Yea some collector Mac's should not be upgraded (so they remain a collectors item). and then if someone wants to upgrade it they have every right to do so.
Exactly, just as the private collector has every right to win an original Picasso at auction and take it home and burn it.
I swore I would not add to this thread after JDW called it wrapped up, but since that suggestion was broached, the oddball thread continues ...
I was itching to respond to this:
What Steve Jobs showed at the Shareholders meeting is not what was sold to customers. Period ... The oldest Mac I currently own is a 512ke, so I have a pretty good idea what you can and cannot do with a 128k.
What keeps throwing me with this statement in relation to the capabilities of the 128K is that what Jobs showed the shareholders may not have been a 128K, but it also didn't do anything a 128K couldn't do, except execute several different programs in a row. Just to be clear, we're both talking about this presentation, right?
I had to watch it again to be sure, but it's not like he put the Mac through its paces and ran Microsoft Excel on it or anything. He put on a show. And it wouldn't be the first time a company "rigged" the demo to do things the production model couldn't in order to put on a show. I might even argue that if they had had the time, they might have pared down the software to actually run on a 128K, but they did it in a few days, with different teams and threw the separate parts together at the 11th hour:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Intro_Demo.txt&topic=The%20Launch&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium
So, to say the 128K had to be upgraded because Steve Jobs couldn't even run a demo on it is a non sequitur. At the risk of being redundant, after viewing the demo again I confirmed for myself that the 512K prototype Mac didn't perform one task the 128K was not also capable of except executing each separate program without pause. I will agree anyone who actually bought a Mac for that exact purpose, probably would have had a legitimate grievance. Then again anyone who rushes out and drops $2500 without further investigation deserves what they get. Besides all reports of this story are inherently biased because everybody wanted the Macintosh to have more RAM but Jobs and here is the perfect "see-I-told-you-so" story. WHen the Macintosh sales began to slow, they didn't just pick up again when Apple fixed the problem with the 512K, in fact as the Folklore story points out, they got worse. Apple had other issues with regard to sales that had nothing to do with RAM.
My point here is you further indicate you know the limitations of a 128K based on your experience with a 512Ke. Again, it seems you are not giving the 512Ke enough credit and by comparison, further maligning what the 128K could do without any real experience. And to suggest the 512Ke is somehow limited shows a biased frame of reference. The 512Ke is a fantastic machine. To fully understand how great, you have to look at it from the 1984 perspective, not a 2007 one. The 128K Mac was revolutionary. Not hype – Earth-shattering! It was the first computer of any kind in commercial production that offered the GUI. I can't even conceive how significant that was because I was a kid at the time and had not really experienced computers in any practical sense and I am guilty of taking it for granted as well. But in context, it was a magic box that did miraculous things. And the 128K WAS a very useful Mac. Admittedly the 512K was more useful, but then my MacBook is more useful after I added another GigaByte stick of RAM to it.
People upgraded their 128Ks because they wanted and/or needed a more powerful computer, just like today, but the 128K had sold them on Macintosh, so they did that rather than switch to a PC. There is no dispute that the 128K short changed a lot to meet a price-point. That doesn't mean it didn't work well. In fact, my argument would be you wouldn't be able to find today a single 128K that had not at least been upgraded to a 512K if the 128K was so unusable in its stock configuration. I used my 128K for years and never had the need to upgrade it. Would I have liked a more powerful computer? Sure, just like I'd like to have a Porsche over a Corolla. But both cars will get me where I need to go.
So back to the original topic ... there's no reason to mourn the upgraded 128K, since it's not really destroyed – just changed and it can be changed back with no harm done. And it was changed legitimately at a time when the need to make it more useful was desirable and encouraged by Apple. Not because it wasn't useful as it was, but because the user wanted more. The same thing we crave today. But today we are spoiled. I had a perfectly useable G3 PowerBook which works as well today as it did when I bought it 7 years ago. So why upgrade to an Intel MacBook? Because software changed and if I wanted to run it, I needed more speed and power.
Oh and JDW, I was fortunate when I bought my used 128K, the previous owner who made me a deal because he had upgraded to a new Plus, threw in the 2nd disk drive for free because it was "obsolete". If the 128K had a single failing it was that Apple was not prepared to offer the 2nd drive simultaneously with the Macintosh release, nor were they able to supply them in sufficient numbers when they did become available, or for a price that mitigated the frustration of using a single drive on a 128K. Frankly, the 2nd drive is indispensable for any of the early floppy disk based Macs. If the original Mac had debuted with 512K, I would have still preferred a second drive and less RAM to any disk swaps at all.
From my perspective, the need for more RAM was only a necessity to run bigger, better faster software. I'll put it in terms that Steve Jobs intended at the time in his effort to create a computer "appliance" for the rest of us. If the 128K were a coffee maker, the only question you need to ask is: does it make coffee? As long as the answer is yes, then the product meets expectations. After you start using it for awhile and decide you need an automatic timer, pause and serve, thermal carafe, built-in filter and any other features you might find useful, you can't blame the original appliance because it can only brew a pot of coffee. And the 128K computes. Period.
) Who can say if such ones will turn out to be more valuable over time? I actually expect some of the upgrades that went in these machines will prove far more collectible in the long run since they are generally rarer, and also represent quite clever engineering. Yet frequently we have people here dictating what determines value.
