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Post by rezonate on Dec 5, 2016 6:12:03 GMT -8
Since the board is stagnant with frustration, I'm going to post some questions to fight Scrooge, the Grinch, Steve Balmer, whatever. So take 3 minutes every day and please reply.
On the first day of Apple...
Day 1: What was your FIRST Apple product? How did it change your perspective on work, life, technology, creativity?
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Post by rezonate on Dec 5, 2016 12:46:18 GMT -8
My uncle worked for Silicon Graphics in the late 1980s. After high school he flew me out to visit Detroit and showed two Macintosh SE computers networked together for a fighter jet dogfighting simulation. Blew my mind. Back then the SE had a 16 mhz processor, and the SGI workstations had an amazing 200mhz processor. The demo was "if the Apple can do THIS, just watch what SGI can do..."
That same summer I went to the Coast Guard Academy. They were starting their second year issuing computers. They had gone with the Mac Plus for the first year, the kind with the telephone connector for the keyboard. The year I showed up they offered an upgrade package to the SE with a full 1mb of RAM and TWO onboard 3.5" floppy drives, so you could boot from one and run a program on the other. Of course I dropped the extra $$ to get the upgrade.
It was an amazing time to be a Mac user in the late 80s. CD-ROM had just come out, Adobe Illustrator 1.0 was generating some really cool black & white art. Microsoft Word and Excel came to the Mac first. And then the Powerbook 100 changed computing all over again. I would have to wait for 1993 and a regular paycheck to afford a laptop, but by then it was a Powerbook 165c - COLOR computing in a briefcase. I picked that one up from the Berkeley campus store while I was stationed in San Francisco. Never made the connection at the time that Cupertino and Apple were somehow connected.
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Post by artman1033 on Dec 5, 2016 13:01:20 GMT -8
my first were the Apple SE at KINKOS (that was/is a print shop used by college students..... now called FEDEX locations... I believe)
I would use the SEs to print my fantasy football weekly mailings in 1987.
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 6, 2016 7:29:01 GMT -8
My first Apple was the IIe. My next was the 128K Macintosh. After that, the SE with two floppies - I added an internal HD (80 MB!) which sat between the CRT and the top floppy drive. Very tricky install. After that came a Centris 610, a clone from PowerPC, several laptops (PowerBooks and MBPs), a Newton, an eMac, and now I use my early 2011 MBP and just bought a new late 2013 27" iMac.
I used my SE to dial in to my college network and used telnet and xmodem protocols to do work and transfer files to the PDP-11s over 2400 baud modem. I also used my SE as a terminal to an HP-3000 minicomputer at work. Lots of fun. Except for the COBOL programming I did then, of course. (Years later, when presented the "opportunity" to do a job in COBOL, I impolitely told my boss I'd rather eat glass.)
I'm using my iMac to learn Swift programming, after retiring from 25+ years of SW engineering work. I'm really enjoying the experience.
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Post by elmar on Dec 6, 2016 7:51:35 GMT -8
My first Apple has been a Lisa at my company which was needed to develop programs for the first Macs. At this time my personal computer has been a Amiga which was later replaced by a Mac SE. But my first experience with a graphical user interface has been a Lilith, a computer developed by Niklaus Wirth at the ETH Zurich. Niklaus Wirth has become famous by his languages Pascal, Modul-2 and Oberon. Just like Steve Jobs he has been inspired by a visit to Xerox Parc.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 6, 2016 8:38:08 GMT -8
On the Second Day of Apple
Day 2: Tell us about a time you made a HUMAN connection around a piece of Apple technology.
For example, when iPod came out, there were many reports of a new phenomenon: sharing an earbud. Total strangers on the train would see another iPod user's iconic white headphones, and ask to listen to whatever was playing. The liberation of CDs into hundreds and thousands of individual portable tracks led to the practice.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 7, 2016 7:53:26 GMT -8
On the Third Day of Apple...
Day 3: What was a cool Apple product that you WANTED but never owned? (and don't tell us "iPod Socks.")
For me it was the iMate. Around the time I moved out of New York City I actually saw one in a display case under glass at a Manhattan store specializing in Apple stuff. The iMate was based on the Newton OS but also had a keyboard. Personal organizers were all the rage but iMate took it to the next level with handwriting recognition and networking. Steve Jobs came back, said he liked the product and concept, but had to kill it along with Newton.
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chinacat
Moderator
AAPL Long since 2006
Posts: 4,426
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Post by chinacat on Dec 7, 2016 12:42:58 GMT -8
On the first day of Apple...Day 1: What was your FIRST Apple product? How did it change your perspective on work, life, technology, creativity? I believe it was a Macintosh Classic, but it may have been an SE - it was a very long time ago. After graduating from college, I spent three years in Berkeley while Fabulous Wife went to law school. While there I read several articles in the Journal of ACM about a program at MIT run by Prof. Nicholas Negroponte, which at that time was called The Architecture Machine (now morphed into the Media Lab). They were doing things like projecting the effects of shadows cast by proposed skyscrapers on the surrounding landscape. It was clear to me that computer graphics was the future of computing, so I applied to the Architecture Machine for when we moved back to Boston, but was not accepted. I called Prof. Negroponte and asked where I could find a job doing something similar. He pointed me at the nascent CAD/CAM industry, and I ended up getting a job at Computervision. Everything was still green screen at that point, and in fact I ended up writing the device driver for their first bit-mapped display (2 black and white planes!). So when I saw the Mac GUI I knew right away that this was the future. Took me a few years to save up enough to get my first one, but I have never owned any other brand of computer. Alas, not all of my employers were so enlightened, and in fact I ended my career as a senior project manager at IBM, awash in the Wintel world.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 8, 2016 4:45:10 GMT -8
On the Fourth Day of Apple...
Day 4: When you think back to Apple advertising campaigns, which one sticks out the most? Which was a complete bomb? (4 calling birds)
I loved Mac vs PC. Heart, soul, analogy, features. I basically hate all the brand advertising stuff that doesn't tell you anything about a product. "Hey we're cool!" doesn't get me to open my wallet, just the opposite.
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 8, 2016 6:59:39 GMT -8
2. Human connection:
FaceTiming with a niece whom I have never seen face to face, as it were.
3. Apple product I wanted but never owned:
Original Apple II
4. Ads that stuck out and disappointed:
The ones showing how fast the PowerPC was compared to Intel - they were fun (burning bunny suits, snails with chips on their backs, etc) but Apple was never going to win customers using specs - they did better with ads (like Mac vs PC) which let users know how (relatively) easy it was to do things on the Mac, like make home videos and communicate using FaceTime without all the arcane fiddling one needed on PCs (loading device drivers, hand coding environment variables, etc.).
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chinacat
Moderator
AAPL Long since 2006
Posts: 4,426
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Post by chinacat on Dec 8, 2016 12:06:37 GMT -8
On the Fourth Day of Apple...Day 4: When you think back to Apple advertising campaigns, which one sticks out the most? Which was a complete bomb? (4 calling birds)I loved Mac vs PC. Heart, soul, analogy, features. I basically hate all the brand advertising stuff that doesn't tell you anything about a product. "Hey we're cool!" doesn't get me to open my wallet, just the opposite. Have to agree with you, Rez. By 1995 I had been working in the UNIX and/or the open source industry for more than 10 years. The John Hodgman/Justin Long "Get a Mac" campaign certainly encapsulated the general feelings of most of the folks that I worked and played with, viz. if you loved software/computing you were a Mac/UNIX/open source person, and if you were business-oriented droid you were a Windows person. Now that was definitely an unfair simplification, but I do feel that the Mac/PC series captured some of those feelings. In that case, it was the engineers not the business folks that had the "Hey we're cool!" feeling in response to the large scale adoption of Windows in environments like banking and other soulless endeavors. NB: Please do not take this as a knock on all Windows programmers. Having worked at IBM for a number of years I knew many wonderful engineers who could do fairly magical things with Windows. But even there, many of the architects that I knew were personally UNIX devotees.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 8, 2016 13:30:52 GMT -8
Apple does a fairly good job with holiday television spots, but my media consumption habits are not at all like "normal" people and so I never see them. Maybe when one of you posts a link with a positive review. They are trying to ramp up the emotional quotient with pre-keynote videos showing the need, and how to fill it. The whole Simon Sinek "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" angle. The oft-revered 1984 Super Bowl commercial was an emotional us-vs-them middle finger to IBM, and is probably at the heart of every creative meeting. "How can we make this about Apple vs *the evil THEM*?"
It would be great to see Apple get back to their ease-of-use roots again too. Software was generally pushing features with odd updates, ease of use for even updates.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 9, 2016 6:29:12 GMT -8
On the Fifth Day of Apple...
Day 5: How have you used the Apple ecosystem to make money? (Besides just investing in AAPL, of course - as this also involves losing money.)
My first thought was of my book, but then realized any of the individual components could have been accomplished with parallel software on the PC side or through a browser. BUT, without Apple integration I would have given up long before the creative vision was complete. Thankful for Apple every day! (still waiting on the money part though, I guess...) 😎
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 9, 2016 9:30:11 GMT -8
Day 5: Using Apple products to make money:
Hmmm. That's a thing? Seems I mostly just SPEND.
Seriously though, if you figure all the times I learned new programming languages, web design, etc using my Mac and how that applied to my career in software engineering, Apple products contributed greatly to my long term earnings. Some might say any ol' PC would have done the same, but I say it wouldn't have been as much fun, so I might not have learned as much.
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Post by mrentropy on Dec 11, 2016 14:23:32 GMT -8
My uncle worked for Silicon Graphics in the late 1980s. After high school he flew me out to visit Detroit and showed two Macintosh SE computers networked together for a fighter jet dogfighting simulation. Blew my mind. Back then the SE had a 16 mhz processor, and the SGI workstations had an amazing 200mhz processor. The demo was "if the Apple can do THIS, just watch what SGI can do..." That same summer I went to the Coast Guard Academy. They were starting their second year issuing computers. They had gone with the Mac Plus for the first year, the kind with the telephone connector for the keyboard. The year I showed up they offered an upgrade package to the SE with a full 1mb of RAM and TWO onboard 3.5" floppy drives, so you could boot from one and run a program on the other. Of course I dropped the extra $$ to get the upgrade. It was an amazing time to be a Mac user in the late 80s. CD-ROM had just come out, Adobe Illustrator 1.0 was generating some really cool black & white art. Microsoft Word and Excel came to the Mac first. And then the Powerbook 100 changed computing all over again. I would have to wait for 1993 and a regular paycheck to afford a laptop, but by then it was a Powerbook 165c - COLOR computing in a briefcase. I picked that one up from the Berkeley campus store while I was stationed in San Francisco. Never made the connection at the time that Cupertino and Apple were somehow connected. I worked for Sho in the early 90s. I would be funny if I knew your uncle. What was his name?
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Post by rezonate on Dec 12, 2016 6:40:43 GMT -8
On the Sixth Day of Apple...
Day 6: Of all the "high priced" Apple products, which felt like a "steal" to you? (you can opine about products that seem like a total rip-off too)
We all know Apple keeps prices and margins high by pushing a unique software ecosystem and high quality products. Sometimes Apple drops a product that actually seems like a good bargain. The Mac Mini is my pick. I also liked the iPod Mini and still have mine after 11 years with some FrankenPod parts (the housing is silver but the 6gb spinning drive is replaced with 16gb flash, and the click wheel is scavenged off a green iPod Mini).
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 12, 2016 9:04:15 GMT -8
Day 6: Apple product that felt like a steal:
My last 13" MBP. I bought it refurb from Apple for just under $1000 in 2011 (early 2011 model). It was my workhorse for the past 5 years and is still going strong running latest macOS (Sierra). I upgraded it a bit over the years with16GB RAM and a 1TB Hybrid drive. Great value for the money.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 12, 2016 16:49:33 GMT -8
My last 13" MBP. I bought it refurb from Apple for just under $1000 in 2011 (early 2011 model). It was my workhorse for the past 5 years and is still going strong running latest macOS (Sierra). I upgraded it a bit over the years with16GB RAM and a 1TB Hybrid drive. Great value for the money. I'll second that. When I upgraded to a 15" MBP in 2013 my 2011 13" went to my brother. Maxed the RAM and dropped in a 256 SSD. He still uses it every day. It is a beast and CHEAP for the features.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 13, 2016 5:02:45 GMT -8
On the Seventh Day of Apple...
Day 7: If you could go behind *any part* the operation at Apple for just one day, what part would you like to see? (Apple looks serene in public, but you know under the surface they're paddling like crazy.)
I'd be fascinated to take a tour of their robot operation. And maybe sit in a meeting with Tim Cook, just to see the dynamic.
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 13, 2016 7:31:25 GMT -8
Day 7: Behind the scenes:
I'm not exactly sure how Apple is structured, except I've heard via Horace Dediu that it is functional. So, it is kind of a toss up between the R&D group(s) and the group working on Xcode/Swift, etc.
I am interested in seeing where Apple is heading in terms of AI (machine learning, voice recognition/generation, automatic translation, etc.). I took a few AI classes in my undergrad and graduate studies back in the late '80s and early '90s, but haven't really used it since then. It would be nice to see what Apple is doing with it.
I was impressed when I first saw the NeXT cube running Interface Builder and using this thing called Objective-C. I was glad when Apple brought that over to the Mac, along with the new Mac OS based on NeXTStep. I am enjoying learning Swift, now, and have a general interest in programming languages in general.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 15, 2016 5:06:26 GMT -8
On the Eighth Day of Apple...
Day 8: When in comes to cash generation, Apple is king. Is it just pure greed? Or an unseen long game?
Of course this is the big mystery. Kind of like improbable political candidates who end up winning the election, Apple (to me) seems like they are a victim of their own success. They built a hamster wheel and can't get off.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 16, 2016 10:01:24 GMT -8
On the Ninth Day of Apple...
Day 9: Apple is all about ease of use. Give an example where they pass the "grandmother test" and where they really didn't get it right.
The early editions of iTunes with iPod seemed to be magical integration. Sadly as iTunes got more complicated, and Apple stumbled content into the cloud, I have been less enthused. The cloud music thing has gotten a *little* better recently. I also have loved gestures on the track pad, a great acquisition that yielded real benefit to the UI. Siri to me is the back of this coin - great potential and gave Apple a jump start, but the silos have slowed them down, I think. Might have been better for Apple to architect their own AI solution from the start.
Recap: Day 1: What was your FIRST Apple product? How did it change your perspective on work, life, technology, creativity? (1 partridge) Day 2: Tell us about a time you made a HUMAN connection around a piece of Apple technology. (2 turtle doves) Day 3: What was a cool Apple product that you WANTED but never owned? (and don't tell us "iPod Socks.") (3 french hens) Day 4: When you think back to Apple advertising campaigns, which one sticks out the most? Which was a complete bomb? (4 calling birds) Day 5: How have you used the Apple ecosystem to make money? (5 gold rings) Day 6: Of all the "high priced" Apple products, which felt like a "steal" to you? (6 geese) Day 7: If you could go behind *any part* the operation at Apple for just one day, what part would you like to see? (7 swans) Day 8: When in comes to cash generation, Apple is king. Is it just pure greed? Or an unseen long game? (8 maids)
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 16, 2016 13:41:16 GMT -8
Day 8: Cash generation - greed or unseen long game?
I don't see it as either. It's more like the grandparent who has lived through tough financial times, learned how to save money to provide protection against future hard times, and then even after having saved a million bucks, still fears spending it "just in case."
Having just transitioned from the active saving mode to the drawdown mode (I.e., retirement), I understand the reluctance to spend the money.
Of course, sometimes you just have to spend the money to replace the twenty year old car...
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 16, 2016 14:02:01 GMT -8
Day 9: Ease of use successes and failures:
Successes: many aspects of the cloud - keeping documents, calendars, notes, books, etc in sync (though not perfect by any means). Ease of Facetiming - given a good connection. For me recently, the amazing amount of functionality one can include in the software I develop without a lot of work.
Failures: From Mobile Me, Ping, and Apple Music to the constantly changing Apple branded software like iTunes, Aperture, Photos, etc., while making some things easier for casual users those changes often make things harder or impossible for pro users. Another failure, though this isn't limited to Apple by any means: networking - both configuration and security. Definitely not "grandmother" ready.
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Post by rezonate on Dec 20, 2016 6:12:46 GMT -8
On the Tenth Day of Apple...
Day 10: Let's talk Apple's Board of Directors. What's the most colorful BOD story you remember from the last 40 years?
The efficacy of Al Gore still baffles me. (ducks) I'm interested to hear from anyone who has observed a shareholder meeting in person!
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Post by hledgard on Dec 20, 2016 11:35:13 GMT -8
Never have. Would love to. Have no idea what value added Al Gore gives.
PS Thanks for mentioning this in the Intraday thread. Did not know this was here. Cool questions!
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 20, 2016 13:20:19 GMT -8
Day 10: colorful BOD story
How about when they took the Mac division away from Steve Jobs, effectively "firing" him?
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Post by rezonate on Dec 24, 2016 7:27:05 GMT -8
On the Eleventh Day of Apple...
Day 11: At the end of time, the Museum of Humanity will have an Apple exhibit. Which products will be included?
Undeniably, the iPhone first generation will be in there. Probably show a couple incremental iPhone generations like the 4, 6, and whatever the final device was before EOL'd.
What about the Pixar Lamp iMac?
Recap: Day 1: What was your FIRST Apple product? How did it change your perspective on work, life, technology, creativity? (1 partridge) Day 2: Tell us about a time you made a HUMAN connection around a piece of Apple technology. (2 turtle doves) Day 3: What was a cool Apple product that you WANTED but never owned? (and don't tell us "iPod Socks.") (3 french hens) Day 4: When you think back to Apple advertising campaigns, which one sticks out the most? Which was a complete bomb? (4 calling birds) Day 5: How have you used the Apple ecosystem to make money? (5 gold rings) Day 6: Of all the "high priced" Apple products, which felt like a "steal" to you? (6 geese) Day 7: If you could go behind *any part* the operation at Apple for just one day, what part would you like to see? (7 swans) Day 8: When in comes to cash generation, Apple is king. Is it just pure greed? Or an unseen long game? (8 maids) Day 9: Apple is all about ease of use. Give an example where they pass the "grandmother test" and where they really didn't get it right. (9 ladies) Day 10: Let's talk Apple's Board of Directors. What's the most colorful BOD story you remember from the last 40 years? (10 lords)
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Post by PikesPique on Dec 24, 2016 15:52:24 GMT -8
11. Apple in Museum:
Newton, Pippin, 20th Anniversary Mac, Cube, and Steve Job's head (or, maybe bust).
(Just to prove Apple, though it "put a dent in the universe" (as well as our wallets) was not infallible.)
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Post by elmar on Dec 27, 2016 5:42:27 GMT -8
11. Apple in Museum:
I would certainly include the "iLamp". It is the only computer which stands really out of the crowd. I do still own one of them!
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