Happy 30th Birthday Apple Mac

4.0.1

It’s an icon.

For all of our tech gamesmanship, Apple vs PC, iOS vs Android, days like today are fun to celebrate regardless of which team you’ve sided with.

The Mac is 30 years old.

Many are focusing on the revolutionary ad which played during Superbowl XVIII. Seeing “18” in Roman numerals makes me feel damn old, as I was actually alive for that presentation. We of course have that video linked below, but I wanted to focus briefly on the actual Mac itself, and what we might still be able to learn from it today.

It’s impossible to overstate how important the Mac was in making computing accessible to consumers. For many people my age, it was likely their first computer and graphical user interface. In schools, it was often the computer used to populate labs where we learned basic programming skills, supplemented traditional math, science, and writing education. It was probably one of the first machines we were able to play games on. I’m pretty much always down for a round of Oregon Trail.

What made it so revolutionary was a focus on the user experience. Utilizing precious little computing power by today’s standards to draw pictures and icons on the screen. It gave many first time users a much clearer understanding of what they could accomplish on a little magic box. We live in a world now where my watch is more powerful than those cute little Macs of old, so this aesthetic wasn’t easy to pull off.

A multi-disciplined team of individuals was responsible for bringing Mac to life, including doctors, artists, even an archaeologist. All working together to bring a more informative UI to the user than the flashing text prompt of UNIX and DOS. It’s where we first started having conversations about conveyance and skeuomorphic design.

As we move forward…

As we look towards the next 30 years, we must keep asking ourselves the same questions those early Mac pioneers struggled with. We must keep demanding efficiency, but not at the cost of experience. We’ll constantly be evolving, receiving more powerful devices, but we must have applications for that power.

Lastly, we need to start having frank conversations about our social use of technology and ergonomics. How we incorporate it into our daily lives, use it respectfully and safely.

Happy birthday Mac! You’ve been an inspiration for generations.

(Photo courtesy of  Mac History)

Ask Juan: Why won’t my Moto X show up as a USB drive on my Mac?

surface connected to lg g2 file management transfer somegadgetguyFrom our Facebook page, Robin asks:

Here’s a question relating to Android… When I plug my Moto X into my Windows PC using the supplied USB cable, it shows up as a storage device and I can copy stuff to/from it with no problems. But when I plug it into a USB port on my wife’s MacBook Pro, it’s not even recognized as a device. How can I access my Moto X from Mac OSX?

Hey Robin,

It’s because Apple can be frustrating about supporting standards like MTP. Apple refuses to natively support the USB Media Transfer Protocol. It’s how you can plug your phone into a PC and see files on your phone and computer at the same time.

There are two different ways to share files between a phone and computer, MTP and Mass Storage. If you use Mass Storage, the storage on your phone becomes a standalone drive for your computer, and your phone will no longer be able to see any of those files. That was fine during the Windows Mobile and early Android days. You’d plug in your phone, and it would essentially become a dead lump of a USB drive. Now though, we don’t want to lose access to our precious communication tools, even for a brief file transfer. That’s why Android and Windows Phone now utilize MTP. It comes with some drawbacks like slower file transfers, and you can only move one file at a time, but your phone wont be separated from its storage while connected to a computer. Given the trade off, I’d rather be able to connect my phone to my computer, and still being able to use it as a normal phone with all of my files and apps intact.

The iPhone just doesn’t work that way, so Apple doesn’t feel any great pressure to support other mobile device file management protocols. As far as they’re concerned you should be using iOS and iTunes.

Google did release an Android file manager program for Mac users which might work for you – http://www.android.com/filetransfer/

If that doesn’t work you might need to look at cloud solutions. The nice thing about Android, it’s silly easy to move files on and off via services like Google Drive, Box, and DropBox.

You could also do a local network sync via an app like AirSync –http://www.doubletwist.com/airsync/ or Air Droid – http://www.airdroid.com/ which will use your home WiFi network. It wont be as fast as a cable connection, but it’ll be faster than Bluetooth. 

But yeah. Short story long, this is basically Apple’s fault.