The first 12" macbooks were super efficient lap warmers. Mine would get so hot (doing nothing much in particular) that the case would temporarily warp and then snap back into place when it cooled.

The first generation retina macbooks had screens that ghosted, and it took several months before lots of kinks were worked out

The first gen products ARE spectacular, and they're not 'bad products', just not necessarily great value. i.e. it pays off to wait 1-2 years.

The Macbook for example was $1800, with a $1300 additional cost if you wanted a 64gb SSD. It had a few hours of battery life and very weak performance.

Was it spectacular? Absolutely. But not necessarily amazing value. It eventually turned into a damn powerful little laptop that people bought instead of a MBP for dev work and even lightweight photo/video editing, with 12+ hours of battery life and still really thin.

The rMB kind of feels like that. It's not necessarily the best value right now. A rMBP or MBA is fine, and if you're OS agnostic, the Dell XPS or Asus Zenbook are interesting choices, too. In a few years the MBA won't have gotten any updates and the rMB gets sourced with a faster chip, drops $100 in price and adds some battery life, and probably comes out with a beefier 14" version. Then it'll be an interesting buy.

Original Macbook Air was terrible. Slow performance, very expensive, overheated, poor battery life...the 2010 model is when it came into it's own.

How's your Apple Watch treating you?

I haven't bought one. Don't feel a need for it yet. I'm not a reflexive tech buyer.

The first generation of macbook pros were quite unreliable.

That first gen iPhone that came with EDGE was spectacular?

Don't forget lack of third party native apps, GPS, MMS, live video streaming/calling, copy/paste, and backgrounding of tasks. You know...all that stuff that had made smartphones "smart". You couldn't even change your wallpaper or ringtone.

First gen iPhone was a big deal because they put all resources into providing the one or two things all the others sucked at: a smoother and more user-friendly interface and a more pleasant mobile web browser.

But it wasn't until the second or third gen that people coming over from previous smartphones could really get most of those things we took for granted already. If you were coming from a flip phone you were just adding some cool stuff. But if you had become accustomed to the typical features of a smart phone, you had to choose between smooth scrolling and pinch/zoom on a nice capacitive screen and being able to install software, stream music (in the background no less), get live navigation in the car, and operate on the latest high(er) speed networks.

I don't think the new Macbook has nearly as far to go as the first iPhone did. They'll iterate with faster processors, a better GPU, and maybe an extra port next round.

Right. The iPhone was a fundamentally new kind of product. The new Macbook is just an incremental refinement of a 15+ year old product line. The only thing that even remotely makes it more than "a better Air" is the single port. And the single port solves other problems.

Today, after 8 years of both phone and network improvements, it looks terrible. But then? You could get on the internet from your phone! It was incredible.

The Model T, released today, would be a joke. But a century ago, the idea of an automobile rather than horses was a tremendous advance.

It kind of redefined what a smartphone is.

Eventually. Once they got on popular carrier and had the ability to install apps (since user-installable applications pretty much defines the "smart" aspect of smart phone). The first iPhone at launch was basically a tech demo, a taste of what was to come.

In 2007? Sure it was.

The screen and form factor and software (web browser in particular) and touchscreen beat the crap out of everything that wasn't already a mini computer.

I mean, the state of the art in smart phones in the US at the time was an HTC 2125...