Found Footage: Unboxing a Twentieth Anniversary Mac

"What a bold design." HA! It always kills me when people have geekgasms over the TAM, like it's some magical thing... ooh, it's kinda SMALL, and has a FLAT PANEL! BFD. It's a LAPTOP. PERIOD. There's no magic in how they made it. They took a laptop, opened it up flat, gave it a new case, and that's about it. (OK, it was a PowerMac MB, but still.) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; personally, it doesn't do much for me. Add to that Apple's hubris--they charged $10,000 for it (a comparable PowerBook was less than half that at the time) and it was delivered and set up by a tuxedo-wearing tech (arriving in a limo, no less)--and it's just hysterical. Even with a limited run of 12,000, there wasn't enough demand and they dropped the price repeatedly, eventually selling the final units at a loss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2004/01/61729
And Compaq introduced the Compaq Presario 3020 and 3060--all-in-one computers with built-in LCDs--a year EARLIER. They failed in the marketplace, too, but at least they were priced comparably to laptops, not 2-3x more. :-)

OK, you all bitch about almost any little thing..makes me think you like nothing. STFU, and lets get to the good part..Michael Hedges, that is so him!!!! All the synths and a SLIDE CUITAR are not on any released music. Can we get a full sample/MP3 with the voice over removed. Surley one of you boys can do it for us MH fans. I miss him a lot, what a chance to hear something "new", he was a bit crazy during this time...so I really would like hear it for real. It sounds so good. Let "deep tissue" music live on!!!!!!!

Ah, Memories!
The TAM was my very first Mac, bought 2nd hand in 1999.
I remember the day I opened that huge box (minus the decapitated guy). I was able to sell it for what I paid for it 5 years later which was enough to buy a refurb 24" iMac. The iMac is similar in many ways, but already worth half what I paid for it.

"And XP and Vista"... You're an idiot. If that POS boots faster than a modern day PC, i'll NOT kiss your ass.

Other than the design I seem to remember the guts of that machine being equivalent to a PowerBook 5300. We all know how great those were, he'll need the year warranty!

Alfred and I have known each other a very long time, and we have our little "shorthand communications" like all old friends do. Sorry if we got a little too "inside" for you. We also both enjoy and understand the long, varied history behind Apple's computers. I had never even seen a TAM in person before this unboxing. This one was special and we wanted to take our time with it. When the TAM was first shipping, they sent a tech in a limo to set it up for you. It was all part of the "show" back then.

Blame the seller for stuffing the dummy in the box, we knew nothing about that beforehand. His joke, we just went with it.

And while some may think that 22 minutes is long (and yes, take out the dummy and some jokes, it's down to 15), there were over 150 people watching us live on Ustream.tv for over 90 minutes from start to finish.

Oh, and Al has over 3000 subscribers on YouTube. I only have 600 myself for my tech and humor videos.

@ Dan M - I agree. That was weird.

@ Matt - "Knock it off" is just one of his catch phrases. We all have them. Wait until you hear him say "Whatever"...

@ Chris W - I want him to send in the warranty card, see what kind of response he gets...

@ Allan, Andrew, Chuck - we're not trying to make friends with everyone out there. No one can. Alfred and I make these videos with our personalities right out there. It's like Letterman vs Leno. You might like one, hate the other. (I can't stand Leno, myself.) If all you want is the tech content, feel free to load, pause, and scrub your way through the video or look at the Flickr feed Al links to in the sidebar of the YouTube page for this video. But I do hope you guys did get something out of it.

@ Darren - ADB but I do have an adapter somewhere....

Wow, I had to skip through most of the video after the first couple minutes. This guy is literally the most annoying person I can Imagine. I still can figure out what he's laughing about and why he does it every 5 seconds through the whole video!! Is he laughing at his own jokes and if so what are they? I actually feel bad for this poor guy because he must not notice when people cut him off when he's talking and constantly are trying to get away from him.

I thought for sure I was going to get Rick Rolled on this..

Cool to see somebody get that excited over an unboxing. Also cool to see how far ahead of the design curve Apple was over ten years ago.

Is that keyboard/touchpad ADB or USB? Either way, it'd be cool to get it hooked up to a modern computer.