5 ms·

On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people

On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.

PaulHoule 3mo ago
Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago
  Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but also often true for Windows 95/98 as well!
  - a2tech 3mo ago
    OS 9 running Microsoft Internet Explorer! I can remember the puck mice and the noise of the hard drive grinding away while pulling up Ebay and the campus webmail (Horde/Roundcube debates going on and on...)
    - kzrdude 3mo ago
      I remember browsing using 5 slightly offset IE windows stacked diagonally, since this was somehow before tabs in browsers.
  - PaulHoule 3mo ago
    When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad. People think "you have race conditions or you don't" and that is true on some level but if your utilization factors are low they might cause problems once a month but increase the load and those problems are happening once an hour. I saw all the symptoms that I expected such as a brand new and faster mac crashing less often than the old mac because it had more capacity to process events and less overlap between them. Yeah '95 was bad, NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise (had terrible fights w/ a prof who was a roommate of Bill Gates who got a grant from Wintel to get new x86 machines.) Once we got those machines there were two of us you'd always find in front of the NT machines: the student who liked NT and myself who would use VNC to log into one of the few Linux machines. One day that prof came around and said "you win Paul!" and announced that most of those NT machines would be switched to Linux.
    - ndiddy 3mo ago
      > My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad. They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Toolbox still had to run in the main thread and be cooperatively multitasked so it wasn't much of an improvement (hence the lockups).
      - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
        The list of classic Mac OS programs which actually spawned preemptive threads was probably in the single digits. Very few of the machines were multi-core, so it didn't matter much.
  - ndiddy 3mo ago
    If you had good enough hardware to run OS X, running OS 9 stuff in Classic meant that at least you didn't have to restart your whole computer when something froze, just all your OS 9 software. OS X was definitely slow and a bit buggy early on, but IIRC it got good enough for daily use around when Jaguar came out (late 2002?).
    - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
      Oh sure, by the time 10.2 rolled around, the system was quite usable. All the major apps had been Carbonized.
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  The network stack was fine (they licensed the same STREAMS implementation also used in AIX, UnixWare, VxWorks, etc) - it was everything else around it (cooperative multitasking, no virtual memory, no memory protection) that was a house of sand.
- wat10000 3mo ago
  The iBook also started at over $3,000 adjusted for inflation ($1,599 in 1999).
  - kube-system 3mo ago
    That was a pretty average price for "value" laptops at the time, much like the pricing of the Neo today.
    - PaulHoule 3mo ago
      At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007. You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
      - oarsinsync 3mo ago
        > At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007. I think that was very hardware-dependent. I don't recall what hardware I had, but it had a > 90% success rate of resuming from suspend and/or hibernation under Windows XP. Apple's advantage there being pretty obvious: they control the entire range of hardware > You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day. The irony being that I still have to turn wifi and bluetooth off and on on my macbook air regularly today, as airplay stops working every ~10-20 transfers / every other week.
Insanity 3mo ago
True, but it's effectively a 'new' market segment when it was introduced and thus demand was less predictable.

PaulHoule 3mo ago

Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.

StilesCrisis 3mo ago
Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but also often true for Windows 95/98 as well!
- a2tech 3mo ago
  OS 9 running Microsoft Internet Explorer! I can remember the puck mice and the noise of the hard drive grinding away while pulling up Ebay and the campus webmail (Horde/Roundcube debates going on and on...)
  - kzrdude 3mo ago
    I remember browsing using 5 slightly offset IE windows stacked diagonally, since this was somehow before tabs in browsers.
- PaulHoule 3mo ago
  When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad. People think "you have race conditions or you don't" and that is true on some level but if your utilization factors are low they might cause problems once a month but increase the load and those problems are happening once an hour. I saw all the symptoms that I expected such as a brand new and faster mac crashing less often than the old mac because it had more capacity to process events and less overlap between them. Yeah '95 was bad, NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise (had terrible fights w/ a prof who was a roommate of Bill Gates who got a grant from Wintel to get new x86 machines.) Once we got those machines there were two of us you'd always find in front of the NT machines: the student who liked NT and myself who would use VNC to log into one of the few Linux machines. One day that prof came around and said "you win Paul!" and announced that most of those NT machines would be switched to Linux.
  - ndiddy 3mo ago
    > My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad. They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Toolbox still had to run in the main thread and be cooperatively multitasked so it wasn't much of an improvement (hence the lockups).
    - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
      The list of classic Mac OS programs which actually spawned preemptive threads was probably in the single digits. Very few of the machines were multi-core, so it didn't matter much.
- ndiddy 3mo ago
  If you had good enough hardware to run OS X, running OS 9 stuff in Classic meant that at least you didn't have to restart your whole computer when something froze, just all your OS 9 software. OS X was definitely slow and a bit buggy early on, but IIRC it got good enough for daily use around when Jaguar came out (late 2002?).
  - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
    Oh sure, by the time 10.2 rolled around, the system was quite usable. All the major apps had been Carbonized.
kalleboo 3mo ago
The network stack was fine (they licensed the same STREAMS implementation also used in AIX, UnixWare, VxWorks, etc) - it was everything else around it (cooperative multitasking, no virtual memory, no memory protection) that was a house of sand.
wat10000 3mo ago
The iBook also started at over $3,000 adjusted for inflation ($1,599 in 1999).
- kube-system 3mo ago
  That was a pretty average price for "value" laptops at the time, much like the pricing of the Neo today.
  - PaulHoule 3mo ago
    At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007. You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
    - oarsinsync 3mo ago
      > At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007. I think that was very hardware-dependent. I don't recall what hardware I had, but it had a > 90% success rate of resuming from suspend and/or hibernation under Windows XP. Apple's advantage there being pretty obvious: they control the entire range of hardware > You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day. The irony being that I still have to turn wifi and bluetooth off and on on my macbook air regularly today, as airplay stops working every ~10-20 transfers / every other week.

Insanity 3mo ago

True, but it's effectively a 'new' market segment when it was introduced and thus demand was less predictable.