The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh: the Mac in the golden tuxedo

Around mid-2006, I spotted this comment in an online discussion of good and bad hardware:

I got a chance to actually use a 20th anniversary mac about 2 months ago, after only seeing pictures and it in person once behind a glass cabnet.

It is such a beautiful machine, they could seriously gut the insides of it and release a new mac that looked identical to it and it would probably sell like crazy. It was extremely easy to open up and pull the drive out of or install new ram or repair. It had a built in TV tuner, Component video capture, and FM tuning. It sounded amazing... with the bose subwoofer and speakers built into the side... way better than any system I've seen without crazy 5.1 surround speakers. The cable management was totally cool, all of the cables you'd expect for power, audio, etc.. all went through one thicker cable to the subwoofer, then from the subwoofer to the wall power. It had a trackpad that was removable from the keyboard so you could set it anywhere, instead of a mouse. It also had USB built in and very thin. The guy who owned it had loaded OS 9 on it so it was running really smoothly.

Anyhow, my point being that it was absoultely gorgeous especially at the time. It came out about a year before the first iMac was released in 1998.

It was out of the price range of most people, but I wouldn't say it was one of the worst products ever. No one says sports cars like a Lambourgini or Ferrari or even a high end BMW are the worst products released just because they cost more than most of us can afford.

Ah, great overview. Someone speaking right to me! I had to reply:

I'm an owner of a 20th Anniversary Mac (TAM). And while it does have many of the features you claim, it was also deeply flawed.

The TV tuner and other media extras were nifty, but otherwise the innards bordered on out-of-date right from the day of release. The machine had an old, slow 604 [edit: 603] processor, just as Apple was preparing to introduce the G3. The innards were, for some reason, nicked from a Performa (!) desktop, not a laptop, and things didn't fit so well -- in particular, there was no networking card! Adding Ethernet meant purchasing an expensive, hard-to-find card for an expansion slot, which then required replacing the computer's back with an (included) "humpback" panel that erased the unit's clean lines. Even for the time, the hard disk was small and the CD-ROM drive slow. And although the USB iMac appeared soon after, the TAM most definitely does NOT have USB, only the clunky old Apple connectors. (If you saw USB on a TAM, it was a user mod.)

You're right that the Bose speaker system was amazing, and was really the machine's power feature -- and biggest failure. That pristine sound system had a wiring flaw that caused many owners' TAMs to break out in pristine static and screeches, and the problem often persisted after fixes. Mine went to the shop three times for sound system repair (all on Apple's dime, fortunately).

In the end, the TAM was definitely a fitting look forward to the gorgeous future of Apple design -- but was unfortunately saddled with the company's hardware innards of yesteryear. Not a "worst" product, I agree. Just an unhappy example of cool concept whacked by poor execution.

That's the pocket-sized view of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh – one of the best of Macs, one of the worst of Macs, too far ahead of its time and too far behind, a Wacky Mac through and through. Read on to meet the elusive TAM.