5 ms·

I am seeing these post recently and they get on my nerve. I have actually lived through a lot of that history and I remember it quite differently. One could th

I am seeing these post recently and they get on my nerve. I have actually lived through a lot of that history and I remember it quite differently. One could think, after reading these kinds of posts, that Apple was the single force that created modern portable devices. This is selecting facts from history, taking away any context, creating impression that Apple did it all alone. For an alternative history, look for example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops

wffurr 5y ago
I didn't see that in this post at all. If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. You do have to somehow acknowledge and explain the dominance that Apple portables have in the popular imagination though, and that's what this does.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. I can't remember any laptop doing the same trick at the time. Perhaps some Vaio models could? The trick with the envelope was the long-needed nail in the coffin of netbooks: it was a fully-functional laptop with none of the compromises that netbooks at the time had.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    "It didn’t matter that there were many PCs smaller/ lighter (including from SONY!) and many that fit in a yellow envelope." https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443653349376010 https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/144944365334937601...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Joeri 5y ago
      For example, the Sony Vaio TZ from 2007: http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/sony-vaio-tz-review-2/ http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/sony-vaio-tz-re... The air was the thinnest laptop at the time of its reveal though.
      - lmilcin 5y ago
        By entire 0.8mm. Not exactly Earth shattering.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. That wasn’t the start at all, Apple had been making laptops for 20 years at that time. Apple and Sony had been leapfrogging each other ever since the very first PowerBook (built by Sony). The titanium PowerBooks and iBooks (and to a lesser extent the Wall Street and Bronze G3s) were great devices in different ways, certainly not worse than their Vaio competitors. What Sony had and Apple had not was a broad range of tons of devices, each one with its own special gimmick. And a lot of terrible machines in the dark years between ~1991–1998.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    I didn't say that was the start? Did you read the thread or what I was responding to?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  the famous "yellow envelope" moment Manilla. Not yellow. "The Manila component of the name originates from Manila hemp, locally known as abacá, the main material for Manila folders, alongside the Manila envelope and Manila paper." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_folder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_folder
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
> This is selecting facts from history, taking away any context, creating impression that Apple did it all alone. News at eleven! It's the same thing with practically everything else (and not only from Apple), but what can one do...
smackeyacky 5y ago
It might be a symptom of people aging out if the industry or what jobs they may have had. Cloistered in a university somebody may never have seen the groundbreaking Toshibas, or the Zenith supersport. Its been interesting to me to watch an industry giant like Toshiba abandon the laptop market while Apple took all the mindshare. Zenith was probably doomed as their main businesses were decimated by white box suppliers but toshiba had few peers 25 or 30 years ago. I did used to favour toshibas but the last two were hard to distinguish from everything else.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  Some 20+ years ago my dad had a Toshiba Portégé (no idea what the model number was, but it had a P3-500) that didn’t weigh more than a current MacBook Air, yet was a competent laptop. They were truly ahead of their time in some ways. I wonder what happened. Innovation slowed down? Poor product market fit / not price competitive? Failed at securing corporate mindshare like Dell/HP/IBM?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    I'm not sure. HP have shown that a premium laptop like the Spectre definitely has a market, which is where Toshiba probably needed to be. They seemed to decide at some point that they wanted to cover the entire market, including budget offerings like the Satellite right up to the fancy touchscreen, crazy folding half-tablet Ultrabook. The last Satellite I bought all the hinges broke and the screen flaps about (still works though). My wife's old Ultrabook has a cool design idea (screen slides over the keyboard and folds upwards) but all the hinge gubbins are exposed so it looks half-finished when it's open. It has also decided to poop itself when Microsoft send out updates on a semi-regular basis and require booting from a rescue USB. Both of them are ancient though. Their market used to be "I'm doing business but I'm not a developer" types who wanted something reliable and a little stylish and paid a premium for it, so I suspect what happened is too many budget Satellites and not enough interesting thinking like the Ultrabooks.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Just as every good quote eventually gets attributed to Lincoln or Churchill, every PC advance eventually gets attributed to Apple.
- xattt 5y ago
  Is there a PC manufacturer that does great trackpads?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - themadturk 5y ago
    Not Dell (just to establish that going in)
- macintux 5y ago
  Apple does what most companies won’t: focus on something and place heavy bets on it. I’ve long argued this with those who claim the current smartphone form factor was inevitable. Sure, companies were experimenting with touchscreen smartphones, but none of the major players like Motorola would ever have dared make just one phone and market the heck out of it. If someone like Nokia or Motorola had created the iPhone, it would have been just one of dozens of models, languishing in the corner of carrier retail stores because no one knew what to do with it. Similarly, Apple gets credit for a lot of things not because they invented it (e.g., USB) but because they embraced it, popularized it, and doubled down on it.
  - bluedevil2k 5y ago
    Palm? The Treo was their only phone for many years.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      It also had a different form factor, built around the graffiti scribbling thing, and completely reliant on a stylus and resistive screens, which were ok for the time (I loved mine), but were obsoleted overnight by the iPhone. There was also the LG Chocolate (pretty much the only phone with a capacitive screen released before the iPhone), which is a demonstration that “capacitive touchscreen” does not imply “iPhone form factor”.
simonh 5y ago
The article is by Steven Sinofsky who was at Microsoft at the time, who absolutely knows what he's taking about, and extensively documents the state of Windows portables right alongside the Mac. How is that "taking away context"?

wffurr 5y ago

I didn't see that in this post at all. If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. You do have to somehow acknowledge and explain the dominance that Apple portables have in the popular imagination though, and that's what this does.

dmitriid 5y ago
> that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. I can't remember any laptop doing the same trick at the time. Perhaps some Vaio models could? The trick with the envelope was the long-needed nail in the coffin of netbooks: it was a fully-functional laptop with none of the compromises that netbooks at the time had.
- wffurr 5y ago
  "It didn’t matter that there were many PCs smaller/ lighter (including from SONY!) and many that fit in a yellow envelope." https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443653349376010 https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/144944365334937601...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Joeri 5y ago
    For example, the Sony Vaio TZ from 2007: http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/sony-vaio-tz-review-2/ http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/sony-vaio-tz-re... The air was the thinnest laptop at the time of its reveal though.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      By entire 0.8mm. Not exactly Earth shattering.
kergonath 5y ago
> If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. That wasn’t the start at all, Apple had been making laptops for 20 years at that time. Apple and Sony had been leapfrogging each other ever since the very first PowerBook (built by Sony). The titanium PowerBooks and iBooks (and to a lesser extent the Wall Street and Bronze G3s) were great devices in different ways, certainly not worse than their Vaio competitors. What Sony had and Apple had not was a broad range of tons of devices, each one with its own special gimmick. And a lot of terrible machines in the dark years between ~1991–1998.
- wffurr 5y ago
  I didn't say that was the start? Did you read the thread or what I was responding to?
reaperducer 5y ago
the famous "yellow envelope" moment Manilla. Not yellow. "The Manila component of the name originates from Manila hemp, locally known as abacá, the main material for Manila folders, alongside the Manila envelope and Manila paper." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_folder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_folder

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

> This is selecting facts from history, taking away any context, creating impression that Apple did it all alone. News at eleven! It's the same thing with practically everything else (and not only from Apple), but what can one do...

smackeyacky 5y ago

It might be a symptom of people aging out if the industry or what jobs they may have had. Cloistered in a university somebody may never have seen the groundbreaking Toshibas, or the Zenith supersport. Its been interesting to me to watch an industry giant like Toshiba abandon the laptop market while Apple took all the mindshare. Zenith was probably doomed as their main businesses were decimated by white box suppliers but toshiba had few peers 25 or 30 years ago. I did used to favour toshibas but the last two were hard to distinguish from everything else.

cehrlich 5y ago
Some 20+ years ago my dad had a Toshiba Portégé (no idea what the model number was, but it had a P3-500) that didn’t weigh more than a current MacBook Air, yet was a competent laptop. They were truly ahead of their time in some ways. I wonder what happened. Innovation slowed down? Poor product market fit / not price competitive? Failed at securing corporate mindshare like Dell/HP/IBM?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I'm not sure. HP have shown that a premium laptop like the Spectre definitely has a market, which is where Toshiba probably needed to be. They seemed to decide at some point that they wanted to cover the entire market, including budget offerings like the Satellite right up to the fancy touchscreen, crazy folding half-tablet Ultrabook. The last Satellite I bought all the hinges broke and the screen flaps about (still works though). My wife's old Ultrabook has a cool design idea (screen slides over the keyboard and folds upwards) but all the hinge gubbins are exposed so it looks half-finished when it's open. It has also decided to poop itself when Microsoft send out updates on a semi-regular basis and require booting from a rescue USB. Both of them are ancient though. Their market used to be "I'm doing business but I'm not a developer" types who wanted something reliable and a little stylish and paid a premium for it, so I suspect what happened is too many budget Satellites and not enough interesting thinking like the Ultrabooks.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Just as every good quote eventually gets attributed to Lincoln or Churchill, every PC advance eventually gets attributed to Apple.

xattt 5y ago
Is there a PC manufacturer that does great trackpads?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- themadturk 5y ago
  Not Dell (just to establish that going in)
macintux 5y ago
Apple does what most companies won’t: focus on something and place heavy bets on it. I’ve long argued this with those who claim the current smartphone form factor was inevitable. Sure, companies were experimenting with touchscreen smartphones, but none of the major players like Motorola would ever have dared make just one phone and market the heck out of it. If someone like Nokia or Motorola had created the iPhone, it would have been just one of dozens of models, languishing in the corner of carrier retail stores because no one knew what to do with it. Similarly, Apple gets credit for a lot of things not because they invented it (e.g., USB) but because they embraced it, popularized it, and doubled down on it.
- bluedevil2k 5y ago
  Palm? The Treo was their only phone for many years.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    It also had a different form factor, built around the graffiti scribbling thing, and completely reliant on a stylus and resistive screens, which were ok for the time (I loved mine), but were obsoleted overnight by the iPhone. There was also the LG Chocolate (pretty much the only phone with a capacitive screen released before the iPhone), which is a demonstration that “capacitive touchscreen” does not imply “iPhone form factor”.

simonh 5y ago

The article is by Steven Sinofsky who was at Microsoft at the time, who absolutely knows what he's taking about, and extensively documents the state of Windows portables right alongside the Mac. How is that "taking away context"?