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There is a question that still baffles me.
Just evil I guess?

Interesting history Yasu.

I always wondered about the quality of some of Job's decisions (and in particular how they affected aspects of product quality and utility).

I wish I had kept one of the four Apple IIIs I at one time own.
That model is a fun example of a bad decision by Jobs.
The aluminum case (supposedly chosen by Jobs for heat dissipation) actually increases heat fluctuations (as the Apple III is used then turned off).
This, over time, works the socketed chips loose.

Most service call on those models simply require you a press down on each socketed chip (or make the occasional chip swap).

This started my love affair with Apples weird design decisions.

My current favorite is having to open the door covering my G5's dvd-rw drive should I need to access the manual eject button.

My apologies to the Apple fans that visit this site, but over the years Apple design teams have made some really retarded decisions.

@Jim

I have the Apple Graphite G4 as you might recall and I seriously cannot believe that any sane person would pay its original price (up to 2,999 USD) back in 1999 to purchase it.

I built my PC (which exceeded the specs of the comparable Mac) back then, with less than or almost 1/3 of its price! The difference is simply put, unbeliable. God damn, it made more sense to upgrade to a PPC accel. for the Amiga than buying a new PMAC, LOL!

I was hearing/reading from so "so called tech pros" of the era that the Mac was suitable for specific tasks such as image manipulation (specially since Adobe supported them hard latest nineties, beginning '00s) and thus geared to profesionals. What a joke... and one of the greatest (marketing) lies I 've heard throughout my computer life. That was only an excuse for the naives who paid 2 or 3 times more in oprder to do the same things with a PC.

Bought my 1st Apple only for MorphOS. Now, I am investigating the option to upgrade to a G5, but none the less, if it wasn't for our beloved OS, I wouldn't even touch a Mac :P

Actually, Adobe had dropped their support for Apple in the 90's. When Jobs wanted them aboard again with his new flagship the iMac they said no. "Not enough users". This despite that there was a lot of "creative people" actually buying Macs and would have no doubt bought Photoshop for example. That made Jobs so angry he started his own inhouse software team. Adobe did eventually relent a little and released a very buggy version of Flash to the Mac. Jobs took this as mockery and later, when the Iphone was a confirmed success he simply forbade the use of Flash on his phones (and later also tablets and Macs, though the latter never had a working version to begin with). This eventually killed of Flash when HTML5 was getting closer.

Personally, I wish Flash was completely dead.
No other software so routinely frogs up my browser sessions (regardless of how many cores or how much memory the system I use has).

Anyone else wonder where Flash seems to absent mindedly run off to?

Oh, and back to great Apple devices, my youngest niece attends a school that wants her to buy a $599 iPad that has specs that are worse than my cell phone (which cost me a small fraction of that price).
Certainly, the iPad has a nicer display, but 3G connectivity?
Really?

Hello, this discussion thread was created for a widely off-topic discussion that originated in the Beginner forum.

Several posts have been moved from here: Original thread

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Flash is very big on Phones and tablets (including iPhone and iPad) but in the shape of apps. You can publish for iOS directly from within the Flash IDE, and also Adobe Flex can contain Flash contents.

Flash isn't about watching videos on Youtube in a browser on www. Really, it isn't, it's so much more!

@Takemehomegrandma

True, but people are looking/have found alternatives since Apple products are a big market now. As long as iPhones and iPads remain popular Flash is going to lose it's relevance little by little.

Mind you that I don't hate Flash at all. I've enjoyed it a lot during the years playing games and watching movies. The only reason I'm glad HTML5 is taking over it's functions is because then I can use more services on OWB

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If you have a look at the "ARM for the future" thread, you'll see that the CPU in iPad Air and Air 2 is more like a desktop Intel Core i7 in their designs than it is to any other general phone/tablet CPU you may think of. It has grat performance, much more than what's typically being used by todays apps.

Ipad has had 4G since iPad 3 already, at least frequencies used in some (but not all, mainly US) markets. Ipad Air 1 and iPhone 5s was when they released models that included "4G frequencies" usable where I live. That was 1.5 year ago.

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You are not the only one.
The biggest cause of problems on the Mac was not anything Apple did - it was Flash! That's why they didn't put it on the iPad. BTW that's not me quoting Steve Jobs, I heard that quite independently.

Even today if I watch a few videos it'll happily eat all my memory and then refuse to free it. I usually have to restart the browser (fairly old version of Safari) otherwise the machine will grind to a halt. But it least it runs fine what it's been restarted.


Acrobat reader and Firefox on Windows are also memory hogs. Took about 10 minutes today to get my laptop working sensibly. Grrr. Windows also tends to slow down over time.

> Adobe had dropped their support for Apple in the 90's.

It's good then that Flash wasn't an Adobe product up until 2005 :-)

> Adobe did eventually relent a little and released a very buggy version of Flash to the Mac.

Wasn't that rather Macromedia?

I only own two macs, a G3 iMac and a mini G4.

They are aesthetically pleasing, that is all that Jobs cared about.

For example, the Mac Mini, no way to manually get CD's out (that I know of). And you need a knife to open it (I use my trusty scout knife). It opens, but doing that too often can't possibly be good for it. Couldn't they just put on a latch of some kind, a sliding mechanism? Nope, Jobs wanted a seamless slab.

2 USB ports in 2005, my PC at the time had 4 on the back and two in the front (and a multi card reader). So now the owner of the Mini would need a bulky powered hub (kinda negates the point of the tiny computer and replaces it with a rat's nest). But if they used the Apple Mouse and Keyboard, they would have one USB port open, because since Jobs hated wires, the keyboard has a USB port on it for the mouse. (this makes the keyboard a bit more expensive too), the mini didn't come with any Apple keyboard or mouse, so those USB ports would most likely be used up one by the keyboard, the other by the mouse...(where does the printer go?, where does the USB drive go? Where does the webcam go?)

Its power button is in the back, a tech pet peeve of mine. Why must I reach around and feel for it? Why can't it just be in the front or on top. Why, because it must be smooth in the front for appearance sake, of course....

Apple loves their brand and image and wants you to salivate like Pavlov's dog when you hear the 'bong' sound emanate from the tiny speaker inside. Oh what to do if you need to turn the computer on while somebody is sleeping... put in some head phones, easy, but the jack....is in the back. If I had a mac mini back in '05 I would have duct taped a head phone jack extension chord upon its top to save myself the aggravation of fumbling around or having to pick it up, turning it around, or just moving it.

It can only use one stick of ram. If you wanted the maximum of one gigabyte you couldn't have two 512MB sticks, buy one now, the other later on...nope, all or nothing. Only one slot means no dual channel, one of the best features of DDR RAM, used a slow speed by default, PC2700. Curiously they used desktop RAM and ...a laptop hard disk...a PATA laptop hard disk. Those are kind of more expensive than a desk top one. Keep in mind, the Mini was meant to be a "budget" Mac. It wouldn't have been that much bigger if it had a cheaper hard drive and a tray loading cd drive, but they went for looks over practicality.

Because it came out in 2005ish it came with a VGA to DVI adapter, couldn't fit both in the back, Apple wanted DVI only...but it had to acknowledge that most still used VGA. It also had a dial up modem. Funny... they could have just put in a third USB port, or even a fourth if they ditched firewire. They had USB modems at the time.

--

The G3 iMac is more of the same. But since it's older it is more user friendly in terms of repair and replacement. The slot drive has a tiny place where one may use a paper clip to poke, and force a CD to eject (but only while powered). The optical drive came in either DVD or CDRW, no way to have both. Though to this day one may spend over a hundred dollars for a 3rd party internal DVDRW drive. The drive uses a proprietary Apple made cable. Good luck finding CD versions of Tiger...I got a period correct external DVDRW drive and connected it with firewire, not detected....huh...

Opening it up is a chore, Can't open too much as it's a CRT and can blast you across the room or to the afterlife depending on your luck. There is a VGA port on the back, it is for monitor mirroring, no second monitor. The 1024:768, Resolution is low even for 2001 standards, but I guess they had to keep it at a reasonable physical size. I had 1280:1024 at the time.

When one opens it up you have oodles of screws. Thankfully they are all ordinary Philips heads. It needs to be laid upon a mat (or my pillow) or the cheap but pretty plastic will crack under its own weight.

It accepts up to one gigabyte of RAM (weird, same amount as the mini, but this uses SDRAM), but Tiger feels sluggish so I stuck with OS9. The wireless card was useless as it doesn't support WPA2. A modem was attached, I removed it because I could. I can't imagine many people used wifi in 2001, just Jobs and his wireless fetish getting in the way of the average buyer.

The CPU is soldered in place, earlier models were upgradable to G4, somehow owning a later model gave me worse specs....I don't even...

The real time clock died, it will be missed, it doesn't use standard CR232 batteries, it used weird half sized AAs. Had to order one.

Getting updated to OS 9.2.2 was a chore, Apple apparently doesn't keep the updates on hand anymore. Would be nice if they released OS 9 into open source or just made it available for free. Strangely it was easier to find OS 9 software than OS 10.3 software.

Still only two USB ports, but in 2001 that was okay. But it would have been nice if one of the firewire ports was sacrificed for a third USB.

Famously, there's no Floppy support...not surprising now, but back in 2001 most people didn't have USB sticks, they were expensive only held 8 Megs or so and you could easily buy like 20 floppies for less. No easy fast way to store data for later use or transfer it, especially if you opted for one with a DVD drive with no writing capability. No google drive or drop box yet, I suppose everyone just emailed themselves all their data. USB floppy drives were quite popular, as were ADB adapters to use non-hockey puck shaped mice that plagued the earlier models.

It has two head phone jacks, I suppose Apple expected people to share the sound connection. But why not a cheaper splitter? Why would two people sit so close to each other to look at such a small screen?

Yeah...I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to Apple hardware.

> same amount as the mini, but this uses SDRAM

The Mac mini G4 uses SDRAM as well :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory#Generations_of_SDRAM

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From my experience,

My iMac G3 uses SDRAM (100MHz, forward compatible with 133MHz), (the kind with two notches) 2 slots, each slot can take a maximum of 512MB for a total of 1GB.

My Mini G4 uses DDR2700, the kind with one notch. About 333MHz, the slot takes a maximum of 1GB.

While they may both be SDRAM, they are different types of SD RAM.

It's actually somewhat interesting, about the memory limitations of these two models compared to contemporary PCs.

The PC (from 2000) takes 512MB, no more, but is considerably snappier than the iMac and seems to benefit more from the 512MB than the iMac benefited from 1GB. Everything from win98 to XP runs well. The iMac runs OS9 well, I found 10.3 to be unstable and very difficult to find any abandonware for it. 10.4 was usable, but quite slow to the point of annoyance. MintPPC was usable, (based on Debian Squeeze, no relation to Linux Mint) It worked, but one had to have realistic expectations when installing packages.

The PC (from 2004) takes a maximum of 4GB of RAM, due to not being able to use 64bit CPUs, it is limited to 3.2-ish. It Runs XP well, though Win98 and 2000 could run too, they wouldn't be able to take advantage of SSE2 or Hyperthreading. Win98 wouldn't be able to see past 512MB of RAM anyway without some serious tinkering. Windows Vista and Seven, though slower than XP are quite usable on this computer. The Mac Mini probably would run 10.4 well (don't own it anymore can't check) it runs 10.5....okay, but naturally it is unsupported. Had my keyboard worked with it, Morph OS would have run amazingly fast. (especially considering I installed it on PATA SSD. I also put a heat spreader on the RAM stick just to be on the safer side.

Conclusions are that Apple doesn't care a bit about specs as long as the computer looks good and works for about a year or two, not a care in the world for longevity.

>> The Mac mini G4 uses SDRAM as well :-)
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory#Generations_of_SDRAM

> While they may both be SDRAM, they are different types of SD RAM.

Exactly. One type is SDR SDRAM while the other type is DDR SDRAM.

> MintPPC [...] based on Debian Squeeze, no relation to Linux Mint

Seems to depend on the version:

"MintPPC 11 is based on Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) and Linux Mint LXDE 11 (Katya)."
http://www.mintppc.org

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And actually, wasn't that the original point of flash, being able to make fancy looking menus for web pages, games etc. - no idea at what point video support was added (or was it just mostly ignored in the distant past?)

Anyway, as time went by, html+js became more powerful and people actually learned to use them, and flash became "less fancy" by comparison, and more and more people started to question the reasons for its existence... Then it went to being "mostly just a video player", I guess the major selling point was "Stupid users won't know how to save local copies"

But then came popular platforms with absolutely no flash support in browser (iOS), html5 video became actually usable, and sites like youtube stopped requiring flash long time ago.

So where could flash go? Back to its origins, which takemehomegrandma already mentioned, games.

And yes, I find it somewhat funny it's very popular especially on one specific platform "that doesn't support flash at all": iOS.

(Of course I don't really like it, as it makes games practically "unportable to us")

@Jupp3

Well, it was a long time ago it lost its relevance on the web, even though there are many areas where it is still strong there (like for example various systems for e-learning and web based video conferencing). Anyway, IMHO the AS3 language is very nice and very powerful. The bytecode is (as far as I can tell) very compact, fast and efficient. I actually think Flash (and all the related technologies in the framework) is quite beautiful. The only "aber" here is perhaps the fact that it's proprietary and out of reach for outskirt platforms like ours. Sour grapes!