I'm all for nostalgic reviews of the bygone era of 20 years ago, but I jumped off the bus at Minecraft...
Got overwhelmed with a clammy feeling of watching a whole new generation retrograde hipsters go through the motions of being on the TV of my youth. Something in the combination of David Letterman's guffawing patter, Buddy Holly black-rimmed glasses with obligatory silk-record-store-weenie black t-shirt with silk-screen motif, whole-arm tats, and jumping wipe cuts to try make a shot of a tabletop seem edgy mixed together to cause me psychic pain.
I pretty sure the brilliant intention of that channel is not to understand and celebrate old Macs, it's to monetize nostalgia for a future that never really happened on Youtube.
The Mac is just a convenient artifact from a fashionably nerdly past that we can now clearly see was way less cool than it seemed in its time. I've got a friend who recently re-discovered cassette tapes and sees them as gods gift to pop music appreciation. He has not yet started a YT channel.
Props to this culture segment: I understand the ache of Apple fan service in a whole new way looking back at these ridiculous plastic blobs. Apple was shameless. The difference between the G4 tower and a Dell was far less than Apple claimed.
I was there. I had a mirror-drive-door 867 MHz first week of release. I recall unboxing it and plugging it in and the fan noise was like refrigerator tractor-trailer truck idling in my studio. I wrote to Macintouch that it was "insanely noisy" and Apple announced a power-supply replacement program with quieter fans. After installing the fixed PS, I still ended up building an acoustic enclosure for it out of leftover Techline furniture to prevent a headache from working next to it.
When the G5 Quad was released I jumped towards multiprocessing future. It felt like a beautiful new world of case design. But it has a similar problem to the MDD 867: under load its fans revved up like a Sikorsky taking off!
It was the 2006 Mac Pro at which point Apple finally achieved sanity on most counts, notwithstanding 32-bit UEFI, and I've run a 2008 Mac Pro for 14 years in which its upgrade potentials were fully realized.
This quirky G4 nostalgia is lost on me. I do get the joy of keeping old kit around to play games. And that's what we're really talking about: hanging on to pop culture as another generation passes into oblivion. The trick is that no one partaking in this nostalgia can claim to be innocent of the implications of this media. We are all children of TV, we all deeply inhabit and feel a world that is merely surfaces.
Looking back at these older Macs, it's obvious in hindsight that with goading by Apple a entire culture became disturbed by tawdry techno fetish, with Jobs leading the pack.
Today it's an open question as to how to properly dispose of so much waste. The youtube half-life of this stuff is measured in seconds. It like particle decay of pop culture. All that plastic is swirling into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The fact that in 2006 Apple started putting PCs with a 10 year life span into cases that can last 10,000 years to eternity just magnifies my sense that something is way out of balance. Imagine vast beaches of a post-human era with the tides slowly grinding these aluminum boxes back into the sands from whence they came.
So what's actually going on here? I suggest it's something else than what it looks like.
That old Eizo LCD monitor in the vid was the capper: equally atrocious in its design as the garish creaky Dell G4, but rendered in Lenovo black with 2 inch bezel, iconic flying saucer base, and a panel that today would be suitable for an ATM. —It's color managed! That Apple Cinema Display, which in its time has nothing to do with the history of cinema, but foreshadowed what cinema was about to become: from David Lynch to The Mandalorian.
There's something going on with this stuff, but it's not what it seems...
The amazing part is the entire industry of this stuff arose in the last 50 years! NeXT became fully an anachronism then Jobs got old and passed on.
What will the future bring, my oh my.
