The eMac looks better than the “molar” display, but that ain’t saying much.
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20 Years Ago Today, Apple Unveiled the eMac
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20 years ago today we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Steve Jobs… you know the rest. ?
Agreed, but Apple accepting $12B/year from Google to make it our default search engine isn't helping the cause.
My step father had an eMac. He smoked in his office. When I upgraded him to a Mac mini, I took his old eMac hoping I could sell it and get a few bucks for it. The tar and smoke from the cigarettes had make it a shade of caramel. It smelled like an ashtray and it got worse when you turned it on and the fans started running. I took it apart in hopes of cleaning it, but everything was covered in the sticky tar and there was no hope. I wound up throwing it away.
Acquired about 10 of these units five years ago and sold them for $20 a pop using TFF as the default browser.
I created a special single layer DVD for restoring these computers from your time machine back up.
They were great little work horses although the 700 MHz model was pathetically slow.
Was notorious for failed hard drives from maxtor. Had to change a few out and it was like brain surgery with 100 screws.
I created a special single layer DVD for restoring these computers from your time machine back up.
They were great little work horses although the 700 MHz model was pathetically slow.
Was notorious for failed hard drives from maxtor. Had to change a few out and it was like brain surgery with 100 screws.
I’m pretty sure every eMac purchase came with 2 free bricks ? inside. That’s the only explanation I could come up with for how heavy they were compared to the CRT iMacs. ? Neat machines though!
Like others have mentioned, I won’t forget the workout lugging classrooms of them around was back in the day!
Like others have mentioned, I won’t forget the workout lugging classrooms of them around was back in the day!
My first Mac!
Me and my friends use to make fun of it, but it grew on me over time and is part of the reason I transitioned from Windows to OS X. Damn it was heavy though.
Me and my friends use to make fun of it, but it grew on me over time and is part of the reason I transitioned from Windows to OS X. Damn it was heavy though.
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When rumor had it that they were going to come out with a new iMac I thought they would use this form factor and just replace the crt screen with an LCD but instead they came out with the gooseneck.
I abandoned the Apple garbage in the 1990s when it became pathetically underpowered and the OS was terrible. I hated to switch to WinTel for my personal computer, but since I was using them at work I knew how more they could do compared to the Apple Macs in the 1990s. I do remember there were at least three major lines of Macs in the 1990s, including the educational line. None were good. The only good thing they did in the 1990s was to fire Jobs and license the hardware to 3rd party vendors who immediately started turning out much better Macs than Apple, and at lower prices. I waited until the Intel Macs came around before I returned to buying Macs.
Time flies but god am I happy that this machine is history, together with all the old CRT iMacs. This contraption was loud, not particularly fast, and had a mediocre monitor.
The machine isn't from the 90s and neither was Jobs fired in that decade.
I hope Apple finds a way to become more relevant in classrooms again. Apple had such a larger footprint in schools when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. I developed my affinity for the brand as a student and having access to their beautiful machines in computer labs art my schools. Inexpensive Chromebook's really have taken over that space. I don't think iPad has made the inroads Apple was expecting. My own guess is that between cheaper kid-focused laptops and Apple designing curriculum as a service, that's probably their best bet. When most things are web apps and Google Docs, curriculum is about the only vector where Apple can use their scale and not just compete for cheapest hardware.
It was between this and the iMac G4, for me. I chose the iMac G4. Still have it, works fine. Still the best design ever, IMHO.
That was my first Mac, too, bought around the same time! I could play YouTube videos up to 360p, but it was fine. I could even edit videos on it pretty well, using not just iMovie HD 6 but even iMovie '09 thanks to that hack. (Editing was indeed fast, but rendering did take quite a while.) I still have that eMac, and it still boots into Leopard and operates just fine.
I still love the MiniDisc concept. Record songs to a 74- or 80-minute disc. If you wanted to move one song to another position, no problem. If you wanted to add a cleaner, newer version of a song, just delete the old one and record the new one.
Great way to make a collection of my vinyl 12-inch records back before they appeared on CDs (10 years later, at least). I still have 2 MiniDisc portable players and 3 920 full-size decks, for playing and recording (mostly playing), and over 1000 MiniDiscs -- all of which still play. (This is hardware that is 22 years old! I'm still waiting for a Mac to last that long!)
You could do soooo much with a MiniDisc versus a CD-R. Once that CD-R was burned and finalized, that it was. The MiniDisc ... you could keep playing around with it to your heart's content.
The only downside was Sony's DRM and all music, etc., had to be pretty much recorded in Real Time. But
it even had a larger bit rate than MP3s at 320 bits, versus 128 MP3s. Sony's compression rate was actually pretty good, It's just too bad they never wanted to let you easily transfer your collection to your Macintosh or iPod later.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, this is "off-topic," but hey, what can I say? More of a Fan Boy for Sony than Apple back in those days.)
Yes! Very little for me to add!
I was like the only kid in high school who invested in this. I also used it to record live music, unless I'm making this up. It was a portable recording studio. I never had a full-size deck, but over several years had about 5 models. It was also a awesome for road trips — all you needed was the cassette adapter and you had hours and hours of music. And you could SHUFFLE!!!!!!!!
I still have one of these in my basement, which because it's so heavy (they're like fifty pounds or so), has sat in the same spot for well over a decade after its initial cleaning, take apart and set up. We used to use it for digitizing old VHS tapes and things for a while as part of our workflow a long, long time ago. lowendmac says they can run 10.4 maybe 10.5 https://lowendmac.com/2002/emac-2002/ so I may have a fun little weekend project now.
The CRT is fine, I have one and it runs at 1280x960 and looks pretty good. Also, it isn't that noisy and it runs pretty fast. Mine is the 1 GHz model that still runs native Mac OS 9. It does slow down considerably when running 10.4 though.
Those early LCDs were not nearly as nice as the ones we have now. Viewing angles dropped off real quick, for one thing. CRTs were also a known quantity, especially the higher-end ones designers were using. I remember visiting a friend who did video in the mid-2000s and they were editing on these specific little Sony monitors. Tech like that doesn't die off immediately, especially since those monitors probably cost a couple grand a piece at the time.
