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.
This month in my MacStories column, I revisited the insane story of the lost/stolen iPhone 4. It was a lot of fun to re-read all the stories about this.
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard “stacks” were created using the software.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, we’re bringing it back.
Early last year, I tweeted that I wanted to collect every color of iMac.
A month later, I had all 13 colors of iMac G3 in my office. I took a bunch of photos and made a video of the process. I then went on a summer-long tear writing about every generation and permutation of the CRT iMac. This work then morphed into an ebook about the iMac and the road from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X.
Steve Levy, writing at Wired, recounting a conversation with Steve Jobs the day Apple announced the iPod nano:
“This is a huge bet,” he said, describing how once or twice a year he gathered the top 100 people at the company—“not the top 100 in the org chart but if you were going to have 100 people on a rowboat with you, who would you want?”—to figure out big strategic issues. The previous year, he said, he had opened the meeting with a speech: “Our revenues have doubled in the last two years,” he told his team. “And our stock price is high and our shareholders are happy. We have a lot of momentum. And a lot of people think, ‘It’s really great, we’ve got a lot to lose, let’s play it safe.’ That’s the most dangerous thing we can do. We have to get bolder, because we have world class competitors now and we just can’t stand still.” The bold move was the Nano, replacing the wildly popular iPod mini with an even tinier, full-featured, color-screened successor. “We call this a heart transplant—stop one production line, start another. It’s amazing, and the team has done brilliantly and pulled it off.”
The iPod world has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, as apple.com/ipod now redirects to apple.com/ipod-touch. Both of the smaller music players were there just a few days ago.
Apple hasn’t published a press release on its website, but issued a statement to the press:
Today, we are simplifying our iPod lineup with two models of iPod touch now with double the capacity starting at just $199 and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano.
Part Two of Avie Tevanian’s oral history has been posted to YouTube by The Computer History Museum.
Today is World Emoji Day. Started by Emojipedia founder and very handsome man Jeremy Burge in 2014, it’s a day to celebrate the tiny icons that have taken over much of our communication.
To help mark the day, Apple is previewing the new emoji coming to the company’s operating systems later this year. Beyond the press release, Apple Podcasts is getting into the day in a big way:
Happy #WorldEmojiDay!
Come play along with us and turn podcast titles into emojis with #PodcastEmoji.
This month in my MacStories column, I wrote about three of the most adorable Mac notebooks ever shipped: the PowerBook Duo, the 12-inch PowerBook G4 and the original MacBook Air.