What you don't miss, as a modern Mac user...

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
I was mentioning something in another thread about "thank goodness they chucked SCSI and ADB..." from the Macs and then started thinking about my old Quadra 610 and all the beige, boxy, pre-second-era Jobs Macs I've used at jobs over the years.



And an idea for a thread was born!



So I ask, is there anything any of you miss from the "old days" (pre-iEra) that you actually viewed as a better solution?



Or the other way around: what do you NOT miss these days?



Me?



- SCSI (6 device limit, ID numbers, terminators, having to shut down and restart to hook up a stupid scanner, etc.)

- ADB

- The fact that a keyboard and mouse were sold separately (and the keyboard - the one I had - was $133)

- Floppy drives

- Expensive, ridiculous RAM (in 1996, I paid $259 for 8MB...I shit you not)





I'm sure there are others and I realize that perhaps the RAM thing above isn't necessarily Apple-related, BUT it still affected me and how I used my Mac, so it counts.







I remember the day I first learned of the iMac (the original Bondi model in 1998) and had a momentary freak-out over "no floppy? What the hell? And what in the crap is USB? This thing is gonna TANK big-time!"



Yes, I'm an idiot.



Think back to System 7, SCSI and separately-purchased keyboads and mice...then fast forward today to USB, FireWire, included optical mouse, AirPort, Bluetooth, DVD-R drives, Ethernet on every model, FireWire on every model, built-in modems on every model, OS X, the iApps, etc.



What's YOUR little piece of Apple hardware/software history that you don't mind leaving behind forever?
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 33
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    Small screens is one of the first things that come to my mind. Comparing this iBook 14" to my old Plus, or even that old PowerBook 180... I don't miss peering hard to make out something on those small screens (my eyes, admittedly, aren't the best. I'm kind of hoping for an affordable 30" LCD with pixels the size of pigeon eggs).



    I would like to be able to say that I don't miss one button mice, but alas, that madness must continue for some time to come (at least, on the trackpad of my current and probable next laptop).



    Speed? I don't miss the speed of the mac Plus. I remember that pressing return on page 1 of a 10 page document (in ClarisWorks) required 5 to 10 seconds of calculation to scoot all those lines one line down.
  • Reply 2 of 33
    jlljll Posts: 2,713member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by der Kopf

    Small screens is one of the first things that come to my mind.



    When I first started using Macs (in 1993) I was using a 17" screen with a resolution of 1024x768. Today I use a 14.1" iBook and a 450MHz PMG4 with a 17" monitor.



    I would really like to not miss the 1024x768 resolution
  • Reply 3 of 33
    spartspart Posts: 2,060member
    Don't Miss:



    chug...chug...cught *cough* CRASH.



    Damn.



    Miss:



    The freaky chimes you could play at boot (ones that alerted you to hardware catastrophe) with command+power.



    The slightly different chimes on PPCs with command+power.



    Weaseling my way out of system bus errors and the like through that weird little command prompt (hold command and press the power key on a system booted up in a Classic Mac OS)



    Stuff using the command+power key in general.



    (Probably nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about.)
  • Reply 4 of 33
    rampancyrampancy Posts: 363member
    I have to say that I definitely don't miss Classic. On my Performa 6320/120, it didn't matter how thoroughly I paired down my system extensions, all it took was Internet Explorer and Outlook Express running together and either one or the other would bring my system to a crashing halt.



    What I also don't miss was Apple not having Ethernet on the Performas, at least, not the early 63xx and 62xx models. I think there's an adapter out there for the modem jack, but it's apparently quite hard to find. It's funny because I didn't think I'd need Ethernet, but looking back, it's something I think every Mac should have.



    But the one thing I don't think I'll ever miss is 640x480 resolution. Whenever I fire up a game in X which brings the resolution down to 640x480, I can momentarily see my desktop in that resolution, and all I can wonder is how I put with that for so long...



    I miss Apple's old keyboards.



    I also miss Cassady and Greene's Conflict Catcher. I recall many an hour spent tweaking my extension sets. That utility truly was God's gift to Mac users.
  • Reply 5 of 33
    progmacprogmac Posts: 1,850member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JLL

    When I first started using Macs (in 1993) I was using a 17" screen with a resolution of 1024x768. Today I use a 14.1" iBook and a 450MHz PMG4 with a 17" monitor.



    I would really like to not miss the 1024x768 resolution




    1024x768 is 1993?? That must have been one pricey monitor, especially if you were running over 60hz. You also would have had to have one hell of a video card to push it, in 1993.
  • Reply 6 of 33
    jlljll Posts: 2,713member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by progmac

    1024x768 is 1993?? That must have been one pricey monitor, especially if you were running over 60hz. You also would have had to have one hell of a video card to push it, in 1993.



    It was an Eizo monitor and they were very pricey (but so were the Macs back then).



    The Mac was a IIci with a Daystar processor upgrade (030).
  • Reply 7 of 33
    amoryaamorya Posts: 1,103member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by rampancy

    What I also don't miss was Apple not having Ethernet on the Performas, at least, not the early 63xx and 62xx models. I think there's an adapter out there for the modem jack, but it's apparently quite hard to find. It's funny because I didn't think I'd need Ethernet, but looking back, it's something I think every Mac should have.



    You can get ethernet cards for them. My 6200 now sits happily on my network.



    Amorya
  • Reply 8 of 33
    trumptmantrumptman Posts: 16,464member
    What don't I miss? Well as a Mac user from 1984 on and owner from 1990 on, I have lots to say about the use of Mac's over time.



    I don't miss having to manually switch on multifinder back in System 6. Why would you switch it on and off? Because when you only had a meg of ram, you had to stretch pretty darn hard sometimes, and also certain games wouldn't run with it on.



    I don't miss the blocky text that you to pass for fonts, especially on Imagewriters back before Truetype existed.



    I don't miss ANY 52xx/62xx series machine because they were just crap.



    I don't miss how all the Pluses had to have that seperate hard drive. I didn't mind attaching them to transfer with to my Classic/Classic II, but to have it be your only HD would have sucked.



    I personally didn't mind the 9 inch screens. They were the sharpest you could find at the time. They were much better than the blurry CGA/EGA screens and much better than even most VGA screens when you were paying top dollar for .28/.29 instead of .31 which was on the cheap monitors.(Which would cause you to yank your own eyes out of your skull to stop the pain)



    I don't miss nubus at all because everything available on it was profoundly expensive.



    Nick
  • Reply 9 of 33
    kelibkelib Posts: 740member
    I actually miss the old ADB printer port. I never had a problem with it but now I often have to unplug/plug again the usb port for my G4 iMac to find the printer. Maybe it's just the print manager that sux, I dunno. The simplicity of old is gone for good but we've got so many interesting new things instead. In short, I'm happier now than I was then



    What I don't miss however are the Performa/ LC series. What a crap the 5200 was! We have competitive consumer lineup 2day, something we never had before really
  • Reply 10 of 33
    jlljll Posts: 2,713member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by kelib

    I actually miss the old ADB printer port. I never had a problem with it but now I often have to unplug/plug again the usb port for my G4 iMac to find the printer.



    You should compare serial to USB - not ADB to USB.
  • Reply 11 of 33
    kelibkelib Posts: 740member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JLL

    You should compare serial to USB - not ADB to USB.



    I ment the Serial printer port
  • Reply 12 of 33
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    I miss Nimitz, the Apple Extended Keyboard. I don't miss its price tag (over $200).



    I miss the little toaster Macs. I don't miss doing the Endless Floppy Swap of Doom on little toaster Macs.



    I sometimes miss the classic Mac OS appearance. But I don't miss Platinum, the "Business Macintosh" version of that appearance.



    I miss my 8600. I don't miss paying $3400 for it, or waiting 9 months for Apple to ship it.



    I miss the way Macs used to boot up fast. I don't miss being reminded several times a day that they do indeed boot up fast.



    I miss the bomb dialog, but I don't miss the bomb dialog.



    I miss the dead easy, rock solid networking of AppleTalk. I don't miss the frozen-molasses speed of AppleTalk over serial.



    I miss the early, simple, clean Mac OS programs, before branding and cross-platform design and vanity interfaces had diluted the experience. I don't miss the early, baffling, widget-soup Mac OS programs, before people really got the point.



    I miss HyperCard. I don't miss opening HyperCard stacks in a text editor to extract data manually after they'd corrupted themselves.



    I miss the incredibly thorough documentation of Inside Macintosh. I don't miss the Mac OS Toolbox.



    I miss Dark Castle.
  • Reply 13 of 33
    brunobruinbrunobruin Posts: 552member
    I remember when background printing was a HUGE breakthrough. Prior to that, printing a document locked up your Mac until the last page emerged from the LaserWriter. Those were the days when, if you had a long document to print (oh, say, 24 pages), you started it and went to lunch (and then hoped your Mac didn't crash halfway through). I don't miss that.



    I also don't miss the days of early PageMaker, where you'd have to wait for a spread to completely redraw before you could turn a page. So you'd hit the wrong spread and then you'd have to sit there while eight or ten or 12 columns of type slooooowly floooowed into place, at which point you could turn to another spread.



    I honestly don't know how we got any work done at all.
  • Reply 14 of 33
    agent302agent302 Posts: 974member
    I don't miss clicking and holding every time you wanted to choose something from the menubar.
  • Reply 15 of 33
    serranoserrano Posts: 1,806member
    Pssst. ADB isn't gone. iBook trackpads use ADB.
  • Reply 16 of 33
    pscatespscates Posts: 5,847member
    Pssst. That wasn't what I was talking about...and you know it, so stop it.



  • Reply 17 of 33
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    I certainly don't miss cleaning that guck inside the old ball/mechanical mouse.



    I also don't miss the having to lug a heavy 8lb Lombard Powerbook...man it was a serious workout carrying that sucker around (surely that new lightweight 15" AL will be here soon)



    I also don't miss straining to adjust an old CRT monitor as a featherweight touch is only needed with my floating LCD iMac screen.
  • Reply 18 of 33
    applenutapplenut Posts: 5,768member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by satchmo



    I also don't miss the having to lug a heavy 8lb Lombard Powerbook...man it was a serious workout carrying that sucker around (surely that new lightweight 15" AL will be here soon)




    Lombard was between 5.7 and 6.1 lbs. Do you mean Wallstreet?
  • Reply 19 of 33
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by applenut

    Lombard was between 5.7 and 6.1 lbs. Do you mean Wallstreet?



    Yeah, you're probably right. It was a 233 mhz model with a 14.1 display. Very durable, but not good for my back.
  • Reply 20 of 33
    leonisleonis Posts: 3,427member
    what I don't miss:





    manual memory adjustment to each apps



    lack of protected memory



    co-operative multitasking



    ADB



    one button mouse



    rainbow Apple logo



    beige
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