Category: 2001 Revisited

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago. On July 18, 2001, Steve Jobs presented the keynote at Macworld New York, less than two months after WWDC 2001.

Retail Update

This event took place a couple of months after the first two Apple Stores opened, and Jobs seemed eager to show photos of them off before announcing four new stores:

• Willow Bend in Dallas, TX, which closed in 2019
• Mall of America in Minneapolis, MN
• Woodfield in Chicago, IL
• Northshore in Boston, MA, which moved locations in 2016

This would bring the total number of Apple Stores to six, with a goal of 25 being set for the end of 2001. To share his excitement about this, Jobs ran a video showing off the concept.

Mac OS X

Next, Jobs turned to Mac OS X, which had been on the market for a mere 116 days at the time of this keynote.¹ He said that while Apple was still in the early days of the transition away from the classic Mac OS, there were many signs that the young operating system was doing well:

• Over 1,000 native Mac OS X apps shipping
• 29% of Mac developers were targeting OS X in a release due within three months of WWDC
• 55% of them were planning releases for OS X by December 2001

Jobs went on to talk about “10 on X,” a collection of ten great apps that were coming soon to Mac OS X. These included some major names, including titles from Macromedia, Adobe and Microsoft.²

Demos of these applications took up a big chunk of time in the keynote, but when they were done, Jobs moved on to talk about OS X itself.

He lauded the operating system’s progress, with four updates being pushed to version 10.0 since its launch. These updates has patched bugs and added features such as support for burning CDs in iTunes.

These were minor updates, ticking the version number up to 10.0.4 by the time Macworld New York rolled around. What was next, Jobs said, was a major update.

Mac OS X 10.1 Preview

Jobs then went on to preview Mac OS X 10.1 Puma:

I will write more fully about Puma this fall when the 20th anniversary of its release rolls around, but what Jobs showed off was a more refined, feature-complete version of Mac OS X.

10.1 was focused on performance, something that plagued OS X in those early days. If you haven’t read John Siracusa’s review of 10.0 in a decade or two, this section really shows how slow OS X could be.

Aqua, the Mac’s new user interface, got big updates as well, with a Dock that could be placed on the side of the screen, alongside other options for customization.³

iTunes would be bundled with the OS, as well as support for DVD playback. Finder gained the ability to burn CDs, and a new application named Image Capture made grabbing pictures off of digital cameras a whole lot easier.

(The demo for that didn’t go super well.)

Mac OS X 10.1 would ship in the fall of 2001, as would iDVD 2, also previewed at the show. The big feature was the ability to use video for the background of menus or buttons.

Mac Hardware

Jobs opened the hardware section of the keynote talking about the new iBook G3, which had been introduced on May 1. He reported that the iBook was already a huge hit, both with reviewers and customers, with 182,000 models already sold, overwhelming Apple’s production abilities.

The Titanium PowerBook also got a mention, with Jobs rattling off praise for the machine from the tech press. I liked this quote from Hiawatha Bray from The Boston Globe in particular:

“If you could take just one laptop with you on a desert island, this would be the one.”

Up next was the iMac, with three new models being announced at 500, 600 and 700 MHz. You can read all about these iMacs over here, but the gist is that the new machines were faster and more capable than ever, even as the finishes of Indigo, Graphite and Snow were more mature than the outgoing models.

The “Quicksilver” Power Mac G4 was the next announcement. Personally, I think this is the best looking G4 tower:

(It’s the classy one in the middle.)

This was more than just a fresh coat of polycarbonate. Inside the Power Mac was a nice jump up from the previous model. As with the iMac, Apple had three new models for sale:

	733 MHz	867 MHz	Dual 800 MHz
RAM:	128 MB	128 MB	256 MB
HDD:	40 GB	60 GB	80 GB
GPU:	GeForce2	GeForce2	Dual Display
Optical:	CD-RW	SuperDrive	SuperDrive
Price:	$1,699	$2,499	$3,499

The previous generation topped out at 733 MHz, and the SuperDrive had been only available in the most expensive model.

(Years later, the Dual 800 MHz Quicksilver would be the center of a small storm when it came to Mac OS X Leopard’s system requirements, which stated a 867 MHz G4 or faster was required. Customers with a Dual 800 MHz machine were stuck on OS X Tiger, or forced to look for ways to trick Leopard’s installer.)

After it was announced, the new G4 was pitted against an Intel Pentium that was clocked much higher. As was the case in all of these shootout segments, Apple showed the PowerPC was competitive with the best Intel had to offer, despite what the numbers on the box may have suggested. This time, Jon Rubinstein got roped into things to explain why the G4 was better than what else was on the market.

After reminding the crowd of Apple’s display lineup for these new towers, a promotional video for the new G4 played:

Wrapping Up

Macworld New York 2001 wasn’t the most impactful event of 2001, but I was surprised to see just how much Apple managed to announce so close to that year’s WWDC. 2001 really was a busy year.

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago.

And yes, in 2001, WWDC took place in May. That may seem strange to us now, but from 1989 to 2002, that’s when Apple hosted the conference. It’s been in June every year since, except for 2006, when it slipped to August.

I think we can guess what was keeping Apple busy that year.

Turns out, finding video of WWDC 2001 was way harder than I thought it would be. There are videos of Macworld keynotes that year on YouTube, but I can’t seem to find the developer conference. If you know of a copy of it, please let me know.

Thankfully, Apple’s press release archives go back to 2000, so we have something to go on.

As we’ve seen already, 2001 was a bonkers year for Apple, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the press release coverage left me thinking that WWDC that year was a bit sparse in terms of actual news.¹

Here’s how Apple pitched the $1595 conference:

It’s time to raise your development to the power of ten! With Mac OS X, developers can create great-looking, robust software applications and high-performance hardware peripherals.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, May 21-25, 2001 in San Jose, California, you will get the very latest information on Mac OS X and other important Apple technologies. What’s more, you’ll get it directly from Apple engineers and technology experts in more than 100 in-depth technical sessions and hands-on labs.

The unique combination of technologies in Mac OS X make WWDC 2001 especially interesting to Java and UNIX developers looking to take advantage of this new desktop platform.

The gift to attendees was something special: a black leather jacket with an Aqua X on the back. Here I am, with my jacket, given to me by James Thomson at Relay FM’s live show at WWDC 2018:

So, with that out of the way, let’s get to the news of WWDC 2001:

An Update on Apple Retail

The WWDC 2001 keynote took place just days after Apple had opened its first retail stores, and as such, Steve Jobs took some time to talk about them. Here’s a bit from Apple PR:

Apple today announced that its first two retail locations welcomed over 7,700 people and sold a combined total of $599,000 of merchandise during their first two day weekend. The stores, located in Glendale, California and McLean, Virginia are the first of 25 stores the company is opening across the U.S. in 2001.

“We are blown away with the numbers,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “More importantly, customers have told us they love everything about the store—from the knowledgeable sales staff to the Genius Bar to the store’s design and unique approach to presenting digital lifestyle solutions.”

Not a bad start at all.

An All-LCD Display Lineup

After updating its display lineup just a few months earlier, Apple took this chance to kill of its last stand-alone CRT. My all-time favorite Apple external display, the Apple Studio Display (17-inch ADC) was gone.

In its place was a new 17-inch flat panel display running at 1280 by 1024 pixels and a full 16.7 million colors. Here’s a bit from the press release:

The 17-inch Studio Display continues the award-winning industrial design of its 15- and 22-inch siblings that is both beautiful and functional. In addition to its slim desktop footprint and low power consumption, the 17-inch Studio Display also features the Apple Display Connector, an innovative single-connection quick-latch mechanism that combines USB, power and video in one cable, for easy hookup and reduced desktop clutter. For easy plug-and-play connections to peripherals, the 17-inch flat panel also offers a 2-port powered USB hub.

The 15-inch models was $599, the 17-inch cost $999 and the mammoth 22-inch ran $2,499.

Mac OS X Server

This one is a little confusing, as it was the second product Apple sold with this name. The first one was based on Rhapsody, Apple’s failed first attempt at smashing NeXTSTEP and Mac OS together. It was … quickly forgotten.

This new Mac OS X Server was based on Mac OS X 10.0 which had launched just two months before WWDC. To OS X, Apple had added a range of services that, according to the company, would let admins:

• share files and printers with Macintosh, Windows, UNIX and Linux clients;
• host Internet web sites with Apache, the world’s most popular web server;
• enable collaborative web publishing and remote content management with WebDAV, the new extension to the HTTP protocol;
• stream digital media over the Internet using the QuickTime Streaming Server;
• deploy scalable network applications with WebObjects 5, Apple’s powerful pure Java application server;
• can easily be managed with secure remote administration tools;
• support SMTP, IMAP and POP mail protocols and provide anti-spamming services;
• protect network resources and dynamically assign IP addresses using advanced networking services such as IP filtering firewall and DHCP;
• locate Internet resources and organize IP-based work groups using standards-based – protocols DNS and Service Location Protocol (SLP);
• provide students and educators with a consistent, personalized and controlled experience by centralizing the method of unifying system configurations with Macintosh – Manager and NetBoot; and
• share user and group information between servers, utilizing NetInfo and LDAP-based directory services.

For a 10-client license, Mac OS X Server cost $499, with the unlimited license costing $999. Apple also sold a dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4 with a 4-port Ethernet card and OS X Server built-in for $3,999.

WebObjects 5

Uhhh, WebObjects got a big update at this WWDC. I find it hard to write or talk about WebObjects outside of making jokes about Apple’s infrastructure, so I’m just going to link to the press release and move on.

Pre-Installing Mac OS X

Even though it was basically brand new, at this event Apple announced that Mac OS X would be pre-installed on all new Macs — alongside Mac OS 9 — effective immediately:

“The reception of Mac OS X has been so positive that we’ve decided to pre-install it alongside Mac OS 9 on all Macs beginning today—two months ahead of schedule,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “This will give all our customers access to the world’s most advanced operating system and ensure a ready and lucrative market for Mac OS X applications.”

Beginning today, all new Macs coming from Apple’s factories will include both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9.1 pre-installed. The systems are set to default boot into Mac OS 9.1, but using Apple’s Dual Boot technology users can easily change the default boot to Mac OS X, and just as easily revert back to Mac OS 9.1 if they choose. During the transition, customers buying new Macs that do not yet have Mac OS X pre-installed will receive a free copy of Mac OS X.

A lot of people probably experienced Mac OS X for the first time because of this. I’ve heard many people say that they would boot into OS X, poke around a bit, then return to Mac OS 9 for getting their work done. Over time that would change, and this was one of the first big steps in that direction.

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago.

It’s hard to imagine the Apple of 2021 without its huge retail footprint, but the first Apple Stores opened just 20 years ago.

Let’s jump right to the press release:

Apple today announced that it will open 25 retail stores across the U.S. in 2001, with the first two stores opening this Saturday, May 19, at Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia, and the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, California.

“The Apple stores offer an amazing new way to buy a computer,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Rather than just hear about megahertz and megabytes, customers can now learn and experience the things they can actually do with a computer, like make movies, burn custom music CDs, and publish their digital photos on a personal website.”

Knowledgeable salespeople will be able to demonstrate Macs® running innovative applications like iTunes and iMovie™, as well as Mac® OS X, Apple’s revolutionary new operating system. All of the Macs are connected to the Internet, and several are connected to digital lifestyle products that complement the Mac experience, such as digital cameras, digital camcorders, MP3 players, and handheld organizers.

On its website, the company went into more detail about why the Apple Store was such an important step:

Apple currently has around 5% market share in personal computers. This means that out of one hundred computer users, five of them use Macs. While that may not sound like a lot, it is actually higher than both BMW’s and Mercedes-Benz’s share of the automotive market. And it equals 25 million customers around the world using Macs.

But that’s not enough for us. We want to convince those other 95 people that Macintosh offers a much simpler, richer and more human-centric computing experience. And we believe the best way to do this is to open Apple stores right in their neighborhoods. Stores that let people experience firsthand what it’s like to make a movie right on a Mac. Or burn a CD with their favorite music. Or take pictures with a digital camera and publish them on their personal website. Or select from over 300 software titles, including some of the best educational titles for kids. Or talk to a Macintosh “genius” at our Genius Bar. Or watch a demonstration of Mac OS X, our revolutionary new operating system, on our theater’s giant 10-foot diagonal screen.

Because if only 5 of those remaining 95 people switch to Macs, we’ll double our market share and, more importantly, earn the chance to delight another 25 million customers.

This was also used for full-page newspaper ads in areas that were home to new stores.

In this video, Steve Jobs gives a tour of what Apple came up with to lure Windows customers in:

That initial store design and layout spread across a bunch of different locations, including my own Saddle Creek store, where I was hired as a temporary salesperson for the holiday rush of 2006, before becoming a Mac Genius for a couple of years. Saddle Creek has since moved to a newer section of its shopping center and ushered in a new design for the stores.

The history of the Apple Store is an interesting one. For years, Ron Johnson was at the heart of it. In 2018, he did an interview on the now-defunct “Without Fail” podcast telling some pretty wild stories from those early days of Apple retail.

For a decade, the changes Apple has made to its stores were faithfully chronicled at ifoAppleStore, until its founder Gary Allen passed away in 2015. Today, folks like Michael Steeber faithfully report on the Apple stores.

From the very first store openings to dealing with the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Apple store is how millions of people interact with Apple. It’s a bit cringe-worthy when Apple says that the stores are meeting places and town halls, but for many fans of the company and its products, there’s something special about them, even as they’ve changed and grown over the last 20 years.

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago.

On May 1, 2001, Steve Jobs unveiled an all-new iBook, and the new notebook was a huge departure from what came before it.

This came at a special on-campus event¹ at Infinite Loop, and a somewhat-janky video of the event is still online:

This event came just a few months after the launch of the Titanium PowerBook G4, and Apple’s notebook game had never been stronger. In fact, Jobs announced that notebooks accounted for nearly 30% of the company’s Mac sales, up from less than 20% just a year before.

Redefining the iBook

The all-new iBook was a huge departure from the “Clamshell” design that came before it:

Gone were the swooping edges and vibrant colors of the original iBook; this new iBook G3 was far more conservative in design, being dressed in all white.

The top and bottom parts of this enclosure were actually made of clear plastic that had white paint applied to the inside, giving it a slightly frosted look, earning it the nickname “IceBook.” This design lent itself to some … interesting modifications made by some users.

The new iBook was 4.9 pounds, a huge reduction from the 6.7 pound Clamshell. It was also some 35% thinner. As Jobs was quick to point out, this made the iBook the thinnest and lightest notebook in its class.

This was made possible by Apple ditching the large rubber-injected molding that gave the original iBook its rugged nature.

That said, Jobs insisted that the new machine would still hold up to the demands of being used in the home and in schools, saying it proved to be “twice as durable” in Apple’s internal testing. The hard drive was rubber-mounted to absorb shocks and the magnesium frame was meant to be strong and light, but as many Apple techs from back in the day will tell you, it wasn’t uncommon to see iBooks with broken frames come in for repair.

The display was still a 12-inch LCD, but now running at 1024×768, an upgrade from the old 800×600 panel. The additional space made running Mac OS X much more comfortable, and matched the number of pixels on the iMac G3.

The screen rotated down and away from the keyboard on a new hinge that was markedly better than anything Apple had shipped on a notebook before. I honestly think the hinge feel holds up today, two decades later.

The I/O on the new machine was also an upgrade from before, with an additional USB port joining the single port on the Clamshell. It joined the power, FireWire, Ethernet, modem, mini-VGA and the combo audio/composite video ports, all along the left side of the machine.

Inside, the iBook had been improved as well. The Clamshell topped out 466 MHz, but the new iBook was clocked at 500 MHz and could be equipped with up to 640 MB of RAM. The display was powered by the ATI Rage Mobility 128 GPU 8 MB of video memory, which was the same as the FireWire-equipped Clamshell models.

The laptop could be outfitted with one of four optical drives:

• CD-ROM player
• DVD-ROM player
• CD-RW burner
• Combo (DVD-ROM + CD-RW burner)

Prices ranged from $1,299 to $1,799 — $200 less than the Clamshell:

Regardless of price, the iBook came with a 10 GB hard drive, something Apple would improve drastically later in 2001 when it revised the machine for the first time.

In its press release about the new laptop, Apple was quick to praise it:

“The new iBook is wonderfully small and light, and packs in all the amazing features you’d expect from Apple,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With iMovie, iTunes and iTools, the new iBook builds on the incredible success of the original iBook and is designed to fit today’s digital lifestyle.”

Every iBook is powered by 500 MHz PowerPC G3 processors, and offer up to twice the onboard memory, twice the memory expansion, and twice the storage than previous models. iBook’s new stunning design is almost two pounds lighter and twice as durable than previous models, and small enough to easily fit into any backpack or computer bag. Made for students and consumers alike, iBook’s streamlined impact resistant polycarbonate enclosure has no doors protruding, latches or levers to break or accidentally catch.

I encourage you to watch the video, but I love how the whole thing is announced. Jobs talked about the specs for over ten minutes, before ever showing off the iBook’s new design. He holds it up compared to a Dell, making fun of the PC’s design and features before Apple employees passed iBooks down the rows of journalists in the audience. As they looked at the machines, Jobs answered a couple of questions about the notebook, and he shared that the notebook did have a fan, and that the only color it came in was white.

Schools

After announcing and showing off the new iBook, Jobs demoed it for the audience, showing iTunes, iMovie, and the DVD Player all running on the 12-inch machine. Despite its size, Apple wanted people to see the iBook as worth of being part of the company’s Digital Hub strategy.

After that, Jobs spoke about the importance of education to Apple, leaning on its history with schools going back to the Apple II. However, he then spoke about dedicated computer labs and how the idea of moving student into a room full of computers was an outdated idea. With wireless notebooks, computers could come to the students, he said, showing off a cart full of iBooks on the screen behind him. Apple was the number one computer company in education, he said, and Apple planned on keeping that title. In fact, the iBook could be bought starting at $1,199.

Jobs then announced a huge deal with Henrico County Public Schools in Richmond Virginia, with 23,000 notebooks making it the largest portable computer order in education to that point. Every middle school student, high schooler and teacher in the district would have their own iBook G3.

Apple shared more about this in a press release:

“This is the mammoth–the single largest sale of portable computers in education ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Apple is thrilled to partner with Henrico County Public Schools in their revolutionary initiative because when every student and teacher has access to wirelessly-networked mobile computing, learning reaches far beyond the classroom.”

“Students, teachers, parents and the community will now have the best technology tools in the world at their fingertips every day,” said Dr. Mark Edwards, superintendent of Henrico County Public Schools. “We chose Apple’s iBook because our experience has shown that it costs significantly more to support other platforms. Apple’s iBook is the best product available to meet our instructional needs.”

When these machines were sold off by the school district four years later, all hell broke loose in Richmond.

Legacy

This new design would stay with the iBook until its demise at the Intel transition five years after this announcement, with some changes. The clear-but-painted exterior would be swapped for white plastic panels, and the nasty smell would be resolved with a keyboard revision as well.

A 14-inch version would show up as well, but neither would survive the introduction of the MacBook in 2006. While that machine is well-loved by many, the IceBook was an important step in the Mac’s shift to being a primarily mobile platform.

If you want even more Mac OS X reading, I’ve got a couple of PDFs for you:

• The “Welcome to Mac OS X” guide
• The 10.0 “Before You Install” document

Jason Snell at Macworld:

So when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, it’s important to realize what we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating a software release that was the culmination of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. We’re celebrating the operating system we still use, two decades later. But we’re also celebrating the foundation of iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

In that way, this isn’t just the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0. It’s the 20th anniversary of modern Apple, and the end of the dark days when Apple couldn’t fix its own operating system.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it here: Apple buying NeXT was the most important tech acquisition of all time.

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

Recapping Previous News

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.

Apple & Nvidia

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.

The Digital Hub

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.

Power Mac G4 Cube

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

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

iMac (Early 2001)

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.

Wrapping Up

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:

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago. This month, we’re looking at Macworld San Francisco.

To kick off what would be a very busy year, Steve Jobs took to the Macworld stage in San Francisco, boasting that in addition to the 5,000 people in attendance, tens of thousands of people were watching via livestream around the world via QuickTime.

Mac OS X

Jobs started by talking about Mac OS X, recapping the new operating system’s architecture, from the kernel on up all the way to the new UI, dubbed Aqua.

I ripped this graphic out of my book about the iMac G3 and the roots of Mac OS X. You should check it out.

He praised the Mac OS X Public Beta, which had on sale since September 2000. Some 100,000 people had purchased it, providing 75,000 feedback submissions.¹

After thanking the community for their feedback and involvement, he outlined some common themes in the reports. The first was positive feedback, naturally:

• “Far more stable”
• “Aqua is incredible”
• “Super easy to install”
• “Classic really works”
• “Mac + Unix is nirvana”

Then he tackled a list of features missing from the public beta:

• AirPort support
• Printing
• Location manager
• Dynamic network settings
• PPP over Ethernet

After revealing that those features were all in the current build of the OS, Jobs shared some concerns they had been hearing from users:

• The Apple menu was terrible
• The lack of a clock in the Menu Bar
• Disks and Trash on Desktop
• No Control Strip
• Toolbars were too big

The placement of the Apple logo in the Public Beta was centered in the menu bar, which was ridiculous:

To make matters worse, it was just a logo without any menu items, forgoing one of Mac OS’ more useful UI features.

Thankfully, Apple put it back in the correct place on the left and made it an actual menu again for system-level controls such as Sleep, Restart and Shutdown.

(In the classic Mac OS, these were under the Special menu, and were only available when in the Finder, which was a bit odd.)

To this, Apple added a list of recent items and a way to switch network locations without taking a trip to System Preferences. It wasn’t as flexible as the old Apple menu, but it was a big improvement over the beta.

Toolbars in Finder and other apps were made smaller and customizable, so users could put their own favorite commands and shortcuts where they wanted them. Finder also picked up the ability to spawn a new window for every folder and sub-folder moved through on a user’s way to their desired destination. While this may have looked like the classic Mac OS’ way of doing things, it missed the mark, according to John Siracusa:

The Mac OS X Finder needs a lot of work before it can fill the shoes of its predecessor. The addition of many useful and powerful features to the Mac OS experience (column view, browser mode, the toolbar, bundle manipulation, file mapping, and built-in network integration) does not outweigh the significant problems. Missing features, mis-features, and bugs render the new Finder unable to reproduce the spatial file manipulation environment that has been the defining characteristic of the Macintosh experience since 1984.

Speaking of features from Mac OS, the Control Strip wasn’t reintroduced, but its easy access to settings was shoved into “Docklets,” or icons in the Dock that managed these settings but didn’t launch applications.² They were weird.

In the early days of Mac OS X, there were a handful of these, including:

• Monitors: Manage screen resolution and color depth
• Battery Monitor: Shows remaining battery levels on notebooks
• Signal Strength: Displays the connection strength for a Wi-FI network
• iTunes Dockling: Controls iTunes
• Folders: Any folder put in the Dock by a user would show a pop-up of its content when clicked, just like today.

Mercifully, Docklets were killed off with Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, but that’s an operating system update for a different time.

Applications

After discussing Mac OS X itself, Jobs walked through the Carbon and Cocoa application environments. As a recap, early versions of Mac OS X could run classic apps inside a virtual OS 9 machine and apps that had been “carbonized” to run natively on OS X, accessing new features like protected memory and the updated user interface.

Lastly, there was Cocoa, which had its roots in NeXTSTEP, not Mac OS. This was to be a new generation of Mac applications, written in Objective-C.

Jobs boasted that some 400 developers had committed to Mac OS X, accounting for more than 1,200 software titles. While they would not all be out on day one, Jobs pitched a bright future, full of software for Apple’s new operating system.

After a demonstration of Maya on the new OS, the keynote turned to the schedule. Jobs announced that Mac OS X would go one sale on March 24, 2001 for $129. Starting in July, Mac OS X would be the bundled, default OS on new Apple hardware, Jobs said. He closed out this section saying:

We know that Mac OS X is really laying the foundation for the next decade to decade and a half of our software efforts. We think we’ve got something really, really good here. I hope you love it as much as we do.

Power Mac G4 Update

After thirty minutes of software talk, the keynote turned to hardware, starting with a new generation of Power Mac G4 towers. The last machines to use the original industrial design, these are known as the “Digital Audio” G4s.

The name came from the included built-in amplifier, which could be used with Apple’s USB Pro Speakers, also announced at Macworld 2001.

Jobs said the theme for this new generation of G4 was “Power to Burn,” before acknowledging that the Power Mac had topped out at 500 MHz a year and a half before this. These new machines could be ordered with up to a 733 MHz G4, delivering 5.5 gigaflops of computing power.

The new line was broken down into four models, as detailed in this archived tech spec sheet on Apple’s website.

The processors in the four machines were clocked at 466 MHz, 533 MHz, 667 MHz and 773 MHz.³ The 533 could be custom ordered as a dual-processor system. The slower two machines used the PowerPC 7410 CPU, but the two faster models were built around the PPC 7450, complete with an on-chip 256 KB L2 Cache.

All four had that new digital amp, Gigabit Ethernet, five expansion slots, CD-RW drives, a faster 133 MHz system bus and AGP graphics with NVIDIA cards in the top three models.

Prices ranges from $1699 to $3499. That most expensive model came with a SuperDrive, which Jobs said was an industry first. It could read and write both CDs and DVDs. Those DVDs could be then played on a consumer DVD player. It was a big deal, as Jobs joked: The new G4 could burn CDs, DVDs and Pentiums.

This launched into one of many races Apple would hold between their slower-clocked PowerPC Macs and Windows machines running faster-on-paper Intel CPUs. This time, Phil Schiller came out to show that a 733 MHz Power Mac G4 could run circles around the new 1.5 GHz Pentium 4, at least in Photoshop 6.

The 466 and 533 MHz models were on sale immediately, with the faster SKUs coming the next month.

To make burning CDs on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X easier, Jobs showed that Finder had been updated to treat blank optical media as a folder. A user could drag files and folders to it, then tell the system to burn the disc when they were ready.

Power Mac Accessories

I’ve already mentioned the Pro Speakers that Apple announced with these machines. Designed in conjunction with Harman/Kardon, they were clear spherical speakers, each roughly the size of the HomePod mini. They sold for $59 a set.

Then, Jobs showed the company’s 15-inch Studio Display, a smaller, less-expensive sibling to the 22-inch variant pictured above with the Power Mac. It used Apple Display Connector (ADC) for power, video and USB all over one cable. It had been for sale at $999, but got a price cut here to $799.

The Digital Hub.

Jobs opened the next section, referencing the downturn in the PC industry. While some were closing up shop on the personal computer, Jobs said Apple saw things differently. The PC wasn’t dying; it was evolving. He laid out his interpretation of the personal computer industry’s history:

• 1980-1994: The first Golden Age, thanks to productivity tools like word processors, spreadsheets and digital publishing applications.
• 1995-2000: The second Golden Age, thanks to the rise of the Internet. It added to the productivity tools, making the personal computer more valuable than ever.

Jobs then said the PC industry was about to enter its third great era — the age of the Digital Lifestyle.

Here’s how he laid out this vision:

We are living in a new digital lifestyle with an explosion of digital devices. It’s huge. And we believe the PC, or more importantly the Mac, can become the digital hub of our new emerging digital lifestyle, with the ability to add tremendous value to these other digital devices.

I wrote about the advent and evolution of the Digital Hub over on iMore if you want to read more. Needless to say, Jobs’ words were prophetic and over the subsequent years, Apple would flesh out this vision with products like the iPod for mobile music listening and iPhoto for managing digital photos.

The news at Macworld 2001 was all about digital music. He explained how MP3s worked, and how this was a revolution already underway. In fact, in 2000 alone, 320 million blank CD-Rs had been sold in the United States, and portable MP3 players were becoming popular.⁴

Jobs walked the crowd through the current music applications and showed how they were just too complex to use, and often came with restrictions on encoding and burning unless the user paid up.

Enter iTunes.

While it’s hard to believe given what would happen to iTunes over the next two decades, but this version of the product was clean and simple.⁵ Users could import CDs, organize their music into playlists and then burn those playlists onto CD-Rs to take with them. It even had a visualizer and a hip design.

iDVD

After talking about iTunes, Jobs changed gears to talk about the explosion of DVD usage in households and businesses around the world. The dream, he said, was to make your own DVDs, with your own movies on them — and play them on consumer-grade DVD players.

iMovie, which had been around since 1999 let uses edit home video, but that’s as far as it went. By 2001, Apple was ready, thanks to the SuperDrive to burn the discs, and the power of the Power Mac G4’s Velocity Engine to encode the data in software at just 2x real time, a huge increase from the 25x real time that was required before this breakthrough.

This was all building to iDVD, a new application for laying out DVDs with menus.

Jobs demoed the new title on one of the just-announced Power Mac G4s running Mac OS 9. He quickly added titles, menus and the media for playback, thanks to iDVD’s built-in collection of themes, templates and layout tools.⁶

In just a few short years, this technology would show up in cheaper desktop and even notebooks, but this was a big deal, and along with iTunes and iMovie, formed the foundation that would later become iLife, complete with iPhoto and even later, iWeb.

Titanium PowerBook

While the Power Mac G4 was great, the real hardware star of this event was my all-time favorite Apple notebook: the Titanium PowerBook G4. It was Job’s One More Thing, after 90 minutes on stage.

I’ve covered this machine a lot over the years, but in short, it was a huge departure from the PowerBook G3 series of machines. It was thin and made of metal, and brought the G4 to a notebook for the first time, with either a 400 or 500 MHz G4 in a chassis that was just one inch thick, weighing 5.2 pounds. It boasted a 15.2-inch widescreen display and slot-loading optical drive, all housed in a Titanium chassis.

Apple was very proud of this machine, as you can tell from the press release:

“The all new Titanium PowerBook G4 is the most revolutionary portable computer ever created,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Its a supercomputer to go’ in terms of performance, yet it’s thinner and sexier than the best subnotebooks.”

As it would turn out, this would be a short-lived design, as it had rather weak hinges and the paint used on parts of the case would often chip and flake off, making the expensive laptop look like a beater.

To learn more about this machine, I recommend this article on iMore and Jason Snell’s recent coverage of the machine on Six Colors and in the 20 Macs for 2020 podcast feed.

…and of course my video on the machine from a few years ago:

In Conclusion

This Macworld keynote is jam-packed with stuff that would really change Apple’s trajectory for years to come. Mac OS X would spin off other operating systems to power things from the iPhone to the Apple Watch. iTunes has since been replaced,⁷ but music is still near and dear to Apple. Most people haven’t thought about iDVD in years, but we all use Apple devices to shoot and share video. And, of course, Apple is still in the business of making fast and capable Macs.