This Apple ad from 1996 reminds us how awful Apple's ads used to be

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roll over steve

This is what Scully, Spindler and Amelio did to the companyā€¦

ā€œHi, I look like John Hodgeman, but Iā€™m really a Mac Quadra - reporting from Gil Amelioā€™s beige colon.ā€

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This isnā€™t an ad.

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Well it sure isnā€™t a TV ad, clocking in at seven minutes. Maybe it was meant for trade shows?

What do you mean ā€œused to beā€?

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Yeah, this was definitely for a trade show. The Steve made long videos like this too for NeXT, but they were better produced, and so much more interesting IMHO. But they were basically targeting developers and power usersā€¦ they werenā€™t general consumer ads so to speak.

And a mere 4 years later, soooo much of this was abandoned in Mac OS X. It took many years for them to build their core tech back up in OS X. I had the last Mac that was capable of running OS 9 and/or OS X (G4 ā€œmirror doorā€ w/ dual processors). I had to go back to OS 9 from time to time still (in '04 I believe). I didnā€™t care, as I could run X apps, *nix/GNU command line utilities and more on my Mac desktop. It was the coolest thing ever. I still have that Mac. Itā€™s nice to know I can run both OSā€™s on it (although itā€™s probably unnecessary now.

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And I would want to drag a 3d object into notepad why exactly?

This one from 1988 is much better produced. It really laid out quite a bit of Appleā€™s long term goals. Predicting the Ipad and Siri.

Project 2000

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Also predicted full-color flatscreen monitors.

and wall sized ā€˜chalk boardā€™ style video screens, that wirelessly link to show video and presentations from a hand held device.

Which would be nice to see in schools like in the video.

The hardest part of technology they show is a fold-able screenā€“which are starting to come on the market.

Maybe Apple will dust that off and make a iphone that folds out to larger screen.

That was the year I went to MacWorld Boston for the first/last time.

Mac clones were the star of the show, especially Power Computingā€™s booth babes in fatigues roaming around, but I really wanted a StarMax 604e for some reason. Based on the rumors, I ended up waiting a year for their G3s to come out.

Jobs killed the license program right before the G3 clones almost beat Apple to the market [I heard that the CEO of Moto actually flew in to beg Steve to keep the program going], so I ended up with a 35-pound PowerMac 9600 that I still keep around in case I need something from my old ā‰¤ OS 9 stuff, or the short-lived triple boot partitions for BeOS and Yellow-Dog Linux.

the last mac to boot os9 was the mirror door powermac g4, single cpu variant. I think I had that model.

It also sold for a much lower price, US$1299 instead of US$3299.

iā€™m not sure why I got this over a Powermac G5 refurb, but it proved a capable mac until apple decided that everyone who mattered had dual core machines. 10.5 proved to be the last straw,

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I know a few guys who build models for various games (Mostly NPC models, vehicles, and weapon resources for ARMA3ā€™s Epoch mod.)

Some of them edit the models mostly in Notepad++, then scoop that into the compiler that builds the mod package for ARMA3, and test it in game. Thereā€™s an IDE for doing that work, but one of the guys never bothered to learn the IDE, and feels more comfortable with NPP.

Youā€™re right. I had no idea they re-released a SINGLE processor variant, based on the dual processor G4 mirror door that I own. That said, Iā€™ve been moving it from apartment to apartment in the greater NYC and CT area for so long. Before that I trekked up to NY from FL (I carried it on the plane). That bastard is heavy too. Truth be told, those machines really needed more ram. That was my only gripe about it. Otherwise it was a great machine. Of course I maxed it out, but OS X was too demanding. That said, I used it from '03 to '09 fulltime. And then when I got my MBP, I used the old desktop as a file server and streaming media server (Plex). I replaced it about 1.5 years ago with a Mac Mini Server. What a massive difference in noise. Now the G4 is sitting in storage in the basement (the hard drives are in a separate storage location, along with all my old drives from the past 20-25 yearsā€“ā€“ā€“ that container is SERIOUSLY heavy)

Ahhhā€¦ Power Computing and the other clone manufacturers. I know someone who was instrumental in getting Apple to authorize clones. Itā€™s a neat story.

I ended up with a USB 2.0 card, a Radeon 9600 from ebay, 1.75 GB Ram, and maybe a few extra harddrives before I replaced it with a iMac 9,1 from 2009, (which I still use as my main machine). Ram is maxed at 8 GB, but itā€™s showing its age.

Actually, this is how cool Appleā€™s promotional material used to beā€¦

Would love to see one of those about where Apple thinks weā€™ll be in 2027.