Newer isn't always better. Ask any wine connoisseur or violin player. I recently googled across this article over at the Apple Blog on why new iPods aren't quite as good as old iPods. Sure there are a lot of great reasons to buy new. It was iPod video support that finally convinced me to buy. Eddie Hargreaves writes that early iPods had a lot going for them too, with features recently phased out such as A/C power adapters included in the box, FireWire support, and carrying cases, among others.

I personally prefer having my modern batteries and video capability (currently about 80% of my iPod's tiny 30GB hard drive is used for video) and I long ago picked up a cheap A/C-USB power adapter. Still, an included wired remote would have been nice and I wouldn't have minded playing around with the original extra feedback click settings.

If your business is out of control, suggests this ad, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems, with its shiny, shiny spreadsheets, word processing, and other business features that allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to become a computer expert. More to the point, the Macintosh proves it can defeat alligators and lower the incidence of in-office sewage... or something like that. You do have to give the ad-makers credit for their clever twist on the standard lemonade-from-lemons solution.

I am assured by those having worked with the Macs of that time, and with managers of that vintage, that many of those early, expensive macs ended up rarely used on managers' desks as a kind of status symbol rather than as an actual productivity tool. And that those alligators might have been cheered on just a bit by the employees.

May 11, 1988. The dawn of a new Apple ][gs+. Someone claiming early access to the development posted details to an online board, which was copied and forwarded and eventually posted to Usenet: "please don't spread this special information around, as apple would not be happy if this got out to the public. I will post more info as I discover it. this new machine has alot of potential!"

The "inside information" that was posted contained a description of the new Apple IIgs+. Let me slip for a moment into a more excited mode: <Fangirl Rumor Mode>OMG! OMG! Have you heard? I know this guy who knows this guy who actually has received an actual Apple II GS+ and he wrote about it on one of the boards that my friend's friend was on and here's a copy of his notes about the changes for all of your readers on Usenet! Like it's got 768K of RAM including 512K "fast" RAM and 128 "slow" RAM and the sound chip no longer buzzes and there's a super Hi-Res mode and a normal 320x200 mode with 256 colors per line! And there's a built-in SCSI port on the back and the peripherals are now slot independent! I'm not sure I can swing the $1054 for the IBM MS-DOS card--but I swear that they swear that this is a real product not vaporware!</Fangirl Rumor Mode>

According to Arnold Kim, at normalkid.com, the GS+ never was released and the Apple II line was discontinued.

It's December 20, 1996. Apple has just acquired NeXT in a $400 million deal that brings Steve Jobs back to Apple. Jobs will act as an "advisor" to CEO Gil Amelio, bringing his charisma to the team led by Amelio and Ellen Hancock.

The deal offers $350 million in cash and stock as well as covering about $50 million of NeXT's debts. Apple suggests that it will start shipping products using NeXT's new OS some time in 1997. After abandoning Copland, some had predicted Apple would acquire the Be operating system.

RixStep hosts a copy of the early 1997 letter sent to NeXT customers regarding the Apple/NeXT Merger as part of its Red Hat Diaries. In this letter, Gil Amelio promises to continue to develop and enhance WebObjects and to provide cross-platform support for QuickTime. He looked forward to WebObjects running on Power Macs in short order.

Like many other companies, Apple offers archival versions of its product manuals for products that have long since been discontinued. As a regular user of OS 9 on my PowerMac 7200, this comes in more useful than you might imagine. So I was delighted to find that the archival support goes back even further than I'd previously thought, when a random search turned up this page offering the Apple II Users' Guide and Product Manual. I am not an Apple II owner, but I know that there are any number of units still out there and still working in hobbyists' basements.

Printed out in 2002 and converted to PDF, the 84-page manual starts off with the classic story about Steve Wozniak, "the creation of an engineer who hated so much to leave his computer behind at the end of the workday that he made himself a home computer." The manual brags about how memory capacity has grown over time from 4K on the Apple I to 256K on the Apple IIgs, and how you could stretch that 256K to 8 megabytes and beyond. (In the early '90's, 8 MB of RAM would easily set you back $800 or more.)

I particularly enjoyed the problem-solving checklist--testing for loose connections, that your monitor is plugged in and the disk drive connected to the computer--which gives you a real sense for the technology of the day.