Category: Apple History

Antonio G. Di Benedetto has an in-depth look at the little buttons on the underside of the Apple Watch that make swapping bands so easy:

While I often prefer a universal solution over a proprietary connector, here’s the thing — Apple’s band release button beats the hell out of fiddling with little spring bars and jeweler’s tools. Instead, you just press a near-invisible button, slide your band out, slide another one in, and get a lovely audible click as it locks in. No fuss, no muss; just a simple swap for a different visual vibe to match your style and wardrobe.

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The Verge has published a half-hour documentary on what happened to the Lisa at the end of its life, and it’s a fantastic watch:

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Apple Support:

My Photo Stream¹ is shutting down on July 26, 2023. Learn more about this transition and how to keep your photos up to date across all your devices and safely stored in iCloud.

As part of this transition, new photo uploads to My Photo Stream from your devices will stop one month before, on June 26, 2023. Any photos uploaded to the service before that date will remain in iCloud for 30 days from the date of upload and will be available to any of your devices where My Photo Stream is currently enabled. By July 26, 2023, there will be no photos remaining in iCloud, and the service will be shut down.

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Apple Tysons Corner in Virginia was one of the first two Apple Stores to open back in May 2001. This week, it is reopening in a new location and features a new design that brings back an old friend. Michael Steeber has details:

Today, Apple revealed its most comprehensive redesign of the Apple Store experience in nearly a decade. The Genius Bar is returning with a reimagined design. There’s an all-new space for more immersive product discovery. Store accessibility has been improved, and new design elements emphasize sustainability. It was 22 years ago at Tysons Corner that Steve Jobs showed the world how to “Shop Different.” Now Apple is back in the mall where it all began to start a new chapter.

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Jean-Louis Gassée has a new book coming out on May 16:

For the past 20+ years, everyone has been waiting for the story to be told. What really happened at Apple when Jobs returned and Gassée was out? In this first ever comprehensive memoir, Gassée doesn’t hold anything back. From his stellar career to his deepest moments of doubts to his new calling as a grand-father, Gassée dispenses his legendary witty advises and shares some very important moments of the tech world.

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As noted by Joe Rossignol, the Thunderbolt Display is being added to Apple’s list of obsolete products.

In addition to making me feel old, this news made me remember just how good the Thunderbolt Display was.

Announced in 2011, the Thunderbolt Display was an extension of the previous display, the 27-inch LED Cinema Display which was announced a year earlier. Here’s a bit from Apple’s press release:

Apple today unveiled the new Apple Thunderbolt Display, the world’s first display with Thunderbolt I/O technology and the ultimate docking station for your Mac notebook. With just a single cable, users can connect a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac to the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display and access its FaceTime camera, high quality audio, and Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire® 800, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt ports. Designed specifically for Mac notebooks, the new display features an elegant, thin, aluminum and glass enclosure, and includes a MagSafe connector that charges your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

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On April 28, 2003, Apple made a pair of announcements. The first was a new generation of iPod that featured completely solid-state controls and introduced the 30-pin Dock Connector.¹

The other would change the company forever: the iTunes Music Store.

Here’s a bit from the press release:

Apple today launched the iTunes Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac, including iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.

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I love this.

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Make Something Wonderful, the new book by The Steve Jobs Archive is really something special if you’re an Apple nerd. The best reading experience is on the web, but it’s available in a bunch of digital formats as well.

(Personally, I snagged the .epub for my Apple history library that I store in DEVONthink.)

The holy grail, it would seem, is the physical edition of the book, which has been given to employees at both Apple and Disney.

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This machine has been on my “white whale” list for collecting for a long time. This video is a great look at the Lisa:

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I recently found a screenshot of the App Store running on iOS 5 hanging out in my Dropbox¹ and I had things came to mind.

1. iBooks wasn’t part of a clean iOS install until iOS 8.
2. Apple pushing its services with annoying notifications isn’t anything new.
3. We need more brown UI elements in our lives.

I put this on Mastodon yesterday, but wanted to share it here, too:

I came across this page when working on the next Apple History calendar, and it really made me chuckle. I’ve got an image of the whole thing saved here for all time.

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