac application that gave you a little

Unix shell, right? And so I wanted them to be mixed. I wanted my chocolate and my peanut butter together and I eventually got it with Mac OS 10, but the classic Mac, it was like, okay, but that's still just an app that you run on your Mac. And I did run AUX, which was an earlier unholy hybrid. And I was like, no, that's not it. MK Linux, that's not it. Mac OS 10, now we've got something. All right. So one more little detail that I just love about the classic Finder and the way that it represented the actual computer itself. And in today's world, if you change the volume on your iPhone, you'll notice that, or it used to be at one point before the,

what's the capsule at the top called? The dynamic island. The dynamic island. But remember they used to put the volume indicator right next to the volume buttons so that the on-screen indication of the volume level was right by the volume buttons physically. On the Mac,

the floppy disk on your desktop was on the right side, and you'd drag it down to the trash, which was on the bottom right side. And then the floppy disk, the physical disk, would pop out of the Mac right underneath the trash can. And it would make a puking noise if you had it. If you had done it right. We won't mention the fact that it was sort of confusing that you would, to eject and not destroy a floppy disk, you would drag it to the trash. I mean, that was just a shortcut.

You could always select the disk and select eject from the menu item or hit command D. Put away. That's usually what I do. Command Y, put away. Command Y, yeah. Next round is favorite or best Mac accessory or

hardware feature this is a large name for just tell us something I made this category so John could pick the extended keyboard well we'll find out as we go first to John Gruber

it's the Apple extended keyboard too. Draft Kings, pay me. You wouldn't get good odds on that. Bad odds, very bad odds. Every single time, God damn it, Jason comes on my podcast, we start talking keyboards, or at least nine out of 10 times, And it just goes off the rails. And I still buy keyboards like an idiot. And then I type on them for a little and then I put them away or give them to my son and then go back to my Apple extended keyboard too. It is the best feeling keyboard I've ever used.

They last almost literally forever. I'm on my second one from 1993 uh and it's going strong and i believe the only reason i stopped using my first one is the e-key broke and i keep meaning to like solicit from my audience surely somebody i don't know how to solder anything surely somebody in my audience you got someone who knows about keyboards right here yeah i could probably do it yeah actually i should i should do is send it to mike maybe i will uh although i you know uh overseas i don't know but how fun seeing the food crumbs since the 90s in the bottom mike can meet you somewhere when he's picking up his vision pro yeah uh i don't think it's a coincidence that it was the e-key the most used typed key

that just sort of flaked out but but it's just great. And even though it uses Apple Desktop Bus ADB, adapters have continued to work, including a much, much better one. For years and years, I used the Griffin iMate, which went from ADB to USB-A, and then I'd have to go now that USB-A isn't on any Mac, you'd have to get another adapter, a dongle for your dongle to make it work. But there's a guy in, I think he's in another adapter, a dongle for your dongle to make it work. But there's a guy in, I think he's in Hong Kong, who runs a site called Tinkerboy. Just search for Tinkerboy on the web and you'll find it, who sells absolutely terrific, much better, better than the Griffin I made ever was. It just makes the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 seem like a USB keyboard. And he even has a USB-C one, so there's no second dongle. Just a great keyboard.

I just love it. I would have picked that. It was actually on my list, even though I stopped using it years ago for RSI reasons, because it does require more force to press the keys than the modern, very sort of loosey-goosey keyboards. And pressing with less force is important for me managing my RSI. But that's the keyboard I got with the se30 i think it was like a 300 option if you wanted the keyboard add you know add 300 in 1991 right so do the math on how much that keyboard cost what percentage of the mac cost it was a work of art and if a mugger came into your house you

could defend yourself with it because it was solid just beautiful wrong-headed in that it had the kickstand that raised raised the height of the keyboard even higher than it already was that's not ergonomically great uh but i i really love that thing um i've still got mine i still got a couple spare ones to sell to john and his old age oh no i have i've got spares yeah well my spares might be in better condition it's all about condition with this market you know uh i think I've got at least two new inbox. But I still remember I can still remember the sound of it because, you know, it was like I think when we first had my first apartment with my wife, she very often would tell me that my keyboard was a little loud and maybe I should type less or just come to bed. But it just it felt so good. It looked great.

I love the the font on the key caps i loved everything about that keyboard uh i will also add that i just a callback that my mac lc came with i forget what they called it but it was one of the worst keyboards apple's ever made the mushy keyboard which had arrow keys in a bizarre arrangement. It was like in a row, left to right, left, right, up and down. I mean, crazy. Yeah. Apple did that on their laptops for years, and they did it on desktop keyboards a little bit too, and it was not a great arrangement. And I used it for a year, quickly grew to hate it. And then in my sophomore year of college, I was in a tournament playing John Madden football on Sega. And in the championship

game, played against another student at Drexel who had the SE30, which came with the Apple Extended Keyboard 2. And I put up $150 cash against his Apple Extended Keyboard 2. And I gave him my mushy keyboard. I i beat him and that's and i always felt it was my millennium falcon it's my millennium was that i was gonna say there's a punishment there too if you give him the other keyboard like not only did i take your keyboard you have to use this one all right jason snell what you got um i'm gonna go i wanted to so i was thinking about the magic trackpad which i I really love. And I learned in the last few years, some things about Apple and the trackpad, um, while trying a PowerBook 500 series, slowly, slowly iterating on its trackpad software. And, um, as a result, it has the best trackpad software in class.

And if you try, uh, using someone else's trackpad, you will discover that it they're bad. It's terrible. They're so bad. It's terrible in so many different ways, especially if you're used to using a Mac trackpad, which since most Macs that are sold are laptops, is almost everybody who's a Mac user. And I also use the Magic Trackpad at my desk. But what I'm going to pick is the Multi-Touch Glass Trackpad, which debuted in, I don't know, 2009, something like that.

And then came the next year to a magic trackpad for the desktop. But it started on laptops and has continued on laptops. And it's that moment where they've got the glass surface. It supports multi-touch gestures. They ended up making it not move. So there was no diving board hinge at all. It really is just pressure sensitive. And it allowed Apple to create a fundamental set of gestures that worked on the Mac. This is sort of in the post introduction of the iPhone era. But the idea that you put two fingers down to scroll and that, you know, there are different gestures to reveal the desktop or hide all your windows or go into expose. And they all become, I think, second

nature to you as a Mac user, especially if you're using a laptop. But the nice thing is they make that desktop trackpad so that you can bring that experience over. Trackpads aren't for everybody. I, uh, became a, a trackball user when I started at Mac user. Um, I ended up with a Kensington, a turbo mouse trackpad trackball, and I loved it. And, um, but you know, enough time using an Apple trackpad made me realize I should probably just use an external trackpad when the Magic trackpad came out. I just

went with that. But it was not until I was exploring the world of alternative trackpads for iPad that I discovered that alternative trackpads are terrible and that we take Apple's brilliant software that is, you know, because it's doing things like it knows where your fingers are down and in what order and the space between them. And it is using very sophisticated software to intuit what you want to do with your pointing device or, or what shortcut kind of thing it wants to fire off to do expose or switch to another window or whatever. So I think that is my favorite Mac accessory. And it's not just the magic track pad,

but it's that track pad that's in every Mac laptop since, you know, since the power book 500, but really since the glass track pad in the MacBook in 2008-ish era. The first MacBook Air is where that was introduced. First glass trackpad was the first MacBook Air? Yeah. So it's multi-touch glass trackpad is my choice. You can use it while it charges.

And I do. Jason totally sneaked that one right out from under me. Yeah. The Magic Trackpad. I also had, exactly, multi-touch trackpad was on my list because that thing honestly i used mice i used track balls i'd struggle a little bit with rsi in college for using the mice a lot and the trackpad for me is just it was a revelation and yes my my wife has a has a lenovo laptop and every time i have to use the trackpad on that thing i wish for the sweet

embrace of death i i cannot figure out how to use this guypad on that thing, I wish for the sweet embrace of death. I cannot figure out how to use this guy. Big clunky plastic buttons at the top. And you're like, what is this? Like the only thing worse than those trackpads was the eraser nub pointer on those windows. Think pad. Oh my God.

Those were so bad. Sorry. Sorry, Casey. Those are trash. People love that thing. Garbage. I was going to say the original trackpads on the those were so bad. Sorry. Sorry, Casey. Those are trash. People love that thing. Garbage. I was going to say the original trackpads on the Macs were not glass. They were like the original code name Midas tiny things.

They were plastic. And if you want to really appreciate the glass trackpad, try using an Apple trackpad before they went glass. It was not great. Not good. Dan, what is your actual pick? My actual pick then, I'm going by backup, which is, so I didn't mention,

my third Mac that I ever bought was a blue and white Power Mac G3, the tower. I love that thing. It was a great looking computer. It was super powerful, but they had the best hardware feature of all time, which was it had a door on the side. The whole side.

And you could just open it and pop it down. It was amazing. That thing was, I i mean after coming from you know the lc where you had to take the monitor off and pop it off and then the performer where you had like i think screws on the back and you'd like pull up this little handle and drag out the logic board the fact that i could and i had by this time started working and doing it stuff on pcs and so i always was like all right i'm undoing thumb screws i'm like pulling off side panels then you get your hands in there and you're trying to like pull out IDE cables and stuff.

And like you're getting your hands all sliced up from the metal. And it was terrible. Like, you know, I had all these cuts on my hands when I was working in IT because I would constantly be inside these PC towers. And then the G3 came along and they're like, oh, you need to replace the RAM. Pop this latch. Fold down. Everything's latch, fold down. Everything's right there for you. No screws, really, except for I think the hard drives.

Like that was basically it. And I, as a result, upgraded that machine in every way I could. I put in other drives. I upgrade the RAM. I even put in a G4 processor and upgraded that at one point. Put in, you know, PCI cards and stuff like that and it was incredible it is i think probably the most easily serviceable mac ever made um probably maybe a close selection the the the g5 g was it one of the imax the g5 imac was that it was there a g5 imac where you could

like pop up the entire back yeah and like yeah my parents had that one and i replaced a few things in there as well but like it was kind of after that that you know repairability certainly never reached i think that peak of the power mac g3 again and stuff just got more and more locked down and that's fine like i don't have a problem with that i understand the trade-offs being made there but for that era that machine was incredible well power mac g5 it didn't have a door that hinged down it had a door that came off but they had the cool thing where you could remember you could take out the fan assembly you could take out the little cpu thing it had the uh the hard

drives where you put screws on the side of the hard drive and then it would slide into these plastic rails smoothly like a little roller coaster ride to go into place. Yeah, they've continued that even, I mean, the 2019 Power Mac Pro that I have here tries to do that, but it makes you lift the entire case off vertically and the computer has to be off to do it. So it sacrifices utility for outer beauty. But once you get it, once you get that thing off,

it's also kind of a work of art inside there. The only machine I ever had that was more accessible than the Power Mac G3 was briefly, I had a pc i built and i didn't have a case for it and it was in a literal shoebox and i would start i would literally start it with a screwdriver between two pins to turn it on wow i just wanted to praise the the that mounting the motherboard on the side on the door so that you get this big kind of open face sandwich instead of like having to take off a panel. So there's no piece to maintain. You didn't need the space to lower the door,

but that made a huge difference in terms of being able to get in because you had the whole base level. Plus you had the stuff on the other side. So I had that machine. It also meant I could keep it clean inside. I never dusted the inside of any other Mac I had, but I, whether it was with very carefully applied compressed air or whether it was just, you know, rag or something like that, I would open that Mac up every once in a while. And if it seemed dusty, I would clean it up. on a table to open it to put a new card in. Or, you know, I think Apple had this idea.

You're going to like sling it around different workstations in the studio or something. I think it was so heavy. But the handles were, it was a great idea. Yeah, the handles were, it peaked in comfort with the Quicksilver G4. They were rounded on the bottom. It didn't cut your hands. And the handles on the Mac Pro and Power Mac G5, not as comfortable. The worst. No.

Yeah. Mac Pro and Power Mac G5 not as helpful. My 9600, which I talked about as my second Mac, I think might have been the first with an easily removable door that didn't need tools, was sort of a predecessor to that. It wasn't quite as graceful inside, and the fact

that the door came off. But John recently reminded me, I forget why, John, but that... We were talking about it after we recorded the show. Yeah, after you were on my show, that there was a button on top to release the door. It was a beige, you know,

or platinum device still, was pre-G3, but the button to release it was made out of iMac-style sort of Bondi blue. But before the iMac existed, before anything was that color, it was the very,

it was the closest predecessor was the e-mate. The beige G3 had that, the green button on the beige door that you could open. Yeah, it was basically a piece of the e-mate. If you remember what the e-mate looked like,

it was frosty, teal, translucent. That's what the button was. It was 100% beige computer and just this one, it was Johnny Ives saying, help me, come in here. It was a call for help from Johnny Ives. It totally was.

Absolutely was. I bought all this blue plastic to try and build a computer. We got to use it up. What if plastic? And Gil Emilio said, no. He said, I'm fine. I'm putting it on the button. And the button was like wavy shaped too.

It wasn't like rectangular. Yeah. Dan's point though about it, the era being like the peak of oh you know ram suddenly i mean it's always been expensive but all of a sudden ram seemed way more affordable than it had been like in the early quote-unquote pc ram right and and so there was a lot more you could do and you know oh cd drives and dvd drives and there were things you know there was a lot of reasons to go into your machine for a stretch in the late 90s and the early aughts. And it was before cooling became so dire that the whole machine had to be focused around cooling. The G3 had fans and stuff, but you could

open up that door and it wasn't like, well, how are we going to make the cooling work if we ever let them do this? And the stuff was kind of standard. It's not just the RAM, but like the drives, you know, you were using IDE cables and you had PCI slots and like of standardized, not just the RAM, but the drives. You were using IDE cables, and you had PCI slots. And yeah, you needed the software and the drivers to run it. But fundamentally, it was still kind of using off-the-shelf components. Shelly, what is your pick? This is the category I had the most trouble with, surprisingly, I guess. And I will confess, there's probably going to be some recency bias here.

This is not an Apple product. It's what I thought of. In other words, there are probably going to be a hundred things that after this, I'm going to think of and be sorry I didn't mention, but I'm going to go with the Elgato Stream Deck because there are many, many ways to shortcut what you're doing, whether it's a keyboard shortcut or whether it's an actual shortcut. There are a hundred ways to do the things that I can do with a Stream Deck. But after years of using Keyboard Maestro and the built-in system keyboard shortcut capabilities, I've just run out of new places to put keyboard shortcuts. And there are some times when my other hand can be on that Stream Deck and can press a button

and can make one thing happen or multiple things if I string it that way. It's pretty flexible. And I know some people are all in that stream deck life and have multiple ones and have, you know, 30 buttons or 60 buttons or whatever. I have a small one, but it's all I need. And because it can have different functions based on what app you're in or what you're doing, it does more for me than it otherwise would. And so even though I'm actually using it with other tools that I already had, like Keyboard Maestro, I just find it incredibly useful, incredibly simple. Because I have a small one, I always remember what shortcut I'm looking for. I've got icons that I can customize that look the way I want

them to, that say something to me that might not say anything to you. And so I've just really enjoyed that device and watching it evolve. I love it. It's funny, the Apple did the touch bar, invested that hardware and then- Oh, I should have chosen the touch and then abandoned it whereas elgato just took this little tiny screen and put some buttons on it and wrote some rudimentary software for it and it's completely transformed how i use the mac at my desk and i didn't say i like the software yeah it's it's bad we're being kind of bad um it's just it's funny that that they i think they got it right in the idea of it's buttons i can see and i can customize but i can also do by feel and apple went in a totally other direction that was

much more high tech and not as good so all right next up john syracuse this is a tough one because it's kind of open-ended uh hardware accessory uh i hope what i'm picking qualifies um it is the original apple cinema display which was a flat panel 22 inch lcd display with the kind of clear uh plastic feet on either side with a little clear leg in the back um and the reason i'm picking this is i actually had the next one i had the 23 inch one um this was uh probably the uh the most shocking piece of hardware i've had in my house uh attached to my mac as evidenced by non-computer people commenting on it because if this was around the year 2000 computer monitors back then if you wanted a really big computer monitor you needed a really big CRT

and 21 CRTs existed and Apple sold one and they were the size of a truck and they took up a huge amount of depth and they were four by three and they look like just huge television things you know like if you can imagine putting a 21 inch television CRT on your desk, it dominates. And you can't really make it much bigger than that. You start pushing the envelope on that. First of all, CRTs weren't even made that much bigger than that. At computer, you know, pixel ratios, you could get a 34 inch television, but that's not, you know, a resolution that you'd want to use with a computer. And so you were kind of hemmed in. And then the LCD era came and Apple started selling the 16 by

nine, 22 inch flat panel display. And I had it on my desk and people would come in. Someone comes to the house to work on the furnace and they wouldn't say they wouldn't be impressed by my computer monitor. They would say, what is that? Is that a television? Because like before flat panels were common, people had CRT televisions and CRT monitors on top of their desk running their computers. And if you did have a flat panel display anywhere, they were small, but this thing was vast. It was 22 inches. It was giant. It was flat. It had the clear feed on it. It looks so futurey. And it was just, think the the most impressive accessory that are even the pro display xdr that i'm using now it's a really big lcd but who cares everyone

is used to lcds now but back when people were not used to the idea of a large display that is flat that had that massive resolution such an impressive piece of technology every time i would sit down in front of it i would just i would be amazed like I can't believe this exists coming from, you know, a nine inch monochrome Mac screen. And now I'm sitting in front of this flat thing that's 22 inches and just, it looked gorgeous. Mine did have two dead pixels on it. Those were the bad old days when every pixel didn't always work, that it was the pixel lottery. But, but yeah, this, this I feel like is the, uh is a point in time when the Mac took a giant leap forward. And if you somehow were foolish enough to spend the massive amount of money that these things cost, you could have connected to your computer and feel like you were living in

the future for a while. Stephen Hackett, what is your pick? I've got one that I'll mention and one that I'll pick. One that I'll mention was the breathing sleep light that Macs used to have. So you could just see at a moment if your Mac notebook was asleep in your bag or your iMac had fallen asleep on the desk. A little bit of whimsy and personality that I miss. A little creepy, too. Like a little.

No, it's sleeping. A little bit. It's a little bit creepy. It's just breathing. You know, just very gentle. It's like watching a baby sleep. It's really nice. We mentioned the iMac gentle. It's like watching a baby sleep. It's really nice. We mentioned the iMac G5 earlier

that the backs come off of. That was very handy because all the logic boards and power supplies failed and I replaced billions of them back in my repair days. But there was a little piece of plastic you had to put back in there

or the light wouldn't diffuse correctly and it looked janky. Anyways, I apologize to everyone in Memphis who's I messed up. But favorite Mac hardware feature ever and i had i brought some something for a sound effect for some asmr perfect thank you so much i know people like asmr podcasts so it is the uh the g4 cubes insides coming out so let's listen to this insides coming out.

So let's listen to this. It's such a satisfying sound. You got clicks and like this big handle that latches in. This was not an amazing computer. Apple very famously discontinued it, I think, after like a year or two. Well, they put it on ice, Stephen. They put it on ice. Excuse me.

Put it on ice. Any day now. But it was me put it on ice any day now but it was such come back it's still like walt disney it's coming dragging it out but it was such a quintessential like steve jobs era mac right the dude just loved cubes right stores the next station this thing uh but the engineering that went into this computer is completely unnecessary but so lovely and interesting it's it's it it was the when i started collecting max this was the first one and maybe i'll get be buried with it all right how are the hairline cracks in your uh acrylic case i've got one in the back corner, but definitely not as bad as some of the photos I've seen online. Yeah, I reviewed that computer, and so I had the review unit

in my house for a while, and having it in my house, it was beautiful, and I did have it connected to my flat panel display, but also it made me glad that I never actually bought one. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, the CD would come out of the top, as would the heat. Yeah, that's great. It was very strange. That's right. No fan. It was convection cooled. The cold air comes in, the bottom goes out, hot come out of the top, as would the heat. It was very strange. That's right. No fan. It was convection cooled.

The cold air comes in. The bottom goes out. Hot air comes out the top. What a machine. I'm always surprised that Apple gave up on it. I am. And I always thought that the mistake was going high-end performance with the G4 rather than putting a G3 in it and selling it at a lower price as a more like I feel like the miscalculation was trying to go really cute and small and high-end performance like

you know it's sort of like pick one yeah you know I think they were trying to go sharper image to use an old reference it was like a rich person's computer that it's small and cute and looks like a work of art and costs more money than you want to spend. And it's very clear that this was Steve Jobs's baby, too, because that puts it on ice press release. It's like you can read between the lines that a group of executives came to Steve Jobs and said, Steve, we have to stop with the cube. And they finally talked him into what we won't say that it's gone forever. Maybe it'll come back. And then they walked out the door and they're like, kill it, get it out of here.

Steve, stop with all the cubes. For the next four years, at every meeting, he was bringing it up. So when we were going to bring it, he told me we could bring it back, right? So when's that? He carried it in by the handle every time and just put it down on the desk.

I mean, the mac mini is that concept but more affordable right that's well no i wasn't going to say the mac mini i would say before that um one of the things i remember noting when this machine came out was that the uh the hemispherical uh base the dome base of the the imac with the the arm and the lcd, the flat panel iMac, had less volume than the Cube. So that was an idea of like, can we make a very small volume computer, right, but not have it be, to John's point,

not have it be the G4, like the high end. It was a lower end computer, but it looked expensive. That was the thing about that computer. It looked and felt expensive. And it was, practically speaking, taking the entire guts of the Mac

and putting them into a smaller volume than the G4 Cube and hemispherically shaped. So it was even more a degree of difficulty. And I think they kind of got it right there. But even that computer was not long lived because, you know, it felt expensive. It felt like you were getting a lot for your money and probably the margins weren't as good

as when they stuck all this stuff to the back of a display. And not easy to open. There's a continuum there, I think, with Apple doing things that sort of look cool or push the envelope from the 20th anniversary Mac through the Cube, through the trash can Power Mac, right? With like, or Mac Pro, with things that like,

oh, we're gonna make, we're gonna reinvent it, we're gonna really slim it down and get it in this tiny little cool shape or something, and then people have to point out it doesn't work great. And unfortunately, they move on. But they really sell it. I remember the G4 iMac being encased in plexiglass on the Macworld show floor and everybody, including me, just oohed and aahed over it. And I was sad to see that go as I was sad to see the Cube go. Did I own one? No, I did not. And I was sad to see that go as I was sad to see the cube go.

Did I own one? No, I did not. The screen on that was always the real winner for me. And it's sad that they've never gotten to a adjustability level that they had with that G4 iMac screen because that was great. Yeah. Well, for me, that would have been an accessibility thing. Like I was not in a position to buy a Mac at that time, but just the idea that you could move that screen up, down, forward, back, tilt, whatever,

that was an amazing thing for accessibility. And eventually when we had more VESA arms easily available and you had a lot of options in terms of how you could make your external monitor, put it where you want it. But the idea that you had an all-in-one iMac where you could move the screen and tilt it in any number of ways was just an amazing thing. Now you got to pay 400 bucks just to move your screen up and down. People would move that monitor just like to show their friend, here, look at this. Because once you realized it was just free to move, people would just grab it and move it because it was a useful thing to do.

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show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. So we are now into our final round, which is the Hall of Shame. Now, over the 40 years, we've spoken about a lot of great things that have happened in the world of Macintosh, but it's not all been perfect.

And so I would like you all to bring something that needs to be noted in the Mac's history of Macintosh, but it's not all been perfect. And so I would like you all to bring something that needs to be noted in the Mac's history that didn't go so well. Jason Snell, I start with you. And I feel like I've got the DraftKings bet here on what this is going to be, but we'll find out. Wow. I actually struggled with this. There are two macs that i considered here the charitably called mac pro late 2013 uh it's out there for people and also my most hated mac of all time the power macintosh 6400 the big forehead mac which is the ugliest mac ever made. But no, I would like to take you to a more innocent time. It was June 2003.

It was WWDC. And finally, at long last, we had heard what the future of the Mac was going to be when Steve Jobs and a guy from IBM stood on stage and said, the G5 is coming.

It's going to be awesome. And then Steve Jobs said, and you know what they're going to do? It's going to go to three gigahertz because they were really lagging behind Intel. I actually got a tour of the factory in New York at Macworld Expo that year. Apple PR took a bunch of us and we put on bunny suits

and we went into the IBM factory. The IBM-Apple relationship with the G5, it was going to be great. And what happened was Apple or IBM absolutely failed to deliver on the three gigahertz promise. They never made a chip that was capable of shipping in a laptop. So there was no G5 PowerBook at any point.

And this instead became the moment where Apple said, you know that Skunk Works project we have to have macOS run on Intel, put more skunks in there or whatever and get it going because the Apple IBM relationship. I mean, you have Steve Jobs make a claim for the future on stage, which is unlikely. Right. And yet he made it. And you get the sense. I got the sense that he was holding him to it like they made him a promise and he was going to put it out there in the public and say, we're doing this. And they failed to do it. And that was the end of the PowerPC alliance and Apple's relationship with

IBM and the Intel transition happened shortly thereafter. And the Intel transition, I would argue, was a huge boon for the Mac. Not just in bringing them to parity with what was going on in Intel at that point, which is a lot of growth in speed, but also eliminating the chip conversation entirely

and enabling a whole new generation of switchers who switch because with Intel inside, they knew they could run not emulated but virtualized copies of Windows just in case they needed a Windows app, which they never actually needed. Sold a lot of Macs that way. So I think it is a seminal bad moment in the history of the Mac when IBM and Steve Jobs promised us a three gigahertz G5, and it instead precipitated the Intel transition.

I just assumed he said that on stage based on the fact that he wanted it to be three gigahertz and that IBM had never said that they were going to be able to do that. If I get up on stage and say it, I'm sure they'll figure out a way to do it. It's possible. Either way. Can you see the stricken look on the IBM CEO's face? He just jumped into the crowd at that point. No!

Kind of like open sourcing the FaceTime protocol. Exactly. You just get up there and say it in public. It really motivates the team to make it happen. Yeah, it did not happen. Well, and the bigger thing, the 3.0 thing is just like, hey, it's a nice round number. But the big, big, big, big thing is that they never could put the G5 in a laptop. Nope.

And that was the era when the rapidity with which everybody who had previously only used desktops because laptops were slower and super expensive, it was like, oh, now they're affordable. They're sort of the default. It was happening so fast. It was just untenable for the leading chip to be unusable in a laptop form factor. That water cooling in the laptop was not happening. Sloshing around in it.

Jason, that wasn't what I thought you were going to say. We'll see if we get to it at some point. I expect someone will probably pick it but we'll find out dan what is your pick i thought jason was going to pick mine and so we'll see if this is what mike thinks but it was let's harken back to the mid 2010s when apple's riding high and it seems like every mac that comes out is great what What could possibly go wrong? Introduce another, not the skunks from the skunk works, but another,

the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings. There it is. As it lands on the keyboard and all of a sudden Apple decides, you know, we got to shove this keyboard in that tiny Retina MacBook we made. So we'll put something in with less travel with this innovative new butterfly mechanism.

And it wasn't great. But a lot of us are like, well, it's such a small MacBook. You know, they got to make some compromises to get in there. And Apple took the exact wrong lesson, which was this keyboard is so good. We should put it in all of our computers. And they nearly, I feel like, tanked their laptop line with a thing that is, you know, basically an unforced error. Because they did not need to change the keyboard that substantially in order to make it work. And yet this thing they thought was so great was awful. And the keyboard being the thing that you need to interact with pretty much every day,

it turns out that if you mess that up, people get really, really unhappy. I did not buy a MacBook in this era because of how bad it was. I was sticking with that 11-inch MacBook Air with the older keyboard basically until I think the Apple Silicon Macs came out and they redid the keyboards again just before that. came out and they they redid the uh the the keyboards again just before that um so yeah i i this sort of bookends i think gruber's pick from earlier of the good apple keyboard with the worst keyboard apple made probably um and yeah i don't i it was you know as jason can attest from the years of uh six colors report cards during that time it was so angry oh people were very very mad it was like the one thing that people were really digging the mac about everything else about it performance was good the screens were great like connectivity was solid but that keyboard it's just so hard to deal with how many

aggregate hours have all of us in this group right now spent podcasting about this keyboard. I sold t-shirts. I sold t-shirts about the keyboard. Good for business. I never owned one either, but I think that there's at least a couple dozen hours of my podcast talking about it. Yeah, I didn't own one either, but I have spent a lot of time around normies who had those computers and loved

Apple laptops and Apple computers generally. And then I saw them start to use the computers with those keyboards and they would look at me and they go, Shelly, why is this terrible? It's your fault. It's my fault. Why did you do it? Right. Why did you do it? Could you please tell Tim Apple to fix it right now? And I'm like,

I can't, I don't have that power. One of my favorite things about the butterfly keyboard era was a friend of the show, Michael Arment, had one of the show michael arment had a one of the macbook pros where they put this in and his e-key started to stick i bought that laptop from him so i owned that computer for a period of time and then i sold it on i don't i think i put i sold it on ebay but it was like a funny thing to me of like it, this, that one specific laptop spurred a lot of conversation on multiple shows, just that one of them, let alone the whole thing. I think this will be a case study in like Harvard business school sometime because,

you know, it's, you make a, you make a keyboard turns out has reliability problems. Like that's a thing that can happen to anybody, but the real business story is here. Like, so then what do you do about it? How do you fix that problem? And Apple, through various internal misfires on their organizational structure and decision making, kept trying to double down and failing to fix it year after year after year. part of this is the um apple's you know penny pinching nature and that for pretty much all the history of apple's laptops they have wanted to have a single keyboard for all their laptops no matter the size because developing a keyboard is expensive and if you just do it once it saves you a lot of money that's why you got the original 17 inch power book with the same keyboard that the

12 inch power book had the one that shelly picked that same keyboard was in the 17-inch power book it was and why because it's cheaper to just have one keyboard so once they made the butterfly one for the 12-inch macbook the the single port 12-inch macbook they're like well we can save a lot of money let's use this keyboard on all our laptops and so when it had problems it was across all of them and did they say well let's go back to the drawing board and come up with a new keyboard did they say let's go back to the old keyboard no year after year they're like we think we've got it this time we think it's all sorted out and then we'd buy them and then they wouldn't work i got one of i got one in the middle in the middle of this thing i got i think the one with like the membrane keyboard i got it at work as my laptop and the keyboard broke and i had to have a

top case replacement at great expense to my employer and it's just just year and so that that internal story that has not yet been told is how does an organization so successful with so much money fail to fix a problem over so many years and suffer such reputational damage just mind-boggling it's hubris right they just thought they could i expect that they just thought they could fix it which is each time it was like this is losing the football it's gonna work this time engineering tells me this keyboard fixes the problem i just i it always baffled me that like it seemed so commonplace that you feel like how is this not caught in q like nobody during testing had a problem at all with like double letters or things not typing or getting stuck it shocks me

it's like the aging you have to test it like rapid aging testing like we'll we'll use it uh for the equivalent of one year of usage and see if it has problems. But like there's no substitute for actual usage over an actual year with all the food crumbs. And I think that's the essential thing is like I don't think the testing had potato chips over the top of it. Right. And they do now. Just throw in. Yeah.

The problem is one little particle would get into that butterfly mechanism and it wouldn't work anymore. We spent all this money with all this stuff to test the iPhone antennas. We blew all our money on that. We don't have any QA money left. Well, it's wild. The last butterfly keyboard MacBook Pro, by that time they had the repair extension program,

so they were replacing them for free. But a brand new laptop was announced and put into the repair extension program on the same day. I mean, what a vote of confidence. Wow. It's like just bringing it in and kicking it straight out the door, right? It's just like, come on in, buddy. It's that way.

We're selling you a product and we know it's no good. I ordered this product from the Apple store. Why is it getting shipped from AppleCare? Well, they're eliminating a step. Yeah. That keyboard was a good test for the Apple fans whose appreciation of the company

could be described as religious because it was indefensible, in my opinion. There's just no way. You cannot... If it worked properly, yes, it was subjective whether you liked the feel

of the shallow travel. But the fact that it was so unreliable, clearly, across the board, widespread, it was absolutely unreliable for like three generations. It's still mind-boggling. Yeah, I always really liked the way it sounded. Like it had a fun sound. Like it was different. I get it, yeah. So I can get why people, if it had been reliable, why there were people who liked it, right? I mean, I know people who love typing on the no adjective 12-inch MacBook, right,

which had the keyboard. I know people who absolutely loved it, but just the reliability. How could anybody defend it? It was crazy. All right, Shelly, what are you putting in a hole of shame? Name and shame. I was sure I was going to be sniped.

Let us stay in the world of laptops for a moment, why don't we? I'm going back to the mid-90s for the PowerBook 5300. Got me. Now, the PowerBook 5300 most famously is known for batteries that will flame. And that problem comes from Sony. That is not the part that can be laid directly at Apple's doorstep. Can I just pause you for a second here? I don't know what you're going to say.

I don't know. And the idea that you can be like, oh, the batteries that caught on fire, that's not the worst part. Oh, come on. It's part of Apple history. Stephen will hook you up later with that. But yeah, just the batteries caught on fire. But other than that, it was not a fine computer. So the PowerBook 5300 was a low-ish cost laptop.

I would characterize it as a full-on lemon product. Because in addition to the fact that it had these lithium batteries from Sony that were subject to catching on fire and that people in fact hurt themselves and other people when they saw indications that the batteries were going to do so could return them and get new ones, I guess. But also the thing just, plastic would fall off of it. Plastic would crack. It was heavy. It was a bad bad laptop it was ugly it was it was all the i had one by the way i bought one used for why did i do that because i really need a laptop i don't know i never had any problems with mine which is why it's funny to

me that i am i'm so adamantly speaking of it now but yeah that was you know right in the middle of the 90s when other bad things were happening and the clone process and everything was happening it was a weird time at apple but the 5300 just feels like a total lemon and that even had it worked it was not you know not optimal apple design like you'd look at that laptop and you wouldn't it did look it had a very pc look about it, to be honest. Uh,

yeah. I remember wanting one when they talked about it, I think probably because it was sort of the, the color one at that era, the 5300C. But like, I love the two things I love about it is that one, I mean,

that's like a $4,000 laptop in today's money. Um, but I like. You got a power PC for your money, Dan. Yeah. Calm down. But I also enjoyed that the code

name for that laptop is m2 uh so they really brought it all the way back around i guess so a few fun details about the blackbird or about the 5300 i wrote about the 500 and the 5300 in a in a an article in 2020 um mac week referred to it said it gave it one of the worst reviews it had ever given an Apple product. It said the product crashed all the time. Apple agreed that there were problems that would be fixed in a software update. Five months later, Apple shipped a software update to fix the crashes. However, many of the logic boards that had shipped with the 5300 were lemons, so they had to be completely replaced it would take about a month for you to get your computer back after that and then my favorite bit is there

was a built-in pc card slot uh it had it had a uh it had two expansion bays uh one was for a battery and the other one was for a floppy drive uh and in a classic moment this was the heyday of the CD-ROM, and the expansion bay was fractions of an inch too small for a CD-ROM drive to go in it. Good times. John Syracuse, hit me with your hole of shame. No. So Butterfly Keyboard was top of my list, obviously. The two remaining ones i think i'm

gonna leave i think i'm gonna leave my second one for somebody else to pick and if they don't we'll just we'll bring out your dead at the end i feel like it's my role on this show to uh pick the 2023 mac pro john really the trash can that what it has going for it is that it exists and shows that apple is still making that product line what it has against it is literally everything else would you like a mac studio that's massively more expensive and is in a giant case filled with air where the guts of that computer are on a motherboard that's like a giant empty field with just the tiny little guts of a Mac studio sitting in the middle of it? Would you like a computer that costs thousands of dollars more than a Mac studio that is

exactly the same speed because it uses exactly the same SOC? Would you like a Mac studio in a case that has a lot of carefully machined holes in it, then the 2023 Mac Pro is the computer for you. Even more so than the trash can, which was mentioned earlier. That Mac Pro at least could do things that other Macs could not because it had different guts inside. It had different GPUs. You could have two GPUs. For all its faults, it was at least a different computer trying to do different things. The 2023 Mac Pro is a Mac Studio in a giant case. It is a sad computer. I like that it exists and that it shows that Apple wants to keep trying there.

But they need to try a lot harder. It's going to be very difficult to unseat this as the worst Mac Pro Apple has ever made. Hang on a second. No, no, no, no. The trash can? Yeah. No, the trash can at no. The trash can? Yeah. No, the trash can at least was trying to do something. You can put two GPUs in it.

John, I owned one. It failed. Now, me and that computer, we had a real tough time. I would record podcasts. It would just turn off. It would just turn off in the middle. Like, consistently. Jason, you know more than anyone.

It used to happen basically every Monday. Where's Mike? Oh, well. And we would have to try and like unearth mp3 files that may be half saved i cannot allow it that the mac pro i know it doesn't do what you like it works though well does it you don't have one if you got one and it was a lemon you'd be making the same complaints but the thing is mine wasn't just a lemon steven can attest to this this was a consistent issue with the trash can. It was a GPU problem. The PowerMax G4 Cube had the same problem, by the way.

When I was using my G4 Cube and reviewing it, it would occasionally just turn off as well. So this is a thing that happens with Macs sometimes. You got unlucky, but I have to say, at least the trash can was trying. It's a thing that happens with Macs. We'll see what happens in the future. If within the next five years,

Apple have to bring a bunch of journalists around a table to talk about the 2023 mac they might have this that's the mac pro cycle i don't think john is only you my friend they're just gonna bring you in the trash can mac i mean they designed that thing to go exactly where they you know design i like philosophically John's point here, which is it is better to try and fail than to not try. Right. Yeah. I think that I would never pick this, but I love it is a very Syracuse-y pick. But I think that the Mac studio that lives inside that giant case is like Jay Gatsby living in a 23-room mansion all by himself.

You can literally put two more Mac studios inside there. There's so much room. That's the move. I like it. It's really nice, but it's really lonely, and it's really a waste. Stevens, please save me. Every single one of my picks has been picked except for one and we gotta wind back to 1993 and talk about the macintosh tv yeah nice it was an all-in-one macintosh lc you know if you're

of a certain age this is like the beige ones defined my elementary school computing but this was in black which makes it instantly cool but the black was the coolest thing about it uh they only made like 10 000 of them not not great so the the headline here is you got a mac what if your mac was also a television and so it's perfect if you think about someone living in a small apartment or a dorm right it's like oh i can have one thing and do my computing and do my entertainment um however the system was not really a mac and a tv it was a mac or a tv you had to choose am i going to be a computer user today or am i gonna watch television uh came with this own tv remote basically it just used uh this like uh cable uh like this card in the back of it tv tuner

card tv tuner card yeah just some weird ideas and they put it in an lc i think an lc 500 series or something that wasn't a great computer to begin with. Yeah. Yeah, it was bigger than the standard LC case, right? It was kind of a tall case, if I remember. It was black too, right? Well, yeah, that too. But I mean, it wasn't this flat pizza box like the LC.

Yeah, some LCs were all in one, like for the education market. Yeah, and the monitor was wider than the base, so it was awkwardly not matched. It didn't look like the powerful computers where the base would be wide and then you'd have a separate. This was a narrow base and a wider monitor fused to it the ugliest, even more ugly than the Molar Mac, I think. 14-inch Trinitron. I only saw one of these in the wild one time. It was at a Blockbuster video. Why? I don't even know why it was there, but it was there i saw it i've got one

and it doesn't work and honestly i think i'm okay with it yeah no it's better that way a friend of mine had the five the lc520 i think which is basically the same chassis um but yeah i remember i coveted one of these of course because like you know mid early mid 90s when it came out you're sitting there going like oh what do i love more than computers, computers and television? It's one device that does all of this. It seemed this it was a toss up between this and the max that you could put the DOS compatibility card in because you have this idea. I was going to run all my awesome Mac games. Yeah, man.

There you go. John Gruber. What is going in the hole of shame uh i'm surprised i didn't get sniped but maybe i think differently i don't know uh i was really worried because i couldn't my second pick was way behind i i have one shining hall of shame moment and it is Macworld Expo, San Francisco, 1997. I think the casual Apple fan would think that must have been the highlight and the moment when Apple turned it around. Apple acquired Nex at the end of December 1996. And everybody knows that's the move that brought Steve Jobs back.

That's the move that brought the guts that became Mac OS X. That still is the operating system that is now called iOS. It still underlies Vision OS. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It's the greatest acquisition in any, I think undeniably, world history. I think undeniably in world history, but it, it wasn't obvious at all that this was going to fix Apple. And I think Mac world expo, that keynote exemplified just how much that Apple lucked into this solution. Gil Emilio was the CEO and he gave the keynote and i wasn't there this is what a showman i was in the first row right this was years before limited oh man years before i was going to keynotes but i've seen it and he was utterly unrehearsed and unrepaired, decided he would apparently, and I've read

books about it, you know, he had no right to be the CEO of Apple. The only thing he ever did that actually worked was buying Next, which I think he honestly, again, lucked into. And I think the keynote exemplified the proof that he did not even understand what he had. He was completely unrehearsed, rambled on and on and on, bored the hell out of people, made no sense,

stammered, said things that didn't make any sense. He said like the best things about Mac OS were that it has the internet and this was like the old Mac OS. I mean, it's just crazy. You can YouTube it. I don't think anybody on YouTube even has the whole thing

because nobody can bear to watch it. But they've got clips of how horrible it is. And then only at the end brought out Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but did it almost as though he were bringing out mascots of Apple's past. of the introduction of the brand new computer that he was showing off there, which was the 20th anniversary Macintosh, a joke of a computer that he loved so much that he had in his severance agreement, Gil Emilio, that he would be given one.

And it's like, John, imagine watching a terrible movie, one of the worst, most boring movies of all time. And then the last, the very last scene is great enough that you wish there was another movie. That's what that keynote is. Because at the end, they're like, oh, Steve Jobs, OS 10, goodbye, everybody. And that was it. After two hours.

And Jobs came out and gave a short, spoke briefly, but it was like, there, there's the guy. That's him. That's the guy. But at the time, there was no plan for Steve Jobs to take over. I don't think Jobs himself really saw a path to it. Everything that happened afterwards involved a lot of luck. And it's not just, oh, he gave a stinker of a keynote. It's that the stinker of a keynote just proved what a shambles apple was and how inept the

executive ranks of the company were and how they just had no idea what they should be doing they had no idea what they what they had they had no idea about anything and it to me while it was the the moment that became modern apple it shows just how close apple came to utterly collapsing yeah it is simultaneously the low point of apple's entire history and that little glimmer at the end which is actually what's going to save apple but wrapped in just in kind of garbage there's also a story i don't know if it's apocryphal or not that jobs was just incredibly late. And so they kept throwing things into the keynote and telling Gil as the sweats coming down to just,

just stall and keep going because jobs isn't there yet. And they want jobs to be the big finish for this thing. I don't know if that's true or not. Sure. Sounds like something Steve jobs would do. He was incredibly late. I wonder why that was stopped to pick up some fast food i don't know but uh yeah that was it is i watched that for my 20 max and for 2020 thing i watched the clips of that and it is remarkable that they

pivot from the product manager of the 20th anniversary mac awarding those max uh you know first two off the assembly line to the steves and Steve Jobs looking like it's just like, why am I even here? And then Steve Jobs having that moment that is electrifying because it's like literally this is what everybody came to see and it absolutely is the future of Apple. But what you had to slog through to get there just is, that's a good choice. log through to get there just is that's a good choice a related moment that is actually still in that kind of trough where we're trying to get our way out of it was uh the the uncharacteristic incredible miscalculation of steve jobs putting bill gates up on a giant screen behind him and talking about the microsoft deal the patent cross licensing 150 million dollar investment uh a rare miss on how is this going to look exactly and it went over like a lead balloon

and it was not i mean to be honest it made pirates of silicon valley really good like that moment in that movie so like for me that's a win because i love that movie so macworld new york remember there were two macworlds at the time i wonder i do wonder whether whether jobs had a sense that hey let's play it this way. Let's show us as the small guys and Microsoft as the... I think it's going for like a Big Brother type thing, but it really kind of undercut the...

The audience was not there for that. No, they were booing and stuff. That was in Boston. It was right before they went to New York. Oh, so it wasn't there. That one was in Boston and then they went to New York and we got...

There was a really terrible keynote in New York too that would be in the second round of the Hall of Shame, but we don't have one of those. Yeah, although speaking of Macworld to New York and we got there. There was a really terrible keynote in New York, too, that would be in a second round of the Hall of Shame. But we don't have one of those. Yeah. Although speaking of Macworld New York. How the processors work. Macworld New York 2000 or 2001 was the apology mouse.

And that was my other pick. 2000. I didn't get to pick, which was the hockey puck mouse. Yeah. Apology mouse. Hardware products so bad that Apple had to give free replacements that are better to the entire audience of the game. Thereby ensuring that at every Apple keynote event after that, people would look under their chairs. That is the end of the 40th anniversary Mac draft.

Thank you so much to our participants. I would like to again extend our thanks to all of you for joining us today to celebrate this momentous occasion. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you would like longer ad-free versions of the show, go to getupgradeplus.com. Thank you to Squarespace, Delete.me, and Vitaly for their support of this week's episode. We'll be back next time.

Say goodbye, everybody. Goodbye. See you in 10 years. Yeah, get ready for 50. Thank you.