[grzm]

It was way more an expensive status tool.

The stability of modern operating systems indeed makes it easy to forget how often we dealt with system crashes (remember the bomb?), especially with resource intensive applications, and even more so when switching between them.

Yet a lot of work indeed got done. The number of newspaper design departments and graphic artists who relied on Macs is hard to underestimate. It was much more than just an expensive status tool. Back in the day, the Mac was a tool that a lot of people relied on, in spite of its flaws.