[ckilner]

Wirkman said:

Still, there's something to this idea that "the greatest Mac is your first Mac." But I have a revision of the notion. The greatest Mac is the first one you modified and upgraded and "took charge of."

I'd call this your "most significant Mac." For me, it was the lowly PowerBook 150.

I learned Basic programming in gradeschool and used it with tape punch via a 300 Baud teletype (to play craps, hangman, Star Trek, etc.). I built my first computer (Sinclair ZX80) in high school and was using Windows 3.1 at work when I started using my wife's Plus and IIci at home and discovered that Macs were so much nicer to use. When it came time for a laptop for law school, I picked up a heavily discounted PowerBook 150 (for $799).

Low End Mac calls this a "Road Apple" for many valid reasons, but I loved it. The passive matrix 2-bit screen that was so often complained about was great for text and helped the battery last 5+ hours (so I didn't need to fight for outlets in the lecture halls like the other laptop users needed to do). Using a RAM Disk helped the battery even more. I put in a 33.6 modem and upgraded to 40MB of RAM... and when the 120MB HDD had problems on the one-year anniversary, Apple replaced it under warranty (in 2-3 days) with a 500MB drive with System 7.5 (it had shipped with 7.1.1). I used it first with my wife's ImageWriter, then a StyleWriter 1200. Internet access and email via my school account got me on the web. I even filed my taxes (MacInTax) and built my first Web pages with the little PowerBook. It got me hooked on mobile computing.

It was replaced with my second most significant Mac - a 366MHz indigo iBook (picked up as a refurb for, again, $799) - that I used to edit my first movies, edit my first digital photos, rip & burn my first CDs, etc. I have some serious memories with that iBook. My office was in the flight path of Dulles airport and they sent us home on 9/11... I spent the day working wirelessly on my front porch with the iBook, watching the F-14s flying overhead as I waited for the kids to get off the bus... a surreal memory.

[RockinKat]

Some might say that the first Mac they ever owned was the best Mac ever. I don't know if I can really say that though. The first Mac I ever owned was a Performa 6115/60CD. a performa version of the PowerMac 6100/60 ... The first PPC based Mac from Apple.
It was nice at first. But within about 3 years it started crashing hard with keyboard resets not working at all. If I tried to show my system to anyone they'd always tell me I had too much in my system folder.. but that wasn't right because I could get it to crash with a minimal system install the same exact way... no.. after a few years of lumping it I finally nailed it.... the stupid thing wasn't very well designed for airflow and it was getting hot enough that it caused things to flex and made card/cable connections come loose...




I went through a lot of trauma before I finally figured it out. The solution came to me when I was reading about the Apple /// and how users were told to drop it to reseat chips that would come loose because the lack of proper cooling caused t he main board to flex... I then thought back to reading that the 6100's case didn't provide proper airflow, put two together and reseated all the connections in the case. it was a real smack your forhead kind of moment.

So, I'd personally say it's a tie between the first Mac I ever really used - a Mac Classic at my friends house - and my Second Mac owned... which is currently still my main computer about 8 or 9 years after I bought it... and running the latest version of OS X, with the help of a sonnet duet DualG4/1.8Ghz processor card. My Gigabit Ethernet Dual G4 Tower....which originally had two 450Mhz processors.

[Albertr]

I started not with a Mac but with the Apple II. Then the Mac you just reminded me of the cooling! The first Mac used plain air flow from the bottom and out the top, no fan. It worked! Some enterprising character used to sell a chemney you attached to the top of the Mac to increase the air flow. Boy did this look funny! Maybe someone has a picture.

[fhirsch]

I live in Argentina, where Spring starts in September and Summer in December. I had no air conditioning so come November I used to put a big fan pointing to my MacPlus. Otherwise it would start crashing

[macktv]

I think a lot of these comments are missing the point. The article is not about the most nostalgic Mac ever, it's about the best Mac ever.

I've had a lot of different Macs through the years, but I have to say that my new MacBook Pro is by far the very best Mac I've ever owned.

[SimpleBeep]

I have one word:
Cube.
Sure, the first Mac I owned was great, but the cube clearly had the best design going for it. And isn't that what Apple is all about?

[Aang]

Mmmmmm. Loved my SE/30. Got it my freshman year in college. Played Risk on it in the dorm lobby for HOURS. Its size, power and portability was unusual for its day compared to the beige boxes with the monitors on top that everyone else had. I also used if for engineering writing and (gasp) Kermit. I could make it emulate a VT220 workstation and check my email on the VM. Yeah, we had some OLD shit in engineering and compsci.

[michaelethompson]

I get a chuckle out of the naming of the SE/30. Apple had the naming convention that every Mac with a 68030 processor had an "x" at the end, so we had the IIx, IIcx, IIfx. I don't know if they ever considered releasing the SEx, but naming it the SE/30 was probably a better idea.

[ckilner]

SimpleBeep said:

I have one word:
Cube.

Sure, the first Mac I owned was great, but the cube clearly had the best design going for it. And isn't that what Apple is all about?

I also love the Cube... I picked one up a couple of years ago to play with and now it's my primary computer, running Leopard.

These days, many people are asking Apple to come out with a mid-tower or headless iMac... well, that's what the Cube was (and it only sold when priced low enough to canniblize sales of towers); unlike the mini, the Cube used a full-size, fast HDD and had a replacable video card, but people weren't willing to spend money on style and somewhat limited-upgradability. If Apple made a mid-tower today, people would complain that it couldn't do what a Mac Pro does ...

[XMattingly]

Quote

{size:10px} ckilner wrote: I also love the Cube... I picked one up a couple of years ago to play with and now it's my primary computer, running Leopard.
These days, many people are asking Apple to come out with a mid-tower or headless iMac... well, that's what the Cube was{size}

Wow, you can run Leopard on one of those things? Pretty cool. In any event, with room for only one internal hard drive and no PCI expansion slots the Cube is most definitely not what people are looking for in a mini tower.

[ckilner]

XMattingly said:

> {size:10px} ckilner wrote: I also love the Cube... I picked one up a couple of years ago to play with and now it's my primary computer, running Leopard.
> These days, many people are asking Apple to come out with a mid-tower or headless iMac... well, that's what the Cube was
Wow, you can run Leopard on one of those things? Pretty cool. In any event, with room for only one internal hard drive and no PCI expansion slots the Cube is most definitely not what people are looking for in a mini tower.

My Cube has a 160GB HDD w/ InTech drivers, 1.5GB RAM, an 800MHz Sonnet CPU and a flashed nVidia GF 6200 video card...as well as an 802.11g ethernet converter; it benchmarks close to a Quicksilver or 1GHz eMac (faster CPUs - @1.7 to 1.8GHz - can push the performance near the top of G4 macs). It works great for web, email, and iLife (some using prior generation versions due to the G4 cpu). No, it's not a gaming machine (although Google Earth's flight simulator runs passably)... and encoding DVDs in iDVD is an overnight task, but YouTube, Hulu and FrontRow videos play smooth.

As for expansion, it has a 500GB TimeMachine HDD, a DVD-RW, a CD-RW, a Canopus AVDC300, and a 3G 40GB iPod connected via FW (they all sit behind the LCD monitor, so I still feel like the Cube has a small footprint).

The average mini or iMac user is looking to upgrade the video since most other upgrades (HDDs, TV tuners, wireless-n, etc.) are available as external USB or FW devices... what are PCI slots (or PCIe) used for these days? The ones in my old towers are used for USB2 and 802.11g cards to speed up the original USB1.1 and 802.11b Airport.

[XMattingly]

Quote

{size:10px}ckilner wrote: As for expansion, it has a 500GB TimeMachine HDD, a DVD-RW, a CD-RW, a Canopus AVDC300, and a 3G 40GB iPod connected via FW (they all sit behind the LCD monitor, so I still feel like the Cube has a small footprint).
The average mini or iMac user is looking to upgrade the video since most other upgrades (HDDs, TV tuners, wireless-n, etc.) are available as external USB or FW devices... what are PCI slots (or PCIe) used for these days?{size}

Having a ton of satellite devices that you have to plug in to your box isn't very attractive to a lot of people wanting a desktop system. I speak from experience when I say external Firewire drives are notorious for failing, and you get a lot more reliability with an internal drive. Lots of extra chords and power adaptors dangling around... very messy setup.

On the flip side, there are a lot of reasons why PCI is still necessary, especially if you're doing professional work in audio or video and need to connect to other hardware. Mac Pro's are flippin' sweet monsters, but for a good number of people (many of whom have been grumbling for a few years) it's overkill and/or too expensive. IMac's and Cubes are suitable desktops, but not quite expansive enough for pro's and most prosumers.

[jonro]

We all know that the SE/30 isn't literally the best Mac ever, but in terms of speed, usability and productivity, it was a great machine. I have a fully functional SE/30 with an external 50 MB HD. I take it out of the box and boot it up every couple of years just to make sure it's working okay. There was an application called Think 'n Time that I used to run. It was early mind map software and one of the most useful programs I ever used. Today I use NovaMind for the same purpose, but it took many years before I found another program to match Think 'n Time's usefulness. Too bad I can't run it anymore, as OS X no longer supports classic apps.

[Johnna]

My best Mac:
Dual 2.5 OS 10.4.11
My favorite computer ever.