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I understood this as a “the next generation will cost more”. By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales for each season and so they likely have a decent backlog for the current generation, procured at reasonable cost from hardware manufacturers.

It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.

Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.

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> By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales

The Neo being an exception I beleive.

That’s a new product line. Should have clarified but I meant mostly their existing product lines and specifically iPhone

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.

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

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.

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!

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?).

Oh sure, by the time 10.2 rolled around, the system was quite usable. All the major apps had been Carbonized.

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...)

I remember browsing using 5 slightly offset IE windows stacked diagonally, since this was somehow before tabs in browsers.

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.

The rainbow beachball cursor was added in OS X. I think your memory of the Mac OS 9 machines might be mixed up.

Classic Mac OS used a cooperative threading model which meant that one program locking up would lock up the whole computer, but Windows 95 was only slightly better in this regard. It didn't have any classical race conditions with the network as you can't "race" in a world with no preemptive threads--control is only ever handed off when a program explicitly yielded.

> 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).

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.

The iBook also started at over $3,000 adjusted for inflation ($1,599 in 1999).

That was a pretty average price for "value" laptops at the time, much like the pricing of the Neo today.

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.