Category: Apple History

I am working on a thing, and I needed to find the release date of Apple’s GS/OS. I knew from this article that it had come out at AppleFest in September 1988.

Finding the date of an event like this isn’t easy on the modern web, but I have collected a massive amount of computer history research over the years. I store it all in DEVONthink, which has some amazing search tools.

In my library, I found a PDF of a September 1988 edition of the Washington Apple Pi Journal, which covered loads of Apple stuff back in the day. There, on page 9, was an ad for the very event!

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Here in April 2022, we’re enjoying a rare treat for us Mac nerds — an entirely new Mac desktop.

Beyond the Mac Studio, we’ve had the iMac Pro, the Mac mini, and of course, a couple of different attempts at the Mac Pro.

But 20 years ago, there was another — the eMac G4.

In April 2002, the iMac G4 was basically brand-new, and while there was technically still an iMac G3 on sale, Apple wanted to do something new for its education customers that had purchased so many iMacs over the previous few years.

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These photos are really something.

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Kali at Admiral Shark’s Keyboards has built the case that Apple’s Newton keyboard was based on the IBM Model M6-1.

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With the 2022 Apple Studio Display, the company has returned to the display business in a big way. To celebrate, I thought we could walk through the history of Apple’s standalone flat displays.

1984: Apple IIc Flat Panel Display

In April 1984, Apple introduced a 1-bit, 7-inch LCD for use with the somewhat-portable Apple IIc:

With a resolution of 560 x 192, it provided an 80-column text mode and hi-res graphic support, but things were a bit … squished, as you can see in these photos. At $595, it didn’t sell very well, with estimates putting the number made at just about 10,000 units.

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Five years ago this week, we got news that the Mac Pro wasn’t dead, and more importantly, that Apple knew that it had lost the plot when it came to the Mac.

In the years since Apple has shipped both the iMac Pro and a new Mac Pro, but also a Retina MacBook Air and (eventually) notebooks with non-busted keyboards. The Mac mini was overhauled to be much more powerful. macOS got a new, fresh design and some amazing new features.

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Developer Mihai Parparita has launched an amazing project dubbed “Infinite Mac” that lets you run System 7 or Mac OS 8 right in your browser. Don’t miss his blog post outlining some of the details. It’s just wonderful.

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From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook.

The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook.

The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and pricing. Many people wrongly believe that the extra cost of the black model just got you a nicer-looking laptop, but that’s not completely true.

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Like the headline says, the iOS keyboard emoji suggestions suggests two emoji as replacements when you type “Clarus.” The problem is that they are in the wrong order:

Clarus is a dogcow, not a cowdog. If Apple is going to have this VERY EXCELLENT reference in the keyboard, the details should be right.¹

Thanks to Jason Robinson for pointing this terrible bug out.

I’ve filed this as Feedback FB9970338 for Apple to fix.

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I just love this piece by Jason Snell.

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Over on Userlandia, Dan Vincent has a great piece about the Apple IIe and Apple’s desire to put it in classrooms. I learned a lot in listening to it last night.

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Editor’s Note: This column was originally published in System Extension, the newsletter sent to 512 Pixels members. Learn more about the 512 membership here.

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Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the iMac G4. Two decades after its introduction, this machine is still a favorite of many, many Mac fans.

I was in high school in 2002 when the iMac G4 was introduced, and really getting into the Mac for the first time, thanks to my time at the student newspaper.

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