Category: Apple History

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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There’s a lot to love about the new 24-inch iMacs, and Jason Snell has put together an excellent article showing how many of those reasons have to do with the past:

The new iMac, like the original, has the fortune to live in interesting times. Things may be a bit stressful and unsure, but at least we can look at the pretty colors.

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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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The company’s CEO, Oleksandr Kosovan:

We’re counting months to opening the doors of MacPaw’s very own Apple Museum. 323 exhibits, fascinating stories about Apple’s behind the scenes, and one big mission to befriend humans and technology. Here’s how we’ve got here.

This looks really cool. I’m putting a tour of it on my nerd bucket list.

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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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Since the introduction of the iMac G5 way back in August of 2004, the basic building blocks of what makes an iMac an iMac have been the same:

From the front, it’s rather remarkable how little the iMac has changed in nearly two decades. The screen is front and center, surrounded by a bezel with a chin below the display. The whole thing is mounted on a foot that lets a user tilt the entire computer easily.

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We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades.

What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot.

And they are glorious:

Macintosh II

The Macintosh II line used several different chimes. These large machines combined the Macintosh operating system with the open hardware of the Apple II, and while they aren’t as charming as the original Mac’s design, they were lusted after by many users in their day.

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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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When you think about desktop Macs from the 90s, names like LC, Performa, Quadra and Power Macintosh come to mind.

That’s pretty understandable. Apple shipped a bunch of those models. Nine Macs bore the name LC, while there were 11 Quadras, 24 Power Macs and a whopping 44 Performas.¹

Then there’s the Centris line of Macs. Here’s the list of models that wore that name:

• Centris 610
• Centris 650
• Centris 660AV

Yep, just three Macs, all for sale for less than a year in 1993. In fact, the 660AV was for sale for a mere three months in the fall of that year, making my example a real treasure.

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Joanna Nelius at Gizmodo, writing about the CPU at the heart of NASA’s newest rover:

The PowerPC 750 was a single-core, 233MHz processor, and compared to the multi-core, 5.0GHz-plus frequencies modern consumer chips can achieve, 233MHz is incredibly slow. But the 750 was the first to incorporate dynamic branch prediction, which is still used in modern processors today. Basically, the CPU architecture is making an educated guess on what instructions the CPU is going to process as a way to improve efficiency. The more information that’s processed, the better the chip gets at predicting what it needs to do next.

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