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My thanks to the site sponsor this week: MarsEdit. It is a Mac app for editing WordPress, Micro.blog and many other types of blogs.
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CleanMyMac X is the only Mac “cleaning” utility I ever recommend, and it just got a nice update. I checked out the beta on my M1 MacBook Pro, and it runs great.
I wanted to be certain that my fond memories of Snow Leopard weren’t just nostalgia. While I am confident when I say that Snow Leopard is the most stable version of Mac OS, I wanted to make sure its user interface was really the good user interface and experience I was remembering. So, after a few frustrating attempts at creating a virtual machine on my current iMac with Mac OS High Sierra, I decided to install Snow Leopard on a USB flash drive, and boot my 2009 MacBook Pro (yes, it’s still alive & kicking) in Snow Leopard from that flash drive.
Snow Leopard was the first version of Mac OS X that I ran the betas for, and I knew it was going to be good when it solved an on-going kernel panic issue I had on a work machine that ran Leopard.
This week on the show, Jason and I are joined by Eric Berger to discuss his new book Liftoff, which covers the origins of SpaceX. Eric is the Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and the book comes out on March 2. We s also discussed the landing of Perseverance, the Starship test flights and who may be the next NASA Administrator.
This article describes what is new and different with the iMac (Early 2001) computer.
In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago.
On February 22 of that year, Steve Jobs put on a suit and tie and hosted Macworld Expo Tokyo. Video of the event can be seen here, and a lot of it is a rehashing of the San Francisco event that took place just six weeks earlier.1
Jobs recapped the value of Mac OS X, including the new features, the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa environments and more. He then gave a demo of the Aqua user interface and some region-specific features including support for the world’s first high-quality Japanese fonts shipping for free on a personal computer.
Following a Maya demo on OS X, Jobs went over the Titanium PowerBook, reusing his “Power+Sex” line from the month before, and then played the product video:
Next, Jobs spoke about the new Power Mac G4s that were announced in the previous keynote, harping once again on the SuperDrive that shipped in the 733 MHz model.2 And, of course, Phil Schiller came out to race a 733 MHz G4 against a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4.
Apple’s spherical Pro Speakers were shown off, as were Apple’s 22-inch and 15-inch displays. The larger of the two saw its price cut to $2,999.
Jobs then announced a new Nvidia video card, the GeForce 3. As Nvidia’s David Kirk stood on stage, the GPU rendered Pixar’s famous Luxo Jr. scene in real-time. When it was first rendered in 1986, Jobs said it took a Cray supercomputer 75 hours to computer a single second of the film.
When comparing almost anything to its counterpart from 15 years ago, it’s a fun demo. It was followed by John Carmack showing off a game engine running atop Mac OS X.
The GeForce 3 would be an Apple exclusive GPU at launch, and was made available as a $600 build-to-order option in the Power Mac G4, starting in April.
After the Nvidia but, Jobs revisited Apple’s Digital Hub strategy, talking about the overall vision, as well as iMovie 2 and iTunes, which was still brand new and had already clocked 750,000 downloads.
Version 1.1 of the product was announced, with support for third-party CD burners, in addition to the CD burners found in Apple’s own products. Here’s a bit from Apple PR at the time:
Apple today announced iTunes 1.1, an update to its popular iTunes music software, which includes support for more than 25 third-party CD burners from popular vendors such as Iomega, La Cie, QPS and Sony. Since its debut at Macworld San Francisco last month, iTunes has been downloaded more than 750,000 times.
“With almost one million Mac users managing their digital music with iTunes, we are witnessing a revolution in digital music on the Mac,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iTunes 1.1 now supports over 25 third-party CD burners, so even more Mac users can create and burn their own custom music CDs.”
The list of supported drives could be found on Apple’s website.
After that bit of iTunes news, Jobs gave a demo of iDVD, which had been announced in San Francisco as well.
This event also included the one single update the Cube ever received, with the small computer gaining a CD-RW drive and a standard 128 MB of RAM, up from 64 GB. With these changes, the entry price dropped $200 to $1,299.
iTools is iCloud’s great-grandfather, and at Macworld Expo Tokyo in 2001, the service went from being English-only to supporting Japanese as well. iCard, HomePage, email and more were live the day of the event
The closing news of this event was a new set of iMacs. I’ve written about these machines at length, but the short version is that now all iMacs came with FireWire and the higher-end models came equipped with a CD-RW to burn CDs.
Speeds ranged from 400 MHz to 600 MHz, with prices starting at just $899 for the entry-level Indigo model. Like before, a Graphite model was available at the top end of the line.3
The other two cases were a bit more … interesting:
According to Jobs, the new cases took 18 months to develop. They weren’t “colors,” but rather patterns molded “right into the plastic.” While some companies may have just used a decal, Apple wanted something special with these machines.
Like many other Macworld Expos, this one is on the light side when it came to new announcements from Apple, but it did get Apple’s products in front of a different media market. Maybe this iMac ad shown at the end is all you really need to remember about the event:
Holy moly.
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Tom Charlier, writing for St. Jude, about just-named crew member Hayley Arceneaux:
Rocketing into space may be one of the few adventures totally new to Hayley. She’s packed a veritable lifetime’s worth of travel and experience into her 29 years. She’s studied in Spain, worked mission trips in Nicaragua and Peru, and checked off five continents on her travel to-do list. And she’s done it all with a titanium prosthesis in one leg — legacy of treatment for bone cancer nearly 20 years ago at St. Jude.
Arceneaux is the perfect person for this seat.
In an internal memo this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple informed service providers that it is aware of and investigating an issue that may result in “pink squares or pixels” appearing on displays connected to an M1 Mac mini.
According to this report, Apple has a suggestion on clearing up the small squares:
That sure makes me think this is something that’ll be fixed in a future version of macOS Big Sur. I’ve gotten a few emails from readers and listeners about this, so hopefully that fix comes soon.