What a weird Mac:
Category: Apple History
Macintosh Portable Turns 30⇢
Prototype Macintosh Portable⇢
Some of Apple’s Awkward Product Names Over the Years
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:
Five Years Ago, Tim Cook Unveiled the Apple Watch
Five years ago, Apple announced several products in its annual September event:
- iPhone 6
- iPhone 6 Plus
- Apple Pay
- Apple Watch
- This International Nightmare
The keynote is on Apple’s official YouTube channel, which is handy:
I remember watching this keynote at work in the conference room with several of my co-workers, and the news of two bigger iPhone was a big deal, but that section was only 36 minutes long. Everything felt rushed. Then, an hour in, we got to the Apple Watch.
The Importance of the Apple IIe Card⇢
Over on his YouTube channel, The 8-Bit Guy has posted a video talking about the Apple IIe card.
This optional compatibility card let several different 90s Macintosh models run Apple II software, in a successful attempt to make users of the Apple II more easily be able to move over to the Macintosh.
Steven Sinofsky on ‘Bicycle for the Mind’⇢
Steven Sinofsky has published an article on Medium about this famous Steve Jobs quote, and it’s well worth a read.
An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs⇢
James Thomson did an amazing job with this talk:
The Whole Widget⇢
After listening to the most recent episode of The Talk Show, I decided to go hunt down video of Steve Jobs dropping the “i” from his title, and becoming Apple’s full-time CEO. That took place at Macworld Expo in January 2000.
This keynote is wild,1 as it includes the first public demonstration of Aqua, but something right before the CEO announcement caught my attention. In this clip, Jobs talks about how Apple viewed itself, and why some who called for it to be broken up into a separate software and hardware company were wrong:
The Power Mac G3: An Apple Marketing Archetype⇢
At Macworld Expo 1999, Apple’s big news was the Power Macintosh G3, a high-end tower desktop. After introducing it, Steve Jobs played a promotional video, prefaced with a Henry Kissinger quote and featuring Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s The Look of Love on the soundtrack. (If you know who’s singing, please tell me; I’m not sure, and it stumped Shazam.) The video touts lustworthy features such as a 400-MHz processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and USB (“the future of I/O!”).
Happy Birthday, Frog Design⇢
On Stuffing a Mac mini into a Macintosh Classic⇢
Brian Sutorius has quite the summer project on his hands.