Nice. Reminds me of Frame of Preference, with embedded emulators for all major MacOS, placed on top of images of the machines they ran on, with effects to simulate the grain and color of those machines, and with scripted "goals" and easter eggs.
Same here. The home iMac Core Duo from early 2008 was finally decommissioned last year, after 12 years (had an SSD change only). Up until that moment it had been the "go to" computer in the home and 24/7 running a Plex server, Sonarr and Transmission.
My 2012 MBA is used daily and heavily by my mother and graphic designer sister. My 2015 MBA replaced that iMac and now I'm trying to find an excuse to replace my current 2019 MBA because M1s are reaaally attractive. Essentially I've convinced myself Apple is anouncing laptops later in the year that look like the newest iMacs, just so I wait.
"Optimized" in this sense meant that animated gifs can have a frame reference only three pixels of the original image. So an image of 300K with only small movement (think cinemagraphs) wouldn't be much larger.
This is a given for movie formats, but at the time the animated GIF came up it was revolutionary. I think the proper phrase should be "animated GIFs can be pretty optimized, taking into account how inefficient the algorithm is, when compared with other animation algorithms of the time".
I also think there's an interpretation that applies here: When you see an animated gif, even if it's a frame that changes three pixels and nothing else, internally the renderer may be expanding it into a full movie (that is, uncompressing each resulting "frame"). This usually makes GIFs (regardless of how large or small the GIF actually is) take much more memory than common sense would tell you.
https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/