50 Things We Miss About Old-School Apple
Posted 08/27/2009 at 1:36pm
| by Michael Simon

31. It was a bug, Dave
Everyone remembers 1984, when the greatest commercial of all time aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, and most can recall the following year, when the dreadful "Lemmings" ad debuted. But when Apple returned to the big stage in 1999 with its Hal 9000 Y2K spot, we had high hopes for another. Ten years later, we're still waiting.
32. Laser tag
Hewlett Packard gets all the credit for desktop publishing, but our first PostScript laser printer was dressed in platinum gray, spoke the Snow White design language and was made in Cupertino.

33. Yo-Yo Mac
We could never get it to perform any actual tricks, but Apple’s yo-yo adapter was a thing of beauty that turned as many heads as the PowerBook it was attached to. Who knew Steve’s Reality Distortion Field applied to clunky power bricks, too?
34. Membership had its privileges
We couldn’t be happier for Apple and its string of record-breaking quarters, but all these new members have made Club Apple feel a whole lot less exclusive. It’s gotten so bad that only three people eyed our MacBook Pro at Starbucks the other day... what gives!?!

35. Toppled Secret
A casualty of the Asteroid fallout, Nick dePlume agreed to close his popular Think Secret rumor site in 2008 after a closely watched court battle with Apple over publication of "trade secrets." But weren't we, the faithful readers who hung on Nick's every word, the real victims?
36. Taking stock
It wasn't too long ago when you could buy a few shares of AAPL for less than the cost of a shuffle, but Apple's success seems to have gone to its head. Despite a robust ROI, shareholders haven't seen a stock split since 2005, and you'd have to go back another 10 years to find the last dividend payout.