Since the beginning of my "Mac" experience in 1987, I've never been one to pay retail. If you have been a Macintosh user for long, you will remember a time when the computer made "for the rest of us" really was an expensive proposition.
I avoided that mostly by always buying closeout Macs that were last year's model. My first Mac, a Plus, was purchased at a Little Rock, Arkansas, downtown computer store for $1,299. For that price, all I got was the basic system. I purchased a tote bag (remember those?) and an external floppy drive.
I lived with the Plus for a number of years before purchasing a PowerBook 145B in Tupelo, Mississippi, which was being offered at an enormous discount at a Sam's Wholesale Club. At the time it was quite an upgrade from the Plus, which I had upgraded from one meg of internal RAM to four and 52 meg external hard drive. As I recall, the PowerBook came with four megs of RAM and an 80 meg hard drive.
Later, I purchased a secondhand Color Classic in Memphis, Tennessee. I now enjoyed a colorful Mac experience and was able to use all the applications I had grown to depend on.
Following the Color Classic, came a new 6116 Performa PowerMac, which was being sold on closeout at Office Depot in Columbia, Missouri. I was thrilled at the price and performance for the dollar. Literally up until a few months ago the 6100 was the fastest Mac I had ever owned.
I also acquired a used Mac Classic with four megs of memory and a 40 meg hard drive along the way, which was the computer my mother used up until last month.
You might say, "Well, what's the point?" The point is the 400 mhz G3 iMac that I'm typing this column on is an amazing piece of computer technology and engineering at an incredible price ($1,299). While you can certainly buy cheaper computers, you would be hard pressed to find a better value in top-of-the-line, cutting edge computing today.
The drawback for those upgrading to an iMac from older Macs is that Apple has created a legacy-free machine with the iMac. Gone are the outdated SCSI and serial port connections and in are Firewire and USB connections. The flip side is that everything you'll want to do with your new Mac will literally fly! The processor and hard drive is a screamer. Firewire smokes and USB does just about everything else.
Legacy-free can be good. It takes a company like Apple, however, to take the hit and make it happen.
This is really a great time to be a Mac user. While Apple is turning out great products, there is a huge market out there in older Mac equipment. Contrary to the PC market, old Macs are still very usable computers today. Let's face it, even the oldest Macs, such as the Mac Plus, can surf the web today. Try doing that on the competitor to the Mac at the time the Mac was introduced, such as a 286 IBM compatible.
This past weekend I picked up a used Mac LC III with monitor and printer for little to nothing. Despite the limitations of hard drive space and RAM, which I've already upgraded, this is a sweet machine. It runs System 7.1 and older software at good speeds and could be used for an Internet surfer if so desired.
There are many other examples of great deals on older Mac equipment on the web. While these machines may not fit the bill for everyday web surfing or intensive number crunching, they can still perform 90 percent of the tasks people purchase computers for.
And still yet, over the past several months I've purchased "closeout" software for a song as well. I've bought some nice older software, which by the way still runs on my iMac, for .99 cents and for $2.99 at several local stores.
I've known for some time that "old" isn't necessarily bad. That goes for age of a person and certainly the age of vintage Macs.