Today is the 30th birthday of the Macintosh. January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs pulls the thing out of a bag on stage at the Flint Center and the little beige box says hello to the crowd in that creaky text-to-speech voice. Thirty years. I keep doing the math in my head and it doesn't feel right, but it checks out.
I'm not going to do the whole "here is a timeline of every Mac ever made" post, because if you're reading a blog like this one you've already seen four of those today and its only lunchtime. What I actually want to write about is my own first Mac, because it was kind of a disaster and I never see anyone admit that part.
Mine was a Mac LC, hand-me-down from my uncle sometime in the mid 90s, already a few years old by the time it got to me. Beige, that weird pizza-box shape, and it came with this add-on card slot that was supposed to let you run some Apple II software too, which I never once used. The thing that actually broke my brain about it, though, was the single mouse button. I'd grown up on a PC with two buttons and right-click menus everywhere, and switching to a machine that expected me to hold down keys to fake a right-click felt like a step backwards dressed up as elegance. I complained about this to basically everyone I knew for a solid year. Nobody cared. I still think Apple was stubborn about that button for way longer than made sense, honestly into the early 2000s with the original iMac mouse, which was somehow worse because it was round and you could never tell which way was up by feel.
Anyway. That machine ate a school report of mine once, a whole essay on the water cycle, gone, no autosave to speak of and I hadn't hit save in probably forty minutes because eight-year-old me did not understand the concept of data loss as a real threat. I rewrote it at like 10pm the night before it was due and it was worse the second time. That's my Macintosh origin story. Not exactly "and then I fell in love with computing forever," although I guess in a roundabout way I did, just via frustration rather than delight.
What's funny is thinking about that LC next to what Apple's selling now. The new Mac Pro, the cylindrical one that everybody's been calling the trash can since it was announced back in the fall, started actually shipping to people in December. I haven't touched one in person yet but I've read enough about the spec sheet to have opinions. No internal expansion at all beyond the Thunderbolt ports, everything external, and Apple's whole pitch is that this is the future and towers are dead weight. Maybe they're right for the video and audio people it's aimed at. But there's something almost funny about going from a beige box you could crack open with a screwdriver and shove cards into, to a sealed metal cylinder that wants you to buy a shelf full of external boxes instead. Thirty years and the philosophy swung a full 180 and landed somewhere I don't think 1984-era Apple would even recognize as the same company, for better or worse. I lean toward worse, but I also don't buy $3,000 workstations so maybe my opinion doesn't count for much here.
The original Mac shipped with 128 kilobytes of RAM and cost $2,495, which is something like $5,800 today once you adjust for inflation, and it could barely run MacPaint without choking. People forget how underpowered and how expensive that first machine actually was. The mythology around it, the "insanely great" marketing and the Orwell ad that ran during the Super Bowl the day before launch, that stuff is what survived, not the actual user experience of trying to do real work on 128K of memory with no hard drive.
I don't have a tidy takeaway here. I just think it's worth thirty seconds today, wherever you're reading this, to remember that the machines we complain about now started out as objects that were genuinely magical to look at and genuinely painful to use, both at once, and that combination hasn't gone away even if the specifics have.