deskthority

Not sure if this is real or a wind-up by alps.tw:

http://kbtalking.cool3c.com/article/47338

Page 1 shows an unbranded switch.
Page 3 shows an Apple-branded switch, which is a different photo/switch from the one on page 1. I remember these switches or something like them coming up in discussion recently, but sadly nothing in that topic appears to says what they are or what computer they're from (early Apple ][?), which makes me wonder if the Apple branding is indeed real, otherwise they wouldn't know that they're switches used in an Apple product.

The good news is that they're alps.tw's photos, so they're going on the wiki if someone remembers what they are.

TL;DR → [wiki]Apple hairpin spring[/wiki]

The logo in question looks really sharp compared to Alps or Cherry's typical branding. Too sharp, like he layered it on himself for some reason.

It looks suspicious to me, too ... annoying, if he's butchered the photo with a fake logo. If no-one's sure, I could necropost with a Google Translate question :)

Edit: Bing Translator reckons "Call it Apple axis for the time being good", and alps.tw normally describes switches as "X axis", where X is frequently something written on the shell. "SFON axis" (SFON軸) for example is an Alps clone with "SFON" written on it. "Apple axis" is what he'd use to describe a switch with Apple branding found on it.

No offence to alps.tw, but if that photo is doctored, it looks far too good to be his handiwork. The smooth plastic colour and tone is very close to the area around the middle of the switch.

If there were one company, one company who would insist on having their own logo on the switches … I mean, Steve even demanded that the PCB traces on the Mac motherboard be routed artistically until it was proven to him that that just doesn't work! :P

Did you say that in your best Peter Sellers impersonation voice?

Genuine! I spotted a post with the Apple model stated (IIC) and tracked it down:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/143520/article.html

Hard to make out, but you can clearly see the Apple logos on the switches; the last two photos are of the keyboard (switches and PCB). I remember these Apple switches (or something similar) came up in IRC recently or some such, or maybe that was another switch?

Here's another weird Apple keyboard, a little bit like that Tatung one posted the other day:

http://www.applefritter.com/content/hel ... s-keyboard

Apple also used SMK, so that's some more data points (albeit vague) for SMK once I've tracked those down. The tab count is on the rise again.

OK, here's Apple's patent:

https://www.google.com/patents/US4525613

So yes, Apple-patented, Apple-branded switches. Pretty bad, apparently, from what I recall someone saying. I'll post these up later.

More interestingly, the patent was filed in 1984, at a point when one has to wonder what Apple hoped to achieve with it. 1984 was an interesting point in time, as that was also the approximate time of introduction of Alps SKCL/SKCM, Cherry MX and NMB Hi-Tek, and not far off from when 2nd gen SMKs were introduced (around 1985 I'm guessing for that, as there's a 2-year gap where I've not seen either).

1984 was also the peak of Steve Jobs' power (the first time around). He was thrown out the very next year, when the lunatics took over the asylum. This could have been to do with his notorious control freakery. Or, if they weren't for his darling, the Mac, maybe not. He never did give a shit about the Apple II once the Lisa and Mac got under development.

If Steve had stayed, what would have happened? Steve's vision was correct, but he was jumping too far ahead. When the Macintosh 128 came out, you had 1 bpp graphics in a meagre 9" display, likely monaural audio, and a floppy drive. You cannot treat a computer as an appliance with such primitive technology.

The only fact I am aware of is that Steve was opposed to expansion card slots. However, the post-Jobs Macintosh was an absolute revolution, and the one thing IBM failed to do with the PS/2. The Macintosh II gave you, in addition to the corrections:

• Multiple video cards for multiple monitors
• Dedicated uniform desktop expansion bus (ADB)
• Uniform internal/external fast expansion bus (SCSI)

The Mac II was a very coherent system that replaced the mishmash of single-use expansion options with a small set of generic expansion ports. No need to figure out how you're going to connect the zip drive and scanner both into the printer port, or being scared to death that you've killed someone's PS/2 tower that no longer boots, due to some nonsensical boot failure from having plugged the keyboard into the mouse port by mistake. (Audio excluded, if the plug fits, it should work.)

These days, your appliance-style computer has everything you need: wireless connectivity, stereo sound, 24 bpp colour, high storage capacity — the days of mandatory expansion cards are over. Steve got his way before he died, with the iPad and the MacBook Air. He got to live his dream in overseeing the kinds of computers he would have been hoping to see back in 1984, but back then it just wasn't practical, and Apple probably needed someone more realistic to get them through the hard years. Sadly, they did lose the plot terribly, and they were always cripped by some tragic mistakes inherent with trying to bring the graphical paradigm to the desktop several years before it was truly practical to do so, mostly with the QuickDraw globals that prevented pre-emptive multitasking that Commodore unveiled only a year later with the Amiga 1000. That one mistake cost them very dear — Mac OS was plagued far more with unresponsiveness from the multitasking model than it was with crashes from the memory model.

Indeed. You only have to look at NeXT (established 1985, as soon as he was tossed out of Apple) to see what Jobs was up to; and how badly the market of the day could react to it.

The Mac II was a great machine, and its completely opposite direction was all Jean-Louis Gassée. He was the guy that Sculley put in charge of the Mac (Sculley was a real executive and put himself in charge of diddly squat, as was the style of the time) and was just as powerful a mixture of right and wrong as Jobs. Gassée led the development of some fine and much more popular hardware, but bungled the development of the OS badly and wound up out on his backside in a hurry, too. Apple never did get it back on the rails until they bought NeXT, and Steve, as a Christmas present for the entire industry in December 1996. Right after considering Gassée's own next step, BeOS.

Actually if you look closely, you can see where he's actually removed the Apple logo from the first picture. I've since realised that this series of topics from alps.tw are quizzes, so he's used the rubber stamp/clone tool to remove the logo as it was too obvious a clue :)