Category: 2001 Revisited

In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago. Today, we’re talking about the announcement of the original iPod, which took place during a small press event hosted in Apple’s Town Hall venue.

I haven’t been able to find a great copy of the video, but there is a full-length version on YouTube that’s passable:

The event is pretty subdued. 9/11 had taken place just six weeks before and cast a bit of a shadow over everything. Then there’s Jobs presentation, which is casual and friendly.

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In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago. On September 25, 2001, the company announced the first major update to Mac OS X, and it shipped just four days later.¹

Dubbed “Mac OS X v10.1” and code-named “Puma,” this release looked an awful lot like the original version, but brought a lot of refinement and improvements under its very Aqua hood:

To see a lot more of Mac OS X 10.1, check out its entry in my macOS Screenshot Library

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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.

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In my series 2001 Revisited, I’m covering Apple’s major announcements from 20 years ago. It’s now July, which means we get to talk about what may be the most unusual press release in Apple’s modern history:

Apple today announced that it will suspend production of the Power Mac G4 Cube indefinitely. The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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It’s hard to believe that Mac OS X macOS is two decades old, but it’s true. On March 24, 2001, Apple released the first non-beta version of Mac OS X 10.0:

The release followed years of development that took NeXT’s technology and molded it into an operating system for the Mac. That process took longer than Apple had predicted, and included a false start known as Rhapsody. That’s really a story for a different time, but in short, that operating system strategy left classic Mac OS developers without a way forward for their applications that didn’t require rewriting them, and the community soundly rejected the entire thing.

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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.

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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.

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