This month on MacStories, I wrote about the original Apple TV:
By this point, iTunes housed (and sold) music, TV shows and movies. Users could enjoy this content on Macs, PC and iPods, but not their televisions.
This product — dubbed the iTV at this point — was designed for “completing the package” of Apple’s digital content business. In Jobs’ words, it was a box for getting iTunes content to a flat-screen TV. Pretty simple.
Hard to believe this was just twenty years ago, honestly:
Designed with additional memory, the MessagePad 2100 has 4 MB of DRAM, which is 3MB more than its predecessor, the MessagePad 2000. The expanded system memory allows the MessagePad 2100 to run more applications simultaneously, permitting users to work more efficiently. The upgraded memory and communications software are expected to be especially useful for customers who tend to use large applications, like to work on their MessagePads with a variety of applications open at one time or use communications applications such as Internet email or web browsing.
Robert Digitale, for The Press Democrat:
The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash.
More than 100 boxes of the two men’s writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world’s largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies — itself an HP spinoff.
I wrote about the Pippin several years ago, but recently was sent one by a reader. It’s really incredible to have such a weird piece of Apple history in my collection, and I hope you enjoy learning some more about it:
Very often in life, we see things like products, athletic careers and even relationships end way later than they should. When this happens, sometimes the end goes unnoticed and with little fanfare.
Occasionally, things end on a high note, like when an athlete announces their retirement after winning a championship or a band calls it quits after a massive album and tour.
In the world of Apple products, the iPod mini is an example of the latter. It’s perhaps the best example of Apple killing one of its darlings.
This new Kickstarter project caught my eye:
A beautifully produced, fully illustrated history of the pioneering Macintosh game scene. Spanning over 400 pages, this exhaustively researched book documents the landmark hits and arcane wonders that defined this much loved gaming platform.
In 1988 Apple’s Advanced Technology Graphics Group created a short filmed named Pencil Test to show off the capabilities of the Macintosh II:
The company published two support documents about the film.
Reading this documents is a little wild. The Macintosh II was a modular system, unlike Steve Jobs’ original all-in-one. Apple speaks to both sides of the closed/open coin, claiming they have the best of both worlds: integrated system software and factory hardware with the ability to accommodate modularity at the same time:
Enthusiasts of all types always have that one special obsession. For muscle car people, maybe it’s one particular year of Ford Mustang. Photographers always have a favorite lens, while baseball players may have a favored bat or glove.
Ask almost any macOS fan, and they’ll tell you that Snow Leopard is their favorite version of all time.
There are a bunch of good reasons for that, beyond pure nostalgia.
Your watch should say something about you. More than a mere timepiece, it should be part of your daily fashion, sharing something about your personality with the world.
Me, I’m a nerd. I collect antique computers and make podcasts for a living. I have a dogcow tattoo on my ankle. I know who I am.
In September 2007, the world was a very different place. The iPhone had been for sale in the United States just a few months, and not yet taken over the world.
For nearly a decade, Apple held a fall event focused on music. Most of the major iPods you’d recognize got their start at events like this.
Over time, these events — and the music players they featured — faded in importance. In 2007, however, they still mattered, and Jobs was there to prove it.
As noted by Joe Rossignol, Apple’s sixth-generation iPod nano has been marked obsolete by the company.
The first five generations of iPod nanos were all remixes of the original iPod. They all had the same basic building blocks: a screen and a clickwheel.
Introduced in September 2010, sixth-generation Nano got rid of the latter, the very thing that made the iPod great. In its place, a 1.54-inch square touchscreen that showed off software that was reminiscent of iOS.
The twice-dead YouTube channel lives on at the Internet Archive. If you’re into Apple history, you need to check this out.