GenderNeutralBro

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Haven't heard of Hiren's BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it's still around!

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don't know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.

Most of Apple's history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That's reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you're into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple's specs as closely as possible, you'd find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from "okay" to "so bad it feels like a personal insult"), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple's own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let's say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the "does more", well, that's debatable. Considering this is using Apple's 90s logo, I think it's pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its "beleaguered" period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don't think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn't boil down to "we're used to it" or "we're locked in".

I like the "magic mushroom" theory.

I won't say I believe it. But I like it.

This makes sense to me. The conditions are right for successful conspiracies, whether they truly exist or not. History is rife with real, proven conspiracies — both failed and successful. That's what happens when power is concentrated and unchecked.

The power cord on those had a weird round dongle on the end that plugged into the computer

FUCK THOSE CHARGERS.

I mean yeah, the entire industry was riddled with shitty chargers at that time, but these were the worst.

They're big and scary enough today, and in the past they were even bigger and scarier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle

Relationship with humans

Some believe that these birds are described in many legends of the Māori mythology, under the names pouākai, Hakawai (or Hōkioi in the North Island).[52][53] According to an account given to Sir George Grey—an early governor of New Zealand—Hōkioi were huge black-and-white birds with yellow-green tinged wings and a red crest. In Māori mythology, Pouākai would prey and kill humans along with moa,[54][55][56] which scientists believe could have been possible if the name relates to the eagle, given the massive size and strength of the bird.[52][57] However, it has also been argued that the "hakawai" and "hōkioi" legends refer to the Austral snipe—in particular the extinct South Island species.[58]

For context, Haast's eagle was about twice the size of today's Harpy eagle, which itself looks like it came out of a nightmare. See photos at https://www.demilked.com/giant-bird-harpy-eagle/

It's worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it'll do it while using a lot less power.

In America, all things are about profit.

This is how we got these monopolies in the first place.