A Mac Plus, much like the one I first used at school. (Image: MARC912374)

As the Mac hits 40, I’ve been remembering my key ‘firsts’ with the platform.

At school, in around 1989 or 1990, I was plonked in front of a Mac Plus stashed in a cupboard. My English teacher reasoned “You know about computers” and I was tasked, with a few friends, with putting together the first edition of the school magazine. It’s to the credit of Apple and Aldus that the Mac and PageMaker together were usable enough that we managed this with no instructions. Although the teacher was perhaps overly optimistic about how long it would take, since she started getting annoyed after a few hours of us working on it instead of going to class. Even my most hardcore editors would admit putting together a magazine from scratch with dozens of pages takes a bit longer than a single session of double-English.

In 1996, while studying at Cardiff Art School, I was fortunate enough to win the Helen Gregory Memorial Scholarship. I shall remain forever grateful to the Gregory family, whose generosity allowed me to purchase my first Mac. It was a mighty beast – a PowerMac 8600/250AV, optimistically purchased during a period where people wondered whether Apple would wink out of existence entirely. I used this Mac to fashion some pioneering multimedia artwork, even if its dodgy internal HDD and the integrated Jaz drive tried their best to scupper my chances of retaining data for the entire length of my course.

By the time my uni course was done, Steve Jobs was back at Apple, and it looked like the company had turned the corner. The iMac had arrived. Until then, my parents had been fighting with a terrible PC, sold to them by some local cowboy to help run their business. I suggested the Mac. My folks were reluctant, but bought the Bondi Blue – and never looked back. That was my first experience of a ‘modern’ Mac as well.

Clearly, it had an impact, because I’m still writing about Macs regularly over a quarter of a century later!

The Mac was announced 40 years ago. Over at Stuff today, I’ll be writing about this milestone. First up is The Apple Mac at 40 – and 6 of the best desktop Macs. Later on, there will be articles about great modern apps – and much-loved classics that made the Mac. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Published stuff

Given the kerfuffle over Apple and app stores this week, I for TapSmart appropriately wrote 10 apps we’ll never see on the App Store. That’s me off Apple’s Christmas card list.

I also wrote up a relaxation toolkit (apps to help you unwind and destress) and a guide to bucket list apps.

My column for Stuff this week is:
Samsung Galaxy Ring looks to ring in wearable changes – how will Apple and others respond? Which may or may not be an ENTIRELY SERIOUS look at how the competition might respond to Samsung’s one ring to rule them all.

I also updated best upcoming Lego sets and browser games to kill your productivity.

Upcoming stuff

The big thing on my plate right now is Mac apps. I’m delving into the best of them, to rework an article in time for the Mac’s upcoming 40th. If you’ve any thoughts on apps to include (big or small), holler!

Other stuff

We’ve started to wind down telly subs, because we’re not using them. Disney+ and Amazon Prime have been paused. We’ll see how that goes. Ideally, Netflix would go too, but we have a 9yo glued to that service. Oh well. I can’t say I’ve missed Prime. Not having it has stopped me wasting yet more time trudging through Fear the Walking Dead.

Elections are bubbling into people’s consciousness. I therefore took a proper look at our seat. It’s one of the safest in the UK, but reportedly in play, according to pollsters. Although the results of the boundary review have skewed it in favour of the Conservative incumbent.

What irked most was the commission arguing it bolted on villages in the south-west to ensure the community was cohesive, and yet carved an entire town in half in the north-east. So people who live across the road from each other may be served by MPs from different parties and with starkly different ideologies. Unsurprisingly, the bits carved off are strongly Lib Dem in nature, and therefore more likely to vote against the current government and incumbent. Hmmm.

In tech, I saw Plants vs Zombies 3 was on the way, and promised a return to the gameplay of old. Natch, it’s not returning to the pricing of old. It has IAPs up the wazoo. One is a £74.99 consumable. Bollocks to that. I’ll stick to the original, which I sideloaded on to my original iPad Air.

Speaking of, Apple looks like it’ll carve up the App Store on a regional basis rather than allow global sideloading or the removal of anti-steering. I like my Apple kit, but come on. We know where things are heading, and right now Apple is seriously annoying developers of all stripes, right when it could do with them supporting its new platform. Bonkers.

Finally, some good news. In the UK, a video games magazine called Digitiser used to be broadcast on Teletext. It was a daily blast of games coverage and absurdist humour, which was hugely popular and with a unique writing style that influenced countless young minds.

I found it akin to an evolution of the Newsfield magazines I’d grown up with, combining their smart writing with silly humour. The lights finally went out in 2003, when Teletext succeeded in ousting the folks behind Digitiser, whereupon it was replaced by the staid GameCentral, at which point a lot of people lost interest.

The spirit of Digitiser lived on in various forms online, driven by co-creator Paul ‘Mr Biffo’ Rose. But a few years ago, a successful Kickstarter led to the hugely ambitious YouTube Digitiser The Show. It was a lot of fun, mixing retrogaming with a chaotic vibe that reminded me of anarchic children’s TV shows of old.

This weekend, Digitiser Level 2 debuts. The format has changed – for the better. It’s faster and with a smaller presenting team. The show is peppered with weird animations that look like they’ve escaped from Teletext pages. But mostly I love it because everyone involved looks like they’re having a blast. We need more of that kind of thing.

Published stuff

‘Based on a true story’, as they say in the movies, my Stuff column this week is I swapped an Amazon Echo for an Apple HomePod and found Siri is dumb as a rock. It’s sobering to see how far behind Apple is in basic conversational interactions with smart assistants. For Stuff, I also updated my best browser games piece, and have since hit the dizzy highs of 7954 on Paku Paku.

Over at TapSmart, the excellent Just Press Record was added to my classics series. More of those coming up over the next couple of months.

And for this blog, I wrote Pen computing didn’t fail – it just evolved into something else.

Upcoming stuff

More retro pieces on the way, because a certain mag has asked me to delve into the best bits from a trio of once-popular gadget makers. That should be fun.

Other stuff

CES came and went, and I for a second year in a row largely ignored it, bar reading coverage over on Stuff. But if you fancy reading a couple of previous pieces that have held up rather well: How smart-home technology at CES 2014 ushered in the end of the world (“You might have thought the Terminator looked tough on your TV screen, but you’ve not seen anything until you’ve experienced the sheer horror of Android-powered smart tweezers leaping at your face, screaming DEATH TO ALL HUMANS”) and The CES 2024 I want to see – and the one I’ll probably get (“This new curved display is so wide it’s actually a loop!”)

Natch, I probably should have foreseen ‘AI in everything’ for the second of those articles…

I recently spotted an interesting post by Benedict Evans on Threads. He argued people spent 20 years dreaming about pen computing, but now Apple has a flawless pen computer, it’s “pretty much useless for anything except actually drawing”. He therefore concludes: “Pen computing didn’t happen. I do wonder how far that is applicable to voice, natural language processing and chat bots – the fact they didn’t work was a trap, because even now that they do work, they might be a bad idea.”

I have a different take. If people did once dream ‘pen computing’ was the next step, it feels more like Apple subverted this by removing the need for a specific input device. Instead, you just use your fingers. ‘Pen computing’ became a subset of that, for people who needed more control and precision. Arguably, then, ‘pen computing’ is a massive success, because what it evolved into is how the majority of people use computers – that is, touchscreens on smartphones.

The takeaway here for me isn’t so much that Benedict is wrong nor that I’m right. It’s that you cannot predict the details of the next big thing. We don’t know with any certainty how things will play out, even when the broad brushstrokes become obvious and later largely come to pass.

So with voice, will it work? Quite possibly. But not necessarily in the specific ways we currently imagine it will.