14 DAY TRIAL // Kent Akgungor has a head for money, but he’s also into tech, design, and photography. Writing is on his agenda as well, which is why he keeps a blog called Things of Interest where he posts (you guessed it) things of interest.
His latest interesting thing is a comparison between the first ever Mac and the newest Mac – the Retina 5K model unveiled just months ago. No, he didn’t place the two computers side by side to take a picture. That would be ridiculous. Or maybe it wouldn’t, but it certainly wouldn’t make for a news story these days.
What he did was he took the original Macintosh promo image that Apple used back in the ‘80s to promote MacPaint and overlapped it with the current promo image used by the Cupertino company to promote the iMac with 5K Retina display. The result is visible (though not very much so) in the image at the top of this post.
“That tiny black-and-white rectangle crammed into the bottom-left corner was cutting-edge technology three decades ago,” writes Kent.
Indeed it’s astonishing to realize how much raw graphical power today’s computers have compared to the first-ever desktops that ever rolled out. Sometimes it’s amazing to think that people actually paid thousands of dollars to own machines that did far less than the cheapest cell phone available today.
Exercising another one of his hobbies, Kent also crunched some numbers and concluded that the display of the original Macintosh – featuring a meagre 512 x 342 resolution – had 8,400% less pixels than the 5K iMac does today. That’s about 80 original Macintosh displays in one densely-packed pixel canvas.
The two systems obviously bear little to no resemblance, but it’s still a nice comparison nonetheless.
