Best and worst Macs ever
From MacFAQ
Contents |
[edit] The best Mac of all time
There have been many Macs since 1984. They were all Macs, but for one reason or another some have been more popular or better-loved than others, and some have acquired outstanding reputations within the Macintosh user community.
[edit] SE/30
Into its unassuming little case and behind the pin-sharp black-and-white built-in screen Apple packed a powerful computer which zipped along at 16MHz on a nice wide data bus. When it was launched in September 1989 it was one of the most powerful Macs available. That's no longer the case, of course, but all the same the SE/30 has proved in the intervening years to be one of the most useful Macs ever made. Its built-in FPU meant it was able to run software which even some later models couldn't. It was expandable up to 128MB RAM (1000 times as much as the very first Mac, and all in a case of the same size) which meant that it could keep pace with the ever-increasing RAM demands made by software and users - in fact it wasn't until the appearance of the PowerMacintosh 7100 over five years later that its RAM expansion capability was bettered. It was the first Mac to have the high-density SuperDrive as standard. In all, despite its closed architecture and the lack of expansion card slots that the rest of the world decried, the SE/30 was a thoroughly forward-looking machine. It was also (like most Macs of those years) massively over-engineered, which is why so many of them are still running reliably today. Most have suffered no more than a little screen-burn and some yellowing of the plastics, and some have spent almost every day of their lives hard at work without a flicker of complaint. Sadly, Apple decided not to name the machine the SE/x (the 'x' signifying the 68030 CPU) but apart from this minor failure of nerve they got almost everything else right, and produced one of the most popular and best-regarded computers ever made.
[edit] IIci
No Mac, apart from the Plus, was in production nearly as long (almost three-and-a-half years, an age as far as computers are concerned). During its production life it watched various LCs come and go, as well as some of the Quadras that should have rendered it obsolete. It wasn't until February 1993, on the eve of the PowerMac, that the last IIci rolled off the Apple production line - the IIci really was the Volkswagen Beetle of Macs. The IIci was the fastest of the sensible Mac II series (only the fx with its non-standard RAM SIMMs and non-standard serial ports that no-one ever really supported properly was faster). It was the first Mac with a built-in video output, though it was easy to upgrade with a more powerful NuBus video card in one of the three slots (who ever needed the six slots of the IIfx? and who ever needed them more than they needed the huge area of deskspace it occupied?). This well-judged balance of power, flexibility and moderation made the IIci such an attractive machine to buyers at the time: the combination, including the price (and this was something of a first for Apple), was just right. The IIci's generous 25MHz clock speed gave it an extra lease of usable life (and it's yet to run out as far as many users are concerned). Faster, better video, or a second screen? Stick in a NuBus card. Ethernet, so it can sit happily on a network with much newer Macs? Stick in a NuBus card. ISDN? High-level audio work? NuBus had it all covered.
[edit] The original iMac
Apple finally - after 15 years of the Mac - cracked the consumer market, and this was without compromising power and speed. The original iMac boasted a 233MHz G3, which at its launch made it faster than most Intel PCs available on the market. Apple broke a few other things too, though, including the mould of computing. Everyone knows what that iMac looks like now, and now that outrageous and astonishing design has become familiar (and inevitably, copied really badly by one or two computer companies who clearly haven't grasped what the point was at all). The iMac took the personal computer market by the scruff of its dirty neck and banged some new ideas into its piggish head. The floppy disk drive? 1984. Get rid of it. The serial ports? 1984. Get rid of them. SCSI? 1986. Get rid of it. Instead we got a brand new interface standard, the Universal Serial Bus, which had been languishing unimplemented for some time, and no choice. That lack of choice forced both producers and consumers to adopt it; a year on, USB had become a standard not only in theory but also in practice. What's more, we can now see that we didn't really need the floppy disk drive any more, or the old serial ports, or SCSI. The iMac was the Macintosh ideal come to fruition - this was the first time that computer technology was able to meet the demands of those ideals, and computer design mature enough to implement them properly. This little machine is a giant amongst Macs.
[edit] The worst Mac of all time
[edit] 4400
The worst Mac Apple ever made was the 4400. Next question?
All right, this is what was wrong with it. First of all, it has to be remembered that the 4400 was born during a fairly grim time for Apple. The short-lived Macintosh clones had not been around long, and had brought to the market two ideas unfamiliar to Apple: high specifications at low prices (good) and hideous styling (bad). To some extent the two went hand-in-hand, because the clone manufacturers were using parts, tools and techniques that the ultra-high-volume Intel PC box-makers used (some made a few ghastly attempts to 'style' their machines with moulded-plastic face-plates which looked as though they had been sculpted with shovels, but this was entirely superficial, and beneath the waves, ripples and crenellations there were the same rectangular boxes). Apple had to compete in the same market, and so design considerations in the 4400 were sacrificed for ones of economy. The box is a plain rectangular slab with none of the softness or confidence that Macs have always displayed. Inside the box is a tangle of leads, and sharp bits of metal which have to be screwed to one another (Mac users had come to expect neat cable headers at just the right places for internal drives and cards, and neatly-locking sliding plastic trays). It is not clear at a glance how to remove this or that component.
Perhaps it seems odd that this should merit the 4400 such a title. After all, the machine's styling is at least inoffensive, and compared to most PCs looks quite elegant. More importantly, there is really nothing functionally amiss with the machine, and its CPU can even be upgraded to a G3, bringing it up to speed with much newer machines. But what has always earned it disdain was its conception, not its execution. Apple users were naturally suspicious of the idea of of a Mac created in the image of an ordinary PC, and even more suspicious of the reasoning behind it. As it happened, the cloning experiment ended in failure (and recriminations, too) when Apple (in the person of Steve Jobs) decided that the clone-manufacturers were simply riding on the coat-tails of Apple's research, design and marketing, and abruptly terminated their licenses. With the end of cloning the pressure on Apple to produce anything like the 4400 disappeared, and that was the end of that.
[edit] 6200
There is in fact another Mac vying for this title, though, and that is the Performa 6200. It looked just like a Performa 630 (the only real difference between them was the motherboard). But whereas the 630 was a great little 68040 packed with multimedia hardware (TV card, video in, CDROM), the 6200 was a crippled PowerPC 603 struggling along at 75MHz and trying to manage some of the most unreliable System software Apple had ever produced for the PPC (the same software ran perfectly well on the 68040). Its serial ports were also below standard, another victim of Apple's drive to cut costs. It came with the spongiest Design Keyboard ever imagined. Its video performance was desperately poor. And then a huge number of them were shipped with defective ROM DIMMs, which meant that a lot of software (Open Transport and MacOS 8 for example) would not run on them. Although Apple is still running a Repair Extension Program under which this can be fixed free-of-charge, it is symptomatic of the 6200's failings.
Oddly, while the 5200 shares much of the 6200's hardware (it is basically a 6200 with a built-in 15' monitor) it somehow does not exude the same aura of cheapness, partly because its all-in-one design helps remind one that it is, after all, a Mac.
