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In Reply to: RE: One way or the other - how do you avoid them? posted by AbeCollins on August 07, 2014 at 07:23:57
Nope, better to be in the bling business.
Apple started out making toys. So did Radio Shack. The notion that you could actually use them for work was foreign in those mainframe days. I think more than anything else Visicalc changed our perception of what was possible. Suddenly the delirious thought that we could absolve ourselves of having to suffer the mainframe meatballs in their air-conditioned palaces and do truly useful numerical analysis at our desks was irrestable. And we could even type things with Wordstar! Farewell VT-100's...
But Apple, while greatly benefiting from Apple II business sales never lost their toy focus, hence the solid-state walkmans. The Lisa is what happens when a toy company tries to make a business machine by copying someone else's UI.
The IBM PC (and I started with the very first one) ran circles around the Apples for work because it wasn't intended to be a toy. But time has passed and now the toys have gotten good enough that for very routine work they are satisfactory. And as toys, they excel, hence my two iPads! But as tools, well the one's that mimic real computers aren't too bad...
Ol' Rick
Follow Ups:
Apple started out making toys.
Apple was actually the first to bring a truly "Personal" Computer to market and then IBM later brought legitimacy to "Personal" Computers with the IBM PC. I don't miss my VT100 at all... I just emulate it on my 'toy' Mac with the built-in in emulator:
But we've come full circle. While many PC companies have come and gone, Apple is still around. There's hardly anything that can be done a PC that cannot be done on a Mac.... even if that means running Windows on the Mac on those very few occasions for software that isn't ported to Mac.... like Visio which I run now and then.
Apple is hardly just a 'toy' maker today but some folks like to believe that's the case. And that's fine.
"Apple is hardly just a 'toy' maker today but some folks like to believe that's the case. And that's fine."
Toy is good. From my experience all great tools also have a high toy factor and the converse is also frequently true. I find the iPad to be a lot more living-room friendly than a laptop is. Really to a fault, I'll sometimes spend a lot of time doing something that would take minutes if I walked downstairs and used a PC.
They are perfect retirement computers / digitoys IMHO. Have I mentioned more than a thousand times how much I like not having moving parts?
And just to make you gloat, I totally screwed up my PC last week by innocently buying a 32GB USB Flash drive as an interim backup whilst scanning photos. Apparently it loaded some driver that was incompatible with my oldish system and I bet that my effective clock rate is now a historic 4.7MHz. Maybe not even that... Sigh. Fighting computers no longer holds much appeal for me. Maybe laziness or senility settling in. Maybe rationality...
I now do essentially all of my "computering" on a fondleslab and it's almost a perfect fit for what I do these days. In return for not being able to do PCBs, compile code or run FEA it's cute, cool and quiet. After 3 1/2 years of at least four hours a day of use the battery life is virtually the same as new and I've had no fan or hard drive failures... And the color convergence is still great, the yolk hasn't shifted a bit even though it's been dropped any number of times.
My new one has VPN capabilities so maybe, if I can get my driver? problem resolved, I'll be able to use it as a client and do fancier computing on my PC from the comfort of the deck.
Back to the toy issue, it seemed clear to me when I bought this device that Apple regarded it as just a puffed-up iPod (that's also what my local Apple specialist store told me.) and expected people to use it for music, movies, books, i.e. consummables from the iTune store and light email. I think they were blown away that so many people were trying to do real work on it. So they essentially created a whole new device class almost accidentally. Now of course it has evolved into that which folks thought it was in the first place.
And you know, it works pretty good as a terminal wirelessly SSHing into my RPi. A lot more comfy on the lap than a VT-100... Or if you'e really old, a model 33.
73, Rick
Nope. I'm probably not old enough to know of a model 33 but played on a VT-52 in the mid 1970's for a high school BASIC class. The VT-52 was tied to a school district computer called "Huntington Area Time Share". Once logged in, it would greet you with "HATS off to you". BASIC ruined me. I decided to become a 'hardware guy' instead. ;-)
> Toy is good. From my experience all great tools also have a high toy
> factor and the converse is also frequently true.
I'm having trouble with the idea of dentists' drills and colonoscopy cameras having a toy factor.
> Have I mentioned more than a thousand times how much I like not
> having moving parts?
I still have a few moving parts and don't want to give them up yet.
> And just to make you gloat, I totally screwed up my PC last week by
> innocently buying a 32GB USB Flash drive as an interim backup whilst
> scanning photos. Apparently it loaded some driver that was incompatible
> with my oldish system and I bet that my effective clock rate is now a
> historic 4.7MHz. Maybe not even that...
Sort of a flashback.
> I now do essentially all of my "computering" on a fondleslab and it's
> almost a perfect fit for what I do these days.
Now, this sounds more like a sex toy.
> And you know, it works pretty good as a terminal wirelessly SSHing into
> my RPi.
SSHing into a RPi seems wrong. The computer you connect to should be bigger.
> A lot more comfy on the lap than a VT-100... Or if you'e really old, a
> model 33.
I can picture an ASR 33 on a lap and it seems pretty painful.
Just to inject some audio content, a question. Are you using the fondleslab to play audio or as a remote control device?
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
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