Ian Bogost, The Atlantic:
Everything about this computer is loud: The groan of the power supply is loud. The hum of the cooling fan is loud. The whir of the hard disk is loud. The clack of the mechanical keyboard is loud. It’s so loud I can barely think, the kind of noise I usually associate with an airline cabin: whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom.
This is the experience a computer user would have had every time she booted up her Macintosh SE, a popular all-in-one computer sold by Apple from 1987 to 1990. By today’s standards the machine is a dinosaur. It boasts a nine-inch black-and-white display. Mine came with a hard disk that offers 20 megabytes of storage, but some lacked even that luxury. And the computer still would have cost a fortune: The version I have retailed for $3,900, or about $8,400 in 2019 dollars.
And:
The original Macintosh was an adorable dwarf of a computer. About the size of a full-grown pug, its small footprint, built-in handle, and light weight made it easy to transport and stow. Perched on a single, wide paw, the machine looks perky and attentive, as if it’s there to serve you, rather than you it.
Though the Macintosh SE was a speed-demon compared to the original 128K Macintosh, compared to any modern computing device, the performance was relatively the same.
This article was written on a Macintosh SE and, if old school is your thing, it’s kind of glorious.
The Mac SE really made Apple a serious player. The most important piece: Illustrator 88. Professional designers could do serious typography with a Laserwriter (often taking files on disks to Kinko’s or wherever, for 25 cents a page) or to Linotronic imagesetter films. This really began the era of Mac DTP leadership.
But the thing I remember most about the Mac SE was playing Harrier Strike Mission. I loved it. It was a primitive wireframe flight sim written for the original Mac. It was timed incorrectly on the faster SE, so it ran way too fast. It was like flying a hyperspeed spacecraft, very unstable, and you could fly into the ground in just a moment of inattention.
I had a Classic in teh early 90s, which is Basically An SE in a different case.
It was kind of a dog, but I liked it.
(I was happy to upgrade to a IIsi, though.)
I think a better argument can be made for the Mac Plus (along with the LaserWriter) as what made Apple a serious player.
The Plus had 1MB base memory (expandable to 4) and SCSI, which enabled “fast” hard drives.
The SE’s improvements over the Plus were pretty modest – somewhat improved SCSI, an expansion slot (which almost nobody ever used), and ADB (which didn’t make that much of a difference).