Category: Apple History

To know where we are going, we have to know where we’ve been.

The Case For — and Against — Apple Shipping a Larger iMac

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There’s been a lot of discussion about the iMac recently, and the thing I was struck by this time around was the place the iMac holds in Apple’s product line.

I’ve shown this chart a lot over the years, but it highlights that when it was launched, the iMac was squarely on the consumer side of the grid:

Grid of 4

Apple blew away the Grid of 4 a long time ago — first breaking it with the G4 Cube — and over time, the iMac slowly creeped up to encroach on the professional side of things.

First, it got FireWire, then a G4 and a SuperDrive, then it was the first Mac (by a few minutes) to switch to Intel.

In the Intel era, the iMac truly shined, becoming more and more capable.1 The 5K iMac was jaw-dropping, and the iMac Pro that followed it was the best all-in-one Apple has ever shipped.

In the Apple silicon era, the iMac was reinvented yet again, The current M1-powered machine is beautiful and powerful, but Apple has let it sit since introducing it in April 2021, even as almost every other Mac in the lineup has been updated to an M2-based system on a chip.

The lack of updates and the 24-inch display have left many considering the iMac to be a consumer-level machine again. “Sure, it’s pretty,” you may be tempted to tweet post, “but it’s not the powerhouse the iMac Pro was six years ago when it was introduced.”2

The iMac and iMac Pro

This all brings us to the fact that, for the first time in two decades, Apple is only selling one size of iMac. Let’s dive into why Apple should (or shouldn’t) change that, mostly ignoring the web of rumors that surround this topic.

The Case Against a Larger iMac

All-in-ones are inherently compromised due to their form factor. Do you think Apple wanted to put the headphone jack on the side of the M1 iMac? What about when the computer is out dated? Target Display Mode is long gone, and doesn’t seem to be coming back, so it just seems wasteful to pay for a nice, big display just to have the computer behind it drag it down like an anchor after its useful life is over.

Apple has fixed all of this with the Studio Display and its other desktops! The M2 Pro Mac mini is great! Need more? Get a Mac Studio! Shoot, you can even buy a notebook and use it as a desktop without many of the compromises that would bring back in the bad old Intel days! You just don’t need a big iMac anymore with the riches that Apple silicon has brought to the lineup.

The Case For a Larger iMac

The big iMac fits many workstations better than a display with a computer hanging around somewhere. Who wants cables?! Gross! All-in-ones are graceful and elegant, and when’s the last time you actually had an iMac around and you wanted to use its display as a display? That sounds like a fairy tale made up to argue with someone on a forum somewhere.

The iMac is the flagship Mac, and Apple should treat it as such. I’d be willing to pay for the all-in-one experience with a 27-inch (or larger!) display. The company had something really special on their hands with the iMac Pro, and having a Mac mini just doesn’t have the same feeling to it. A big iMac has a presence about it that Apple should preserve.

Apple spent two decades shaping the iMac into something that pros could really use, and they shouldn’t throw away all that good will. Apple should give the people what they want; just listen to Dan Moren:

As an all-in-one desktop, the iMac offers a convenience and price unmatched by any other Apple desktop. Even a base-level Mac mini starts to get pricey once you add an Apple Studio Display to it, and while the flexibility is appreciated, there are still customers (including institutions and education) that appreciate the simplicity of a one-and-done purchase. Adding a more powerful configuration could entice people who might otherwise by a cheaper model to upgrade to a better configuration, especially if they don’t also have to buy a display.

What Do I Think?

I, for one, would like to see a larger iMac make it out into the world, complete with a Pro-level SoC, like the Mac mini has received. The RAM and storage caps on the base-level SoCs feel too limited for a larger iMac. Yes, it would even more SKUs to an already-crowded desktop line, but for twenty years, iMac users have been able to choose a larger, more powerful machine if it fits their needs and preferences, and the M1 model just doesn’t live up to that legacy.

  1. There is a caveat to this, and it’s the fact that Apple kept spinning hard drives around for way too long in the iMac, and the 21.5-inch model languished in the last few years of its life pretty badly. ↩
  2. Don’t think too hard about the fact that the M1 iMac is faster than the iMac Pro in a bunch of tasks. ↩

The iMac at 25

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Today marks 25 years since the original iMac was introduced. It saved Apple and changed the world.1 We live in a Notebook World today, but if Apple was going to reinvent itself in 1998, it was going to be with a desktop:

iMac G3

In a world of beige boxes, the iMac was new and different. Sure, it ran the same old (and kinda busted) Mac OS, but the design — and the move to USB — made huge waves, some of which are still felt today.

There’s a lot of great stuff out there today to mark the occasion, including this wonderful article by Jason Snell for The Verge:

After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s. Apple had spent a decade frittering away the Mac’s advantages until most of them were gone, blown out of the water by the enormous splash of Windows 95. It was the era of beige desktop computers chained to big CRT displays and other peripherals.

[…]

With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan. Essentially, Jobs went back to his playbook for the original “computer for the rest of us,” the Mac, to sell simplicity. The Mac’s mouse-driven graphical interface may have changed the course of the PC world, but its all-in-one design just hadn’t clicked. Jobs decided it was time to try again.

Back in 2016, I set out to collect every model of iMac G3 that was produced over the machine’s six generations. The result of that was one of my favorite projects to ever grace the pages of 512 Pixels. That page has links to all of my iMac G3 coverage, including my look back at the original’s announcement:

  1. I even wrote a book about the computer and how it gave Apple the runway it needed to get Mac OS X out the door. ↩

Rebuilding my Alfred Workflow for Searching Apple’s Support Site

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that my custom Alfred search to find things on Apple’s support website had broken, so I’ve reworked it a bit to match Apple’s adjusted search URLs.

Alfred search

In Alfred’s preferences, under Features, you can add a new Web Search. You can add a keyword, label and — most importantly — the URL Alfred will need to pass to the browser to fire your search results:

https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&q={query}&product=&doctype=&currentPage=1&includeArchived=true&locale=en_US

To install this directly into your copy of Alfred 5, click here.

Kbase Article of the Week: Remove iTunes Gift Album ‘Songs of Innocence’ from your iTunes Music Library and Purchases →

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Apple Support, on a page first published just a week after U2’s album was forced upon given away to all iTunes users:

Follow these instructions to remove U2’s “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchases. Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again. The album is free to everyone until October 13, 2014, and will be available for purchase after that date.

To remove this album:

  1. Go to https://itunes.com/soi-remove.
  2. Click Remove Album to confirm you’d like to remove the album from your account.
  3. Sign in with the Apple ID and password you use to buy from the iTunes Store.
  4. You’ll see a confirmation message that the album has been removed from your account.
  5. If you downloaded the songs to iTunes on your Mac or PC or to the Music app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you’ll need to delete them manually.

Thankfully, the Wayback Machine has a grab of that “SOI Removal” page. However, it seems that “Songs of Innocence” never really dies.

Apple’s ‘Reality’ Work Dates Back Three Decades →

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Josh Withers:

Tim Cook once said that “we are high on AR for the long run” and it’s true, for 28 years Apple – and the rest of the tech industry – has been noodling around on augmented reality and virtual reality.

Out of a purely personal interest, I started flipping through rumours about Apple and its “glasses” to see where the leakers got it right and wrong, and the next minute I’m back in 1995, so I thought a curated list of all the leaks, rumours, and related dates might be a nice record to make in the year of our headset, AVP 0.

I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and I suspect you will, too.

Exploring an eWorld Promotional Mailer

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An anonymous 512 Pixels reader recently mailed me something amazing — a promotional mailer for eWorld, dating back to 1994. In the package was a set of 3.5-inch eWorld 1.0 installer disks, the “Apple Online Service Subscriber Agreement” and an amazing brochure for eWorld.

Let’s start with the envelope and the Subscriber Agreement:

eWorld Mailer Envelope

Apple Online Service Subscriber Agreement

You can click on any image in this post to view a full-sized version.

Now let’s move onto the real treat of the brochure itself. The outer cover included some simple artwork, and on the back, a customized registration number and password to get started. I’ve redacted the specifics on this particular brochure so no time travelers can steal eWorld from the original recipient:

eWorld Brochure Outer Cover

The inner pages of the brochure both encouraged and educated would-be customers:

eWorld Brochure Inner Page 1

eWorld Brochure Inner Page 2

The whole thing folded out, walking people through the five-step process that was required to get their eWorld account up and running:

eWorld Brochure Inner Page 3

If you want to learn a lot more about eWorld and the other services Apple has offered over the years, the 2024 Apple History Calendar is full of facts and trivia about this very subject. It’s available on Kickstarter now.

Apple’s Original Vision Products Were a Line of CRTs

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The Apple Vision Pro may be ushering in the era of spatial computing, but like many other Apple products, it’s using a name steeped in history.

Ok, steeped may be a little strong, but Apple has had other products with “vision” in their names over the years. Seven products, to be exact, and all of them are long-forgotten CRT displays:

  • AudioVision 14 Display
  • AppleVision 1710 & AppleVision 1710AV
  • AppleVision/ColorSync 750 & AppleVision/ColorSync 750AV
  • AppleVision/ColorSync 850 & AppleVision/ColorSync 850AV

The AudioVision 14 Display came out in 1993, and was built around a Sony Trinitron CRT, as were all the other products in that list. The AudioVision 14 Display was Apple’s first “multimedia display,” and was equipped with a microphone, stereo speakers and two ADB ports for plugging in accessories.

Apple published a Q&A on the product that is still on its website today. This part jumped out at me:

Q: How does AudioVision differ from just adding separate high quality speakers and a high quality microphone?

A: While AudioVision’s sound performance is equivalent to many highly priced speaker and microphone alternatives, the all-in-one integrated hardware and software solution offers several advantages you just can’t get by adding on separate components. This integration advantage translates into simplicity of purchase and set-up, convenience in usage, and software Flexibility.

If that doesn’t explain Apple’s love of all-in-one products, I don’t know what does. Heck, that answer could be used to describe my Studio Display.

I even found an ad for the display, which normally sold for $790.

Ad for the AudioVision 14 Display

This product used the the HDI-45 connector for getting information to/from the user’s Mac with just one cable. As the name suggests, this was a 45-pin connector, and it carried analog RGB video, analog stereo audio signals (both in and out), ADB and S-video. This connector was found on the back of the the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 and was only ever used with the AudioVision 14 Display.

Yikes.

This display ended up being a one-off, being replaced with the AppleVision 1710 and the AppleVision 1710AV.

Before we get to those, we should talk about the naming of these products. There were three generations of “AppleVision” displays, and models with “AV” in their name included a built-in microphone and a set of speakers and generally cost $200 or so more.

The 1710 line shipped with a color 17 inch (16.1″ viewable area) Trinitron CRT and started at $999. The AV model ran $1,159 a big step up from the old AudioVision 14, but in those days, you paid dearly for every inch of CRT on your desk. These two displays were sold from August 1995 to August 1997, alongside the Power Macintosh 7200/75, Power Macintosh 7200/90, Power Macintosh 7500/100 and Power Macintosh 8500/120.

In 1997, Apple released ColorSync, its color management solution for Mac OS. ColorSync is a story for a different time, but to fully support it, Apple replaced the 1710 and 1710AV with two new displays: the AppleVision/ColorSync 750 and the AppleVision/ColorSync 750AV.

These two monitors shipped in August of 1997, retaining the 16-inch (viewable) CRT and required Mac OS version 7.1 or later.

The real highlight of the line was the AppleVision/ColorSync 850 and 850AV, which boasted a 20-inch (19-inch viewable) Trinitron. These shipped in May 1997, for $1,849 and $1,999, respectively. Here’s a bit from the press release:

Apple Computer, Inc. today introduced the new high-performance, AppleVision 850 AV and AppleVision 850 color displays for publishers, multimedia authors, photographers, and other professionals who rely on consistent visual performance and color accuracy, as well as for users of spreadsheet and page-layout applications who require a large display that supports very high resolution. Both displays incorporate Apple’s proven DigitalColor technology for state-of-the-art color accuracy, which is achieved through a patented internal calibration system that adjusts color over time with minimal user interaction. The displays support Apple’s ColorSync technology for color matching across multiple devices such as color printers and scanners by allowing display profiles to be created on the fly. Both displays also feature extensive, easy-to-use software control of screen geometry, mode switching, and color settings.

“The AppleVision 850 AV and AppleVision 850 displays truly complement our professional Power Macintosh computer systems,” said Phil Schiller, Apple vice president of product marketing for desktops, servers and displays. “When you combine one of these new displays with a Power Mac 9600 or 8600 for professional publishing or media authoring, you are getting some of the very best in graphics performance, image quality, color accuracy and industrial design.”

The product’s manual shows off the media controls that appeared on the chin below the display itself, as well as the rest of the display’s features:

850AV Graphic

You may be wondering what’s up with the rather long “AppleVision/ColorSync” name. This was a bit of a bandage to cover up the fact that Apple changed the name of these products on March 11, 1998:

Apple Computer, Inc. today announced a TCO upgrade to the currently shipping monitors for design and publishing professionals. Available in 17- or 20-inch configurations, the Apple ColorSync Displays now meet the strict international TCO 95 standards for recyclability,1 low emissions and power consumption. Additionally, the announcement completes the renaming of the displays from AppleVision 750 (17-inch) and AppleVision 850 (20-inch) to Apple ColorSync Display. The new naming more effectively communicates the advantages of the systems’ color calibration capabilities to customers.

I wasn’t really paying attention to Apple back then, but the name change makes sense to me. In the 1990s, desktop publishing was Apple’s bread and butter, and ColorSync was a big part of that, even if it did mark the end of the company’s “vision” branding, at least for a while.

  1. If you are like me and had no idea what “TCO” means, this should help. ↩

X206 →

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Antonio G. Di Benedetto has an in-depth look at the little buttons on the underside of the Apple Watch that make swapping bands so easy:

While I often prefer a universal solution over a proprietary connector, here’s the thing — Apple’s band release button beats the hell out of fiddling with little spring bars and jeweler’s tools. Instead, you just press a near-invisible button, slide your band out, slide another one in, and get a lovely audible click as it locks in. No fuss, no muss; just a simple swap for a different visual vibe to match your style and wardrobe.

But how does it get that precise click, that nearly foolproof snap? Hint: it’s not magnets. My colleague Sean Hollister and I spoke with two ex-Apple engineers who worked on manufacturing the original parts. We quickly learned that it’s kind of the unsung hero of the Apple Watch — despite launching a $1 billion accessory ecosystem and remaining unchanged since its debut eight years ago.

The secret: there are actually three buttons in the Apple Watch, two of which interlock so precisely that Apple had to rethink its entire approach to manufacturing. “The tolerances in there are kind of insane,” say our sources. “It’s super hard to machine. You can’t get tools in there; the angles are all weird.” So the company wound up buying Swiss CNC machines that cost up to $2 million — each — just for the sake of its swappable band system. “It didn’t cut anything else on the watch, just this, that’s all it did.”

As a side note, I love The Verge’s “Button of the Month” concept. I wish I had thought of it.