Category: Apple History

Thanks to Cameron Kaiser’s excellent blog Old Vintage Computing Research, I have a growing interest in the Apple Network Server line of computers. One of Kaiser’s posts mentions the ANS 300, a model I wasn’t familiar with at the time.

Turns out, it is wild. Tom Owad wrote about it back in 2004:

The Apple Network Servers are high end servers built by Apple that run IBM’s AIX variant of UNIX. Pictured above is the Apple Network Server 700, Apple’s top-of-the-line server with a 180 MHz PPC 604e processor, two power supplies, 7 removable drive bays and 2 fixed drives. The ANS 500 had a slightly lesser configuration, with a 132 MHz 604e, only one power supply, and 7 removable drive bays. Both have locking wheels on the bottom (handy since the unit weighs about 80 pounds!) and a locking/sliding 3-position translucent door to cover the drive bays. The power supplies are removable via a handle behind the purple removable “grille” in the bottom. These units were specifically designed to be highly serviceable yet very secure.

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A post from November 2021 titled The 14-inch MacBook Pro Resets the Timeline is one of my favorite things I’ve written in the 18-year history of 512 Pixels. In it, I reviewed the first 14-inch MacBook Pro as if the 2016-era MacBook Pros never existed.

But of course, they did exist, and were announced ten years ago this week. Here’s a bit from Apple Newsroom back on October 27, 2016:

Apple today introduced the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever, along with a breakthrough interface that replaces the traditional row of function keys with a brilliant, Retina-quality Multi-Touch display called the Touch Bar. The new MacBook Pro features Apple’s brightest and most colorful Retina display yet, the security and convenience of Touch ID, a more responsive keyboard, a larger Force Touch trackpad and an audio system with double the dynamic range. It’s also the most powerful MacBook Pro ever, featuring sixth-generation quad-core and dual-core processors, up to 2.3 times the graphics performance over the previous generation, super-fast SSDs and up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports.

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This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

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Jason Snell:

In researching the Designed in California series, I was struck by just how quickly the iPod’s importance was overshadowed by the iPhone. There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.

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Doug Brown has dug up something previously lost to time. In working with an early Performa, he discovered a true gem on its hard drive:

This Performa 410 was a store demo unit! This is the kiosk software that would have been running on a demo Mac inside a store like Sears or Circuit City. The machine was never wiped back to factory state before being sold, and the original owner kept the demo software the entire time they had the machine. Such a cool find!

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As is tradition, I have made and cataloged a whole bunch of screenshots of the new version of macOS.

Golden Gate is the 24th version of macOS that I have documented this way. It’s a lot of work, but I love having the screenshot library as a resource for folks to use and enjoy.

If you haven’t looked through the library in a while, you should check out my new-ish comparison tool. You can type what you are looking for, and the page will surface related screenshots, sorted by age. It is a lot of fun.

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This is one of my favorite pages across Apple’s various websites. I mean, just look at this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro:

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Well, this little Easter Egg in Apple’s 27 OSes is fun. If you go into Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass and scroll down far enough in the example content, an old friend appears:

This 3D version of Clarus can also be found within macOS 27 Golden Gate:

My thanks to Federico Viticci for sending this my way!

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Sam Gold on Mastodon, writing about the one version of OS X that allowed a user to put something to the left of the Finder icon in the Dock:

[In] Lion DP1, you could set defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-left-of-finder -bool YES and get this.

that first Lion beta build is absolutely chock full of experimental UI behind flags.

This makes me feel weird inside.

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Usually, there isn’t much news in August, but this year we got new desktop Macs and Tim Cook’s last day as CEO. I’ve added both to the Apple History Calendar.

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RR Auction has something amazing for sale at the moment: an Apple I built for the Byte Shop.

The auction page has more details:

Well-preserved and fully functional ‘Byte Shop’–style Apple-1 computer (also commonly known as the Apple I, or Apple Computer 1), complete with all components and accessories required for operation, housed in a unique Smith-Corona typewriter case modified to fit the Apple-1.

This remarkable Apple-1, marked “01-0066” on the reverse side in security marker, is a highly original 8K system from the second batch of 50 Apple-1 computers produced and sold. While the marking alone does not establish that the computer was originally sold directly by The Byte Shop, the system displays several important Byte Shop–style characteristics, including its stock-number marking, its 8K configuration, and its original Datanetics Rev D keyboard with custom wired Apple-1 cable—the same keyboard-and-cable arrangement seen on known Byte Shop Apple-1 systems.

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Jeff Geerling is living the dream:

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