This month in my column on iMore, I revisited MECC, the company behind some great software titles like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers:
My earliest memories of technology came from my first year of grade school: It was 1992, and our teacher had installed some variant of an Apple II in the classroom. The students were only able to use it a few times, but each time I got to put a disk in the machine, I was able to escape to another world.
Darren Orf at Gizmodo has posted a video that all Apple nerds should watch.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by my friend Steven Aquino. He is a freelance tech journalist based in San Francisco, CA, where he covers all things Apple accessibility. His work has appeared in iMore, TechCrunch, Macworld, and more.
The iPhone has been such a revolutionary, life-changing device that remembering what life was like before it existed feels almost like trying to imagine the Stone Age. The advent of the iPhone in 2007 was a seminal moment in technology history; it’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime product that redefined not only smartphones but computers in general. Almost ten years later, it still never ceases to amaze me that everyone nowadays carries with them a lightweight, always-connected supercomputer everywhere they go. A supercomputer, to paraphrase John Gruber, in our freaking pockets!
To mark the release of System 7.5 — and to incentivize people to upgrade — Apple launched a gift program:
From May 1 to July 31, 1995 users who upgraded to System 7.5 could choose between an Apple watch or a copy of Conflict Catcher 3.
Tekserve was an Apple dealer and service center dating back to long before the Apple Store. They have recently closed, and their Mac collection is up for auction. I won’t be bidding due to the price, but there’s some nice stuff in there.
I missed this link the other day, but this week marks 23 years since Apple introduced the Newton.
Lindsay Zoladz at The Ringer, writing about the post-production life of Apple’s last music player with a spinning disk:
Who would fork over up to $1,000 (or more; a factory-sealed seventh gen is listed for $1699 on eBay right now) for an old, obsolete MP3 player except a stick-in-the-mud Luddite, resistant to our inevitable progress toward a cloud-based future? I’m not sure. But I think these people were onto something.
This month on iMore, I wrote about the Titanium PowerBook:
Since their inception, Apple’s PowerBooks had been encased in various shades of gray and black plastics. Some were smaller than others, and they looked good for the time, but by the time 2001 rolled around, it was time for a change.
The iMac and iBook G3s were colorful machines, and even the PowerMac was clad in plastic. The PowerBook G4, however, would be a totally different beast.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by my buddy Thomas Brand.
What makes a Mac a Mac? Is it a computer made by Apple? Does it need to run the Mac OS? For a Mac to be a Mac does its hardware, does its design sit heads above the rest?
iPad, iPhone, and even the Newton are all computers made by Apple. But none of them are Macs.
The Macintosh clones from PowerComputing, Motorola, Umax, and every closet Hackintosh all run Mac OS. But none of them are Macs.
As announced at WWDC 2003, OS X Panther included iChat AV, an updated version of Apple’s AIM client that brought video and audio conferencing capabilities to the Mac. It was all done automatically; users didn’t even need to know if their Buddies had a microphone or camera hooked up to their computer. All that was required was a FireWire camera or USB microphone and DSL or better for video.
Steve Jobs then announced that the company had a companion product for iChat AV: the iSight Camera.
Steven Sandhoff linked to this video in relation to software rot:
It’s a deep, sobering reflection on the life cycle of technology and products from Steve Jobs in 1994.
As hard as it is to preserve vintage computer hardware, software is even harder.
If an iBook’s hard drive implodes, I can knock out the repair myself.
I have a bunch of old Apple hardware. Most of it still works, but if my Macintosh SE blows a capacitor, I can (more than likely) have it repaired by someone more skilled than I am.
If one of my old notebooks has screen failure, the problem may prove too difficult or expensive to repair. Spare parts are harder and harder to come by as time goes on.