Category: Apple History

As noted by Chance Miller at 9to5Mac, Apple has pulled the plug on its iTunes Movie Trailers website and app after starting the process earlier in August.

This website had been around a long time. It made big news back in the late 1990s when it hosted the trailer for STAR WARS: Episode I. Here’s a press release from that era:

The popularity of the STAR WARS: Episode I trailer has set an Internet record with over 3.5 million downloads since it first premiered on the joint Lucasfilm/Apple web site (reachable through www.starwars.com or www.apple.com) last Thursday, March 11.

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There’s been a lot of discussion about the iMac recently, and the thing I was struck by this time around was the place the iMac holds in Apple’s product line.

I’ve shown this chart a lot over the years, but it highlights that when it was launched, the iMac was squarely on the consumer side of the grid:

Apple blew away the Grid of 4 a long time ago — first breaking it with the G4 Cube — and over time, the iMac slowly creeped up to encroach on the professional side of things.

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Monica Chin at The Verge:

…Apple hasn’t updated the iMac in well over 800 days — which is the longest gap in recent memory and double the average gap between updates over its history. And that conspicuous hole in the M2 lineup has been making me wonder: in a future where MacBooks rule the market and most of the desktops Apple produces are niche, enthusiast products, where will the iMac fit?

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Today marks 25 years since the original iMac was introduced. It saved Apple and changed the world.¹ We live in a Notebook World today, but if Apple was going to reinvent itself in 1998, it was going to be with a desktop:

In a world of beige boxes, the iMac was new and different. Sure, it ran the same old (and kinda busted) Mac OS, but the design — and the move to USB — made huge waves, some of which are still felt today.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that my custom Alfred search to find things on Apple’s support website had broken, so I’ve reworked it a bit to match Apple’s adjusted search URLs.

In Alfred’s preferences, under Features, you can add a new Web Search. You can add a keyword, label and — most importantly — the URL Alfred will need to pass to the browser to fire your search results:

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I backed this project years ago — and interviewed its creator, Noah Leon — and it’s very cool to see it available on YouTube for everyone:

Take some time this week and watch it.

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Somehow, this page is still up on Apple’s website, albeit with a big red non-Retina banner reading “Apple TV app is the new home of iTunes Movie Trailers” that doesn’t actually link anywhere. What a sad way to die.

Thanks to Connected listener Gabriel for pointing out the banner.

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I love this project.

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Apple Support, on a page first published just a week after U2’s album was forced upon given away to all iTunes users:

Follow these instructions to remove U2’s “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchases. Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again. The album is free to everyone until October 13, 2014, and will be available for purchase after that date.

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Josh Withers:

Tim Cook once said that “we are high on AR for the long run” and it’s true, for 28 years Apple - and the rest of the tech industry - has been noodling around on augmented reality and virtual reality.

Out of a purely personal interest, I started flipping through rumours about Apple and its “glasses” to see where the leakers got it right and wrong, and the next minute I’m back in 1995, so I thought a curated list of all the leaks, rumours, and related dates might be a nice record to make in the year of our headset, AVP 0.

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An anonymous 512 Pixels reader recently mailed me something amazing — a promotional mailer for eWorld, dating back to 1994. In the package was a set of 3.5-inch eWorld 1.0 installer disks, the “Apple Online Service Subscriber Agreement” and an amazing brochure for eWorld.

Let’s start with the envelope and the Subscriber Agreement:

You can click on any image in this post to view a full-sized version.

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The Apple Vision Pro may be ushering in the era of spatial computing, but like many other Apple products, it’s using a name steeped in history.

Ok, steeped may be a little strong, but Apple has had other products with “vision” in their names over the years. Seven products, to be exact, and all of them are long-forgotten CRT displays:

• AudioVision 14 Display
• AppleVision 1710 & AppleVision 1710AV
• AppleVision/ColorSync 750 & AppleVision/ColorSync 750AV
• AppleVision/ColorSync 850 & AppleVision/ColorSync 850AV

The AudioVision 14 Display came out in 1993, and was built around a Sony Trinitron CRT, as were all the other products in that list. The AudioVision 14 Display was Apple’s first “multimedia display,” and was equipped with a microphone, stereo speakers and two ADB ports for plugging in accessories.

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