Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh overview

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh? What was that?

Ah. Where to begin? Apple's own description is a good start:

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh represents a unique celebration of Apple's twentieth birthday - commemorating 20 years of engineering for excellence as well as ease of use.

It's a very special, limited-edition Macintosh system that offers a glimpse of the future, while paying tribute to the triumphs of past Apple efforts.

A commemoration of the 20th year of Apple Computer (not the Mac itself); a tribute to the past and a concept model for the future. That was Apple's goal with the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM).

To the buyer – this one, at least – the TAM concept is "the Mac in a tux". A golden tux. No, more of a bronze, really, but slick all the same. Though if you look closely... Hmm, the jacket and cummerbund are Armani, yes, but the slacks appear to be a rental from Frank's Formal at the mall. And the shoes: sharp-looking, but scuffed and squeaky. Belt and tie? Done up in odd custom buckles and clips. Most disappointing of all is that while the outfit looks great, quirks and all, inside it is still your old friend Joey who mooches cigarettes and laughs too late at jokes.

Uh, that's probably not making much sense to you. Maybe it will in a bit. Let's take a closer look inside the Mac in the golden tuxedo:

First impressions

The TAM has a shape that's revisited, to a small degree, only in the latest iMacs: a thin, upright slab with LCD screen. Unlike the iMac, though, the TAM isn't all-in-one: there's a rounded bass unit that contains both power supply and the woofer part of the TAM's Bose Acoustimass sound system. It's connected to the main computer unit by a thick, heavy cable.

The TAM is all about aesthetics. Bose supplied the audio appeal; Apple, the visual. In addition to its gorgeous looks – all futuristic angles here, sumptious curves there – the TAM has colors you just won't see anywhere else. It's brown, but that brown is a bronze with hints of copper and gold, a touch of grey, the faintest whiff of green even, if the light hits it right. The TAM's tones catch light in unusual ways, much like eyes that change from brown to hazel and what not, depending on the light. (I refer to those rare eyes that actually do so, not the much larger set of eyes whose owners imagine so.)

Other artistic touches abound. Cloth speaker grilles. A rubberized top for the bass unit. A stunning curved metal "leg" for the computer unit. Italian leather palmrests on the keyboard. What other computer ships with dead cow?

The good

The TAM wasn't all artwork; it boasted some eye-catching technology.

An LCD screen was a novelty in a desktop computer then, and a trackpad would be even now (especially one that can be set into or removed from the keyboard). The TAM inherited some good points from its Power Macintosh 5500 motherboard, namely TV tuner and FM radio cards. A small remote control let users control audio, CD playback, channels, and power from a distance (though without some important capabilities, such as switching between TV and FM). S-video input enabled viewing of video sources other than broadcast TV.

The TAM emphasized cleanness. Although an ungainly cable tethered its two main parts, that would typically hide unseen. The keyboard slid neatly underneath the main computer. The trackpad sported nifty organizational touches: when placed into the keyboard its cable had a unique storage channel under the keyboard; when separated from the keyboard, a leather-upholstered pad came out from under the keyboard to fill the gap left by the trackpad. The TAM not only graced a workspace, it kept it tidy too.

Other nods to neatness included a leather CD case to hold included CD-ROMs and audio CD, plus a leather case to hold the custom pen and pencil that marked TAM owner status. 

The bad

What's wrong with the TAM? It mostly boils down to underpowered, old, or otherwise uninspiring technology inside that awesome case. I'll hit many of these disappointments under What could have been below. First a few more points:

The Bose sound system? The TAM's marquee feature was a nightmare for many owners. It infamously hid a wiring flaw that caused some TAMs to emit ugly static, which could further develop into ear-splitting screeching. Muting the volume didn't stop it. Apple finally acknowledged the problem and initated a repair program – which I had to take advantage of three times before the problem was resolved. (All on Apple's dime, fortunately.) 

The 603 chip is decidedly slow – but then again, software demands of the time were decidedly less. My TAM played a mean game of Diablo with never a hiccup, and for a time I lent it to an artist who used it for serious Photoshop work. (Heh, a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh relegated to Diablo. There's something funny about that.) On the other hand, many tasks, and multitasking in general, feel very slow under OS 9.

The keyboard looks great, but with a "soft" feel that many typists would dislike. And there's no 10-key pad, not even a "num lock" 10-key. That gets a thumbs-down from executives.

Fit and finish is wonderfully good in places, less so in others. The CD drive door, for example, feels less than sturdy and on my TAM doesn't lie quite flush on one side. (Yes, you have to look to notice, but a TAM begs for such scrutiny.) Some removable parts, like the port cover plate on back, don't snap on with a secure feel. The included schwag items – CD case and pen/pencil set – incorporate some nice materials but otherwise are of indifferent quality.

The TAM's remote control has fairly limited functionality and isn't exceptional at all in design. There's nothing overtly wrong with it, but it has an afterthought feel to it.

The fat cable connecting the two main units isn't removable from the computer unit. It's a clunky thing that makes transport or storage a little difficult, and in use, can require some serious persuasion to lie flat at all.

Adding a PCI card or communications card (for Ethernet, etc.) is easy enough, but requires replacing the back panel with an included "hunchback" panel to create the needed extra space. It's good that the TAM offers the option, but it's a decidedly inelegant solution that whacks the TAM aesthetic with an ugly stick ("the Dell rod", as it's known in the industry). 

The odd and the unknown

Some trivia and questions: 

For better or worse, there's much that's "custom" on the TAM. From the body to the keyboard, from the tuner cards to the CD case and pen/pencil set, from the sound system to included software, much of the TAM is unique or is tweaked just enough from older stuff to make it "custom".

One noteworthy custom touch: the TAM has its own warbly startup chime.

Here's an aesthetic observation: While the TAM itself sports the old Apple rainbow logo, other included items, like the documentation, pen/pencil, and remote control, have monochrome logos. Were those intentional looks ahead at the soon-to-be-official monochrome logo? Did Apple designers first see the single-color logo on TAM paraphernalia and say, "Hey, let's use this everywhere"?

(Speaking of conjecture, I once heard that the TAM was the first Apple model with Jonathan Ives input. Anyone know the truth of that?)

The TAM was conceived as a limited edition model, with Apple planning to break the mold after production. Or so it was said. Do molds for the TAM body exist any more? 

Perhaps the oddest thing about the TAM was the planned concierge service. Not only was a "trained field technican" to deliver the TAM to your home and set it up for you, rumor had it that the techie arrived in both a tux and limousine. Was this true? How many buyers actually got this service before the price cuts? Anybody have numbers or stories? 

What could have been

Want to know the real story of the TAM, at least from the owner's perspective? It's all about the could have been.

The TAM came out in the first half of 1997. Had it appeared just a year later, think what could have been:

• The TAM missed by months the introduction of the G3 chip, which appeared in the Power Macintosh G3 in November 1997. A G3 chip would have given the TAM much-needed horsepower and made it ready to embrace OS X. 
• The TAM missed out on easy, elegant USB, introduced in 1998. It's saddled with end-of-life ADB connectors – which require shutting down the computer just to add or remove, say, a mouse – as well as clunky, soon-disowned SCSI and GeoPort connectors.
• The TAM missed perhaps Apple's biggest 1998 milestone: the realization that Internet connectivity and networking are key to the Mac, as seen in the iMac ("Internet Mac") with its Ethernet port. The TAM required ugly (literally ugly!) add-on parts to gain Ethernet.
• The TAM sports the old Apple rainbow logo, not the monochrome logo introduced in 1998. Maybe that's most appropriate, to commemorate 20 years of the rainbow logo; maybe it's not, if the TAM should be looking forward. Either way, it doesn't complement TAM aesthetics in the least. A large, glowing, single-hue white, black, gold, or bronze logo would look fantastic on the TAM.
• The TAM was built on an uninspiring desktop platform shared with the PowerMac/Performa 5500. Why not a chassis from a laptop, whose LCD screen and trackpad (taken from the PowerBook 3400) it already shared? A laptop's compact internals may have allowed a built-in Ethernet card (or at least a regular modem, instead of the TAM's soon-discontinued GeoPort).
• With laptop internals and USB, the bass unit could be strictly a subwoofer without moonlighting as a power supply. A light USB cable, not the TAM's clunky gray cable, could connect the bass unit and main unit. 
• Perhaps nothing says "unwanted legacies" like the TAM's floppy disk drive. The system didn't ship with any floppy disks; floppies were dying fast by 1997, even if only Apple (or was it only Steve Jobs?) was taking notice then. It would have been somehow fitting if the amazing TAM had been the first Mac to stand up and renounce the floppy.  

In summary, the TAM arrived just a bit too early. A little later, and it could have boasted stunning design and truly forward-looking technology, keeping it useful to owners for years to come. Then again, had it been delayed any longer, new iCEO Steve Jobs might have scrapped it altogether. Who knows.

How it went down

Details on the TAM's introduction and sales vary by source. It was introduced in early 1997 – March according to some sources, May or June according to others. It was conceived as a limited-edition model, with only 12,000 units planned – or make that 10,000 if reading other sources.

Initial price? $7500 say some, $10,000 say others. Either one was a lot for a computer even in 1997, especially for one with more aesthetic than technological bragging points. Result: the TAM wasn't moving.

To keep a long story short (because I don't have the details to properly tell the long story), Steve Jobs returned to Apple in mid-1997, some months after the TAM's release, and decided to blow out the remaining units as part of his blitzkrieg simplification and renewal of the Macintosh line. The TAM's price was slashed once (I believe to about $4000, presumably without concerge service), then again to about $2000 (definitely without concierge service!), and that's when I bought.

And that was it. You won't see much mention of the TAM by Apple; one suspects that Steve isn't at all fond of its ties to old technology and old marketing ideas. It doubtless retains some value among collectors, though again, I don't see frequent mention of it even among Apple enthusiasts. It's a wee ironic that the most unique and intentionally flamboyant Mac ever is a largely forgotten Mac.

You will see the TAM conspicuously displayed in late-90s scenes calling for a computer that would be noted. TAMs have been spotted in movies and TV shows including Seinfeld (last season, on Jerry's desk), Batman & Robin (used by Alfred), The Real World, and more. After all these years, there's still nothing else visually like it. Yet there are probably not many more celebrity appearances in store for the TAM, if for no other reason than that the rest of the post-TAM Mac lineup has developed its own amazing beauty and star appeal.  

The future?

There's no official future for the TAM; the future for each unit out there is in the hands of its owner. They easiest way to update the old technology is to look for one of the third-party G3 upgrade chips that followed the TAM. But that's not good enough for me. Here's what I want to do:

Gut the thing. Take out the innards and just toss 'em; really, no one has a use for an old chassis with SCSI and ADB and other obsolete specs.

I want to fill the shell with a whole new Mac chassis. The limiting factors are overall space, including the opening for only a 12" screen. That pretty much leaves a 12" laptop as the option, i.e., a used 12" PowerBook or MacBook. (Probably not a clamshell iBook, with its oversized motherboard.)

Mounting the screen and other parts can no doubt be worked out, and there'll be no need to wedge a power supply into the bass unit; the bass unit could be ditched altogether.

There are bound to be some big difficulties, though. Assuming the existing CD drive won't work with a new chassis, where to place a new CD/DVD drive? Can USB and other ports be routed to the location of existing TAM connectors? Is there any way to save the functionality of the existing Bose speakers – especially, if at all possible, the great woofer in the bass unit? And biggest of all: Until I get my hands on such a laptop for disassembly, it's only a guess that such a laptop's innards will even fit inside the TAM shell.

It's just a geek dream so far. But I'd love to hear from anyone who can offer thoughts and ideas on the feasibility of Frankensteining my TAM!