The Mac Studio Report: X Marks the Mac

March 09, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Note: this is an edited transcript of a live podcast.

Welcome back to another off-the-cuff edition of Userlandia. Off the cuff, because we just had an Apple event today. I didn't do one of these when we had the MacBook Pro announcement, because I knew I was going to buy one and I was going to write a massive review about it. But I'm not going to buy the new Mac Studio, so I'm not going to do a big, giant review of it. So I think it was probably better for me to get some thoughts and other things about it out of the way. It's the late evening here when I recorded this here in the lovely Northeast. So it's been some time since the announcement and I’ve been able to ruminate about various things.

RIP the 27 inch iMac

Today’s announcement was Apple unveiling the new Mac Studio and Studio Display. Now before I get started, I’d like to give a little honor to the 27 inch iMac. I’ve got a bottle of Worcester’s own Polar seltzer, and I’m gonna pour some of this blueberry lemon out in tribute. The 27 inch iMac’s been around for quite a while. Starting at 1440P and then going all the way up to 5k, it had beautiful screens attached to a decent enough computer. But with the announcement of the Mac Studio, it vanished from Apple's website. The 27 inch iMac is no more. In its place is the Mac studio, the Mac that everybody thinks they want: A new headless Mac that will forever separate the iMac’s beautiful screen from the computery guts within.

And, you know, I liked the 27 inch iMac. It was a perfectly fine machine for what it was, and you usually had a really nice value. It had a really nice screen with a usually decent enough computer, but never really a barn burner because it’s compromised by the thermals of the display. Plus, Apple over the years made the sides thinner and thinner and a little more bulbous in the back which didn’t help the thermal performance. The result were iMacs with really loud fans and CPUs that would throttle after a while. And it took the iMac Pro to balance that out by completely redesigning the internal heat removal system. With the Mac Studio, Apple has basically done two things: they've made a iMac without a computer—that's the new Studio Display is. And they also made an iMac without the display, which is the new Mac studio.

It's serving that same sort of high-end iMac user who doesn't necessarily need expansion capabilities. For some users that's a benefit since they don't want to throw away “a perfectly good monitor” when they want to upgrade their computer. And for some other folks, they liked the value that they got when they bought that 27 inch iMac and I just sold the old one and recouped some of the cost. I think there's kind of six and one half dozen of the other when it comes to that. But with the way Apple is moving forward with Apple Silicon, and other things, along with people requesting nicer screens to go along with other Macs, it's hard not to see the 27 inch iMac and saying “well so long, and thanks for all the fish. “

Does that mean that the large iMac form factor is dead for good? I don't know. I personally think an iMac Pro, such as it is, would probably be welcomed by some people, but maybe they're going to hold out until we get whatever 30 inch XDR model is coming down the pike. Who knows. But for the time being, if you are a 27 inch iMac owner, you're either going to be buying a Mac mini and the 27 inch display, or you're going to be buying the Mac studio and the 27 inch display. And whether that works for you or not, I guess we'll have to see what happens on the reviews and everything else come in.

The Mac Studio Design

Why don't we start with addressing the Mac Studio’s design. Those renders had come out a few days before and while they didn't look exactly the same as the finished model, they pretty much predicted what we got. We’ve got a slightly taller Mac Mini with better cooling. It has ports and an SD card slot on the front, which is addressing some complaints people had about the Mini—that you always had to reach behind it to plug stuff in or pop in an SD card. There were similar complaints about various iMacs over the years about the same port arrangement. Why couldn't they put it on the side, we asked? Well, now you don't have to go around the back to go and plug stuff in. I’m all for that—it's nice to have front panel ports. Practicality seems to be the name of the Mac Studio’s game. There's USB A ports. There's 10 gigabit ethernet. There's four Thunderbolts on the back, which is perfect for monitors. And while you’ll need dongles for the front USB C ports, that's becoming less of an issue as time goes on. So I think people will be pretty happy with the ports.

Of course, in the run-up to this, everybody was asking, “oh, will this finally be the mythical xMac?” If we want to have mid-to-high-end performance without having to buy a big iMac, is this finally it? Some grognards, and probably myself, will come along and say “it can't be an xMac without slots.” Well… maybe I won't say that. I've always been of the opinion that the xMac was supposed to be a headless iMac and then scope creep came in and people kept saying, oh no, it needs to have slots and an upgradable GPU to truly be an xMac. The beautiful thing about the xMac is that it could be anything to anybody at any time. The goalposts just keep shifting and we have no idea what anybody actually means.

With the way things are going these days with systems becoming more and more integrated—and not just on Apple's side, either—it makes sense that the Mac Studio is the machine that you want to buy if you want performance and you don’t need extremely specialized cards. Ultimately the writing has been on the wall for systems on a chip, Apple's integrated GPU, and other strategies. Apple may do something more traditionally expandable but that's clearly going to be in the Mac Pro realm of things. So when it comes to this machine, they're just stuffing as much power into as small of a form factor as possible.

Now I'm not the only one to make the observation that this machine is basically the G4 Cube, except a lot more powerful, a lot quieter, and less chance of seams going through the sides. When you're looking at the people using the Mac Studio in the launch video, it looks like the personal workstation that the Cube was meant to be. It doesn't have the pretense of the Cube—it's not saying, “oh, I’m an object of art.” It's a well-designed and it fits in with your work, but this machine is a machine designed to do work. It’s not designed just to be beautiful. They've put function a bit ahead of the form. Especially when it comes to the function of cooling and performance, when the G4 Cube had no fans.

This machine is much smaller than the Cube, yet it has two very large—and probably very quiet—fans. The 16 inch MacBook Pro is already quiet, so we should expect similar performance here. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the Mac Studio is functionally the 2013 Mac Pro reborn. I prefer calling it the Darth Mac instead of the trash can Mac, because I think the concept of that Mac was fine. It was a machine engineered around external expansion, geared towards heavy GPU compute with a pretty powerful processor inside of it. The difference here, of course, is that you can't replace the processor, you can't replace the video cards and you certainly can't put more RAM or NVME SSDs into it either. But if you put the two next to each other? You can say, yeah, this is that cylinder Mac Pro at a more affordable price point.

If you look at the Darth Mac, it was introduced at $2,999. The Mac Studio starts at $1999, which is $1000 cheaper, with a heck of a lot more performance under the hood. And the M1 Ultra configs are competitive with the old dual GPU options. Of course, the downside is you probably can't shove as much RAM into it, but I don't have the cylinder Mac Pro’s specs currently in front of me to confirm that. If you don’t need PCI Express cards, you could swap out your fleet cylinder Pros with Mac Studios using just a few Thunderbolt adapters. Unlike the cylinder’s trick thermal tunnel design, the Studio is a Mini that's been beefed up in terms of cooling. It’s designed to cool a specific amount of heat, but that’s OK because we're clearly going to have room in the market for a model above this. And I think had Apple kept a machine with slots along with the cylinder Mac Pro, I think the cylinder would have been a lot better received. Thankfully they did that at the end when they said “oh yeah, by the way, we know about the Mac Pro—we'll come back to that another day.”

So that's just giving people permission to not freak out and go “aaah, slots are going away again!” But with the 27 inch iMac dead, and this machine here, there is a very big gap in power between the M1 Mini and this. I genuinely thought that we would have had an M1 Pro machine to start the lineup with at $1299 or even $1499. It’s one thing to say “okay, the M one mini is not enough. I need more monitors. I need more RAM, but I don't need a gigantic GPU or anything like that.” And I think they're missing a trick by not having that there. On the flip side, the M2 Mini may solve that problem for us. It wouldn’t surprise me if the M2 Mini supported 32 gigs of RAM and gain an extra monitor connection to support up to three monitors. That’s what those lower-end 27 inch iMac customers are asking for. So if it turns out that we get an M2 Mini in the summer or fall time, and it includes all those things, then I guess they just have to wait a couple months.

Chips and Bits: the M1 Ultra

I understand why Apple started with the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra, because that high-end market has been waiting. They're going to go and spend all the money they’ve been saving. Users with big tower Mac Pros will probably be okay waiting for another six months to hear whatever announcement Apple is going to make about the Mac Pro. Though the entry point is the Max, the Studio was designed around the Ultra. The M1 Ultra model is a little heavier because they've put a beefier heat sink into it. It’s hopefully designed to run at that 200-ish watts of full-blast power all day long.

We knew about the Ultra because the rumors talked about the leaked duo and quadro versions of the M1 Max. And what we got in the Ultra is the duo. Put together not as a chiplet like AMD, but instead with an interposer. We've seen TSMC interposer come up here and there. People at first thought Apple would use it for HBM memory. Instead they just kept doing their standard on-package memory construction while using the interposer to connect the two processor dies together. That interconnect means we don't have to worry about latency or anything between two chiplets. There's benefits to AMD’s method, namely that if one chiplet is good and one chpilet is bad, it's easier to manage yields. Whereas with the interposer I’m pretty sure both dies have to be good to make a valid processor. Whether apple will ship M1 ultras that have one whole block disabled remains to be seen, I guess we’ll have to see how they'll manage yields on it.

Another question with this method is whether performance will scale linearly. If Apple keeps throwing more cores and more memory channels at problems, especially where GPU is concerned, will that let Apple compete with an RTX 3080 or 3090. That graph comparison they showed was against a 3090, which is very ambitious. As we saw with M1 Max benchmarks, they started reaching some limitations when adding more cores. Some of it’s due to software optimization, of course. But still, if they manage to treat all the cores as one monolithic unit and the GPU manages to get access to all 800 gigs per second…still what a number, right? That’s crazy.

I don't think Apple necessarily needs to beat the 3090 as long as they can trade blows and come up just short and other benchmarks. The fact that they can do as well as they are and still have access to all of the memory is pretty good. If you've got workload that's greater than 24 gigs of VRAM, this might be the machine for you, I suppose, but the fact that they're able to get as close as they are while using less power is impressive., I don't know. I have a 3080TI I in my 5950X workstation. If I don't undervolt that card, it’ll bounce against its 400 watt power limit all day long. If Apple manages to get very close to 3090 performance while using, say, 120 or 150 watts of GPU, I’d call that pretty good.

But the other thing to keep in mind when comparing to something like a 3080 or a 3090, is that this is performance that people will largely be able to buy. Because people aren't buying Apple graphics cards to go mine Bitcoin or Ethereum, they’re buying them to do work. I suppose people could go and buy these machines to be miners. They would be fairly efficient, but I don't see it working from a density standpoint. I haven't done specific price breakdowns on comparing a 3090 to anything else, Keep in mind that if you can manage to get one at retail, you're going to be spending $2,200 on a 3090 that doesn't even include the computer. So if you wanted to build a 5950 X plus 3090 system, you're going to be spending a lot of money to do that.

I put together something that was a little more in line with the base price Mac Studio. If you want just to match the lower end—let's say a 3070 and a 5900X—your whole chassis cost is going to be in the range of about $2,300 to $2,400. And you're going to put another $1,200 to $1,300 on top of that to do a 3090. You're going to be very close to the cost of a Studio. So, if you're thinking about doing work and you've been worried about picking up graphics cards, you can say “well, I can just go buy this whole computer here.” And that won’t help you if you're just upgrading from a 2080TI to a 3090. Still, if you're looking at it from a “I need to buy something to do work” standard, that's going to be harder to argue with. Even through all these production problems that everybody's been having, it's still fairly reasonable to get a hold of 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros.

And that's what these machines are. They're headless 16 inch MacBook Pros that have additional performance options. The fact that you can just go and buy them in a store is very much a mark in their favor. That said, as of this recording, GPU supply is getting better. I've noticed just over the past week that 3080, 3080TI, 3070TI, and so on have actually been showing up on sites like Newegg, where you can just go and buy them and not have to deal with the Newegg Shuffle. You might have a problem trying to buy one in the afternoon or whatever, but I've been watching every day and it's been getting easier and easier to just go and add something into your cart without getting it completely yanked away from you.

The downside of course, is that prices have not yet adjusted to that reality. If you want to buy a 12GB 3080, you're going to be spending $1200 or $1300. 3080TIs are the same deal. You're going to be spending $1,400-1,500 ballpark. 3070TIs would be around $900. That's what you're going to be contending against. So if you're within the Apple ecosystem and you've got GPU reliant stuff that can run on Metal, it's something to keep in mind if you're thinking about switching to Windows. If you run CUDA, these won’t be very helpful. You'd have to port yourself over to Metal.

The Studio Display

For some people, the more interesting half of the announcement is the Studio Display, which comes in at $1599, which is I believe $300 more than the LG UltraFine 5K. If you want to get the stand that pivots up and down, that's an extra 400 bucks on top. A Nanotexture coating costs another 300 bucks. So you could theoretically spend $2299 on just one of these monitors. On the flip side, if you want to use a VESA mount, there's no extra charge for that. Just make sure you know what you want up-front. There had been rumors that the display would have an A-series chip built into it, and it's going to run an OS and on and on. And I think a lot of people don't realize that monitors these days are pretty smart. They have SOCs and other things inside them. Those SOCs just tend to be smaller, cheaper, less expensive ones to do image processing and drive the on-screen display.

But it's clear that the A-series inside is more about enabling other features. Things like Hey Siri, Spatial Audio, TrueTone, et cetera. And they're actually decent speakers which look very similar to the ones in the new iMac. Those iMac speakers are actually good sounding speakers compared to the junk that's in the LG and Dell monitors that I have laying around. The webcam looks similar to ones we’ve seen in iPhones. Add Center Stage along with better image quality and it embarasses the ancient camera in the LG UltraFine. It would certainly outclass what’s in a MacBook Pro or the kind of stuff that you buy on Amazon. Of course, they're showing people hooking three of these monitors up to one machine and it’s a bit silly that you've got three webcams now. Will they allow stereo support? Can you have a steroscopic 3D webcam? Or maybe you could say, “oh, I'll pick the webcam that has the best angle on me.” Who knows. We'll see if you can actually choose both of them. There's also a USB hub built in. One of the ports should have been a USB A port, but I’ll never stop beating that horse.

It is a 5k panel which looks to be pretty much the same or similar to the 5k panel that we've known for a long time now. That means it's not 120 frames per seecond, which I know people are grumpy about. I think for this particular monitor, it's a case where the trade-off is being made for prioritizing resolution over frame rate. And right now with Thunderbolt’s specs, you're not going to get a full say 5k 120 FPS over one of the 40 gigabit duplex connections. You might be able to get 5k 120 over the 80 gigabit half-duplex connections, but then you would give up items like the USB ports, the webcam, and the speakers. For some people, those are important features that matter more than frame rate.

I still think apple should introduce a 4.5k external monitor. I get why they're not. It's very hard to compete with the $400-ish 4k productivity monitors that are out there. But I do think a smaller 4k XDR monitor would make sense. That’s for someone who wants 120 FPS mini-LED, so on and so forth. You can say “well, I don't need as much display space, but I do want different image quality.” That would probably work. There was no mention of support for any kind of HDR, obviously, because the backlights and stuff are not intended for that. If they did support HDR, that would mean even more bit depth than other data to worry about. Which again, encroaches on bandwidth a little bit.

I can understand why they made the trade-offs they did, and that probably won't satisfy some people who might have different priorities than others. But given that the LG 34 inch ultra-wide 5k2k monitor that I own generally retails for about $1299, getting the extra vertical real estate along with other features probably justifies that $400 tax. I can’t buy one because I wouldn’t be able to use it on my PC. And there's also no built-in KVM switch support or support for multiple video inputs, which is disappointing.

The Right Spec

So now let's talk about what these machines mean from a value standpoint—what's the right spec? If you had to buy one of these today, what would you choose? Let's take an easy comparison. The $1999 base model is exactly the same as the 14 inch M1 Max MacBook Pro. The difference is that the $1999 model has no monitor, no keyboard or trackpad, has more ports, and has 10 gigabit ethernet built-in. Compare that to the laptop, which is $2899. You're spending $900 on the monitor. You're losing some ports, but you're going to get probably similar performance. Honestly, the studio will probably perform better because it has better cooling, a better heat sink, and will remain just as quiet. If this is intended to be a desk machine, you'd probably be okay with it, especially if you already own a few monitors.

Now, if you have a 27 inch iMac, that becomes more troublesome because, well you can't use that 27 inch iMac as a monitor. My advice would be to sell that machine as soon as you can and get as much money for it as possible and put that towards another monitor. That would probably put you in line to what a 27 inch mid-range iMac would cost. At least most people I know who were buying the 27 inch iMacs were usually paying $2,500 for that. You could go and buy that $1999 machine and buy a 27 inch 4k monitor. But you're going to be running it at either a scaled resolution or 2x 1080, and most people I know don't like 2x 1080.

On the other hand, you've got the $2399 Studio model, which has a one terabyte SSD and a full 32 core GPU. Compare that against the $3499 16 inch MacBook Pro that you can just walk into an Apple store and buy. That’s a considerable difference. The two machines share the same specs, except the Studio gets more ports, the 10 gig ethernet, and everything else. You're just not getting that 16 inch monitor and that's saving you $1,100. That's $1,100 that you can put towards another monitor. Between these two, I would spend the extra little bit of money and get the one terabyte 32 gig one. And you would probably use that machine for five years and it would more than make the money back if you were using it to do actual work.

The one box I would tick. — The one option box I would tick.

Of course, something that’s not mentioned in that price is that there’s no keyboard and no mouse or trackpad included in that price. It’s another way it’s just like the Mac Mini. So if you already have a mouse and keyboard, you're good. If you want to buy a Magic Keyboard and a Magic Tackpadad, you better pony up 300 bucks on top of your Studio’s price to actually use your new computer. Or, you could go and use whatever keyboard you like. If you're buying one of these machines, you're probably a mechanical keyboard nut, and you probably have your own custom board that you've been typing on. I thought it was funny that Apple’s demo video showed people using MX Masters and other pointing devices. They know their audience—it might make sense to just let them spend the money the way they want. If they want to spend it on an Apple accessory, great. If not, whatever. For 27 inch iMac buyers, I would say, wait a little bit. If your machine is several years old, the winning move might be to sell it and put the money towards a monitor.

A Mac Studio plus a Studio Display is going to be about $3,600. You probably spent $2500 to $3,600 on your 27 inch iMac when you kitted it out initially. It’s a tough call—you might spend more money, but you don't have to buy the Apple Studio Display—you can use whatever monitors you want. So if you want to go and buy the LG Ultrawide, you can save a few hundred bucks. If you've got a LG UltraFine 5K, you can save a few hundred bucks. Otherwise, it looks like you're going to be spending some money. On the flip side, in a few years you won’t have to throw that nice monitor away or sell it along with your computer. You can just go and buy a new Mac Studio, plug it in, and there you go.

A PC and Mac Pro Comparison

Now, what if you compare this to a PC? Now with PCs, there's all sorts of things you say, like, “I found this pre-built machine for less money.” From my point of view, I've been building PCs for the past 20-odd years. I went to PCPartPicker and put together an AMD 5900X with a 30,0 regular—not TI—and an 850 watt power supply, 32 gigs of RAM, and a quality one terabyte SSD with an ASUS B550 motherboard. I came up to about $2,400. It's a slightly less—really more like $2340—but it was very close. And the reason why it's so close is because GPU prices are still sky high. A prebuilt PC from someone like Dell or HP is probably still going to be around a $2,000 ballpark. You might save 200 or 300 bucks, but you’re not going to get the same performance for half the price. And as far as the M1 Ultra goes, if you want to do a 5950X plus a 3090, again, it's going to be very close, especially because you're going to have to upgrade the power supply. I used a Noctua cooler, which you can get for a hundred bucks, and I use that in my own 5950X machine. But if you want a big, high-powered radiator, you’ll probably spend even more money. Putting a 3090 into this same build would add $1,300 at MSRP—and that's not including negotiating with a reseller or whatever they're deciding to call themselves these days. So if you're looking for that kind of performance, you're not going to be building a machine for half the price of the M1 Ultra, especially with the way the market is. 5950X prices have come down a little bit and you're going to save around 200 bucks because Intel has finally gotten their act together a little bit. But if you're building an AMD build like that, you're going to be in a smilar price range.. All that's said and done my recommendation, the $2199 1TB SSD model.

I think most people aren't GPU limited, and they care more about RAM. So this gets you 32GB of RAM and more storage, and you’re probably not going to miss those six GPU cores. You’ll be happy with it on your desk, it’ll run great for five years, and you'll hopefully sell it for 6-700 bucks when it’s all said and done. I’d avoid the M1 Ultra unless you know you need that GPU or CPU compute power. And even then that's a real big price increase for the increased horsepower. But you're going to ask me, “Dan, my needs aren’t being met by this. What can I do?” Well we know the Mac Pro is coming—they told us themselves at the end of the event.

That just raises further questions! Are they going to put in the rumored quad Max chip? I don’t think they’ll call it an M1, since the Ultra was pronounced the end of the line. They could call it something like X1—Like Mega Man! We’ll do Mega Man X naming conventions. A problem with the M1 Ultra is Apple’s way of doing RAM on package. If you need 128 gigs of RAM, you have to get the Ultra, even if you don’t need all the cores or GPU power. That is a problem that they need to solve for a Mac Pro, because this doesn't scale. Assuming if you do a quad, you could probably have 256 gig, maybe even 512 if we have higher density LPDDR5 modules. Pro users who are used to the 1.5 terabyte maximum in the current Mac Pro will demand a better solution, and Apple's going to have to find some way to match that. And I'm not sure there'll be able to do it with the on-package method. On the other hand, it’s hard to see them going back to DIMMs after touting the on-package performance. So it could be that we could end up with an Amiga situation. We could have chip RAM and fast RAM again! On-package memory that's devoted towards the GPU and then logic board memory that's devoted towards CPU. But then we're right back to where we were a couple of years ago, and all of Apple's unified memory architecture starts going out the window. It's a legit problem. I'm sure they have a solution that they're working for on it right now.

But we'll just have to see. The other thing pro users want are PCI Express slots, and I can't see Apple making the mistake of ditching slots again. After their big mea culpa with the 2019 Mac Pro, they’ll have a solution for keeping PCI express slots. They’re probably not going to put eight of them in there and they're not going to have gigantic MPX modules. A new Mac Pro is going to have regular PCI Express slots that you can put regular interface cards into for Pro Tools and such. The question is can they manage making the Mac Pro into something that can scale from the quad up to something even more? I really think they've got the CPU and GPU power nailed, they just need the rest of the package. Apple need to have the ability to have more GPU power, more RAM, and more storage that can scale to high levels. That's all stuff that I know that they have the capability of doing, the question is how are they going to execute it? And we don't really know that right now.

Speaking of monitors, the 6K 32 inch Pro Display XDR it's going to be replaced. Are they going to replace it with an even bigger, meaner monitor? I can see them sacrificing the USB hub and using the unidirectional thunderbolt mode to make a monster 8K display. I can see them doing that with Mac Pro-level machines, but the demands of having even say a 5k 120 or a 6K 120 along with higher bit depth for HDR are significant. That's just a lot of pixels to have to push, especially if you don't use display stream compression, which so far Apple has not mentioned at all.on these types of things. I suppose they could just punt and say “Hey, you want the 8K monitor? You need to use two Thunderbolt cables.” That’s not an elegant design, though.

Final Thoughts

So did Apple meet the expectations of the community and its customers? My gut says yes. I can imagine a lot of people are going to buy and enjoy these machines and do a lot of great work with them. I don't think they're going to satisfy everybody. Some people are already griping that, “oh, it doesn't have slots. Doesn't have replaceable this. It doesn't do that.” Sure, whatever. I have to say that I do like them bringing back the Studio name, especially for the Studio Display. Maybe we should bring back other dead names. Let’s call the Apple Silicon Mac Pro the Power Mac, eh? Ah, a man can dream.

I also don't think this machine is really going to quell any of the complaints that other people have about repairability. It's a logic board and everything's soldered onto it. That can be a problem for some people. Unlike the Mac Pro, it’s still the same problems that we have with a laptop or a Mini. The long arc of computing history has been towards integration. More and more stuff gets integrated. We don't buy sound cards anymore. Well, most of us don't, and if we need something, we're fine with external DACs.. Even on the PC side, more and more stuff is getting integrated into our motherboards, like network cards. Apple is just ahead of the curve here. I have a feeling we’re going to see more of this style of integration on the PC side as well. The ATX standard is getting really long in the tooth, especially as far as thermal management goes. Whether that'll change remains to be seen.

But as the event hype dies down, we can look at this from sort of a higher level standpoint. The Mac Studio really kind of is the machine that Steve and everybody else thought of when NeXT came together. It is a personal workstation that’s very punchy and you can do a lot of really cool things with it. It's small, it's unobtrusive, it doesn't get in your way. It does have expandability, for the most part. You can't put stuff inside of it, but you can still attach a lot to it. There's a lot of Thunderbolt and USB ports. Looking at Apple's strategy over the past year, this really feels like Apple is going for the throat when it comes to the Mac. Obviously we've watched these events and they have all these sparkly videos with special effects and marketing hype. But at the end of the day, the machine's performance speaks for themselves. And even just the base $1999 Studio with M1 Max is a very respectable machine for people doing a lot of content creation and 3d visualization. That’s a very accessible price point for that kind of power. It’s plug and play and you're pretty much ready to go, and I can respect that.

We’ll have to wait for reviews to get the full picture. I don't expect the entry-level Mac Studio to be that much better than the 16 inch MacBook Pro. It'll be better in some ways, but ultimately it's just a cheaper way of getting that level of power if you don't need it to be in a portable form. Consider a Power Mac from 20 years ago, a 1999 Power Mac both in terms of price and the year that it came out. Back then, $2,000 didn't buy you a lot of Power Mac—it bought you a base, entry-level machine. Whereas this is not really entry-level, this is definitely extremely powerful. But ultimately the thing that speaks loudest are the people that I know who had been holding out, and holding out, and holding out are finally buying something. Somebody who was nursing along a 2012 Mac Pro went out and bought one. Same with another friend who was waiting things out with a 2012 Mini. I think that speaks a lot about this new Mac.

For the longest time, people said “Oh, Apple can't do an xMac. Oh, they can't do a mid range desktop because nobody will buy it.” I think the reality was that the value had to be there. And I think this is a case where even if Apple's not going to sell 10 million of these Macs a year, they're still valuable things to have in the lineup. I think they realize that sometimes you do have to make a play for market share. And as far I can see this is a play not just for market share in terms of raw numbers, but market share of saying, “we have this available, we can do this. We're not ignoring you, the customer.” You can only ignore somebody for too long before they look elsewhere. And I think we're really seeing the fruits of that big refocus meeting that was four years ago at this point.

The Mac Studio is shipping in just a couple of weeks, and we'll be seeing plenty of people writing reviews and benchmarks. As I said earlier, I’m not buying one, since I already have a machine of similar power and my desktop is a Windows machine. I have no need for a Mac desktop. So while it's not for me, I think it’ll make its target audience very happy.

The Apple IIe - Computers Of Significant History, Part 2

February 21, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia, an Apple a day keeps the Number Muncher at bay.

Welcome back to Computers of Significant History, where I chronicle the computers crucial to my life, and maybe to yours too. If you’re like me and spent any time in a US public school during the eighties or nineties, you’ve likely used a variant of the Apple II. As a consequence, the rituals of grade school computer time are forever tied to Steve Wozniak’s engineering foibles. Just fling a floppy into a Disk II drive, lock the latch, punch the power switch... and then sit back and enjoy the soothing beautiful music of that drive loudly and repeatedly slamming the read head into its bump stops. Sounds like bagpipes being repeatedly run over, doesn't it? If you're the right age, that jaw-clenching, teeth-grinding racket will make you remember afternoons spent playing Oregon Trail. ImageWriter printers roared their little hearts out, with their snare drum printheads pounding essays compiled in Bank Street Writer onto tractor feed paper, alongside class schedules made in The Print Shop. Kids would play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego at recess, and race home after school to watch Lynne Thigpen and Greg Lee guide kid gumshoes in the tie-in TV show. Well, maybe that one was just me. Point is, these grade school routines were made possible thanks to the Apple II, or more specifically, the Apple IIe.

Unlike the BBC Micro, which was engineered for schools from the start, the Apple II was just an ordinary computer thrust into the role of America’s electronic educator. Popular culture describes Apple’s early days as a meteoric rise to stardom, with the Apple II conquering challengers left and right, but reality is never that clean. 1977 saw the debut of not one, not two, but three revolutionary personal computers: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Tandy Radio Shack 80—better known as the TRS-80. Manufacturers were hawking computers to everyone they could find, with varying degrees of success. IBM entered the fray in 1981 with the IBM PC—a worthy competitor. By 1982, the home computer market was booming. Companies like Texas Instruments, Sinclair, and Atari were wrestling Commodore and Radio Shack for the affordable computer championship belt. Meanwhile, Apple was still flogging the Apple II Plus, a mildly upgraded model introduced three years prior in 1979.

Picture it. It's the fall of 1982, and you're a prospective computer buyer. As you flip through the pages of BYTE magazine, you happen upon an ad spread. On the left page is the brand new Commodore 64 at $595, and on the right page is a three year old Apple II Plus at $1530. Both include a BASIC interpreter in ROM and a CPU from the 6502 family. The Apple II Plus had NTSC artifact color graphics, simple beeps, and 48K of RAM. True, it had seven slots, which you could populate with all kinds of add-ons. But, of course, that cost extra. Meanwhile, the Commodore had better color graphics with sprites, a real music synthesizer chip, and 64K of RAM. Oh, and the Commodore was almost a third of the price. Granted, that price didn’t include a monitor, disk drive, or printer, but both companies had those peripherals on offer. Apple sold 279,000 II Pluses through all of 1982, while Commodore sold 360,000 C64s in half that time. In public, Apple downplayed the low-end market, but buyers and the press didn’t ignore these new options. What was Apple doing from 1979 until they finally released the IIe in 1983? Why did it take so long to make a newer, better Apple II?

Part of it is that for a long time a new Apple II was the last thing Apple wanted to make. There was a growing concern inside Apple that the II couldn’t stay competitive with up-and-coming challengers. I wouldn’t call their fears irrational—microcomputers of the seventies were constantly being obsoleted by newer, better, and (of course) incompatible machines. Apple was riding their own hype train, high on their reputation as innovators. They weren’t content with doing the same thing but better, so they set out to build a new clean-sheet machine to surpass the Apple II. To understand the heroic rise of the IIe, we must know the tragic fall of the Apple III.

When Apple started development of the Apple III in late 1978, IBM had yet to enter the personal computer market. Big Blue was late to the party and wouldn't start on their PC until 1980. Apple had a head start and they wanted to strike at IBM’s core market by building a business machine of their own. After releasing the Apple II Plus in 1979, other Apple II improvement projects were cancelled and their resources got diverted to the Apple III. A fleet of engineers were hired to work on the new computer so Apple wouldn’t have to rely solely on Steve Wozniak. Other parts of Apple had grown as well. Now they had executives and a marketing department, whose requirements for the Apple III were mutually exclusive.

It had to be fast and powerful—but cooling fans make noise, so leave those out! It had to be compatible with the Apple II, but not too compatible—no eighty columns or bank-switching memory in compatibility mode! It needed to comply with incoming FCC regulations on radio interference—but there was no time to wait for those rules to be finalized. Oh, and while you’re at it... ship it in one year.

Given these contradictory requirements and aggressive deadlines, it's no surprise that the Apple III failed. If this was a story, and I told you that they named the operating system “SOS," you'd think that was too on the nose. But despite the team of highly talented engineers, the dump truck full of money poured on the project, and what they called the Sophisticated Operating System, the Apple III hardware was rotten to the core. Announced in May 1980, it didn’t actually ship until November due to numerous production problems. Hardware flaws and software delays plagued the Apple III for years, costing Apple an incredible amount of money and goodwill. One such flaw was the unit's propensity to crash when its chips would work themselves out of their sockets. Apple’s official solution was, and I swear I'm not making this up, “pick up the 26-pound computer and drop it on your desk.” Between frequent crashes, defective clock chips, and plain old system failures, Apple eventually had to pause sales and recall every single Apple III for repairs. An updated version with fewer bugs and no real-time clock went on sale in fall 1981, but it was too late—the Apple III never recovered from its terrible first impression.

Apple III aside, 1980 wasn’t all worms and bruises for Apple. They sold a combined 78,000 Apple II and II Plus computers in 1980—more than double the previous year. Twenty five percent of these sales came from new customers who wanted to make spreadsheets in VisiCalc. Apple’s coffers were flush with cash, which financed both lavish executive lifestyles and massive R&D projects. But Apple could make even more money if the Apple II was cheaper and easier to build. After all, Apple had just had an IPO in 1980 with a valuation of 1.8 billion dollars, and shareholder dividends have to come from somewhere. With the Apple III theoretically serving the high end, It was time to revisit those shelved plans to integrate Apple II components, reduce the chip count, and increase those sweet, sweet margins.

What we know as the IIe started development under the code name Diana in 1980. Diana’s origins actually trace back to 1978, when Steve Wozniak worked with Walt Broedner of Synertek to consolidate some of the Apple II’s discrete chips into large scale integrated circuits. These projects, named Alice and Annie, were cancelled when Apple diverted funds and manpower to the Apple III. Given his experience with those canned projects, Apple hired Broedner to pick up where he left off with Woz. Diana soon gave way to a new project name: LCA, for "Low Cost Apple", which you might think meant "lower cost to buy an Apple.” In the words of Edna Krabapple, HAH! They were lower cost to produce. Savings were passed on to shareholders, not to customers. Because people were already getting the wrong idea, Apple tried a third code name: Super II. Whatever you called it, the project was going to be a major overhaul of the Apple II architecture. Broedner’s work on what would become the IIe was remarkable—the Super II team cut the component count down from 109 to 31 while simultaneously improving performance. All this was achieved with near-100% compatibility.

In addition to cutting costs and consolidating components, Super II would bring several upgrades to the Apple II platform. Remember, Apple had been selling the Apple II Plus for four years before introducing the IIe. What made an Apple II Plus a “Plus” was the inclusion of 48 kilobytes of RAM and an AppleSoft BASIC ROM, along with an autostart function for booting from a floppy. Otherwise it was largely the same computer—so much so that owners of an original Apple II could just buy those add-ons and their machine would be functionally identical for a fraction of the price. Not so with the IIe, which added more features and capabilities to contend with the current crop of computer competitors. 64K of RAM came standard, along with support for eighty column monochrome displays. If you wanted the special double hi-res color graphics mode and an extra 64K of memory, the optional Extended 80 Column Text card was for you. Or you could use third-party RAM expanders and video cards—Apple didn’t break compatibility with them. Users with heavy investments in peripherals could buy a IIe knowing their add-ons would still work.

Other longtime quirks and limitations were addressed by the IIe. The most visible was a redesigned keyboard with support for the complete ASCII character set—because, like a lot of terminals back then, the Apple II only supported capital letters. If you wanted lowercase, you had to install special ROMs and mess around with toggle switches. Apple also addressed another keyboard weakness: accidental restarts. On the original Apple II keyboard, there was a reset key, positioned right above the return key. So if your aim was a quarter inch off when you wanted a new line of text, you could lose everything you'd been working on. Today that might seem like a ridiculous design decision, but remember, this was decades ago. All these things were being done for the first time. Woz was an excellent typist and didn't make mistakes like that, and it might not have occurred to him that he was an outlier and that there'd be consequences for regular people. Kludges like stiffer springs or switch mods mitigated the issue somewhat, but most users were still one keystroke away from disaster.

The IIe’s keyboard separated the reset key from the rest of the board and a restart now required a three finger salute of the control, reset, and open-Apple keys. Accidental restarts were now a thing of the past, unless your cat decided to nap on the keyboard. Next, a joystick port was added to the back panel, so that you didn't have to open the top of the case and plug joysticks directly into the logic board. A dedicated number pad port was added to the logic board as well. Speaking of the back panel, a new series of cut-outs with pop-off covers enabled clean and easy mounting of expansion ports. For new users looking to buy an Apple in 1983, it was a much better deal than the aging II Plus, and existing owners could trade in their old logic boards and get the new ones at a lower price.

A Platinum IIe showing off the slots and back panel ports.

Apple might have taken their time to truly revamp the II, but 1983 was a good year for it. Computers weren’t just playthings for nerds anymore—regular people could actually use them, thanks to a growing commercial software market. Bushels of Apple computers were sold just to run VisiCalc, but there were even more untapped markets than accountants and bookkeepers. By 1983, both the mainstream and the industry press had figured out how to explain the benefits of a microcomputer in your home and/or business. Word processors, databases, and—of course—games were all valid reasons to buy a computer, and sales exploded as a result.

Consider Apple’s sales numbers before and after the IIe’s introduction. Ars Technica writer Jeremy Reimer researched estimated sales figures for various microcomputers, and we’ll use them for the sake of argument. For all of Apple’s hype, they sold just 43,000 Apple II and II Plus computers from 1977 to 1979. Radio Shack, meanwhile, sold 450,000 TRS-80s during the same three years. Commodore sold 79,000 PETs. Atari waltzed into the market and sold 100,000 home computers in 1979. One difference is that the Apple II series had a higher average selling price than most of these computers—a TRS-80 kit with monitor and tape deck cost $599 in 1977, while an Apple II without monitor or drives cost $1239.

But this was a time of rapid advancement and innovation, and a hot start was no guarantee of long-term success. The TRS-80 family’s strong start gradually faded away despite newer models with better capabilities, and Tandy shifted to IBM compatibles in 1985. Likewise with Commodore and the PET, which Commodore largely abandoned after the C64 took off like a rocket. IBM sold 1.3 million PCs in 1983 and would only sell more from there. Apple sold 400,000 IIes in 1983, and a million more in 1984, all with excellent accessory attachment rates and monstrous margins. Shipping that many computers with Woz’s original board design would’ve been impossible because Apple’s quality control processes didn’t scale with manufacturing. Between the IIe’s reduced board complexity and new self-test routines, Apple could both build and test computers faster than ever before. With something like a 60% margin on the IIe’s wholesale dealer price, it was wildly profitable—and that was before upgrades and add-ons. With margins like these, Apple could afford to negotiate with schools, and sometimes even give away computers to seal deals.

Not mentioned: Help provided from Xerox.

The IIe wasn’t the only computer Apple introduced on January 19, 1983. Apple management—especially Steve Jobs—were all-consumed with dethroning IBM as the premier choice for business computing, and the Apple II just wasn’t part of those plans. A complex and powerful machine, the Lisa was the talk of the tech press thanks to its graphical interface and forward-thinking document oriented software suite. It was supposed to change the world of computers and singlehandedly make all text-based workstations obsolete. Yet even Apple had to know that, at ten thousand dollars each—in 1983 dollars, no less—the Lisa would be extraordinarily difficult to sell, even though its advanced graphical interface was unlike anything on the market. Another drawback was Apple’s new FileWare floppy disk drives. These drives, codenamed Twiggy—yes, after the British supermodel—were notoriously unreliable. Apple sold around ten thousand Lisas during its lifetime. Meanwhile, the IIe kept on keepin’ on, much to the chagrin of executives who wanted to change the world. Apple finally cracked its next generation computer conundrum with the Macintosh, and they were also hard at work building the Apple IIc and designing the IIGS. Soon the IIe would retire with the original Apple II and the II Plus. Or would it?

An Apple for the Teacher

My memories of the Apple IIe are bound together with its role as an educator. A computer was in every classroom at Highland Elementary School, and as far as my classmates and I were concerned a computer was as fundamental to learning as a textbook or a chalkboard. Like millions of other kids who were tutored by Apples, we had no clue about who designed these machines, or the cutthroat markets that forged them. A school computer was an Apple, just like a school bus was yellow, because that was the way things were. It never crossed our minds to ask why we had Apples at school instead of Commodores or IBM PCs.

By the time Apple launched the IIe, their computers had already found a foothold in American schools. This was largely thanks to the efforts of the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium, or MECC. Minnesota might not be the first place you think of when it comes to computer leadership, but by the late seventies MECC had brought mainframe and minicomputer access to schools across the Gopher state. Like Silicon Valley and Route 128, Minnesota had a bustling technology and computer center. Control Data Corporation was headquartered in the suburbs of Minneapolis. 3M was a major supplier of materials and media for computers, and the University of Minnesota was full of programmers. When the 1977 trio of microcomputers that all ran BASIC came to their attention, MECC saw an opportunity. MECC’s library of software—called courseware—was written in BASIC for mainframe and minicomputers. Some Minnesota schools already had terminals to access said mainframes, but mainframes were expensive—very expensive. Mainframes also required a staff for maintenance, and they took up a lot of space. Microcomputers solved all these problems—individual teachers could manage them, and they were small and cheap enough to place in every classroom, or even a lab. Since all the new microcomputers used BASIC, it would be straightforward to port MECC’s courseware to a micro—the question, of course, was which one.

Outfitting the entire state school system with microcomputers wasn’t as easy as picking a company and giving them a million dollar order. Rules of acquisition aren’t just for Ferengi—laws dictate how you can spend public money. The first step was acquiring a few computers to experiment with porting their software. MECC was already excited about the new Apple II, specifically for its color video capabilities. They asked if Apple would be willing to cut them a special price for five computers, and Apple obliged. When it came time for the formal bidding process, MECC opened up bids to all comers, but some bidders were better than others. Dale LaFrenz, former president of MECC, recalled as much in a 1995 oral history with the Charles Babbage Institute.

Yes, we got bids from Apple. We also got bids from other companies. Some of the companies, particularly Radio Shack, were not enamored with this process and thought it was kind of hokey—the process being the bid process and the state requirements—and so they weren’t real particular about how they responded. We told Radio Shack, “You know, if you don’t respond in the right way, we can’t accept your bid,” and they weren’t willing to change. The Atari people and Commodore people were late and there were very stringent rules—if you aren’t in by noon on the appointed day, you are [out]. Well, the fact is that the sentiment of the evaluation committee representing Minnesota education was toward the TRS-80.

How different would educational computing have been in America if Radio Shack hadn’t blown off MECC? The bid was theirs for the taking, but for whatever reason, they let it slide. Apple jumped through the hoops, won the bid, and sold 500 computers to MECC. Those 500 computers were crucial to expanding access to Minnesota students, but they were also the base upon which MECC built a software empire. Instead of spending years figuring out what to do with their new computers, MECC ported that existing library of mainframe software to the new Apple II. Word quickly spread and other states and districts knocked on MECC’s door. This ready library of software made the Apple II an easy choice for schools, and launched a virtuous cycle of educational Apple sales. People bought Apples because they could buy MECC courseware, and other developers wrote educational software because the market was Apple. MECC was so successful that by 1983 they transitioned to a private corporation owned by the state of Minnesota, and the Gopher State profited handsomely.

MECC’s early software would be updated and revised and ported to other platforms over the course of the early eighties, but the Apple II would always be its bread and butter. The IIe especially was a crucial ingredient to MECC’s ongoing success as a software powerhouse. MECC’s most popular and memorable titles were either introduced on the IIe or had their definitive versions released for it. Updated classics like the graphical versions of Oregon Trail and Odell Lake required 64K of RAM, which meant a IIe in almost all circumstances. Newly designed games like Number Munchers, Word Munchers, and Spellevator were designed from the ground up for 64K machines. These are the games most people in my age group would have played on their classroom IIe machines in the late eighties on to the early nineties. Though MECC diversified into other platforms, they were still publishing Apple IIe compatible titles well into the nineties.

Apple also updated the IIe during its lifetime, first with the Enhanced IIe in 1985 and then the Platinum IIe in 1987. Internally an Enhanced IIe featured an updated 65C02 processor and new ROMs that brought bug fixes and character updates from the IIc back to the IIe. One such “update” was the MouseText character set, which was used to construct a Mac-ish display using characters instead of bitmaps. Add the mildly updated internals with a mildly refreshed keyboard and you’ve got some mild enhancements. The Platinum IIe was so named due to its new exterior case color, which was a shade of gray that Apple's designers had named "platinum" the year before. The optional Extended 80 Column card was now standard equipment, which brought the total memory up to 128K. The keyboard layout was updated to match the IIGS, which included a standard numeric keypad. Improvements in density meant that eight 8K RAM chips on the logic board were replaced with two 32K RAM chips—Moore’s law in action!—and both ROMs were consolidated to a single chip.

In 1990, the Apple II seemed like a computer Apple just couldn’t kill. They sold over 300,000 across three model lines because schools kept buying the IIe and, to a lesser extent, the IIGS. Schools didn’t want to lose their investment in software, and when a IIe broke, it was easier and cheaper to just replace it with another one instead of a Macintosh or a IIGS. A Platinum IIe retailed for $800, and schools got even better pricing than that. Though the more powerful and advanced IIGS was still a thing, Apple much preferred it when you bought a Macintosh, thank you very much. The new for 1990 Macintosh LC was thought to be the Apple II killer. But even when Apple offered the Macintosh LC to schools at a 50% discount, $1700 was still too expensive for most districts. So they kept on buying the Apple II even if they procured a Mac or two with a CD-ROM drive that might get carted around or parked in the school library.

Still, 1991 and 1992 saw declining sales, and Apple officially discontinued the IIe in November 1993. It outlived its more powerful sibling, the IIGS, by a whole year. Though you could buy a machine labeled IIe for nearly eleven years, it’s hard for me to say that Apple sold the “same” machine for that time. It's the Microchip of Theseus question—does a ROM update, a memory increase, and a new case color really make for a “new” model? Still, the heart of the computer—the 6502 processor, the slots, the logic chips designed by Broedner and his team—was still the same.

Mr. Jobs Goes to Washington

Content warning: this next segment discusses federal tax law. Sensitive readers might want to put on some music for a few minutes.

In today’s world of budget Chromebooks, the idea of the premium-focused Apple dominating the educational market seems quaint. Computers aren’t just one per classroom anymore. Schools are networked now, with devices relying more and more on web services provided by companies like Google and Microsoft. That’s the difference between personal computing and information technology—most teachers could manage a single computer, but you can’t expect them to manage a fleet of cloud-connected services. MECC might have gotten Apple’s foot in the door, but Apple secured their dominant position in schools the same way Microsoft and Google did: good old-fashioned American politicking.

Not every state had an organization like MECC that could advocate for computers in the classroom, so Apple altruistically advocated for them—because we all know how altruistic corporations are. Steve and Steve—Jobs and Wozniak—were true believers. They'd both been using computers since they were young, and wanted to give kids across America the chance to share in the experience. But Steve Jobs also had dollar signs on his eyeballs. And that's why Apple was so eager to work with MECC to supply those 500 computers to Minnesota in 1978, even though that was almost 7% of their sales that year.

Because Kids Can’t Wait to help make Steve Jobs more money.

But getting a computer in every classroom was easier said than done. Even though the microcomputers of the late seventies cost a lot less than their minicomputer brothers, that still didn't mean they were cheap. And obviously, Apple couldn't afford to just give free computers to every single American school. Compounding the cost of computer components were the complexities of complying with the conglomeration of codes that comprise America’s state-based education system. The solution was obvious: federal legislation. If Apple could get a law passed in time for the launch of the IIe, they could capture the educational market with the help of good old Uncle Sam.

As part of the Smithsonian's History of Computing project, Steve Jobs told the story of how he and then-California congressman Pete Stark worked together to draft a bill granting a corporate tax deduction to companies that donated computers to public schools. According to Jobs, there were already tax breaks for companies donating scientific equipment to colleges and universities. But those breaks didn’t apply to primary and secondary schools, which limited the financial benefits for donating computers. Under the proposed law, Apple would donate 100,000 computers, which would cost Apple about $10,000,000 after the tax break. Without the tax break, Jobs figured the plan would have cost Apple around $100,000,000. The bill’s details and failures were more complex than Jobs’ characterization, and I actually dug through Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee records to figure out how it worked.

Stark designed House Resolution 5573 to allow a company donating computer equipment to deduct its cost to manufacture plus 50% of the difference between the cost and the retail price. The total deduction value per computer would be capped at twice the cost. Let’s say you have a computer that retails for $1300, and it costs $500 to make. Under these rules, Apple would receive a $900 deduction—a pretty significant valuation. Multiply that by 100,000 computers, and you’re talking real money. The bill also increased the total amount of money the company could deduct from their taxable income using this method from 10 to 30 percent. Remember, these are deductions, not credits, so it’s not a straight gift. But based on the average corporate tax rate of 42 percent in 1982, the net effect would have been about $90,000,000 over the course of five years.

Jobs personally met with senators and congresspeople to convince them of the need to get more computers in classrooms, forgoing professional lobbyists. Stark’s bill, known as the Computer Equipment Contribution Act of 1982, passed the House with an overwhelming majority of 323 yea to 62 nay, but it died in the senate. Jobs’ recollection of some of the facts was a bit off—he claimed Bob Dole as “Speaker of the House” killed the bill during “Jimmy Carter’s lame duck session.” Bob Dole was a lot of things—professional endorser of Viagra and Pepsi, guest-star on the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan, space mutant—but he was never speaker of the House. And the 97th Congress’ lame duck session was called by Ronald Reagan in 1982, two years after Carter left office. Dole was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1982, and their report requested a few changes. First, it broadened the definition of educational institutions to include libraries and museums, and it also increased the time period to claim the deduction from one year to three years. But the biggest change of all was reducing the maximum amount of the deduction from 200% of the cost to 150%, and kept the 10% taxable income cap. This change could have reduced Apple’s tax break by 75%. To make matters worse, the other changes could potentially have benefited Apple's competitors.

The US Senate in 1982 was under Republican control for the first time in nearly thirty years, and it was embroiled in all sorts of filibusters and procedural delays. This was especially true in the lame duck months after midterm congressional elections. While Bob Dole’s finance committee was responsible for the changes to the bill, it did recommend that the Senate put the bill to the vote. It’s more likely that majority leader Howard Baker and majority whip Ted Stevens declined to put it on the floor or honor the request to waive certain debate rules. Without some experienced lobbyists on hand to push for their bill, Jobs’ and Wozniak’s dreams of donating thousands of computers went up in smoke. Another angle to this story is the Minor Tax Bills article from the April 1983 edition of Congressional Quarterly Almanac, which is a contemporary take on the events. It turns out Apple itself stopped supporting the bill after the Senate changes, because that would have made the donation plan too costly. But this paragraph got a sensible chuckle thanks to forty years of hindsight.

While the bill was promoted as a boost for technological education, some members objected that it was little more than a tax subsidy for Apple. They pointed out that once the donated computer was in place, a school would be constrained to buy more equipment from Apple, rather than another computer company, if it wanted to expand the use of the machine.

Oh, if only they knew. Even though Apple failed to secure a federal subsidy, they did get a consolation prize at the state level. Around the same time the federal bill fell apart, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law introduced by California assemblyman Charles Imbrecht that gave a company donating a computer to schools a 25% tax credit against its retail value. In January 1983, Apple announced its Kids Can’t Wait program along with the Apple IIe. Every public school in California with more than 100 students was eligible for a bundle of an Apple IIe computer, a disk drive, a monitor, and a copy of the Apple Logo programming package valued at $2364. Given that the tax credit is based on the retail price, if every one of California’s 9,250 public schools took Apple up on the offer, the total retail value of all those packages would be around $21,867,000. That results in a maximum possible credit of $5,466,750! Apple estimated their cost of the program at around $5,200,000, which included the cost of the hardware, software, dealer training, and dealer incentives. I haven’t been able to find a record of exactly how many schools took delivery, but Steve Jobs claimed every school took him up on the offer. Even if only eighty percent of California schools took Apple’s deal, that would have been over $4.3 million dollars worth of credits on a program estimated to cost $5.2 million. It had to be the cheapest marketshare Apple ever bought.

Apple and congressman Stark did try their national bill again in 1983, but this time it didn’t even make it past the House committee. Sometimes governments don’t move as fast as Silicon Valley would like, but in time other states and the federal government would end up with their own tax breaks and incentives to bring more computers into the classroom. And thanks to the lessons learned from these attempts, Apple’s later teams that sold the Macintosh to colleges were more adept at dealing with governments. By the mid-eighties, Apple was synonymous with education due to the efforts of local educators, governments, developers, and enthusiastic users. They even advertised on TV with music videos set to Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. It seemed like there was no stopping Apple as they sold millions of computers to schools across the globe.

The Head of the Class

The Apple IIe’s long and prolific career as an educator is remarkable for technology with a reputation for a short shelf life. It’s theoretically possible that a first grader who used an Apple IIe in 1983 could use a IIe in 1993 as a high school sophomore. It’d be unlikely, because the Apple II platform was phased out of high schools before middle or elementary schools, but if you told me you were that kid, I’d believe you. The IIe weathered stronger, tougher competition because the hardware was stout and the software library vast. Still, even a high quality textbook goes out of date eventually.

My hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts and its public schools hung on to the Apple II well into the nineties, with the venerable system finally being replaced in the 1995-96 school year. Three of the four walls of my middle school’s computer lab were lined with all-in-one Macs from the LC 500 series, and one lonely row of Apple IIe computers remained. Kids who drew the short straws for that week’s computer lab session were stuck in the 8-bit penalty box, forced to endure the same titles they had in grade school while luckier classmates got the latest in CD-ROMs. After winter break, the computer lab rang in 1996 by supplanting the last remaining 8-bit machines with shiny new Macintosh LC580s. Some places held on even longer—I’ve read reports of grade school classrooms still using the Apple II at the turn of the millennium.

Reid Middle School may have retired their remaining Apple II systems by the fall of 1996, but some vestiges of the old computers lingered on. One day when fixing my seventh grade math teacher’s Macintosh LC II, I noticed something unusual: an Apple II 5 1/4 inch disk drive was attached to it! I knew that Macs didn’t use those old floppies, so I opened up the case to see what, exactly, the drive was connected to. I pulled out the card attached to the machine’s processor direct slot and saw the words “Apple IIe Card” silkscreened on the board. This little piece of hardware was Apple’s way of convincing conservative education customers that yes, a Mac could fit right in. Using tech derived from the IIGS, Apple managed to shrink an entire Apple IIe to the size of a postcard. Moore's Law strikes again. A host Macintosh could run Apple II programs from floppies or a hard disk, and a special Y-cable allowed you to attach external drives and joysticks. It wasn't quite emulation, or virtualization either—if you’re familiar with Amiga bridge boards or Apple’s DOS compatibility cards, it was kind of like that. For the low price of $199, you could make that shiny new Macintosh LC compatible with your vast array of Apple II programs and ease the pain of putting an old friend out to pasture.

Apple IIe Card — The Apple IIe PDS card.

The IIe card was introduced in March 1991, and sales of actual Apple IIe computers plunged. According to Apple, half of the LCs sold in schools came equipped with a IIe card, but actual sales numbers for these cards aren’t really known. The IIe card combined with the ongoing cost reductions in Macs meant the Apple II’s days were numbered. In 1991 Apple sold just 166,000 Apple IIe and IIGS computers—almost half of the previous year—and 1992 declined further to 122,000. Only 30,000 IIes were sold in its final year of 1993. Apple sold the IIe Card until May 1995, and you might think that was the last anyone would hear about the Apple II. Well, it turns out that yes, people still wanted to run Apple II software, and two engineers within Apple wrote a software IIGS emulator. This unofficial project, named Gus, was one of Apple’s few standalone emulators, and it could run both IIGS and regular Apple II software with no extra hardware required. Targeted towards schools, just like the IIe card, Gus kept the old Apple II platform shuffling on for those who made enough noise at Apple HQ.

Most product managers would kill to have something like the IIe—it was a smashing success no matter which metric you cite. Yet Apple always seemed to treat the machine with a quiet condescension, like a parent who favors one child over another. “Oh, yes, well, IIe certainly has done well for himself, but have you seen what Mac has done lately? He’s the talk of all of the computer shows!” The IIe sold a million units in 1984, but it wasn’t good enough for Mother Apple, who kept putting the Mac front and center. Even when the Mac suffered its sophomore slump in 1985 Apple seemed to resent that the boring old IIe sold almost another million units. Macintosh sales didn’t surpass the Apple II until 1988, and Apple didn’t sell a million Macs until 1989. Yes, yes, I know about transaction prices, but that’s not the point—without the Apple II to pay the rent, the Mac wouldn’t have been able to find itself.

I don’t want to judge the Apple II or its fans too harshly, because it’s a crucial piece of personal computing. But I also don’t think Apple was fundamentally wrong about the prospects of the Apple II—they just whiffed on the timeline. The core problem was the 6502 and later 65C816 architecture. Even though faster variants of the 65C816 used in the IIGS were available, the 6502-based architecture was a dead end. Maybe that would have been different if Apple had committed to the architecture with something like the Macintosh. But Western Design Center was a tiny design house operation which wasn’t on the same scale as Motorola, who not only designed their own chips, they fabricated them. Apple’s needs for things like protected memory, supervisors, floating point units, and so on would have meant a move away from 6502-based architectures eventually. A new CPU platform was coming whether Apple II users liked it or not.

The divide between the Apple II and Macintosh is endlessly fascinating to me. Could Apple have made the Apple II into something like the Macintosh? Maybe. The IIGS, after all, runs an operating system that mimics the Mac’s GUI. But what separates the two platforms is more of a philosophical divide than a technical one. The Apple II always felt like a computer for the present, while the Macintosh was a machine for the future. Wozniak designed the Apple II as a more reliable, practical version of his TV terminal dream. The Macintosh was a statement about how we would interact with computers for the next thirty years. Unlike the Xerox Star and the Lisa, an average person could buy a Macintosh without taking out a second mortgage. Other consumer-grade machines with graphical interfaces wouldn’t be out until 1985, and the Mac had the benefit of Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field that let him get away with pretty much everything.

I don’t think Apple expected the IIe to live as long as it did. The IIGS was supposed to replace it—Apple even offered kits to upgrade the innards of a IIe to a IIGS! But the venerable computer just kept chugging along. Unlike the Commodore 64, which was just wearing out its welcome, the Apple IIe aged gracefully, like a kindly teacher who’s been around forever but never quite managed to make the jump to administration. By the 90s, Apple didn’t need the Apple II to survive, so they just quietly kept selling it until they could figure out a way to move everybody to Macintoshes without a boatload of bad press. Maybe it didn’t go as quickly as they would have liked, but they eventually got it done.

What accelerated the IIe's retirement, aside from just being old, was the proliferation of multimedia CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web. The Web was an educational tool even more powerful than a single personal computer, and unfortunately there weren't any web browsers for the IIGS, let alone the IIe. Computers were changing, and computer education was finally changing along with them. Now computer literacy wasn’t just about learning to program; it was learning about networking, linking, and collaboration. A school’s computer curriculum couldn’t afford to sit still, but even after all these years some things stay the same. Oregon Trail is still teaching kids about dysentery, just with newer graphics, nicer sound, and better historical accuracy. Carmen Sandiego is still trotting the globe, both on Netflix and in games.

The IIe was too personal for this new interconnected world, but that’s OK. It did its job and the people behind the first educational computing initiatives could retire knowing that they made a difference. Those classroom Apples taught a generation of children that computers weren’t mean and scary, but friendly and approachable instead. True, any other computer of the day could have risen to the challenge—look at our British friends across the pond with their beloved Beeb. But the IIe managed to be just enough machine at just the right time to bring high technology into America’s classrooms, and its true legacy is all the people it helped inspire to go on to bigger and better things.

Dropbox Drops the Ball

January 18, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

You never know when you’ll fall in love with a piece of software. One day you’re implementing your carefully crafted workflow when a friend or colleague DMs you a link. It’s for a hot new utility that all the tech tastemakers are talking about. Before you know it that utility’s solved a problem you never knew you had, and worked its way into your heart and your login items. The developer is responsive, the app is snappy, and you’re happy to toss in a few bucks to support a good product. But as time goes on, something changes. The developer grows distant, the app eats up all your RAM, and you wonder if it’s still worth the money—or your love.

That’s my story with Dropbox, the app that keeps all your stuff in sync. I still remember the day—well, my inbox remembers the day. It was June 2nd, 2010, when my coworker Stephen strolled into my cubicle and said “Hey, I started using this Dropbox thing, you should check it out.” Stephen has a habit of understatement, so from him that's high praise. Minutes later I registered an account, installed the app, and tossed some files into my newly minted Dropbox folder. It was love at first sync, because Dropbox did exactly what it said on the tin: seamlessly synchronize files and folders across computers with speed and security. A public folder and right-click sharing shortcuts made it easy to share images, files, and folders with anyone at any time. I could shuttle documents back and forth from work without relying on a crusty old FTP server. This utility was a direct hit to my heart.

How Dropbox Beat Apple at File Sync

Of course, remote file sync wasn’t a new concept to me—I’d used Apple’s iDisk for years, which was one of many precursors to Dropbox. Mac users could mount an iDisk on their desktop and copy files to Apple servers with just the classic drag and drop. Applications could open or save files to an iDisk like any other disk drive. Yet despite this easy-breezy user interface, the actual user experience of iDisk left a lot to be desired. Let’s say you have a one megabyte text file. Your Mac would re-upload the entire one meg file every time you saved it to an iDisk, even if you only changed a single character. Today, "ooh we had to upload a full meg of text every time" doesn't sound like any sort of problem, but remember: iDisk came out in 2000. A cable modem back then could upload at maybe 512 kilobits per second—and yes, that's kilobits, not kilobytes. So a one-character change meant at least a sixteen-second upload, during which your app would sit there, unresponsive. And this was considered super fast, at the time—not compared to the immediate access of your local hard disk, of course, but trust me, dial-up was much, much worse. The sensible thing was to just download the file from your iDisk to your hard drive, work on it, and then copy it back when you were done, and that was no different than FTP.

Needless to say, Apple felt they could do better. Steve Jobs himself announced major changes to iDisk in Mac OS 10.3 Panther at the 2003 WWDC Keynote.

“We’ve enhanced iDisk significantly for Panther. iDisk, as you know, is for our .Mac customers. The hundreds of thousands of people that signed up for .Mac. And iDisk has been a place where you can manually upload files to the .Mac server and manually download them. Well, that’s all changing in Panther, because in Panther we’re automatically syncing the files. And what that means is that stuff that’s in your iDisk will automatically sync with our servers on .Mac—in both directions—and it does it in the background. So what it really means is your iDisk becomes basically a local folder that syncs. You don’t put stuff in your iDisk to send it up to .Mac, you leave it in your iDisk. You can leave a document in your iDisk, open it up, modify it, close it, and the minute you close it, it will sync back up to .Mac in the background automatically.
So you can just leave stuff in your iDisk, and this is pretty cool. It’s a great way to back stuff up, but in addition to that it really shines when you have more than one computer. If I have three computers here, each with their own iDisk, I can leave a copy of the same document in the iDisk of each one, open up the document in one of those iDisks, change it and close it, and it’ll automatically sync back through .Mac to the other two. It’s really nice. In addition to this, it really works when you have untethered portables. You can be out in the field not connected to a network, change a document in your iDisk, the minute you’re connected whether you walk to an AirPort base station or hook back up to a terrestrial net, boom—that document and its change will automatically sync with .Mac.”

It’s hard not to hear the similarities between Steve’s pitch for the new iDisk and what Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi pitched for Dropbox. But even with offline sync, iDisk still had speed and reliability issues. And even after Apple finally ironed out iDisk’s wrinkles, it and iCloud Drive still trailed Dropbox in terms of features. Apple had a five-year head start. How could they lose to Dropbox at the "it just works" game?

Houston and Ferdowsi’s secret sauce was Dropbox’s differential sync engine. Remember that one meg text file from earlier? Every time you overwrite a file, Dropbox compares it against the previous version. If the difference is just one byte, then Dropbox uploads only that byte. It was the feather in the cap of Dropbox’s excellent file transfer performance. Its reliability and speed left iDisk in the iDust. Yet all that technowizardry would be worthless without an easy user experience. Dropbox’s deep integration into Windows Explorer and the Macintosh Finder meant it could integrate into almost any file management workflow. I knew at a glance when file transfers started and finished thanks to dynamic status icons overlaid on files and folders. Clumsy network mounts were unnecessary, because Dropbox was just a plain old folder. Best of all, it was a cross platform application that obeyed the rules and conventions of its hosts. I was so smitten with its ease of use and reliability that I moved a full gig of files from iDisk to Dropbox in less than a week.

Dropbox fulfilled iDisk’s original promise of synchronized web storage, and its public launch in September 2008 was a huge success. A free tier was available with two gigs of storage, but if you needed more space you could sign up for a fifty-gig Dropbox Plus plan at $9.99 per month. Today that same price gets you two terabytes of space. And Plus plans weren't just about storage space—paying users got more collaboration features, longer deleted file recovery times, and better version tracking. And yes, I realize that I'm starting to sound like an influencer who wants to tell you about this fantastic new product entirely out of pure unsullied altruism. Trust me, though—that’s not where this is going. Remember: first you fall in love, then they break your heart. Dropbox's core functionality was file syncing, and this was available to freeloader and subscriber alike.

Dropbox Giveth, and Dropbox Taketh Away

This isn’t an uncommon arrangement—business and professional users will pay for the space and version tracking features they need to do their jobs. But in March 2019, Dropbox dropped the number of devices linked to a basic free account from unlimited… to three. The only way to raise the device limit was upgrading to a Plus plan. Three devices is an incredibly restrictive limit, and basic tier users were caught off guard. My account alone had seven linked devices: iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, desktop PC, two work computers, and work phone. Dropbox’s intent with this change was clear—they wanted to shed unprofitable users. If a free user abandons Dropbox, that’s almost as helpful to their bottom line as that same user paying to upgrade.

Speaking of their bottom line, Dropbox Plus plan pricing actually went up to $11.99 per month soon after the device limit change. To keep a $9.99 per month price, you have to commit to a one year subscription. There’s also no options for a lower priced tier with less storage—it’s two terabytes, take it or leave it. In comparison, Apple and Google offer $9.99 per month with no yearly commitments for the same two terabytes. Both offer 200 gigs for $2.99 per month, and if that’s still too rich they offer even cheaper plans. Microsoft includes one terabyte of OneDrive storage when you subscribe to Office 365 for $6.99 a month, and if you’re already an Office user that sounds like a sensible deal. If you’re a basic user looking for a more permanent home, the competition’s carrots look a lot better than Dropbox’s stick.

Even paying users might reconsider their Dropbox subscriptions in the wake of behavior that had left user-friendly far behind, and was verging on user-hostile. Free and paying users alike grumbled when Dropbox discontinued the Public folder in 2017, even though I understand why they cut it. People were treating the Public folder as a webhost and filesharer, and that was more trouble than it was worth. But compared to the device limit, killing the public folder was a minor loss. Photo galleries suffered the same fate. Technically savvy users were annoyed and alarmed when they noticed Dropbox aggressively modifying Mac OS security permissions to grant itself levels of access beyond what was reasonably expected. And even if paying users didn't notice the device limits or the public folder or the photo album or the security misbehaviors... they definitely noticed the new Dropbox client introduced in June 2019.

Dropbox Desktop — This is what Dropbox thought people wanted. From their own blog.

A zippy utility was now a bloated Chromium Embedded Framework app. After all, what's a file sync utility without its very own Chromium instance? While the new client introduced many new features, these came at the cost of resources and performance. Dropbox wasn’t just annoying free users, it was annoying paying customers by guzzling hundreds of megabytes of RAM and gobbling up CPU cycles. With an obnoxious new user interface and, for several months, irritants like an icon that wouldn't let itself be removed from your Dock, the new client made a terrible first impression.

The Apple Silicon Compatibility Kerfluffle

The latest example of Dropbox irritating customers is their lateness in delivering a native client for Apple’s new processors. Apple launched the first ARM-based Macs in November 2020, and developers had dev kits for months before that. Rosetta emulation allows the Intel version of Dropbox to run on Apple Silicon Macs, but emulation inflicts a penalty on performance and battery life. With no public timelines or announcements, users grew restless as the months dragged on. When Dropbox did say something, their response rang hollow. After hundreds of posts in their forums requesting an ARM-native client, Dropbox support replied with “[Apple Silicon support] needs more votes”—definitely not a good look. Supporting an architecture isn't a feature, it's part of being a citizen of the platform! Customers shouldn't have to vote for that like it's "add support for trimming videos," it's part of keeping your product viable.

We're certainly supporting Apple Silicon, sorry for the confusion. We've been working for a while on a native M1 build which we aim to release in H1 2022. (And agree the responses in the support thread were not ideal)
— Drew Houston (@drewhouston) October 28, 2021

Niche market software usually takes forever to support new architectures on Mac OS or Windows, but Dropbox hasn't been niche since 2009. I expect better from them. I’ve worked for companies whose management let technical debt like architecture support accumulate until Apple or Microsoft forced our hands by breaking compatibility. But our userbase was barely a few thousand people, and our dev teams were tiny. Dropbox has over fifteen million paying users (not counting the freeloaders), a massive R&D budget, and an army of engineers to spend it. The expectations are a bit higher. After multiple Apple-focused news sites highlighted Dropbox’s blasé attitude towards updating their app, CEO Drew Houston said that they hoped to be able to support Apple Silicon in, quote, "H1 2022.” More on that later.

Compare Dropbox’s response to other major tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft released a universal version of Office in December 2020—just one month after Apple shipped the first M1 Macs. The holy trinity of Adobe Creative Suite—Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—were all native by June 2021. Considering these apps aren’t one-button recompiles, that’s a remarkably fast turnaround. On the other hand, this isn’t the first rodeo for Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies lived through the PowerPC, Mac OS X, and Intel transitions. They know firsthand that botching a platform migration costs goodwill. And goodwill is hard to win back.

Dropbox is young enough that they haven’t lived through Apple’s previous architecture changes. Apple announced the start of the Intel transition in June 2005, and shipped Intel Macs to the public in January 2006. Dropbox's public launch wasn't until September 2008, and their app supported both Intel and PowerPC from the start. Before the Apple Silicon announcement, the closest thing to a “transition” that Dropbox faced was Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps in Mac OS Catalina. Fortunately, Dropbox was prepared for such a move: they'd added 64-bit support to the client in 2015, two years before Apple hinted at the future demise of 32-bit apps at WWDC 2017. When Catalina arrived in 2019 and axed 32-bit apps for good, Dropbox had nothing to worry about. So why is it taking so long to get Dropbox fully ARMed and operational—pun intended?

One culprit is Dropbox’s GUI. Dropbox uses Chromium Embedded Framework to render its JavaScript UI code, and CEF wasn’t Apple Silicon native until July of 2021. My issues with desktop JavaScript frameworks are enough to fill an entire episode, but suffice it to say Dropbox isn’t alone on that front. Some Electron-based apps like Microsoft Teams have yet to ship ARM-native versions on the Mac despite the OpenJS Foundation releasing ARM-native Mac OS artifacts in Electron 11.0 in November 2020. I get it: dependencies are a bear—or, sometimes, a whole family of bears. But this is a case where some honest roadmapping with your customers earns a lot of goodwill. Microsoft announced Teams’ refactoring to Edge WebView2 back in June, so we know something is coming. Discord released an ARM-native version in their Canary nightly build branch back in November. Compare that to Spotify, which also uses CEF. They too fell into the trap of asking for votes for support on issues raised in their forum. Even so, Spotify managed to get a native beta client out in July and a release version in September. CEF isn’t Dropbox’s only dependency problem, but it’s certainly the most visible. I’m sure there’s plenty of Dropbox tech support people, QA engineers, and software devs who aren’t happy about the current state of affairs, and I’ve got plenty of sympathy for them. Because I’ve been in that situation, and it stinks. Paying customers shouldn’t have to complain to the press before they get an answer from the CEO about platform support.

The Cautionary Tale of Quark

Dropbox should heed the tale of Quark and its flagship app, QuarkXPress. Back in the nineties, most Mac users were printing and graphic arts professionals, and QuarkXPress was a crucial ingredient in their creative soup. Apple announced Mac OS X in January 2000, and the new OS would feature badly needed modernizations like preemptive multitasking and protected memory. But—and this might sound familiar—existing apps needed updates to run natively under the new OS. To expedite this, Apple created the Carbon framework for their long-time developers like Adobe, Microsoft, Macromedia... and Quark. Carbonizing was a faster, easier way to update apps for Mac OS X without a ground-up rewrite. Apple needed these apps for a successful OS transition, so it was in everyone’s interest for developers to release Carbon versions as fast as possible.

The Carbon version of XPress 5.0 previewed in Macworld.

How long did it take developers to release these updates? Remember, Mac OS 10.0 came out in March 2001, and it was very raw. Critical features like disc burning and DVD playback were missing in action. Even if some users could live without those features, it was just too slow to be usable day-to-day. It wasn't until the 10.1 update in September 2001 that you could try to use it on a daily basis, instead of poking at a few apps, saying "cool" and and then going back to OS 9 to get some work done. So Microsoft’s release of Office v.X for Mac in November 2001 was timed perfectly to catch the wave of new 10.1 users. Adobe wasn’t doing the whole Creative Suite thing at the time, so apps were released on their own schedules. Adobe’s Carbon conversions started with Illustrator 10 in October 2001, InDesign 2.0 in January 2002, and Photoshop 7.0 in March 2002. Macromedia was one of the first aboard the OS X train, releasing a Carbon version of Freehand in May 2001. Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash all got Carbon versions with the MX Studio suite in the spring of 2002. Even smaller companies managed it—Extensis released a Carbon version of their font manager Suitcase in November 2001!

One year after the launch of Mac OS X, a working graphic designer could have an all OS X workflow, except for, you guessed it... QuarkXPress. How long would Quark make users wait? Well, in January 2002, they released QuarkXPress 5.0… except it wasn't a Carbon app, and it only ran in classic Mac OS. Journalists at the launch event asked about OS X, of course, and Quark PR flack Glen Turpin promised the Carbon version of QuarkXPress would be here Real Soon Now:

“The Carbon version of QuarkXPress 5 will be the next upgrade. There’s one thing we need to do before the Carbon version of QuarkXPress 5 is released: We need to launch QuarkXPress 5.0 in Europe.”

Would you believe that Quark, a company notorious for slow and unpredictable development, never shipped that promised Carbon update for version 5.0? Quark customers had to wait until QuarkXPress 6.0 in June 2003 for an OS X native version. Users who'd bought 5.0 had to upgrade again. And users who'd stayed with 4.x got charged double the price of a 5.0 upgrade—and yes, that's for upgrading to 6. Ask me how I know. Quark’s unfashionable lateness to the OS X party was another log in the chimney fire of failing customer relations. Despite Quark's many virtues, they charged out the ear for upgrades and tech support, and their leadership was openly hostile to customers. Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi actually said that if you didn't like Quark's support for the Mac, you could, and I quote, “Switch to something else.” He thought that meant QuarkXPress for Windows. What it actually turned out to mean was Adobe InDesign.

The moral of the story is that customer dissatisfaction can reach a tipping point faster than CEOs expect. You can only take users for granted for so long before they decide to bail. Quark squandered fifteen years of market leadership and never recovered. Dropbox isn’t the only cloud storage solution out there, and they’d be wise to remember that. Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have native ARM clients in their beta channels. Box—not Dropbox, just plain old Box—released a native client in November 2021. Backblaze also has a native client, and NextCloud’s next release candidate is ARM native too.

When I was writing this episode, I had no idea when Dropbox would finally deliver an ARM-native client. The only clue I had was Houston’s tweet about the first half of 2022. At the time, I thought that “first half” could mean January. It could mean June. It could mean not even by June. Your guess would have been as good as mine. In my final draft I challenged Dropbox to release something in the first quarter of 2022. Imagine my surprise when just before I started my first time recording of this episode, Dropbox announced an upcoming beta version supporting Apple Silicon. This beta was already in the hands of a small group of testers, and was released to the public beta channel on January 13. I had to make a few… minor revisions to this after that. There’s still no exact date for a full final version—I’ll guess, oh, springtime. Even though that challenge wasn’t published yet, I still wrote it, and pretending I didn’t would be dishonest. I am a man of my word—you got me, Dropbox. Still, that doesn’t make up for poor communication and taking your users for granted. You still got work to do.

My Future with Dropbox and Comparing the Competition

Before my fellow nerds start heckling me, I know Mac users aren’t the majority of Dropbox’s customers. Windows users significantly outnumber Mac users, and their business won’t collapse if Mac users leave en masse. But like dropping client support for Linux, it’s another sign that Dropbox is starting to slip. You have to wonder what woes might befall Windows customers in due time. After all, Dropbox has yet to ship ARM binaries for Windows, which is a problem if you're using an ARM Windows device like a Microsoft Surface or virtualizing Windows on ARM. If you really want to access Dropbox on an ARM Windows device, you’re forced to use Dropbox’s tablet app, and that’s not quite right for a cursor and keyboard environment.

Amidst all this anguish about clients, I do want to emphasize that Dropbox’s core competency—hosting, storage, and syncing—is still very good. After all, the client might be the most visible part of a cloud-based storage system, but there's still… you know… the cloud-based part. People are willing to put up with a certain amount of foibles from a client as long as their content syncs and doesn't disappear, and Dropbox's sync and web services are still top of the line. Considering how long it took Apple to get iCloud Drive to a reasonable level of service, that competency has a lot of value. External APIs bring Dropbox integration to other applications, and if you've still got a standalone 1Password vault, Dropbox will still be useful. All these factors make it hard to disentangle Dropbox from a workflow, and I get why people are waiting and won’t switch unless absolutely necessary.

So what’s the plan? For now, I’ve switched to Maestral, a third party Dropbox client. Maestral runs natively on Apple Silicon and consumes far less resources than the official client. While Maestral syncs files just fine, it does sacrifice some features like icon overlays in the Finder. I also signed up for Apple’s 50 gigabyte iCloud plan, and in my mixed Mac and Windows environment it works pretty well. And it’s only a fraction of the price of Dropbox. iCloud’s syncing performance is satisfactory, but it still lags when it comes to workflow. Take a simple action like copying a share link. Apple’s share sheet is fine as far as interfaces go, but I don’t need to set permissions all the time. Just give me a simple right click option to copy a public link to the file or folder, please. As for Google Drive, their client software has been an absolute disaster every time I’ve used it, regardless if it’s on Mac or Windows. Microsoft OneDrive seems reasonable so far, but I haven’t subjected it to any kind of strenuous tests. If push comes to shove, I’ll probably go all-in on iCloud.

Share Sheet — This is complete overkill when most of the time you just need to copy a public link.

I miss what Dropbox was a decade ago, and I’m sad that it might end this way. It’s not over between us yet, but the passion’s dying. Without a serious turn-around, like a leaner native client and cheaper plans, I’ll have a hard time recommending them. It’s not my first software heartache, and I doubt it'll be my last, but I’d hoped Dropbox would be different. Naive of me, maybe, but Dropbox won’t shed any tears over me. Maybe the number of people I've signed up for their paid service balances out my basic account use over the years. Enthusiasm for Dropbox has all but dried up as they’ve prioritized IPOs and venture capital over their actual users. It’s that old Silicon Valley story—you either die the hero, or live long enough to become the venture capital villain. In the meantime, I’m sure there’ll be another cute utility that’ll catch my eye—and yes, that sounds flirtatious and silly. I began this episode with a “boy meets program” metaphor, but everybody knows that fairy tales are just that—fairy tales. Relationships take work, and that includes customer relationships. If one half isn't upholding their side, maybe it's time to move on.

It's not impossible that Dropbox could win me back... but it's more likely that I'll drop them.

Happy Twentieth Birthday, iMac G4

January 10, 2022 by Dan Vincent in podcast

What is a computer? A miserable little pile of… yeah, yeah, I’ve done that bit before. These days it’s hard for a new personal computer to truly surprise you. When you scroll through a site like Newegg or Best Buy, you’ll see the same old story. Laptops are the most popular form factor, flanked by towers on one side and all-in-one slabs on the other. Old-style horizontal desktops are D-E-D dead, replaced by even tinier towers or micro-PCs. The Raspberry Pi 400 brought the wedge-shaped keyboard computer combo back from the dead, which I appreciate. But seeing a brand new design, something no one else has done before? That’s a rare opportunity indeed.

Hop in the time machine and let’s visit twenty years ago today: January 7th, 2002. The place: a foggy San Francisco, California, where the Moscone Center opened its doors to the journalists and attendees of Macworld San Francisco. This day—keynote day—was a very special day, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs would present all kinds of new and shiny things. Steve warmed up the audience with the announcements of iPhoto and the 14 inch iBook, which was all well and good. As well paced and exciting as these keynotes were, everybody in the audience was waiting impatiently for Steve’s magic words: they wanted One More Thing. I can only imagine how it felt in person, but mortal geeks like me could stream it via QuickTime in all of its MPEG glory. I was virtually there, watching as Steve launched an all-new computer. That was my first exposure to the brand new iMac G4: a pixelated, compressed internet live stream. But even a video crushed by a low bitrate couldn’t obscure this reveal.

A black podium slowly rose from the center of the stage. My brain, poisoned from years of pop culture, imagined an orchestra swelling with beats from Also Sprach Zarathustra. From within the monolith came a snow white computer that could have been plucked right off the set of 2001. A 15 inch liquid crystal display stood above a spherical base; its panel framed by a white bezel with a clear acrylic ring that reflected the stage lighting like a halo. As the podium turned I caught a glimpse of the silver cylinder that connected the two together. Oohs and aahs flowed from the crowd as Steve gently moved the display with only his fingertips. He pulled it up and down, then tilted it forwards and backwards, and even swiveled from side to side. I didn’t think a screen could perform such gymnastics—it was like the display weighed nothing at all, yet when Steve let go it stayed firmly in place with no wobbles or wiggles. CRTs could swivel and pivot, but adjusting the height usually required plopping it on a stack of old encyclopedias. Other LCDs could only tilt forwards or backwards, including Apple’s pricey Cinema Displays.

I didn’t have to suffer with low-quality video for long. Apple posted some high-resolution beauty shots of the iMac on their website after the show. Photos couldn’t convey the monitor’s range of motion, but they could show off its unique design. When you look at the gumdrop-shaped iMac G3, you can see its evolutionary connection to the all-in-one Macs that came before it. Those computers were defined by a CRT stacked on top of disk drives and circuit boards, and the cases around these elements were shaped accordingly. iMac G3s were smoother and rounder, but you can see their evolutionary resemblance to a Power Mac 5500 or a Macintosh SE. An iMac G4 looks like a completely different species in comparison. It shares more visual design DNA with a desk lamp than the Macintosh 128K.

While iMacs are all-in-one computers, the iMac G4 feels the least all-in-one of them all. A literal all-in-one LCD computer puts everything into one chassis, but the iMac G4 is more of a spiritual all-in-one. Distinct components, like the display and the base, are tied into a cohesive whole thanks to the articulating arm. Jony Ive and his design team wanted to emphasize the natural thinness of an LCD display. So they let the thin display stand on its own, and all the computery bits were housed in a separate hemispherical base. Unusual for sure, but this form did have a function—it allowed for that lovely 180 degree swivel with no risk of bumps. Reviewers and users alike praised the original iMac for its friendliness and approachability, but the new model seemed even more personable.

Steve Jobs really thought Apple was on to something with the iMac’s new design. The new iMac was, quote, “The opportunity of the decade to reshape desktop computers.” Jobs, John Rubinstein, Jony Ive, and the rest of Apple’s hardware and industrial design teams knew that flat panel displays would radically change desktop computers. For a long time LCDs were found only on laptops or other portable devices because they were very expensive. Their advantages—less eyestrain, less power draw, thinness—came with disadvantages like slow refresh rates, poor color quality, and small sizes. Panel makers kept iterating and improving their product during the 1990s, slowly but surely chipping away at their limitations while bringing down costs. By the turn of the millennium, flat panels were finally good enough to make a play at the desktop.

The new iMac wasn’t the first all-in-one desktop LCD computer, much like the Macintosh 128K wasn’t the first all-in-one CRT computer. Both the Gateway Profile in 1999 and IBM NetVista X series in 2000 beat Apple to the flat-panel punch. Gateway chose to layer laptop components behind the LCD, turning a nominally thin display into a thick computer. It was still thinner than a CRT all-in-one, but it was slower and more expensive. IBM took a different route with their NetVista X40. Sculpted by ThinkPad designer Richard Sapper, the NetVista X40 evokes Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter with its angular black fuselage. Eschewing Gateway’s method of mounting everything behind the LCD, Sapper instead put the big, bulky items in a base and smoothly blended it into the display, forming an L-shaped pedestal. Place it next to the iMac G4 and you can see how Ive and Sapper came to the same conclusion: let each element be true to itself. Where their executions diverge is in the display’s range of adjustability—you can only tilt the NetVista X40’s display forwards or backwards. If you wanted height or swivel adjustments, you needed to shell out two hundred bucks for a Sapper-designed radial arm. Think of the desk-mounted monitor arms you can buy today, except this one suspends the whole computer above your desk.

Steve Jobs called out these competitors indirectly during the keynote by reciting the flaws of slab-style all-in-ones. Glomming the drives and electronics behind the display makes for a thick chassis, negating the thinness of a flat panel display. All those components in a tight space generated a lot of heat, which affected performance of both the computer and display. Side-mounted optical drives had to run slower, and thinner drives couldn’t burn DVDs either. Previous LCD all-in-ones also placed their ports on the side of their displays, forcing unsightly cables into your field of vision. The new iMac’s design solved all these problems while having a more functional neck than the NetVista X40.

But there was another all-in-one LCD computer that influenced the new iMac, and it came out years before Gateway and IBM’s attempts: The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. Coincidentally, this is also the 25th anniversary of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which was also announced on a January 7, but that was in 1997. Nicknamed the TAM, it was the swan song for Robert Brunner, Apple’s chief designer during the 1990s. Brunner’s Industrial Design Group—including Jony Ive—had been experimenting with flat-panel all-in-one designs since 1992 in a project called Pomona. Designers from inside and outside Apple contributed ideas that all shared the same core concept: Apple’s future was an all-in-one flat panel Macintosh. One of these ideas was a Mac sketched by Eric Chan and modeled by Robert Brunner. This design was inspired by and named after Richard Sapper’s Tizio desk lamp, which goes to show how referential all these designers are. You might have seen it before—it was on the cover of the May 1995 issue of Macworld. Tizio was a jet-black Mac with an LCD display attached to its base via an articulating arm—sounds familiar, doesn’t it? After reviewing many wildly different design concepts like Tizio and a Mac shaped like a vintage television, the team settled on a Brunner-designed Mac that resembled a Bang and Olufsen stereo. Jonathan Ive then transformed Brunner’s models into an actual case design, code named Spartacus.

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. Official Apple photo.

When members of the industrial design team finished the first Spartacus prototype in November of 1995, they envisioned it as a $3500 computer. Sure, that’s a premium price, but it was in line with Apple’s other premium products. But when Apple marketing executives saw the twentieth anniversary of the company looming on the horizon, they saw Spartacus as an opportunity. These executives decided to make Spartacus a limited edition collector’s computer, with a maximum production run of 20,000 units. The price ballooned to an outrageous $7499, and for an extra $2500 it would be delivered to your door in a limousine and set up by a tuxedoed technician. All the pomp and circumstance was the wrong way to market this otherwise interestingly designed computer, and the TAM flopped hard.

But the TAM’s outrageous price and marketing stunts are separate from its actual worth as a computer or as a design. From a technical point of view, it was a Power Mac 5500 that borrowed parts from a PowerBook 3400 and crammed them all into a case that looked more like hi-fi equipment than a computer. But the legacy of the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was more than just the computer itself—the process that gave us the TAM also gave Jony Ive and his team valuable experience with materials like aluminum and curved plastic surfaces, as well as new computer aided design techniques. Now that Apple was in a better place at the turn of the millennium, Industrial Design surely wanted another shot at a definitive LCD all-in-one Macintosh. I can imagine a meeting between Jony and Steve where Steve asks “if you could do it again, what would you do differently?” Fortunately, Jony Ive knew the TAM and its history inside and out—remember, he designed the production model. With a second chance to create a definitive LCD all-in-one, Ive and his team took the lessons they learned since designing the TAM and vowed to do it right this time.

During the iMac’s reveal, Jobs predicted that the iMac G4’s beauty and grace would redefine desktop computers for the next decade. Like wishing on a monkey’s paw, Steve’s prediction came true—just not in the way he thought it would. After only two years on the market, the beautiful and graceful iMac G4 was replaced by the iMac G5. The complicated gooseneck was out and a simple aluminum stand was in. All the computer components and the display were crammed into a two inch thick white plastic case. Apple pitched this new design as bringing the iPod’s style to the desktop, but anyone who paid attention two years ago saw this white computer as a white flag. Apple had given up on their radical design and retreated to the safety of a slab. I don’t hate the iMac G5—it’s not an unattractive machine, but I can’t help but feel a little sad about what we lost in the iMac G4.

The M1 iMac with a VESA mount. Official Apple Photo.

Twenty years later, today’s iMacs carry the torch of the iMac G5, not the G4. Even the iMac G3’s radical rainbow color choices are lovingly homaged in the new Apple Silicon design. Where’s the love for the G4’s height adjustable screen? For years the slab-style iMacs have been stuck with tilt only adjustment, though admittedly they are light enough that you can simply turn the whole computer left and right. Astute listeners and readers won’t hesitate to point out the availability of VESA-mount iMacs. Since the slab iMac’s introduction, Apple has offered the ability to attach the iMac to any standard 100 by 100 VESA mount, like a wall mount or a desk arm. Some models could be converted with an add-on kit, but most require a trip to a fruit stand or an Apple authorized service provider to perform the conversion. Some are just plain stuck with their factory stand configurations. That said, adding a desk-mounted arm does bring back a lot of positional freedom. Alas, a VESA-mounted Mac won’t have the same effortless, soft-touch action as the iMac G4. Without something explicitly designed for the iMac’s weight and balance, it’ll always be a little tight or a little sloppy no matter how much you adjust the tension.

Steve might have cited “fatal flaws” as reasons to avoid an all-in-one slab, but as time went on the iMac G4 revealed its own set of flaws. That wonderful articulating arm was complex and expensive, and it could develop a droop over time. The base wasn’t exactly well ventilated, and the G4 processor ran quite hot. Apple never managed to put the even hotter G5 chips under its dome. But the most fatal of them all was, ironically, the cohesive visual design that made it so special. That free-floating display with its freedom of movement was still bound to the laws of physics. Without sufficient weight in the base to act as an anchor, the iMac could tip over when you push or pull on the screen. Apple only needed a few pounds of ballast to make this design work when paired with its original 15 inch display. But what happens when you attach a larger display?

iMac G4 15 and 20 inch comparison — Compare the two screen sizes. Official Apple Photos used for comparison

iMac G4s came in three sizes: 15, 17, and 20 inches, and the latter two were wide-screen ratios. An original 15 inch iMac G4 weighs 21 pounds. Upgrading to a 17 inch widescreen brought the weight up to 22.8 pounds, which isn’t much of a difference. But the 20 inch iMac G4, the biggest of them all, tipped the scales at a staggering 40 pounds—that made it heavier than an old CRT iMac G3! All the extra weight was ballast required to counterbalance the extra large screen size. Imagine how heavy 24 or 27 inch models would be! Another flaw with the 20 inch model was the visual proportions of the display when paired with the base. The same 10.8 inch diameter base supported all three display sizes, and what looked just right with the 15 and 17 inch screens didn’t pair well with the 20 inch. A larger base would consume more space on a desk and cost more to manufacture since it would reduce economies of scale. It’s a danger of making a design centered around solving a singular problem: sometimes it just doesn’t scale.

The iMac G4 might not look like the Mac 128K, but peel back their visual differences and you’ll find a similar philosophical core. All of its pieces work together in harmony to appeal to a more elegant idea of computing. Steve pitched it as the ultimate digital hub, where you would edit your home movies, touch up your vacation photos, and act as your digital jukebox. Part of this was thanks to the G4’s Velocity Engine, but it was also because iMacs are meant to look like a part of your home. Even though it evokes the same kind of glossy-white minimalism you’d find in an art museum, I have yet to see an iMac G4 look out of place whether it’s in a garage, a workshop, or a living room. You were inviting this computer into your home, and the iMac was designed to be the friendliest of guests.

ThinkPad 701C — The IBM ThinkPad 701’s trick keyboard let you have a ful-sized keyboard with a teeny tiny notebook. Official Richard Sapper photo.

Separating emotions from the iMac G4 is very difficult because it is an emotional machine. It looks like a person and tries to move like one. Even if it died due to practical realities, the world is still a better place for its existence. The iMac G4 joins such illustrious examples as the ThinkPad 701’s butterfly keyboard—the good butterfly keyboard. History is littered with designs like these—great solutions that get left behind because other designs were deemed “good enough.” Or in the case of the ThinkPad 701, the problem it was engineered to solve doesn’t exist anymore. It’s harder to justify a trick keyboard when you can make a laptop with a bigger screen that weighs less than the 701.

I didn’t own one back in the day, but I did procure a well-loved example a few years ago. My iMac G4 lives on more as an ornament than a computer, operating as a digital photo frame and jukebox. Every time I look at it, I get a little wistful and think of what might have been. Somehow the iMac G4 managed to pull off what the G4 Cube couldn’t: it was a computer that was both a work of art and a sales success. Let's raise a toast to the anniversary of this confluence of design and engineering. Twenty years later, the iMac G4 is still the computer that’s the most human of them all.

PageMaker 4.0 Podcast is Up! →

December 28, 2021 by Dan Vincent in text-only

A while back I wrote a text post about PageMaker 4.0. Well, it’s been rewritten and recorded into a podcast! If you missed it the first time, or want to hear an even better version of it, check it out!

Let Macs Control Apple TVs

December 13, 2021 by Dan Vincent in text-only

If you have an Apple TV and an iPhone, you might be familiar with the Apple TV Remote app. It used to be a standalone application until Apple moved its functionality to Control Center in iOS 12. After pairing with the Apple TV, all the functions of your remote control are now available on your iPhone. If you like swiping around to navigate an interface, I suppose you’d like the bigger trackpad surface. It’s also great to have another way to control an Apple TV without shelling out for another remote, just in case that slippery thing goes missing. Or if you just don’t like the “which way is up” Siri remote, that’s fair too.

Remote control is also available on the iPad, and there’s a cut-down version on the Apple Watch too. Even HomePods can control Apple TVs via Siri. But for some reason, Macs can’t remotely control an Apple TV. Macs can’t fast forward, adjust the volume, or queue up the next episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Apple has yet to publish a standalone app, menu extra, or control center doohickey that’ll put your Mac in control of your TV. I imagine a Mac wouldn’t be somebody’s primary remote control, but having the ability to send commands from a Mac could be useful in other ways. Imagine Shortcuts remotely controlling your Apple TV.

But that’s not why I want the Remote functionality on my Mac. There’s one feature that puts the iOS remote above a Siri or infrared remote: text entry. If you’ve had the displeasure of entering any kind of text on a TV with a remote control, you’ll know why this feature is helpful. Whether they come in a grid or a line, on-screen keyboards are the most infuriating part of streaming devices and smart TVs. Apple TV’s system-level keyboard used to use the grid-based keyboard until the launch of the Siri remote, which introduced the line-based keyboard. You can still use the grid-based one if you use an infrared remote, but some apps will force line-based input regardless—Netflix, I’m looking at you.

This horizontal nightmare is inflicted not just on Apple TV users, but also Chromecast and Roku owners too.

There’s an escape hatch to this line-and-grid prison if you’ve paired your iPhone or iPad to your Apple TV as a remote. When a text field pops up on screen, you’ll get a notification on your iOS device to enter some text. This text field behaves like any other, and you can type anything into it. Thumboarding on a phone is far quicker than pressing multiple buttons or swiping around using normal remote controls. It took fifteen seconds for me to type five letters using the awful horizontal arrangement. Unlocking my iPhone and using its keyboard cuts that time to two seconds. If you’re already in the Remote app, it’s even faster than that.

This is incredibly useful, and not just for finding the right film for your Friday night Netflix fix—this text field can summon password managers! If you’re like me and have uniquely generated random passwords for every single login—complete with numbers, special characters, and capital letters—entering them with an on-screen keyboard is torture. So it’s super handy to autofill or paste a password from Bitwarden instead of hunting and pecking with an on-screen keyboard! This feature’s been around for three years now on iOS devices, but it’s nowhere in sight for a Mac. People watch TV with their laptops, they AirPlay from laptops to TVs, and there could be TVs in rooms with desktop Macs. Given that Macs can now AirPlay to other Macs in Monterey, the absence of an Apple TV remote on the Mac is glaring.

Now Playing Menu Extra — The Mac OS Now Playing menu extra.

So how would you add this functionality to a Mac?Sure, a standalone application could do the job, but the Mac has many ways to add the controls. Let’s start with the Now Playing menu extra. Introduced in Big Sur, Now Playing is a quick shortcut to control media apps. Why not Apple TVs? Pull down the menu and you could play, pause, or fast forward whatever’s currently playing on any of the Apple TVs on your network. Easy peasy.

But Now Playing is fairly limited in terms of space, and shoving a full remote in there would be overkill. Along with Now Playing, a standalone Remote app can mimic all the functions of the iOS Remote app. Just bring it all over. Want to move through menus with your Mac’s trackpad like the Siri remote? Swipe away! Hate swiping? Use arrow keys or click on the buttons with a mouse! As for keyboard access, the app could show text prompts just like on iOS, but don’t forget about Notification Center. When a text prompt comes up on the Mac, it should be an interactive one that you can type into, just like Messages’ alerts. The next time a password or text prompt shows up, I won’t have to reach for my iPhone again! The lives of multi-screeners who use a TV and laptop at the same time will never be the same again!

Okay, okay—I admit, that’s a bit much. I know this feature won’t change the world, but the whole ethos that Apple is pushing these days is “ecosystem.” Macs should be part of the Apple TV remote ecosystem, just like they’re part of the AirPlay ecosystem. AirPlaying from my laptop to my Apple TV is one of the best ways to work through my daily YouTube queue, and I can pause, rewind, and fast forward using controls on my Mac. That’s been there since day one of AirPlay. Let’s get remote control and text entry on the same level.

Now, I know there’s some workarounds I could use right now. I do have a Bluetooth keyboard paired up with my Apple TV. I think it’s mixed in the drawer of game controllers and miscellaneous games in the entertainment center. But that keyboard can’t autofill passwords, and the goal is to avoid having to use a separate input device. Still, if you want to use one, it’s a valid option. Game controllers can control an Apple TV too, but they’re not that great at text input. Just ask Microsoft, who made an add-on keyboard for Xbox controllers.

“Just pick up your phone!” you say. Well, my phone might be another room. My Mac might be more convenient. Plus, my Mac has a real keyboard, and it’s easier to copy-n-paste passwords with a real pointer and keyboard.

“Use CiderTV or Ezzi Keyboard!” Yes, that’s true. They do exist. But this should be an operating system level feature. These apps also don’t have all the functionality of the Remote app, since they’re just emulating a bluetooth keyboard. Still, they are useful and their developer is filling a nice that Apple seems to be overlooking.

I’ve also been told that Roomie Remote has full support for controlling Apple TVs including text input, but $60/year is pretty steep for just that functionality alone. It looks like a very powerful utility with a lot of functionality, and in that context the $60 is likely justified. But for just reproducing the Apple TV remote app on a Mac, it’s overkill.

So, to Apple, I issue this challenge: let my Mac control an Apple TV. You’ll make a minor inconvenience disappear, and for that I would commend you.

The Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT - Nifty Thrifties

December 07, 2021 by Dan Vincent in podcast

Here in Userlandia: a new home for wayward laptops.

Do you like searching for old tech? Sure, you can try Craigslist, Letgo, or even—ugh—Facebook Marketplace. But if you're really feeling adventurous, there's nothing like a trip to a thrift store. If you're someone who'd rescue a lonely old computer abandoned by the side of the road, then Nifty Thrifties is the series for you. After all, one person’s obsolete is another’s retro treasure. Like most retro enthusiasts, I’m always on the hunt for old junk. My usual thrifting circuit consists of Savers, Goodwill, and Salvation Army stores in the Merrimack River valley of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. I leave empty handed more times than I care to admit, but every once in a while fortune smiles upon me and I find something special.

Here’s a recent example. Back in August, I was combing through the usual pile of DVD players and iPod docks in the electronics section at the Savers in Nashua, New Hampshire. It was about to be another regulation day ending in regulation disappointment when two platinum slabs caught my eye. I dug them out and was quite surprised to find two identical Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT laptops, tagged at $7 apiece. Dock connectors, PCMCIA ethernet cards, and Pentium MMX stickers pegged their vintage around 1997. Toshiba always made good laptops, and Satellite Pros were business machines aimed at a demanding clientele. Both laptops were in decent physical condition, but they lacked power supplies—hence the low price. Missing power adapters don’t faze me since I have a universal laptop power adapter. Whatever their problems, I figured I could probably make one working laptop out of two broken ones. I happily paid the fourteen dollars total and headed home with my prize.

Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT — Not bad, for a machine old enough to drink.

The first order of business when picking up old tech is a thorough cleaning. “You don’t know where they’ve been,” as my mom would say. Although these didn't look too dirty, a basic rubdown with a damp cloth still removed a fair bit of grime. After cleanup comes the smoke test. We begin with laptop A, distinguished by a label on the bottom referencing its previous owner—hello, JG! After a bit of trial and error, I found the correct tip for the universal charger, plugged it in, and held my breath. After a tense moment, the laptop’s power and charge LEDs glowed green and orange. Success—the patient has a pulse!

Confident that the laptop wouldn’t burst into flames, I pressed the power button and waited for signs of life. An old hard drive spun up with a whine, but no grinding or clicking noises—a good sign. Next came the display, whose backlight flickered with that familiar active matrix glow. A few seconds later the BIOS copyright text announced a Chips and Technologies BIOS, a common one for the time. Things were looking good until my new friend finished its memory test. A cursor blinked at me, cheerfully asking: “Password?” My new friend had a BIOS supervisor password! I tried a few basic guesses—Toshiba? Password? 12345?—but JG hadn't been that sloppy. New Friend called me out with a loud beep and shut itself down.

Well, there was always laptop B. I plugged in the charger, the LEDs came on, I powered it up… and got the same result. Both of the laptops had supervisor passwords. Great. Adding injury to insult, laptop B’s display panel had multiple stripes of dead pixels. At least everything else on both computers seemed to be working. I bet they’d boot just fine if I could get around the password. This would be a delicate operation, one that required a light touch—like a safecracker.

Breaking Through The Back Door

Security for personal computing was an afterthought in the early days. Operating systems for single-user home computers were, well, single-user, and didn’t need any permissions or login security. But when laptops were invented, people asked inconvenient questions like "what happens when somebody steals one?” The laptop makers didn't have a good answer for that, so they hastily threw together some almost-solutions, like password-lock programs that ran during OS startup. In MS-DOS land, startup programs or drivers were specified in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files, and there were plenty of ways to bypass them. Even a password program embedded in a hard drive’s bootloader can’t stop someone from booting the computer with a floppy disk. It's like tying your bike to a parking meter with a rope. Inconvenient to defeat, but easy if you know how and have the right tools. There’s got to be a better way!

Well, that better way was a supervisor password. When a PC starts up, the system’s BIOS gets things moving by performing a power-on self test and configuring hardware devices. After finishing its work, the BIOS hands control over to a bootloader which then starts the operating system. A supervisor password sits in-between the self-test and hardware configuration stages. If you don’t know the magic word, the BIOS will never finish its startup routine and thus will never start the bootloader. This closes the external storage loophole and ensures only an authorized user could start the operating system.

Early supervisor passwords were stored in the battery-backed CMOS settings memory—the very same memory used for disk configuration data and the real-time clock. To clear these passwords, all you had to do was unplug the computer’s clock battery. To close that hole, laptop makers pivoted to non-volatile memory. A password stored in an EEPROM or flash memory chip would never be forgotten even if batteries were removed, went flat, leaked acid, or—as can happen if you're really unlucky—literally exploded. So what kind of lock did my new friends have?

Some light Googling revealed that Toshiba laptops made from 1994 until sometime around 2006 stored the password in a reprogrammable ROM chip on the motherboard. Because Toshiba anticipated users forgetting their supervisor passwords, they included a backdoor in their password system. An authorized Toshiba service tech could convince the machine to forget its password by plugging a special dongle into the parallel port and powering on the locked laptop. Apparently this service cost $75, which is a bargain when you're locked out of a $3000 laptop.

Now, backdoors are generally a bad thing for security. But users and administrators are always making tradeoffs between security and usability. Businesses wanted the security of the password, but they also wanted the ability to reset it. In principle, only Toshiba and its techs knew about the backdoor. But once customers knew that resetting the passwords was possible, it was only a matter of time before some enterprising hacker—and/or unscrupulous former Toshiba employee—figured out how to replicate this. And the backdoor was just one of the Satellite’s security flaws. The hard disk carrier was held in place by a single screw. Anyone with physical access could yoink out the disk and read all its data, since there was no support for full disk encryption. Odds are, Toshiba thought being able to save customers from themselves was more important than pure security.

So how does this backdoor work? It’s actually quite simple— for a given value of “simple.” Toshiba used a parallel port loopback. By connecting the port’s transmit pins back to its own receive pins, the computer is able to send and receive data to itself. It’s a common way to test a port and make sure all its data lines are working. When the laptop is powered on, it sends a signal to the parallel port’s transmit pins. If that signal makes it back to the receive pins, the BIOS clears the password stored on the EEPROM and the computer is ready to boot.

So how would you reset the password without paying Toshiba to do it, just in case they stopped supporting those laptops fifteen years ago? Just wire up a homemade loopback dongle! It's easy enough—again, for a given value of “easy.” Multiple websites have instructions for building a DIY password reset dongle. You can cut up a parallel cable, solder some wires together to connect the right pins to each other, and you'll have those laptops unlocked before you know it.

Of course, I didn't actually have any parallel cables I could cut up, no. That would have been too convenient. Since I only needed this to work once for each machine, I took a page from Angus MacGyver's playbook and connected the pins using paperclips. If you want to try this yourself, just make sure none of the paperclips touch each other, except the ones for pins one, five, and ten. Make sure to unplug the power supply first and wear a grounded wrist strap while connecting the pins. And... well, basically, read all the instructions first.

As with the best MacGyver stories, the paperclips worked perfectly. Once the paperclips were in place, I powered the machines back on, and the password prompts disappeared. Both laptops carried on with their boot sequence and the familiar Windows 95 splash screen graced both displays. I opened the locks, but that was just step one in bringing these computers back to life.

Check it. pic.twitter.com/QsaGLpkV5p
— Dan Vincent (@kefkafloyd) August 14, 2021

Laptop B—the one with the half-working screen—made it to a working desktop. Unfortunately those black stripes running through the screen meant I needed an external display to do anything useful. Laptop A, which had a functioning screen, was problematic in other ways. It crashed halfway through startup with the following error:

"Cannot find a device file that may be needed to run Windows or a Windows application. The Windows registry or SYSTEM.INI file refers to this device file, but the device file no longer exists. If you deleted this file on purpose, try uninstalling the associated application using its uninstall program or setup program.”

Laptop Displaying Windows 95 Splash Screen

I haven’t used a Windows 9x-based system in nearly two decades, but I still remember a lot from that era. I didn’t need Google to know this error meant there was a problem loading a device driver. Usually the error names which driver or service is misbehaving, but this time that line was blank. I rebooted while pressing the F8 key to start in safe mode—and it worked! I got to the desktop and saw a bunch of detritus from the previous owner. This machine hadn’t been cleanly formatted before it was abandoned, likely because nobody could remember the supervisor password. Safe Mode meant the problem was fixable—but Windows wasn’t going to make it easy.

Microsoft’s impressive ability to maintain backwards compatibility has a downside, and that downside is complexity. Troubleshooting startup problems in the Windows 9x era was part science, part art, and a huge helping of luck. Bypassing autoexec.bat and config.sys was the first step, but that didn’t make a difference. Next was swapping in backup copies of critical system configuration files like win.ini and system.ini, which didn’t help either. With the easy steps out of the way, I had to dig deeper. I rebooted and told Windows to generate a startup log, which would list every part of the boot sequence. According to the log, the sequence got partway through the list of VxDs—virtual device drivers—and then tripped over its own feet. Troubleshooting VxD problems requires a trip to that most annoying of places: the Windows Registry.

I can understand the logic behind creating the registry. It was supposed to order the chaos created from the sea of .INI files that programs littered across your hard drive. But in solving a thousand scattered small problems, Microsoft created one big centralized one. Even though I know the registry's logic and tricks, I avoid going in there unless I have to. And it looked like I had to. Since the problem was a VxD, I had to inspect every single key in the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlset\Services\VxD

After inspecting dozens of keys, I found the culprit: a Symantec Norton Antivirus VxD key was missing its StaticVXD path. Without that path the OS tries to load an undefined driver, and the boot process stumbles to a halt. An antivirus program causing more problems than it solves? Whoever heard of such a thing! I deleted the entire key, rebooted, and New Friend started just fine. Hooray! I landed at a desktop full of productivity applications and Lotus Notes email archives. According to their labels, these laptops belonged to salespeople at a national life insurance company. Don’t worry—I cleaned things up, so all that personally identifiable information is gone. Still, it bears repeating: when disposing of old computers, format the disks. Shred your hard drives if you have to.

Where Do You Want To Go Today?

1997 was an amazing year for technology, or maybe for being a technologist. No one knew then that the merger of Apple and NeXT would change the world. Microsoft and Netscape’s browser war was drawing the attention of the US Justice Department. Palm Pilots were finally making handhelds useful. Sony’s PlayStation had finally wrested the title of most popular game console away from Nintendo. Demand for PCs was at a fever pitch because nobody wanted to miss out on the World Wide Web, and laptops were more affordable and user-friendly than ever before.

If you were looking for a laptop in 1997, what would you buy? Apple was selling the fastest notebook in the world with the PowerBook 3400C, but if you couldn’t—or wouldn’t—run Mac OS, that speed wasn’t helpful to you. DOS and Windows users were reaping the benefits of competition, with big names like IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP, and of course Toshiba, dueling for their dollars. Most buyers were shopping for midrange models, and Toshiba aimed the 1997 Satellite range directly at these Mister Sensible types. The lineup started with the Satellite 220CDS at $1899 and topped out with the 460CDT at $3659 according to an October 1997 CDW catalog. That works out to $3,272 to $6,305 in 2021 dollars. The Satellite family featured similar cases, ports, and expansion options across the lineup. What differentiated the models were case colors, types of screens, CPU type and speed, the amount of memory, and available hard drive space.

If you had the scratch for a 460CDT, you scored a well equipped laptop. The bottom-line specs are all competitive for the time: a 166MHz Pentium MMX processor, 32 megabytes of RAM, and a staggeringly huge two gigabyte hard drive. CD-ROMs were standard equipment across all of Toshiba’s Satellite laptops, though there wasn’t enough room for both a floppy and CD-ROM drive at the same time. Don’t worry, because the SelectBay system allowed the user to quickly swap the CD-ROM for a floppy drive, hard drive, or a second battery. Multimedia games and PowerPoint presentations were no problem thanks to integrated stereo sound and 24-bit true color Super VGA video output.

Despite all these standard features, laptops of 1997 were still significant compromises compared to their desktop counterparts. Active matrix color TFT screens looked beautiful—but only if your eyes stayed within a narrow viewing angle. Trackpoints and trackpads may have kicked trackballs to the curb, but most users still preferred a mouse when at a desk. Memory often came on proprietary boards, hard drives were smaller and more fragile, and PCMCIA cards were expensive. Power management features in Windows laptops were rudimentary at best—standby never worked very well and it drained the battery faster than a Mac’s sleep function. But this was the tradeoff for portability. To us, today, it's obvious that these are significant disadvantages. But back then, they were top of the line. Think about the average laptop buyer in 1997: mobile IT professionals, road warrior businesspeople, and well-off college students. They were not just willing, but eager to accept these compromises in the name of true portability.

In their prime, these laptops were beloved by demanding business users. Today they’re worth only a fraction of their original price tags, fated to rot in an attic or get melted down by a recycler. So if you stumbled across one in the wild, why would you grab it? Well, it turns out these laptops are decent retro gaming machines. It’s a bit ironic, because serious gamers in 1997 wouldn’t touch a laptop. But hear me out—for playing MS-DOS and Windows 95-era games, these machines are a great choice.

Most laptops of this era fall into a Goldilocks zone of compatibility. A Pentium MMX-era PC can still natively run MS-DOS along with Windows 95, 98, or even NT 4.0. Windows is still snappy and responsive, and demanding DOS games like Star Wars: Dark Forces are buttery smooth. Unlike most older laptops, these Toshiba models have built-in SoundBlaster-compatible digital sound with a genuine Yamaha OPL-3 synthesizer for authentic retro music. Though it lacks a 3D accelerator, the Chips & Technologies graphics processor supports your favorite DOS video modes and has good Windows performance. There’s even a joystick port, although granted, it requires an adapter. External video is available (and recommended), but the LCD panel can run both in scaled and unscaled modes, giving some flexibility compared to laptops that are forced to run 320x240 in a tiny portion of the panel.

Running some games across all these eras was painless—again, for a given value of “painless.” I tried my favorite DOS games first: Doom 2 and Warcraft 2. Blasting demons and bossing peons around was effortless on this Pentium machine. Windows and DOS versions of SimCity 2000 ran A-OK, though the FM synth version of the soundtrack isn’t my favorite. But this CD-ROM machine was made for multimedia masterpieces like You Don’t Know Jack, and announcer Cookie Masterson came through crystal clear on the built-in speakers. The most demanding game I tried, Quake, still ran acceptably in software rendering mode. For seven bucks, this is one of the best retro values I’ve ever picked up—and I have two of them! It’s a testament to Toshiba’s history as an innovator in the portable space that these machines still work this well twenty five years on.

The Toshiba Satellite Legacy

Toshiba’s been a leading Japanese heavy manufacturing concern for over a century. Like Sony, their name is on so many products that it’s probably easier to list what they don’t make. With a history in computing stretching back to the mainframe era, and their expertise in consumer electronics, Toshiba personal computers were inevitable. After designing a few microcomputers of their own, Toshiba joined Microsoft and other Japanese electronics companies to form the MSX consortium. Toshiba’s MSX machines were perfectly fine, but they were mostly known only in Asian markets. If they wanted to compete on the global stage, they’d need to bring something unique to the table.

Everything changed for Toshiba in 1985 when they introduced the T1100, one of the first laptop computers. Toshiba liked to hype up the T1100 as “the first mass market laptop,” which is true from a certain point of view. It’s not the first clamshell laptop—that honor belongs to the GRiD Compass. Other clamshell-style machines followed suit, like the Sharp PC-5000 and the Gavilan SC. Don’t forget the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 either, which was just as much of a laptop despite a flat slab chassis. So what did Toshiba bring to the table?

Each of those predecessors had some kind of compromise. The GRiD Compass was the first clamshell, but since it didn’t have a battery its portability was limited to wherever you could plug in to a power socket. Gavilan and Sharp’s offerings had batteries, but both machines had compromised displays that could only show eight lines of text at a time. What about operating systems? GRiD wrote a custom operating system for its PCs, while Sharp and Gavilan used MS-DOS. But they weren't fully MS-DOS compatible, because MS-DOS expected a 25-line display instead of that measly 8. The T1100 managed to beat them all by having a 25 line display, battery power, integrated 3.5 inch floppy drive, and full MS-DOS compatibility.

Weighing in at 8.8 pounds, the T1100 was also the lightest of the first battery-powered clamshells. Toshiba’s PC engineers pitched it as a go-anywhere machine for a demanding user, but according to project leader Atsuoshi Nishida, Some Toshiba Executives Who Would Rather Not Be Named had their doubts about whether there was a market for something so expensive. The T1100 met Nishida’s first year sales target of ten thousand units in Europe, proving that MS-DOS portable computers didn’t have to be back-breaking suitcase-sized luggables.

In 1989, Toshiba introduced the first super-slim, super-light notebook computer. They dubbed it Dynabook—the name computer pioneer Alan Kay had suggested for an always-connected, take-anywhere computer. The chief of Toshiba’s computer division, Tetsuya Mizoguchi, easily secured that name in European markets. Japan and the US were more difficult, because some other companies had trademarked that name already. In Japan, that was the ASCII Corporation. Mizoguchi called the president of ASCII, Kazuhiko Nishi, and secured a license for the Dynabook name. Unfortunately, Mizoguchi didn’t have those special connections in America. Because Toshiba wouldn’t—or couldn’t—cough up the licensing fees, models for the US market omitted the Dynabook name.

Steve Jobs running OpenStep on a Toshiba Tecra laptop.

Toshiba maintained a leadership position in the laptop market despite competition from the likes of Compaq, Dell, and IBM because they pushed the envelope on power and features. Toshiba laptops were some of the first to feature hard drives, lithium ion batteries, CD-ROM drives, PCMCIA card slots, and more. When NeXT was in its post-hardware days, Steve Jobs ran OpenStep on a Toshiba laptop, and it’s hard to find a better endorsement than that.

By the mid-nineties, competition in the laptop sector was stiff. Toshiba adapted to changing times by creating multiple product lines to attack all levels of the market. The Satellite and Satellite Pro series were the mainstream models, preferred by perpetrators of PowerPoint for their rugged construction and balanced feature list. If you desired something less weighty, the compact Portégé subnotebook gave you the essentials for portable computing in a smaller, lighter package. If the Portégé was still too big, you could try the Libretto: a petite palmtop with paperback proportions packing a Pentium-powered punch. Lastly, there’s the Tecra series. As Toshiba’s desktop replacements, Tecras had the biggest screens, the fastest processors, and a veritable Christmas list of features. All it cost you was most of your bank account and a tired shoulder from lugging all the weight around.

This strategy served Toshiba well for nearly two decades, but you know what they say about all good things. You might’ve seen the news in 2020 that Toshiba left the laptop market. Like IBM selling its PC business to Lenovo in 2005, Toshiba decided to call it quits after years of cutthroat, low-margin business. The first sell-off was in 2018, when Sharp purchased an 80% share in Toshiba’s Dynabook division. Two years later, Sharp bought the remaining 20%, completing Toshiba’s exit from the market. What used to be Toshiba laptops now bear the Dynabook name everywhere, not just Japan.

It’s not like Toshiba hadn’t faced competition before. There were just as many companies making laptops in 1997 as there were in 2018. We still have the old stalwarts like Dell, Sony, and HP, and though the labels say Lenovo the ThinkPad is always a popular choice. Don’t forget Apple’s still sniping at all of them too. Old names like Winbook, AST, Micron, and NEC may have fallen to the wayside, but Asus, Acer, MSI, and Razer have taken their place. The field’s just as crowded today as it was back then. Why did Toshiba bail out of the market they helped create?

Like IBM before them, Toshiba simply decided that they had enough of chasing razor-thin margins in a cutthroat market. Their money could be better spent elsewhere. Business gotta business, I suppose. Seeing Toshiba exit the laptop market is like seeing Minolta leave the camera business. These companies were innovators that changed the very core of their markets, and seeing them fall to the wayside breaks my heart. In the case of Minolta, they wisely sold their camera division to another company with a history of innovation: Sony. Every Sony Alpha and RX series camera sold today has some Minolta expertise inside. I can only hope that Sharp carries the legacy of Toshiba to new heights.

The future may be uncertain, but when it comes to the past Sharp might be all right. Dynabook’s website has a wealth of drivers, spec sheets, and knowledge base articles for decades-old computers. Go ahead and try to find drivers for a Compaq Armada of similar vintage on HP’s website—yeah, try. Most manufacturers are terrible about keeping any kind of support for vintage machines online, so major props to Toshiba and now Dynabook for providing some kind of long-term support.

I didn’t own a Toshiba laptop back in the day, but I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they could do. Or at least, respect for what they could do, according to the tech journalists in PC/Computing magazine. Part of the fun of reviving these retro relics is experiencing first-hand the things you lusted after and seeing if the reality lives up to the legend. Thanks to a little effort and a little luck, I was able to appreciate these machines for a fraction of their eBay prices. These Satellites are welcome in my orbit anytime.