Linked List: December 28, 2020

Monday, 28 December 2020

20 Macs for 2020: #1 – iMac G3 

Jason Snell:

You can divide Mac history in a bunch of different ways. But perhaps the clearest line of demarcation is the mid-1998 release of the original iMac.

Great piece on a great Mac. Snell patterned his 20 Macs for 2020 project on Joe Posnanski’s Baseball 100. Like Posnanski’s list, there was a lot of room for a lot of debate most of the way down the list. But when it got to the end, not so much. There are a lot of Macs that could have made the list; there are only three or four that could credibly hold the top spot. The original iMac is one.

One thing that’s interesting about the original iMac is that its design didn’t have much staying power. CRTs were on the way out already in 1998, and the whole translucent plastic thing was a fad. But it was a great fad. And the spirit of the original iMac’s design, if not its specifics, set the tone for all of Apple’s successes to follow: computers should be fun and useful, beautiful and elegant, and eschew unnecessary complexity.

Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorships in Q1 2021 

DF sponsorships are sold out through the end of January, but February and March are open. One sponsor per week, with a sponsor-written entry in the RSS feed to start the week, a thank-you post right on the homepage from me at the end of the week, and the one and only graphic ad on every page of the site all week long. No tracking or other privacy-invasive bullshit. Just plain honest ads. My best argument that they work: the number of repeat companies in the sponsor archive list.

Last week’s sponsor, Wifi Dabba, is now one of those repeat sponsors. They first sponsored back in August, and wrote this rather glowing testimonial about their experience and results in November. There was an interesting thread on Hacker News, too.

It sounds corny, I know, but the system works. Win-win-win: Sponsors reach a good audience for a fair price; readers get to read DF free of charge, with high-quality ads that respect their attention and their privacy (and bandwidth); and I get to run a business and sleep well at night.

If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s discerning audience, I’d love to have you as a sponsor.

Waterfield’s AirPods Max Shield Case 

That didn’t take long: $100 protective case from Waterfield. I’ve been using various bags from Waterfield for a long time: really well-made, thoughtfully-designed stuff.

Their AirPods Max Shield Case is designed to please two groups: those who want to use it instead of the widely-panned “Smart Case” included with AirPods Max, and those who want to use them both together. I find that curious — why would I want to put my headphones in an unprotective case before I put them in a protective case? But because Apple’s own Smart Case pouch is so minimal (which is partly why it’s been so panned) it doesn’t really add much bulk to Waterfield’s case for it to support both styles of transport. (Notably, Waterfield’s case has magnets to put your AirPods Max into lower-power mode, so one doesn’t need the case-within-a-case for that.)