Category: Apple History

To know where we are going, we have to know where we’ve been.

Cairo Throw ⇢

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I’m thinking this would look good as a tapestry in my studio:

The original emoji, Cairo was a typeface designed by Susan Kare in 1984 for the first Macintosh operating system. Taking its name from the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, each symbol was drawn by hand using the bitmap grid. A few notable symbols lived on into later operating systems including the cursor and watch.

Kare designed this woven blanket for the Jacquard loom, an early example of computer-controlled machinery, operated with punched cards and invented by Joseph Jacquard in 1801.

iPad at 10

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Ten years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad. As you may imagine, there’s quite a collection of stuff to absorb about this:

It’s also fun to revisit old reviews:

About that Easy Pay Video ⇢

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One of the true gems on The Apple Archive is this video about Easy Pay, a roaming payment solution Apple used in its retail stores back in my day.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/374289721

Rumor around Apple Retail was that this video was not officially-sanctioned, and that the people involved had been let go after it surfaced. Sean Hollister at The Verge has gotten to the bottom of this once and for all:

I can guess what you’re thinking, but no, these employees were not fired — in fact, a LinkedIn profile suggests lead singer Brian Maslow spent five more years at the company and got promoted first to train his fellow Apple retail employees, later trained Whole Foods employees, and is now a manager of talent development at NBCUniversal.

That’s good news, but the video is still very, very bad.

Some Short-Lived Macs

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A common talking point between Apple fans over the last few years has been the long gaps between hardware updates for many Mac models. Apple has pretty much righted that ship now that the 2013 Mac Pro has been replaced, but it did get me thinking about what Macs had unusually short lives.

This is probably not a comprehensive list. One can only scan a list of Performa model information for so long before starting to cry.

Macintosh XL (January – April 1985)

image via Wikipedia, and yes, that machine is running Lisa OS in this photo

The story of the Lisa and Macintosh XL is a whole thing, but the short version is that the Lisa was revolutionary, but way too expensive. After watching the Lisa struggle, Apple re-badged a bunch of them as the “Macintosh XL,” and shipped them with software to emulate the Macintosh so that Mac software could run on it.

The machine was scrapped quietly as Apple retooled its factory lines to build more Macs. In 1986, Apple offered customers the chance to trade in their Lisa or XL systems for $2600 off a new Mac Plus and Hard Disk 20 system.

Macintosh Centris 660AV (July – October 1993)

We need to address a pair of machines that suffered from Apple’s rampant badge engineering in the 1990s.

The Centris 6660AV was powered by a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 processor like many other Macs in its day, but it was one of the first “AV” models, coming with support for both s-video and composite video-in and out.

In October 1993, the Centris name went away after just three models, and this machine became the Quadra 660AV.

Macintosh Performa 410 (October – November 1993)

Likewise, the Performa 410 was just a rebadged LC II, bundled with some built-in software and a 12″ Apple color monitor. Along with its siblings, the Performa 410’s 32-bit CPU was crippled by a 16-bit data bus and a system cap on RAM of just 10 MB.

Macintosh TV — October 1993 – February 1994

This computer is pretty much what it says on the tin; Apple took a LC520, made it black and put a TV tuner in the back.

I wrote about the Macintosh TV over on iMore a few years ago. Here’s a bit from that article:

Turns out smashing a TV into a Mac running System 7 was … less than ideal.

Unfortunately, this computer didn’t offer the ease-of-use that iOS 9 captured with Picture-in-Picture. No: The user could either watch TV or use their Mac as a computer. If you flipped over to the TV environment, MacOS basically disappeared. And forget about capturing any video coming into the system; creating individual frames as PICT files was as much as would-be pirates could manage.

To drive the dagger even deeper, the TV picture used 16-bit color—MacOS was still living in the 8-bit world.

Adam Engst once named it the second-worst Mac of all time. Ouch.

Blue & White Power Mac G3, Rev. B (June – August 1999)

The Blue and White G3 was a big deal. It shed not only its beige exterior, but most of the legacy technology that had helped define the Power Mac for so long. It did retain a single ADB port with its new-fangled USB ports, but SCSI and serial were banished, as was the floppy drive.

Apple used Ultra ATA internally to connect the drives to the system, and the transition was a little bumpy. Initially, the machine didn’t support Master/Slave settings on drives, leading to issues when customers installed a second hard drive — something Apple made trivially easy with the new case design.

Apple silently revised the Blue and White in June 1999, some six months after launch to address this issue. This improved Mac was sold for just three months, and is the one to have if you’re looking to collect. Just make sure you get the improved one.

Power Mac G4, PCI Graphics, 350 MHz (October – December 1999)

When Apple unveiled the Power Mac G4, the line was split between “PCI Graphics” and “AGP Graphics” models. The former used the logic board from the Blue and White G3, just with a G4 in the socket. Apple shipped this G4 and it finished working on the “real” G4, the AGP machine.

These machines were also known by their code names: “Yikes!” and “Sawtooth,” respectively. The first was well-named, as there were real constraints with the G4 chip in these early days, and the 400 MHz chip that was initially sold was replaced with a slower 350 MHz G4 in October 1999, at the same price point.

Mercifully, Apple got the AGP machine ready, and IBM was able to crank more processors and things smoothed out later in 1999.

iBook, 14.1 LCD (January – May 2002)

If you think about the laziest possible way to make a larger laptop, what comes to mind? Just taking the case and screen and stretching them?

That’s how the 14-inch iBook was built. It used the same 1024 x 768 resolution as the smaller 12-inch models.

Just five months later, the original 14-inch iBook was replaced with a model with a slightly faster CPU and a new GPU with 16 MB of VRAM, twice that of previous models.

This wasn’t strictly unique to this specific iBook; Apple revised these machines on a very regular and aggressive basis in the 2002-2004 time frame.

But I can’t stop thinking about that screen. It is not good.

iMac G5 with iSight (October 2005 – January 2006)

The iMac G5 was revised in the fall of 2005 to include an iSight camera and Front Row Support and faster internals, all in a slimmer case. It was more refined than the original iMac G5, and looked like it was ready for years of service.

Of course, Apple had announced its move to Intel in the summer of 2005, but then, Steve Jobs had said that it would be a two-year process to move over to the new CPUs. There was a sense that this would be the last PowerPC iMac, but no one expected it to be replaced just four months later at Macworld 2006. Here’s a bit from Apple’s press release:

“The iMac has already been praised as ‘the gold standard of desktop PCs’, so we hope customers really love the new iMac, which is up to twice as fast,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With Mac OS X plus Intel’s latest dual-core processor under the hood, the new iMac delivers performance that will knock our customers’ socks off.”

What the press release didn’t mention was just how big of a performance jump the CoreDuo CPU gave the iMac. In his keynote, Jobs praised the new system for being 2-3x faster than its G5 predecessor.

I can’t imagine many customers of the iMac G5 (iSight) were thrilled. Yes, the new iMac looked identical to the old one, but just knowing that something so much better was now available must have been a real bummer for some.

That aside, I do love this artwork Apple used on its site for a while:

Early 2009 MacBook (January – May 2009)

This machine was the last iteration of the plastic MacBook that was so popular in the mid 2000s. The sweet black model was gone; this machine was just $999, and sat below the aluminum MacBook in Apple’s lineup.

It was replaced with the weirdo unibody plastic MacBook that you can see here:

2019 15-inch MacBook Pro (May – November 2019)

The drama around the butterfly keyboard is still on-going, but the weirdest chapter in its story is perhaps the 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro.

It came with a revised keyboard using “new materials,” and faster CPU and GPU options, but then was replaced just seven months later by the 16-inch MacBook Pro and its magic keyboard and more robust cooling. If you looked up “stopgap” in the Macintosh dictionary, a photo of this machine may appear.

Bonus Devices

Of course, some products other than Macs have also seen short lifespans:

  • The original Lisa was for sale just a year, starting in January 1983. Apple would release other models, but none of them sold well, and about 2,700 of them ended up in a landfill in 1989.
  • While its exact cancellation date seems lost to time, the QuickTake 200 digital camera was only on sale in 1997.
  • The iPad 3 was on sale from March to October 2012. It was the first retina iPad, and was fairly underpowered when it came to pushing all of those pixels around. Apple replaced it with the iPad 4 which included a much better GPU and a Lightning port.

Twenty Years Ago, Steve Jobs Showed Off the Aqua Interface for the First Time

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At Macworld 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the user interface for Mac OS X. It was called Aqua.

Aqua, as seen in the Mac OS X Public Beta

I love how Jobs introduced it:

When you design a new user interface, you have to start off humbly. You have to start off saying “What are the simplest elements in it? What does a button look like? And you spend months working on a button.”

He then showed what a button looked like in Aqua, then radio buttons, checkboxes and popups. He took the audience on a tour of building blocks of the UI, including the now stoplight window controls that we are all so familiar with it today.

Apple’s press release wasn’t so humble:

The new technology Aqua, created by Apple, is a major advancement in personal computer user interfaces. Aqua features the “Dock” — a revolutionary new way to organize everything from applications and documents to web sites and streaming video. Aqua also features a completely new Finder which dramatically simplifies the storing, organizing and retrieving of files—and unifies these functions on the host computer and across local area networks and the Internet. Aqua offers a stunning new visual appearance, with luminous and semi-transparent elements such as buttons, scroll bars and windows, and features fluid animation to enhance the user’s experience. Aqua is a major advancement in personal computer user interfaces, from the same company that started it all in 1984 with the original Macintosh.

Aqua is made possible by Mac OS X’s new graphics system, which features all-new 2D, 3D and multimedia graphics. 2D graphics are performed by Apple’s new “Quartz” graphics system which is based on the PDF Internet standard and features on-the-fly PDF rendering, anti-aliasing and compositing—a first for any operating system. 3D graphics are based on OpenGL, the industry’s most-widely supported 3D graphics technology, and multimedia is based on the QuickTime™ industry standard for digital multimedia.

Aqua was a huge leap over the classic MacOS’ Platinum appearance, and far richer than anything on Windows at the time. It felt alive, with subtly pulsating buttons and progress bars that looked like they were some sort of modern-day barber poles, turned on their sides.

In his initial review of Mac OS X Developer Preview 3, John Siracusa introduces Aqua this way:

As anyone who’s seen the screenshots knows, Aqua looks very nice. Even in this very first private release, the attention to detail in Aqua is impressive. Everything appears sharp and polished. All the UI elements look just as good as they do in the screenshots on Apple’s web site. Some even look better.

All of this polish came with a cost in those early days: performance. Aqua was painfully slow on older machines, and it wasn’t really snappy on most Macs for a few years. I remember the first time I used a Power Mac G4, after only having used iMac G3s and thinking, “Oh, this what it is supposed to feel like.”

Today’s macOS is a far cry from earlier versions in terms of power and features, not to mention aesthetic. I mean, just look at how far we have come:

Despite all the changes, the core tenants of Aqua remain. The Dock. Window controls. Sheets. It’s mostly all still here, and that is a real testament to the work done over two decades ago on the original iteration of Aqua. It’s been able to keep up with the times, while still being itself, and that’s a pretty good test of user interface design over the long haul.

Some Bonus Reading:

Some of Apple’s Awkward Product Names Over the Years

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There’s no way around it, the name “iPhone 11 Pro Max” is a bit of a mouthful. For a company that is so good at marketing, this is far from Apple’s first awkward product name.

Of course, over time these things settle down. I remember groaning at “MacBook Pro” in January 2006 when the PowerBook’s successor was unveiled, but now we don’t think twice about it.

There are some other examples that have come to mind for me:

Apple IIe Enhanced (1985)

Over its 11 year existence, the Apple IIe was on sale longer than any other Apple computer (Mac or otherwise) without a major change.

The IIe Enhanced is one of the few changes to the machine. In March 1985, Apple revved the machine, swapping in the 65C02 processor, clocked at 1.023 MHz. The chip had been found in the smaller IIc, and Apple was hoping to make software support more uniform across the line.

The upgrade also brought updated character and firmware ROMs, making 80-column text far less buggy than before, and opening the door for lowercase letters in Applesoft BASIC.

By appending “Enhanced” to the name, Apple did a good job at signaling that this was just a better Apple IIe, but it seems a bit kludgy today.

In a very non-modern-Apple move, the company sold upgrade kits that let users upgrade — and even re-badge — their Apple IIe machines into Enhances models.

Macintosh SE FDHD (1987)

The SE/30 is one of the most beloved Macs of all time, but its predecessor, the Motorola 68000-powered Macintosh SE received a revision before the famous upgrade to the 68030.

The SE FDHD included support for 1.44 MB floppy drives, up from the 800 KB diskettes SE users were stuck with. Hence “FDHD,” which stood for “Floppy Disk High Density.”

image via Vectronic’s Collections

Siri, heat up some alphabet soup for me.

The Apple OneScanner Line (1991-1997)

In the 90s, Apple had a line of scanners dubbed the “OneScanner” line. Just look at this beast:

image via Stephen Edmonds

The OneScanner offered 256 levels of grey, with 1995’s OneScanner adding color support. Later models picked up goodies like automatic document feeders and support for higher resolutions, but never a less grandiose name.

Basically Every Performa (1992-1997)

The Performa line was a family of low-cost Macs borrowed from other product lines, made slightly worse, bundled with software and sold in places like Sears and other big-box stores.

The names of these machines are all long and some of them are downright awkward. Check out the full list on Wikipedia for more details, but you can see they got worse over time:

  • Performa 200
  • Performa 250
  • Performa 275
  • Performa 400
  • Performa 405
  • Performa 430
  • Performa 450
  • Performa 410
  • Performa 460
  • Performa 466
  • Performa 467
  • Performa 475
  • Performa 476
  • Performa 550
  • Performa 560
  • Performa 575
  • Performa 577
  • Performa 578
  • Performa 580CD
  • Performa 588CD
  • Performa 600
  • Performa 600CD
  • Performa 630
  • Performa 630CD
  • Performa 630CD DOS Compatible
  • Performa 631CD
  • Performa 635CD
  • Performa 636
  • Performa 636CD
  • Performa 637CD
  • Performa 638CD
  • Performa 640CD DOS Compatible
  • Performa 5200CD
  • Performa 5210CD
  • Performa 5215CD
  • Performa 5220CD
  • Performa 5300CD
  • Performa 5300CD DE1
  • Performa 5320CD
  • Performa 6110CD
  • Performa 6112CD
  • Performa 6115CD
  • Performa 6116CD
  • Performa 6117CD
  • Performa 6118CD
  • Performa 6200CD
  • Performa 6205CD
  • Performa 6210CD
  • Performa 6214CD
  • Performa 6216CD
  • Performa 6218CD
  • Performa 6220CD
  • Performa 6230CD
  • Performa 6260CD
  • Performa 6290CD
  • Performa 6300CD
  • Performa 6310CD
  • Performa 6320CD
  • Performa 6360
  • Performa 6400/180
  • Performa 6400/200
  • Performa 6400/200 VEE2
  • Performa 6410
  • Performa 6420

Workgroup Server 95 (1993)

This just sounds like Microsoft product, but it’s not. The Workgroup Server was based on the still-cool-looking Quadra 950, but with a digital tape drive coupled with faster internal SCSI.

image via Carl Berkeley

The Workgroup Server ran A/UX in addition to Mac OS, which is a story for a different time…

Macintosh LC III+ (1993)

Eschewing the traditional “Plus” spelling found on a couple of Apple II and Mac models,3 the LC III+ used the mathematical symbol, right in its name.

The main difference between this and a regular LC III was a faster 33 M MHz Motorola 68030 CPU, as opposed to the 25 MHz part found in the original machine. An optional Floating Point Unit could be added, and the machine did come wrapped in a slightly nicer case.

Why this wasn’t the LC IV, I’ll never know.

The + symbol would show up again in the summer of 2000 with the iMac DV+.

AppleDesign Products & PowerCD (1993)

The Apple Industrial Design Group was a team within Apple tasked with taking the company’s design back in-house after Apple split with Frog Design, who had worked on the famous “Snow White” design language.

The team’s name was given to several products, including the AppleDesign Powered Speakers in 1993 and AppleDesign Keyboard in 1994, as well as the AppleDesign Powered Speakers II in 1994.

I own a set of the original speakers:

Don’t miss the tiny Macintosh logo on the back.

Related to these speakers is the PowerCD, a redesigned and re-badged desktop CD player by Philips. While I like the name PowerCD, it feels a bit over the top.

PowerBook 500 with PowerPC (1995)

With a name like this, you would think that this notebook was the first to ship with a PowerPC processor, but you’d be wrong. That honor goes to the ill-fated PowerBook 5300.

Instead, the PowerBook 500 with PowerPC was exactly what it sounds like — a PowerBook 500 with a PowerPC chip onboard.

image of a PowerBook 500c via Wikipedia

This machine wasn’t sold for very long, but it’s exact end-of-life date is not known.

QuickTake Video Conferencing Camera 100 (1995)

The QuickTime Video Conferencing Camera came with the short-lived QuickTime Media Conferencing software. This obscure little bit of history is preserved for us by The New York Times:

But if Apple Computer and other industry players are right, this could be the year video conferencing finally lives up to its promise. At an industry trade show in San Francisco last week, Apple announced a new software technology that has the very real potential of driving down the cost of personal video-conferencing equipment, while solving some of the problems that have nagged this talking-heads technology since it first arrived on personal computers a few years ago.

Apple’s new video-conferencing technology is called Quicktime Conferencing, and is one of two extensions that the company plans to make by mid-year to the Quicktime video component of the Apple Macintosh software operating system.

[…]

“It’s not just the next best thing,”‘ said Rick Shriner, Vice President of Applecore Technologies, Apple’s technology development unit. “It’s better than being there.”

Mr. Shriner was referring to the fact that Quicktime Conferencing will do more than simply let two computer users view each other’s faces as they speak. Its Shared Window is an on-screen work space in which the two or more users can work on the same document simultaneously, each making notes the other can see, while cutting and pasting from other files. The face-to-face conversation, meanwhile, takes place in a separate window.

I’m sure it worked super well.

PowerBook G3 Series (1998)

Like the PowerBook 500 with PowerPC, this line’s name would indicate it was the first PowerBook with a G3 at its heart, but it wasn’t.

The early days of the PowerBook G3 line are messy, and worth exploring in a future article, but the original G3 PowerBook was pretty much an older PowerBook 3400 with new guts.

The PowerBook G3 Series was actually a range of notebooks, available with 12.1, 13.3 and 14.1-inch displays. They were completely build-to-order, thanks to Apple’s fancy new-at-the-time WebObjects-powered website.

These machines were on sale for four months before Apple killed off the 13-inch model and standardized features across the 12 and 14-inch machines. The smaller of the two then slowly faded away, too.

Best I can tell, this is the only time Apple has used a Mac’s product name to indicate the product is part of a wider family. After this, screen sizes were just a detail on the check-out screen.

iMac DV SE (1999)

For 1999, the humble iMac line was expanded out into a line of Good/Better/Best products, each with their own name. At the top of the line was the iMac DV SE, short for “Special Edition.”4

While not quite the jumble of letters the aforementioned SE FDHD was, I’m not sure how widely understood this was. For most people, it was the Graphite iMac:

Bonus Round: Apple Display Names

Apple’s series of displays have been plagued with some weird names as well. Here are a handful beyond the confusing “Apple Studio Display” line of the early 00s that included both LCDs and CRTs:

  • AppleColor Composite Monitor IIe/IIc
  • Apple Performa Plus Display
  • AppleVision/ColorSync 850AV
  1. I had no idea this machine was a thing. ↩
  2. …or this one. ↩
  3. Not to mention the it-shall-not-ever-be-thought-of-again Apple III Plus. This suffix, of course, came back much later with the iPhone 6 Plus. ↩
  4. Apple also used this name in the iBook G3 line for a time. ↩