Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Another great show, well up to the usual high TWiT standards.
During it, I heard Leo recount the story of Steve Jobs demanding the use of special screws for the original Mac so that no one could open it up. It’s important to realise that there were good safety reasons for making the Mac hard to open - parts of the inside, particularly around the cathode ray tube, store voltages in the order of 10,000 volts. Gettting zapped by that could prove fatal.
As the high voltage can linger long after the machine has been switched off and performing a safe discharge of the CRT requires specialist equipment, I feel that it was reasonable of Apple to choose to use Torx screws.
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I always loved seeing the signatures of the design team pressed into the moulding on the inside of the case.
And the interrupt hack to show the digitized pictures of the crew in a slide show.
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The Amiga 1000 
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Locast is a great example of established businesses codifying their business practices into law.
At some level, it made sense for cable companies to pay broadcasters. The broadcast networks were among the most valuable properties on a cable lineup, and if they were willing to pay 5 cents a subscriber to MTV, why wouldn’t they pay 25 cents to KCBS?
But today, the value proposition is totally on its head. There’s almost nothing worth watching on broadcast TV, since all the talented writers and producers have been hired away by Netflix/Apple/Amazon and arguably premium cable. Yet the prices for broadcast retrans keep going up, even as broadcast viewership (which should be correlated to value) goes down. Nielsen recently said that streaming video surpassed the broadcast networks in viewership: Nielsen: Streaming Video Audience Share Is Higher Than Broadcast TV
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Absolutely excellent panel! Not sure how I’ve missed Alex Kantrowitz previously, but his commentary was spot on - as was Dan’s and Larry’s. This episode right here is a prime of example of the excellence and quality of TWIT. Bravo!
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Wouldn’t that also have been a concern for anyone previously with a CRT screen? I think much like the discussion on the show it fits in neatly with Apple’s PR mantra of “safety” as a service.
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Live sports will always still be the thing that drives this. If there ever comes a day when the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, etc aren’t available on OTA TV then that’s when the bottom falls out. But until then they will continue to milk us with tiers and tears.
Count me as a big fan of Alex! Not that I don’t also like the other panelists, but I find him a particularly bright spot.
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That’s an interesting question!
In terms of mass market machines of that era, not many computers featured integrated CRTs. Those that did - such as the Commodore PET - were quite a bit larger than the Macintosh and so were able to keep the high voltage innards separate from the logic board. The Mac’s much more compact design meant that the high voltage parts sat side by side with the other components.
The later compact Macs featured a small circuit board that was attached to the neck of the CRT - this was very easy to knock and so cause the fragile CRT to break! Even more reason to deter unskilled users from opening their machines up …
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This is from TWIT 839 (another great episode).