Every major version of Mac OS X macOS has come with a new default wallpaper.
I have collected them all here, in glorious 5K resolution. I owe a huge thank you to the mysterious @forgottentowel for upscaling many of these for modern screens.
Category: Apple History
The JLPGA PowerBook 170
There are a lot of colorful Macs. Look no further than the original iMacs and iBooks if you need a little more than brushed aluminum in your life.
These machines are all great, but there’s one Mac that puts them to shame when it comes to being colorful.
Say hello to the JLPGA PowerBook 170:
There were only 500 of these made to commemorate the 1992 JLPGA golf tournament in Japan. The guts are a run-of-the-mill PowerBook 170, 1 but the case is truly special. The blue body is completed with a white lid and base. The battery doors are red, as are the screen adjustment sliders. The hinges are bright yellow; rounding things out are the green feet.
The Original iPhone SDK⇢
John Timmer at Ars Technica has rerun the site’s original review of the first iPhone SDK, way back in 2008. It’s wild to see how basic it seems now.
iPhone Turns Ten
This week marks a full decade since the original iPhone launched. I wrote about it back in January, on the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ incredible keynote.
There’s already a bunch of great stuff on the web about the anniversary. Throughout the week, I’m going to round up some of it here.
- WSJ: How The iPhone Was Born: Inside Stories of Missteps and Triumphs — Former Apple executives Scott Forstall, Tony Fadell and Greg Christie talk about the time and work leading up to the iPhone’s announcement.
- CBS: It had us at “Hello”: The iPhone turns 10 — A video with the four journalists who received review units of the iPhone back in 2007, coupled with an interview of Bas Ording, who was instrumental in Apple’s early multi-touch work. Don’t miss this chance to re-watch David Pogue’s painful music video of his review.
- Computer History Museum: Putting Your Finger On It: Creating the iPhone — Original iPhone Engineers Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz, and Hugo Fiennes in Conversation with John Markoff, followed by Scott Forstall.
- Wired: iPhone-creator Tony Fadell: don’t let smartphones threaten your ‘analogue life’ — In this interview, Fadell mentions a multitouch MacBook Pro and talks about the Rokr, which is fun.
- MacStories: iPhone 1.0: The 10th Anniversary Review — John Voorhees reviews the iPhone as if it was 2007.
- The Verge: We compared hardware specs for every iPhone ever made — All the great charts.
- WSJ: Living With the First iPhone … in 2017 — Joanna Stern is braver than most.
- The Prompt #30: The Internet in Your Pocket — Back in 2014, Federico Viticci, Myke Hurley and I talked through the original keynote.
- 512 Pixels: On the Original iPhone’s Launch — A few years ago, I recounted my experience as an Apple retail employee when the iPhone launched.
Oral History of Avie Tevanian⇢
The Computer History Museum has posted a two-hour interview with Avie Tevanian, the principle designer of the Mach kernel, and Apple’s former Chief Software Technology Officer.
The Tragedy of FireWire⇢
Richard Moss, writing at Ars Technica, has published a lovely article about FireWire. I learned a bunch of stuff reading it.
Apple’s Previous Home Stereo Attempt⇢
In my MacStories column this month, I dusted off my iPod Hi-Fi:
While I don’t use mine day-to-day, I do break it out sometimes, and the thing still sounds great, 11 years after it was introduced.
The HomePod is set to take the Hi-Fi’s legacy and extend it in our age of voice assistants and cloud-connected devices. It trades an iPod dock for Apple Music, and an IR remote for Siri.
Replicating Old Computers
Two different stories caught my attention as I spent some time today catching up from a week at WWDC:
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Jeff Rule built a replica of a long-lost Apple prototype from the early 1990s. The work done in this prototype led to the 20th Anniversary Mac, and Rule’s work really brings the concept back to life in an amazing way.
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Chris Larkin has put a project together to build a tiny Apple II, complete with emulation. Tested published a video of the model and what goes into making one. It’s pretty incredible the Apple II can be emulate on such cheap hardware these days.
A Trip to Infinite Loop ... Two Decades Later
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by James Thomson, the indie iOS and Mac developer behind apps like PCalc and DragThing. He has a long history with Apple, and was recently sharing some old photos on Twitter. I badgered him into sharing some more with me here.
I visited Infinite Loop for the first time around twenty years ago, and decided to properly document my visit. All these photos were all taken on my trusty film camera, and the negatives scanned some years later. They were promptly forgotten about until now.
The view from outside of Infinite Loop building 1. It looks pretty much the same today, with the exception of the six colour Apple logo. Steve’s office was at the top right. At this point Infinite Loop had only been open for four years.
The Icon Garden, featuring Clarus the Dogcow who was the mascot of the Developer Technical Support group, and appeared in the print dialog. One day, Steve got rid of the icon garden in the middle of the night and everybody was very sad.
High Sierra Format⇢
I knew that name was familiar.
WWDC 1997⇢
Brendan Shanks has put together a wonderful look back at WWDC 1997.
An Interview with Noah Leon, the Creator Behind the ‘Love Notes to Newton’ Film Project
Recently, I linked to (and backed) an Indiegogo project named Love Notes to Newton.
It’s by a filmmaker named Noah Leon. Here’s his pitch:
Newton was the first mass-produced touchscreen handheld computer made by Apple. It only lasted a few years on the market (1993 to 1998), but that wasn’t because it sucked! A large community of people still love Newton, and this film is an homage to the little device(s) by the people who still remember and even still use one.
I spent some time with Noah to talk about his work and this project. Our interview is below.