In March of 1996, I decided to leave Claris to go work with a friend at Sun Microsystems Laboratories (you can read about that process here). I had been thinking about leavinf for a while, so in December of 1995, I decided to use my first discount as an employee at an Apple subsidiary to replace my now-sort-of-broken PowerBook Duo 250-upgraded-to-2300c with a spanking new tower Mac.
It was an exciting time to buy a Mac; the Power PC transition was complete, and the lineup had shiny, brand-new fast machines in it. I settled on a Power Mac 8100/100 AV. I still had my two monitors from the days I purchased my Mac IIci six years earlier, and I had plenty of hard drives sitting around for storage. According to everymac.com, this thing in its default configuration was listed at a retail price of $4600, which seems high. I know I got it for less because of the Apple employee discount.
I loved this machine. It was fast. I had enough disk space. I could plug in my ergonomic keyboard and mouse. It ran Finale great, and I spent quite a bit of time working on music. It was everything I wanted for my personal mac.
I was hired to work on Tck/Tk for both Mac and Windows at Sun Labs. However, when I got there, the IT department did not have a standard or for either Macs or Windows machines. John Ousterhout, my boss, asked if I had the ability to buy my hardware, and expense it to be reimbursed later. So I got to pick out my hardware. I will write about the Windows side of that later, but I liked the machine I had at home so much, I bought one for work. I also bought the AppleVision 1710AV Display to go with it. It was sweet.
So, why is this machine on my most hated list? About 15 months after I bought my personal machine, I would sit down at it, and hit the power button, and nothing would happen. If I waited a few minutes, it would turn on. This started happening all of the time, and was getting more and more annoying. I took it to some kind of Apple-authorized repair center (no Apple Store yet), and they charged me $50 to look at it, and tell me that it worked for them, and they could find nothing wrong.
About a year and a half after I bought this thing, I woke up, had breakfast, and tried to turn on the machine. Nothing happened. So I got in the shower.
When I got out of the shower, I smelled something terrible. It smelled like somebody was frying salmon that had turned bad. It was putrid, nauseating, and strong. I started looking around, and then I saw a small wisp of purple smoke coming from between the seems of my computer. I pulled the plug and the smoke stopped. The outside of the box wasn’t hot, so I opened it up.
The CPU on the machine normally had a heat sink glued to it, but the glue had failed, and the heat sink was hanging by a cable. The CPU was exposed, and there were purple scorch marks all around it. It had fried itself.
I called Apple tech support, and they told me that since the warranty had expired, I would have to pay over a thousand dollars to fix it.
At work, the tower mac worked fine, but that stupid 1710AV monitor kept dying. Apple replaced it twice!
Given the problems I had with the Duo upgrade, the 1710AV monitors, and the Mac that ate itself, I had a real crisis on my hands. I did not trust that the hardware that Apple made was going to last.
Steve Jobs had returned to Apple in early 1997, and he found a company careening out of control. The board finally ousted Gil Amelio in July, and Steve Jobs was in charge, if not quite official (he was officially named CEO in early 1998). At the time, Apple’s product line was horribly fractured. The software was in pretty rough shape as well, and was a big reason that Apple had bought NeXT (which netted them Jobs). But classic Mac OS’s replacement was a long way off.
I seriously thought about replacing my Mac with a Dell Pentium machine. I had worked with Microsoft Windows for a few years at work, and I was quite familiar with Windows.
But I had a LOT of Mac software, and it was expensive. And most of it was either not available for Windows, or I had to pay for it again for the Windows version. I was looking at double to the cost of the CPU when you accounted for buying the PC and the software I was using.
So, telling myself that this was probably buying the last Mac I would ever buy, I bought a Power Mac 8600/300. After I bought this machine, I wrote Steve Jobs a letter, detailing my troubles with Apple hardware the previous couple of years.
Apple managed to dig themselves out of the hole, and with the software they adapted from NeXT, Mac OS X (pronounced “Mac OS Ten”), and the release of the playful but incredibly popular iMac, they set themselves up for the future. And I eventually ended up working for them. And the Macs I have bought since have mostly worked great.
Appendix
This is the text of the letter I sent Jobs in 1997:
Steve Jobs
Apple Computer
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 94014
Dear Steve,
I am writing to tell you of some very frustrating experiences I have had with Apple machines this last summer.
First of all, a little background. I am an Apple user from way back; I learned BASIC on an Apple II in junior high school. I used the Mac when it came out at school. My first job out of school was at StyleWare, where I was one of the developers for AppleWorks GS. When Claris bought the company, I started working on FileMaker Pro. I left Claris about a year and a half ago to work on Tcl/Tk for Mac and Windows at Sun Microsystems.
I have been doing cross-platform development since 1990, and after these many years, I still think the Mac kicks serious Wintel butt.
Lately, however, I have had some very frustrating things happen to me. When I joined Sun in 1996, I ordered an AppleVision 1710 AV monitor. It looked great, sounded great; I loved it. In November, it died. So Apple sent me another; I put the old one in the box; everything was fine.
Then in July, the new one died. I took it in to the shop (since the policy of mailing new ones out had stopped), and they fixed it.
Now, it still flickers, especially when I turn it on. It is a lot fuzzier that it used to be. If it dies again, I will be quite angry, and will basically hope that I can get it replaced (with depreciation of course) with a 750 AV.
That was problem number 1.
In 1994, I purchased a Duo 250 through the first discount program at Apple. Nice little machine; used it for years. About a year and two months ago, I upgraded to a 2300.
Recently, it started behaving very strangely. It would not shut down if it was not docked. If you did get it shut down, it would not want to start back up again. It lost the clock and the startup settings.
I took it to ComputerWare in Palo Alto. They tried replacing the battery, but it did not fix the problem. It’s the logic board, which costs ~$800 to replace.
That was problem number 2.
I bought a Performa 6112 CD through an employee promotion for my wife three years ago. Recently, the floppy disk drive stopped being able to read any disks. When I asked ComputerWare how much it would cost to get a replacement, I was told that they did not sell it over the counter; I must go in and pay them to install a new one. And the new one cost $300 (when a floppy for a PC costs $45).
That was problem number 3.
My main machine I bought in December of 1995 through an employee promotion. It was an 8100/100 AV. Nice machine. Loved it. Saw no reason to upgrade my home machine since it did everything I needed.
About two months ago, it started having problems when I turned it on. Nothing would happen. Then, ten or fifteen minutes later, it would come on magically. Then it would turn off randomly. I took it to the shop. They duplicated the behavior once, told me it was the motherboard ($1200 to replace), and recommended that I just not turn it off. I got it home, hooked everything back up, tried to power on, and of course, nothing happened. About ten minutes later, this really foul smell started permeating my house. I finally tracked it down. It was the 8100/100 AV. Now completely dead.
After all of this, I was quite upset. I need a machine for consulting and working at home. Now I had a flaky PowerBook and a dead desktop. My wife and I are divorcing, so she had a working machine, but with no floppy drive. And I could pay $2000 fixing everything up. The obvious thing to do here was to get another machine.
I seriously considered buying a Wintel machine. I am quite comfortable with the machines having programmed them for seven years. However, I have several quite expensive software packages for the Mac (FileMaker, Premier, MPW, Photoshop, Finale, etc.), and I have three monitors that work on the Mac. And I just cannot get over my love for the machine.
Yesterday, I bought an 8600/300 from ComputerWare. It is a very, very nice machine that is very fast, has lots of hard drive space, an internal zip drive, video-audio in and out, etc. Unbelievably fast.
I just hope it lasts longer than 20 months like the 8100, or 14 months like the 2300 motherboard on my Duo. I am still quite upset about the way this whole summer went.
I am going to sell the Duo Dock, Ethernet card, external 4X CD ROM, and Zip Drive that went with the Duo. I took the floppy out of the 8100 and gave it to my ex-wife, and her floppy works again. I got rid of some of the RAM and the AV card by giving it to a friend with a 7100.
I will donate the rest of the dead parts to an outfit which refurbishes for schools.
But I am still very upset about this. You almost lost a loyal customer. I only hope that quality control in 1997 is better than it was in 1995.
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