Apple Newsroom, back in 2001:
“Mac OS X is the future of the Mac, and we hope it will delight our customers with its unrivaled power and ease of use,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The Public Beta has generated incredible feedback and support from Mac users and developers, which has helped us to make Mac OS X the most advanced operating system ever.”
If you didn’t get to use the first version of Mac OS X, these screenshots can give you a good feeling for what it was like.
Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us — that the world is moved forward by people who think different.
That’s because progress always begins with someone — an inventor or scientist, a student or storyteller — who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. But it has never belonged to us alone.
Every invention we bring into the world is just the beginning of a story. The most meaningful chapters are written by all of you — the people who use our technology to work, learn, dream, and discover. You’ve made breakthroughs and launched businesses. You’ve cheered up loved ones in the hospital and captured your toddler’s first steps. You’ve run marathons, written books, and rekindled friendships. You’ve chased your curiosity, found your new favorite song, and shared stories that connect us all.
dreamwieber’s video on Hypercard is one of the best things I’ve seen on the topic:
via Kottke
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the original MacBook Pro. In the spirit of this article, I’m going to review it as if I were blogging about Macs back in 2006. Just go with me here.
I have been a PowerBook G4 user since 2002, when my boss handed me a 1 GHz Titanium PowerBook to use for page layout, audio editing, and other media tasks at the non-profit where I spent time after school and on weekends.
This coming weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Apple unveiling the first Intel Macs, which included the MacBook Pro that replaced the PowerBook G4.1
It was no secret that Apple couldn’t shoehorn a G5 into a laptop, but very few details are known about that project’s progress.
That may have changed. A user by the name of Nullcaller on the MacRumors forums has delivered the goods in the form of a set of schematics that looks a lot like a PowerBook G5.
Yours truly in The Daily Helmsman newsroom as a freshman in August 2004. Names and phone numbers have been redacted to protect people who probably don’t remember me at all.
Twenty years ago, I was halfway through my first sophomore year of college1 and loving it. Moving into the dorm in August 2004 marked the first time I had access to the real Internet (not just AOL or Juno), and I dove into being a Mac nerd. I spent time on the Apple Discussion Boards and OS X forums across the web to learn everything I could about the PowerBook on my desk and what it could do.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, his words made their way into history:
Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.
So, three things; a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
Five years ago, the first Apple silicon Macs shipped. While the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini looked like their Intel predecessors, they were vastly better machines.
To celebrate the anniversary, Basic Apple Guy created an impressive graphic outlining the releases we’ve seen since 2020:
Over on Macworld, Jason Snell wrote about what this change has meant for the Mac:
Then the results of the first M1 speed tests arrived, and nothing felt scary anymore. Everything was fast, much faster than Intel, so much faster that even software compiled for Intel running in a code-translation layer via Rosetta ran just fine. In fact, the M1 was such a fast chip that, five years later, Apple’s still selling the M1 MacBook Air. (For $599, at Walmart.) And it’s still a pretty nice computer!
Thom Holwerda, writing at OSnews about the end of the Macintosh clone era:
The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild.
I used iWeb back in the day to make early versions of my personal website, as well as websites for friends, before I started learning more about web development and switched to Adobe Dreamweaver. Apple only released two major updates to iWeb, with the last one arriving in the iLife ‘09 package. When the company migrated its cloud services from MobileMe to iCloud, the ability to publish personal websites was removed, and iWeb was finally discontinued in 2011.
Classic Mac Gaming on YouTube has a great video about a true classic for Mac OS:
Rakhim Davletkali has written a delightful blog post, reviewing macOS releases in reverse:
Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.