Apple typewriter memo (2020)
54 comments
·June 21, 2025yosef123
Personally, I don’t see this move as a negative. It implies that a company believes in its product and potentially wants to improve it. Usually, you can tell when a product is not used by its creator(s), and it’s not a good experience.
PaulHoule
I was a gifted/troubled kid who was taking high school classes half time in the 4th grade at the school I was later to attend as my regular high school.
Circa '81 or so they had a PDP-8/A with a printing terminal and two VT-61s which were unusual in that they had a block mode, though we ran a multiuser BASIC system that didn't take advantage of it until I looked up in the manual how to put it into block mode.
My understanding was that this system was designed for word processing at small newspapers where it would be used to do all the typesetting as well as incorporating classified ads and that a newspaper had ordered it and never taken delivery which was why we got a deal on it. It looked a lot like the "DEC Word Processor" in the article, particularly the dual disk drive.
The PDP-8/A had 32k words of 12 bits each, but regular pointers where 12 bits so it had a rather ugly scheme to access multiple pages of 4k words. We had the Crowther & Woods Adventure and a BASIC interpreter that could be used in single-user mode with the printing terminal and we could also boot it up with a three-user BASIC.
Years later my school got a VAX-11/730 and the PDP-8 was donated to the computer club that was advised by our new physics teacher and I tried plugging in one of the VT-61s into the same current loop plug that the printing terminal was plugged into and it caught on fire because of the dust inside, we cleaned the other one out good and managed to get it running again.
Given that the Apple ][+ had 64k of RAM addressable with 16 bit pointers it was probably a better machine than the 8/A overall, but the terminals for the 8/A were 80 columns whereas the ][ came with only a 40 column screen although 80 column cards for it were not unusual and when Apple made the late step of ASICizing the ][ they eventually built in an 80 column VDC.
mproud
This was obviously satirical, with its tongue-and-cheek tone, name-bombing Ken, and the fact that seemingly escapes the blogger here it was typed on a typewriter!
Apple was an upstart company in its day, the anti-IBM, creative, expressive, rebellious. The memo may have been driving a point, but it was mostly just going for a laugh.
KerrAvon
How do you know it was typed on a typewriter?
mceachen
There were really only teletypes and dot-matrix printers available at that point.
Look at how "effective immediately" is underlined, and how inconsistent the letterforms are.
Also, 1980 is 5 years before the Apple LaserWriter, 11 years before TrueType, and 15+ years before "grunge" fonts were a thing.
II2II
The article mentions daisy wheel printers directly, so they must have been available. Daisy wheel printers existed to produce higher quality (text) output than what you would get from a dot matrix printer. There were many other types of impact printers that produced full letters (or even full lines of text) in one go, though I don't know how often they were connected to microcomputers.
Hizonner
I was around "at that point", and there were a bewildering number of printer types, including daisy wheels and things that were basically converted typewriters, either of which could have produced output like that.
Some daisy wheel drivers would vary the spacing to "kern" the letters, but some wouldn't. If they didn't, what you got looked basically exactly like what you'd get on a typewriter.
jsrfca8
To do letter Letter quality back then could also be done with a daisy wheel printer.
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ginko
> ... and typewriters still aren't obsolete!
I guess I'm living in a particular professional niche but I haven't seen a typewriter in ages. Let alone seen anyone using one.
ben_w
Last time I saw one (working and in real life, rather than TV or a museum) was the late 80s or early 90s. And even then, it was in a second-hand charity sale.
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tempodox
Typewriters typically are not connected to the internet. I.e. nobody can hack them, remotely sabotage them, or hoover up every word you type. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility that we'll come to appreciate those features again within our lifetimes.
zb
The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.
PopAlongKid
Certainly that would be the case with film ribbons, but I don't see how typed character history could be obtained from a cloth/cotton ribbon, especially since they were as I recall reversible (would spool one dirction, then the other when reaching the end), meaning the previous typing would be overwritten multiple times.
beala
It's not uncommon for used typewriters on ebay to include the old ribbon, along with the last fifty thousand characters the previous owner typed...
tptacek
Neither is a computer without a network connection.
throwanem
Fortunately, espionage wasn't invented until after the typewriter's obsolescence - certainly no one has ever used a typewriter in the pursuit of espionage before! - and intelligence agencies the world over thus would be forced to respond from a standing start.
3eb7988a1663
During the Cold War, Russians bugged typewriters to broadcast what was being typed: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-s...
opless
Huh? It was fairly common for typewriter ribbons to be destroyed where confidential information was typed, as it was possible to acquire previously typed characters.
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teeray
I’ve seen a lot of “distraction-free” writing apps up to even e-ink screens glued to mechanical keyboards. There’s still plenty of typewriters out there—they’re just paper-free now.
jethro_tell
That’s not a typewriter no matter how much you’d want to make that connection.
loloquwowndueo
I have not seen a physical fax machine in over a decade; haven’t sent a fax in at least 4 years.
Yet they are still around and not obsolete.
loeg
They're still around and obsolete. They continue to exist solely due to regulatory capture in the healthcare industry.
ghaff
My local hospital system was bought by one of the big city systems. I think quite a few of the older docs basically quit because of dealing with the newer electronic health records system. The younger docs seem OK with it. Never seen anyone use a typewriter.
As a patient much better. No more faxing lab work to the lab and it's back in hours.
kevin_thibedeau
It's because faxed signatures have legal recognition and nothing electronic does.
paxys
Plenty of businesses and governments in the USA still only accept documents via fax. So fax machines and fax services will continue to exist just to service them. I don't think there's a single business that requires you to hand in typewritten documents.
jrajav
What then should we call technologies that have multiple significantly lower cost, more versatile, more ubiquitous, and more interoperable alternatives available?
zabzonk
Yep, the last HP LaserJet Color printer I bought came with fax. I must admit, I kind of wondered why.
drob518
So they could charge you more money for the increase in “value” embodied in the product. (sarc)
ChrisMarshallNY
Go to a doctor's office.
They live there.
jdougan
I'd call them obsolescent, not obsolete.
alexjplant
They are but they aren't.
Excepting niche cases (like filling out carbons in triplicate at car dealerships and such) typewriters are pretty anachronistic. It is, however, amusing that over the past decade as things have digitized fewer people seem to own printers. Without a printer a computer fails at the simple task that a typewriter is inherently designed for - putting words to paper. Anecdotally <50% of my friends have a printer in their home... I wonder how that compares to typewriter ownership 50 years ago?
Regardless it's pretty clear that the author of the site is a big typewriter fan hence their statement. I find it contrived, but hey, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.
anyfoo
Indeed I use my printer once every two months or so, as a very rough estimate. And then it’s usually for myself rather than for someone or something else.
For example I sometimes (not always) like printing out papers to read them “offline”, or diagrams when I want to take notes on them.
I don’t miss dealing with paper because I had to.
KerrAvon
Obsolete doesn't mean useless. Typewriters are obsolete! I use a lot of things that are obsolete, but that doesn't make them not obsolete.
zaphirplane
I am going to guess that most fax machines are not dedicated machines but a part of combination of printer scanner fax. It wouldn’t be obvious
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bigyabai
[flagged]
vbezhenar
Typewriters are not connected to the outer world. If you would use your Macbook as a typewriter, typing documents and copying them PDFs over USB flash stick, it wouldn't be obsolete in 5 years. Although it wouldn't survive 100 years for sure, but I'd expect an average computer to survive 15-25 years.
Computers, especially computers connected to the Internet, are too specific entities, so analogies often are faulty. Gadgets become obsolete not because Apple is evil, but because world is changing too fast. New websites are too heavy for old CPUs. Software evolves too fast, so it costs quite a bit to keep old hardware drivers up-to-date. Malware risks are real, so the option of not updating is unsafe.
paxys
Weird comparison.
Yes some typewriters from a century ago are still working, because their owners have put in the time and money to keep them working. They arent magic machines. They need parts to be replaced, cleaning, lubrication, obscure ribbons, gears, keys.
Similarly there are plenty of computers from the 50s and 60s still working, for the same reason.
tomsmeding
True, but the article was first with that comic it ends with.
leptons
My Macbook Pro had to have the motherboard replaced 8 times in 3 years after purchase. I had to sue Apple in a class action along with a lot of other people, and we won. And they replaced it with an Intel mac that was forced to be obsolete, now the thing can't be updated and some software has stopped working because it can't be updated.
psychanarch
Logging in to say whatever Leptons is saying is almost always false
aspenmayer
It doesn’t fit every use case, and it does have some caveats, but I’ve been happy with Open Core Legacy Patcher. For offline systems, the trade offs are minimal.
null
My workplace makes something that people use throughout the day, but it doesn't give it to most of the employees. Even though they could literally buy one at Best Buy for a fraction of one employee's hourly opex. Often, there will be a grapevine of project managers on chat asking something that any 10-year-old who owns our product would know. Another thing is that about half of the employees own our direct competitor's product by choice. It's a nice place to work though, so I just eat the crazy pills and don't get worked up about the surrealist dilbert comic cosplay going on around me.