The Online Photographer

Ugh, I'm losin' it. The other day I said my new Mac Mini was my 13th Mac. Not so fast, silicon-breath. I left out not only two of the three laptops I've owned, but a short-lived eMac and the 21" iMac I have upstairs right this minute. So the total is 17, not 13. That's a lot of Macs, even over the 40 years of the Mac (1984–2024). It does however include three work and school computers I spent a lot of time on. Also, during the years I used Macs at work, I also had my own at home, so that sort of doubles them up you might say. Other times, like now, I owned two at once.

The first Mac I used was the Apple Macintosh (that was its whole entire name) that I first used at my beloved alma mater the Corcoran School of Art. The Apple Macintosh was later called the Apple 128k Macintosh—the name had not been shortened to "Mac" yet—to distinguish it from the 512k "Fat Mac" that followed it; but that was a back-formation. I'm fond of saying that "My first Macintosh was the first Macintosh," but jumping on board right from the get-go is not actually to my credit. It was because David Adamson, a local gallery owner and computer aficionado, bought six Apple Macintoshes for the computer art class he was scheduled to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, and I was in the class. There were only two(!) programs at first, MacWrite and MacPaint (the latter developed by Bill Atkinson, a photography enthusiast and friend of Ctein's), and it was assumed that all the art students would want to use MacPaint. But I applied for permission to use MacWrite in the class instead, and, after some discussion between David and school officials and faculty, permission was granted.  There was a commercial in those early days in which Steve Jobs was quoted as saying something to the effect that the Mac was a computer for people who don't know how to use computers, to allow them to unlock their creative potential. I was that guy. I contacted David Adamson years later to properly express my thanks. The first Mac I owned myself was the Fat Mac, the immediate successor to the original Macintosh. My Mom bought it for me as a graduation present in 1985 (thanks Mom). It cost $2,495 in 1984, equivalent to about $7,500 today.

To put you in context, in case you are younger and started buying computers later, the 128k Macintosh took 3.5" diskettes that held 1.44MB of data (about ten pages of written text, and less than one high-res photo of today) and required the MacWrite program to be on each disk. So each time you finished writing ten pages you had to swap a new floppy in and out, in and out, again and again, so the system could copy the program onto the new diskette. Most trivial things with any kind of chip in them today have more computing power.

In 1996, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, I bought his first new product, the so-called "Blueberry" iMac. iMac, by the way, stands for "internet Mac," a name suggested by ad agency director Ken Segall. Jobs had wanted the computer to be called the Mac-Man, apparently a play on Pac-Man, a famous early computer arcade game. He hated the name iMac at first, but he came to his senses. I stuck with iMacs through thick and thin, because they carried over the one-box concept of the original Macintosh. But when the screens got to be 27 inches in size it occurred to me that every time I wanted to upgrade I was buying a new display that I didn't actually need. And throwing away an old one that was still perfectly good.

If you allow for the periods of overlap—when I used one Mac at work or owned more than one at once—and subtract the Corcoran's 128k which I didn't own—my average time of ownership for each computer has been three years and three months.

But enough history. Long story short, unless it's too late for that, here are my three favorite Macs of all time, the ones I liked the best and was most pleased with, in chronological order.

The Powerbook 180 of 1992, a slick little "portable" computer that was of course a precursor to the modern laptop. (The picture is the visually identical 190.) I loved that little thing, and probably still have it somewhere around here. I used it basically as a desktop, but the idea of portability appealed to me. Of course, connecting to the internet was a bit of an adventure sometimes; if you were around in those days, you probably listened to something like this a million times. I kept the computer for years after moving on because I had Phil Davis's sensitometric Plotter/Matcher program for films, developers, and papers on it, with all of his own carefully collected data (which he didn't give out or sell; he wanted photographers to buy a densitometer and create their own data!). Newer Macs broke the Plotter/Matcher.

The Quadra 605 of 1993–6 that I started using in 1994 at work (Quadra was the family name of high-end Macintoshes of the first half of the '90s). I inherited it from David Alan Jay, a computer whiz and my predecessor as Editor of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine. It was the first big monitor I had (mine was B&W only, yeah); it ran WriteNow, which was and still is my all-time favorite word-processing program; and it just worked and worked, reliably. It never took any time away from working. The only thing that ever went wrong with the one we had was that the little battery on the motherboard that jump-started the monitor eventually gasped its last and had to be replaced. That was it. It was a bit of a revelation to me to have a computer that was problem-free.

(Illustration from this site)

3D rendering of Aluminum Unibody iMac showing
position of combo drive and SD card slots

The third was the 27-inch version of the so-called "Aluminum Unibody iMac," that came out in 2009. It had an SD card slot on the side, which was incredibly handy. I could change cards merely by feel, without shifting in my chair much less getting up. That iMac was very powerful compared to what I was used to, the huge screen was beautiful, and the machine seemed very fast. And it still had a CD/DVD slot, so I could play music and movies conveniently from CDs and DVDs that I physically owned. Ah, nostalgia.

After this glorious peak is where things turn dark and Mike starts muttering. The iMac that came after it did away with the flat side on the computer such that the front and the back came together along a sharp edge. This necessitated the shift of the SD card slot to the back, which was nutty. It was a pain in the ass (PITA), and irritated me every single time I used an SD card, which was very often, and it stayed a PITA for the whole time I owned that computer. Sometimes I could find the slot by feel; sometimes I had to swing the computer around to find the SD slot, disturbing the rat's nest of cabling, or, sometimes, get up and walk around to the other side of the desk. It never stopped annoying me*. To add insult to injury, I could never, and still can't, see any reason whatsoever for the change. Did the sharp-edge model look better, or was it more cool, or was it more stylish? No. Who gained? What did they gain? There was no reason it made sense, and I couldn't see how it could have mattered to anyone else either. So why did they do it? I really regretted what it said about the mindset of Apple's designers: it turned the architect Louis Sullivan's iconic phrase "Form follows function" on its ear. Function dawdling petulantly along after meaningless, empty form. Yes, I'm a little bitter.

Well, sorry to end on a rant. Suffice to say, I loved the 2009 27-inch Aluminum "Unibody" iMac, as I had loved the Quadra 605 and the Powerbook 190 before it. All my Macs have been good, except the shoddy '90s PowerPC from the time that Apple was circling the drain and in danger of going bankrupt. The Aluminum Unibody iMac was the peak of the Mac, as the iPhone 6 Plus was the peak of the iPhone. Current iMacs (and iPhones) are almost as good functionally, though, and are of course more up to date in terms of their innards and connectors and so forth.

And now I have to go wrestle with re-rationalizing storage and backup again. I wish this stuff were easier!

Mike

*In general, I hate it—I usually change "hate" to "dislike," but not this time—when companies solve a problem, then abandon the perfect solution just for the sake of change. Apple got it right; they had it; then they lost it.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Earl Dunbar: "I’m not nearly as much Mac experienced or knowledgeable (and how I came to Apple is quite the story, at least in my opinion) but I disagree about the iPhone 6 Plus being the pinnacle of iPhone. I had the 6S (I always had a 'thing' for the 'S' models) and liked it except it had a really bad battery issue…for which Apple paid not only for replacement batteries but also refunds resulting from a class action suit. I enjoyed my XS with which I made really wonderful photos, including the shot of Peter Turnley’s bistro in Paris, which you have seen. My current 15 Pro is miles ahead of all previous iPhones if only for battery performance. Don’t bother fighting me on this!  😂  "

Mike replies: I shan't.

John Krumm: "While it definitely wasn't my best Mac, the Mac that gave me the most pleasure, perhaps in the same way that a first real camera does, was one of the original little Mac SE's, my first computer. By the early 'nineties you could find an affordable one used. I had used one at work before. It had two slots for floppy disks. I managed to get onto a very early version of the internet with it, and also dialed in to a BBS to argue politics with people all over the country (some things haven't changed)."

Scott: "My first Mac was the first Mac. At the time it was released, I was working in the IT department of one of Apple’s main investment banks and they gave us one as a commemorative gift. So it was a first-day ship of the first MacIntosh computer. The head of the IT department gave it to me to figure out how we could use it productively. It had a single 1.44MB drive as others have mentioned, but only 64KB of main memory. Hence the need to swap floppies in and out continuously as you worked on a project. Yet, it seemed amazingly advanced compared to the IBM PC and clones of the era, with its graphical user interface. I used that machine and its successors for many years at work, until the need for PC-compatible software overwhelmed me and I reluctantly switched.

"As for the knife-edge iMac, the design was intended to make the body of the iMac appear slim. It met that objective, in my humble opinion. However, I agree with you that moving the SD slot to the back was stupid. I quickly bought an external SD reader and glued it to the side of the printer on my desk, where it was easy to reach. And a DVD reader, which I kept in a drawer except on the rare occasions when I needed to use it. Apple’s obsession with slim and sleek designed required us all to buy dongles, external devices and deal with piles of wiring on and below our desks. And still does."