Home • ThinkDifferentStore • MacBoards • Advertising • RSS Syndication • Newsletter • Contact

Remy Davison of Insanely Great Mac has posted a column listing what he considers to be the 10 worst Macs of all time.

I've done some 10-list articles myself, but I always find making the choices tough, and an exercise in arbitration. I don't disagree with most of Remy's choices in this instance, but I do have a few niggles.

However on one point we entirely agree -- execrable LC/Performa 5200/5300 series. That thing was a complete dog of a machine. My son Tristan, who has worked on many different Mac models, came up with the 5200 without hesitation when I asked him what he thought the worst ever Mac was. He has a regular customer with one, and it has been a more or less reliable machine with some tech attention, but it is also horrible, with a crummy built in 15 in. monitor, and is agonizingly slow as well. Definitely one of Apple's poorest efforts

As was the 5200's modular stablemate the.LC/Performa 6200, which was likewise slow, overpriced, and cranky.

Remy gives the Quadra 900 "doshonorable mention." I think that is a bit harsh, and would have chosen the Quadra 700, which incorporated the brilliant innovation of drawing its cooling air in through the floppy drive. I guess the engineer responsible for that never lived in a wood-heated house.

As for PowerBooks, I can't quarrel with Remy's choice of the PowerBook 150 as the worst PowerBook ever built, what with its paucity of ports, no video out, oddball IDE hard drive, and mediocre display.

Remy also chose two other PowerBook models as stinkers -- the much-maligned 5300, and the early, cacheless, "MainStreet" 233 MHz G3 Series 'Books. As happens, I used a 5300 as my main computer for three years, and I also had a MainStreet on loan as my workhorse machine for a couple of months on the cusp of 1998/99 just before I bought my WallStreet.

Save for the unfortunate 150, I can't really think of an alternative candidate to the 5300 for the worst PowerBook. Mine was a good, dependable machine that never had a day's downtime during its tenure with me, notwithstanding that it was snail slow. It is still in daily use by my daughter, although the trackpad button finally broke last summer, and Apple replaced the entire case plastics under their extended service plan for the 5300. Joe Williams at NASA, who is one of the people responsible for navigating the space shuttle, used a 5300 for years (he recently switched to a Pismo), and liked it. Joe still has his 5300 too. Unfortunately, many 5300 owners had less satisfactory service from their machines.

On the other hand, while the MainStreet does pale by comparison to its WallStreet siblings in performance, it was not a bad computer. I really liked the one that I borrowed, and would have bought it save for the fact that I was able to get a WallStreet LE with the 512 K cache and TFT screen for virtually the same price.

Remy compares the MainStreet unfavorably to the original "Kanga" G3 PowerBook, but the operative distinction here is that the canvas sold for $5,700, while the MainStreet was less than half the price at $2,295. And while MainStreet was a lot slower than Kanga and the other G3 'Books, it is still one third faster than a PowerBook 3400/240 -- the erstwhile "fastest laptop on the planet." I also found the MainStreet's passive matrix LCD display quite pleasant to use. It's not as good as my similar-sized TFT unit, but I didn't mind working with it at all.

Which brings me to my principal criticism of Remy Davison's "10 worst" analysis: the lack of cost vs. value weighting. For example, the high-end PowerBook 5300s especially (which were the most expensive PowerBooks ever at $6,500), or the Mac II vx (which also appears on the list) were grossly overpriced for what you got performance-wise. However, in the context of its era, the MainStreet wasn't. In terms of value, it was arguably all lot better one than the cheapest contemporaneous WallStreet (the 250 at $3,899) or the high and 292 MHz machine at a suck in your breath $6,396), or for that matter, the high end 3400 machines that it superseded which sold for $6,400. The MainStreet had no worse hardware defects than the other early WallStreets, and was a solid, dependable, and relatively economical machine for the most part.

A couple of other nitpicks:

I also have a friend whose Performa 630 (another machine that made Remy's 10 worst list) finally croaked after astronomical 35,000 hours or so, and she liked it so much that she bought another identical machine to replace it with.

The WallStreet LE (I own one) came with 32 MB or RAM -- not 64 MB.

The Quadra 900 was in production for six months, not "a few weeks."

And Remy refers to India still manufacturing 1950s Morris Minor automobiles. Actually, the Hindustan, which I think is what he means, is built with the tooling for the 1958 Morris Oxford, and not the smaller Morris Minor (which remained in production in England through the 1960's), and has been upgraded with the 1800 cc engine used in the MGB.

Critiqueing a side, I enjoyed reading Remy's "10 worst" Macs list, which I found entertaining and thought-provoking. One of the thoughts it provoked in me is that if these are the worst machines Apple has produced out of over 200 different Mac models, then things are pretty good. You can check it out at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/features/010806.html

Charles W. Moore

.