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by duxup 1007 days ago
It was a good read.

However, other than the speedy OS upgrade, and maybe a lot of ports, I'm not sure what the "better 20 years ago" parts were, but maybe that was more of a random line / opinion type thing.

Either way fun read and visually that laptop is still pretty pleasing. I love my MBA but ... wouldn't mind if it was a bit more organic looking like the G3.

3 comments

Imagine a modern MBP letting you turn one screw and release a couple of latches to lift out the keyboard for upgrades...

I had a Pismo, which I got with my student discount (and it was still crazily expensive I remember, but not quite how much). It was a good machine, being able to swap batteries / drives / PC cards was slick (sure, now we have usb-c, but where's the clever engineering in that?)

You don't even need a screwdriver for that screw, I think you can turn it with your fingernail.
better 20 years ago: doesn't spy on you, doesn't auto-update and wipe your external drive, doesn't have constant UX regressions in every new version, doesn't harass you to sign up to cloud services, doesn't hit a network service to validate every application you run, can actually be repaired yourself, can actually be upgraded yourself... etc.
>doesn't harass you to sign up to cloud services

That's not really true. The Os9 installer actually invites you register your computer with apple (and maybe even sign up for an apple account, been a hot minute since I've seen the dialogue). But you can just click through it if you don't want to.

The difference in interface speed and responsiveness is tremendous. I have a few G4 machines, os9 on them is absolutely nuts in terms of speed compared to my mid-road M2 macbook with the latest osX.

Helps when you don't have to start up a dedicated web browser instance for every single application you have.