A Blast From The Past: Mac Review From 1984.
Few computers changed the course of computing history like Apple’s diminutive Macintosh circa 1984.
What were the reviews like back then? How does the original Mac compare to today’s iMac?
The Mac Mothership pointed us to a review of the original Mac, just days after the launch in early 1984.
Lawrence Magid, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1984, gushed praise for Apple’s new computer in a lengthy review of the original Mac.
Mac360’s Tera.... (excerpted).
6 Reader Comments
jason Packer said:
Think that $2500 was expensive for how little you got compared to today? Now consider that that was $2500 in 1984 dollars. About $5000 in 2008 dollars, or a very nice Mac Pro with the 30” Apple Cinema Display.
willy wonka said:
Pro dude. You misunderstand. The first Mac had 128k of RAM. That’s 12.8% of 1 meg. Later in the year Apple introduced a 512k Mac. A couple of years later the Mac SE was a whopping 1 meg of RAM. Upgrades to 2 or 4 megs of RAM cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
We live in good times.
PRO~DUAL~INTEL~3/GIGAHERTZ said:
1 m.b.???????????? are you serious? WOW. Makes me wonder what ten years from now holds and how people will laugh at my 4 gigs.
LKern said:
My first mac was a Plus. I remember getting 1MB of RAM installed. Cost 900 bucks and I had to send the whole machine to Philadelphia, 700 miles away. But when I got it back it “screamed”. 
Art said:
My dad was really impressed by the new computer revolution and we just couldn’t be left out. We started with an Atari and had a lot of fun with that. Then one day he came home and said, “I just bought that new Mac.” I didn’t even know what he was talking about.
A few minutes with that first Mac and I was hooked. We also bought the imagewriter and later, some neat video camera software so we could alter everyone’s pics.
The were really fun years and I think back and am amazed at how much we did with that little machine.
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Jonathan Richard said:
My first Mac was the original Mac. I think I bought it in February of 1984. Of course bought the printer, but did that a month later so that my wife wouldn’t have a cow! $3000 was a lot for a Resident in his 2nd year of training, making $22k a year! I spent hours playing with MacPaint. Wish I had kept my MacWorld magazines from that time! Anyone remember the “Thunderscan” (http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Thunderscan.txt&topic=Hardware Design&sortOrder=Sort by Date&detail=medium)?