Digital Fossils

Macs: Better by Design

- 2008.07.11 - Tip Jar

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"You collect old Macs? What's the big attraction?"

It's a question I've heard enough times that I've been forced to think over my answer. I mean, the actual guts of the hardware isn't the reason. Having computers that don't have Intel Inside gives me a warm, squishy, stick-up-for-the-underdog feeling, but that isn't enough.

It's not just the operating system, either. I mean, even if I could run OS 8 on a Dell Pentium, I don't think I'd have an attic full of the things. There's got to be more to it than just a Motorola chip, a smiley Mac, and startup chime.

I think it comes down to the fact that they just feel better by design - better in a bunch of ways that are hard to quantify.

Consistency

The first way is the most prosaic and, in many ways, the one that's hardest to hold against the Mac's Wintel rivals. I love the consistency of so many hardware features on the Mac. Unlike the PC world, Macs are made by one company and make use of very little in the way of third-party hardware, and so it was easy for Apple to set standards in things like ports and the marking of those ports - and to stick to those standards.

From my oldest Mac almost to my newest, there's a remarkable amount of continuity in simple things like "this is a modem connection, and this is how it's labeled". By comparison, I have Wintel boxes built only a couple of years apart that have nothing in common on the back sides but the power socket and the VGA port. No wonder there were near riots in the Mac world with the disappearance of SCSI and ADB!

PowerBook 100Another area where Macs shine is in the area of clever little design details. Look at the first PowerBooks: They weren't the first laptop computers, but they were the first to move the keyboard towards the rear of the case. It seems such a simple thing, but prior to that, there was no place to rest your palms while typing on a notebook.

Or consider the back of the case on a PowerBook Duo. Flanking the little "garage door" that retracts into the housing to uncover the port for the dock are two sturdy feet. The feet pivot downwards, and the pivots are clearly marked with the standard Mac symbols for a modem and a printer port. Sure enough, if you pivot the feet downward, the respective ports are uncovered.

Maybe the best known piece of clever Mac design gadgetry dates back to the very earliest Macintoshes. In addition to using radical new compact 3.5" floppy disks, there was no "eject" button on the face of the machine. Instead, a powered servo would whine when you dragged the picture of the disc on the desktop to the picture of a trash can, and the computer would politely extrude the ejected disc. If that didn't set your gadget bells to ringing, may I suggest stamp collecting as a soothing alternative hobby?

Clever Solutions

Indeed, the history of the Macintosh is practically the history of clever little computer design solutions. Hot-swappable device bays. Internal wireless networking. From power buttons on the keyboard to trackpads, from stereo speakers in laptop lids to folding carry handles in laptops, Apple has taken clever solutions to everyday computing problems to an art form. One could nearly write a term paper on Mac notebook power supplies and their various clever ways of managing power cords alone.

Simply Good Design

However, more important than either good design in ports and their labeling or good design in the form of gee-whiz hardware details is good design overall.

the original MacintoshWith the dawn of the original Macintosh, it was obvious that here was Something Different. It wasn't just the all-in-one form factor of CPU/monitor/disk drive; that had been done before by companies as varied as Commodore and Radio Shack. This time, though, it was done by a company to whom good design obviously mattered.

Good design is one of those things that reminds one of Supreme Court Justice Stewart's descriptor of pornography: You can't define it, but you know it when you see it. The Mac splashed into a world full of consumer electronics that were still slathered in brushed chrome and woodgrain stickers like a dinosaur-killing asteroid into the Gulf of Mexico.

Macintosh IIPerhaps the most telling metric of how important the "House of Style" theme was to the Mac was how painfully apparent its absence was during the dark days of the mid 1990s. Early Macs, with the painful exception of the Mac II, were possessed of the crisp lines and smooth radii more associated with German sedans and Italian couture than with desktop nerdboxes. It's no wonder that designers and the people who write software for them flocked to the platform!

It may be heretical to say as much, but I'd almost be willing to wager that frog design style had as much to do with the embrace of the Mac by the artsy set as the point-and-click interface.

Performa 630PowerBook 190It may be no coincidence that the plummeting fortunes of Apple coincided with the era of "me too" beige boxes - like the Performa 630 and dull charcoal bricks like the PowerBook 190 - and that its resurgence began with the introduction of the brightly colored jellybean iMac, the curvaceous WallStreet, and the radical B&W G3.

Why do I love old Macs?

Because they're better - by design. LEM

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