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Comment by speek | Hacker News Reader

Technically, Macs were the first Personal Computers, then the IBM-clones came out... the clones were what most people had. Then it was just IBM(and clones) vs Mac, and BAM! people thought PCs were IBM-based machines.

Unfortunately for us geeks, Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.

/mini-rant

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Apple is going to continue to use PC to mean non-mac until PC actually means PC for the average person.

That's an entirely normal marketing move. "A car is just a car, but a Cadillac is a luxury vehicle." Same thing, positioning everything else as being "just" a PC, while suggesting that a Mac is special.

Which it is, really. To anyone outside of our little echo chamber here, a Mac is entirely unlike a PC, and it has nothing to do with Apple's ads. At work they are given a "PC," and it is different from the iMac they see in my children's playroom in almost every way that counts to them.

Technically, Macs were the first Personal Computers

Did you mean the Apple II?

Why yes, yes I did. Thanks.

Did you mean the Apple //?

(Also would have accepted Apple ][.)

I think he meant the Micral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral) although I'd accept the Altair 8800 (which predated the Apple II by two years) as the first Personal Computer to run an operating system that was familiar enough to users for mainstream PC use (by which I mean IMDOS, a stripped down CP/M implementation).

It just seems so stupid to me - not to mention annoying.

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