This month at iMore, I took a look at the introduction of the iTunes Music Store, and how the idea of streaming music has changed in the decade since Apple first started selling music.
Category: Apple History
To know where we are going, we have to know where we’ve been.
Ten years ago, Apple brought podcasting to iTunes
Ten years ago this month, at WWDC 2005, Apple brought podcasting to iTunes.
The feature launched on June 28, 2005, three weeks after the keynote. Here’s the Apple PR Machine:
Apple today announced it is taking Podcasting mainstream by building everything users need to discover, subscribe, manage and listen to Podcasts right into iTunes 4.9, the latest version of its award winning digital music software and online music store. iTunes users can now easily subscribe to over 3,000 free Podcasts and have each new episode automatically delivered over the Internet to their computer and iPod.
“Apple is taking Podcasting mainstream by building it right into iTunes,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Podcasting is the next generation of radio, and users can now subscribe to over 3,000 free Podcasts and have each new episode automatically delivered over the Internet to their computer and iPod.”
It’s hard to read Jobs’ personal excitement about the medium, but he says, “We see it as the hottest thing going in radio. Hotter than anything else in radio.” He clarified that this content wasn’t just by amateurs, but that major companies were in the mix as well.
The subscribing and auto-downloading of new content is what made podcasting the “TiVo for radio,” Jobs said, highlighting iTunes’ ability to do just that — and sync the files over a cable to iPods, making podcasts portable.
He closed his presentation on the feature saying, “We think it’s going to basically take podcasting mainstream, to where anyone can do it. We’re bringing innovation to the market.”
Turns out, Apple did just that.
It took just two days for the iTunes directory to see one million subscriptions, but the library itself wasn’t all that large compared to today. 3,000 podcasts doesn’t seem like a lot of shows anymore, and in June 2013, Apple hit a major milestone with their directory, as reported by Lex Friedman:
Apple on Monday announced that the iTunes Store eclipsed 1 billion podcast subscriptions. That’s a whole lot of talking. A special promotion appeared in the iTunes Podcasts directory to commemorate the big number.
Apple says that those billion subscriptions are spread across 250,000 unique podcasts in more than 100 languages, and that more than 8 million episodes have been published in the iTunes Store to date.
Today, the iTunes directory is home to over 500,000 discrete podcasts, but it isn’t the only directory out there. Apps like Overcast, <a href=”https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocket-casts/id414834813?mt=8&uo=6&at=11lt96″”>Pocket Casts and more maintain their own, separate directories with unique curation and search features.
For many types of shows, these third-party clients have eclipsed iTunes as the primary way people consume podcasts, putting Apple in a position of power, but not dominance, in some parts of the market. There are still a lot of people who use iTunes — and its extension on iOS, Podcasts, to listen to shows.
While WWDC 2005 has gone down in history for some bigger news, I’ll always remember it fondly.
Donated Apple I fetches $200,000 ⇢
Sharon Noguchi at the San Jose Mercury News:
A South Bay recycling firm is looking for a woman who, in early April, dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her house after her husband died. About two weeks later, the firm, Clean Bay Area, discovered inside one of the boxes a rare find: a vintage Apple I, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers put together by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976.
The recycling firm sold the Apple I this month for $200,000 to a private collection, Vice President Victor Gichun said. And now, because company policy is to split proceeds 50-50 with the donor, he’s looking for the mystery woman who refused to get a receipt or leave her name.
!!!
The advent and evolution of Apple’s digital hub ⇢
Yours truly, over on iMore:
Like many people, the iPhone has replaced many consumer electronics in my home.
I no longer own a point-and-shoot camera, camcorder, voice recorder or dedicated music player. My iPhone is all of those items — plus more — in one, sleek, powerful and pocketable device.
In 2001, of course, the iPhone wasn’t a thing yet, and many people had a whole shelf full of various dedicated devices. That year, Steve Jobs introduced the “Digital Hub” strategy, a cohesive plan to take all of those devices and make them more useful through the power of software.
The Brushed Metal Diaries: iSync
In the Brushed Metal Diaries, we take a look at one of Apple’s most unique — and most hated — user interface paradigms.
An Intro to iSync
For most Mac users in the early 2000s, the word “sync” conjured up visions of iPods and USB cables. However, while an Apple smartphone was years away, in 2002, Apple introduced a tool to sync contacts and calendar events to mobile phones: iSync.
Just check out all this brushed metal:
iSync — in many ways — was the quintessential brushed metal application. In it’s Human Interface Guidelines, Apple said the UI appearance should be the defacto choice for applications that provided “an interface for a digital peripheral, such as a camera, or an interface for managing data shared with digital peripherals.”
iSync’s History
iSync was introduced in 2002. Here’s a bit of the original press release:
iSync ensures that address books and calendars flow seamlessly from a user’s Mac to all of their digital devices and back. Rather than requiring a separate synchronization application for each type of device, iSync works with the latest Bluetooth mobile phones, PalmOS devices and iPod to keep all these devices up to date. As a result, iSync users will enjoy seamless mobile access to schedules and other crucial information on all the devices they travel with.
iSync would launch as a public beta two months after being announced. It required OS X Jaguar, and would ship built-in with several major versions of Mac OS X.
Steve Jobs spoke about iSync at Macworld Paris in September 2002. “The purpose of iSync,” Jobs said, “is to synchronize our digital lives.”
Here’s what an early version of the iSync page looked like on Apple’s website. On the page, the company boasted integration with these classes of device:
- iPods
- Palm OS-powered handhelds (the iSync Palm Conduit was required)
- GPRS Bluetooth-enabled wireless phones (like the Sony Ericsson T68i)
- Other Macs (a paid .Mac subscription was required)
iSync passed address and calendar information between these devices. This allowed users to add or edit data from the comfort of their desktop, and provided a backup of data that users would lose if their phones were stolen or lost. This, Jobs said, made the cellphone a peripheral to the Mac. With the iPhone still five years off, it’s another example of Jobs having the uncanny ability to hint at the future when he himself probably didn’t have a fully-formed vision in his mind.
iSync 1 would receive numerous updates, adding support for more devices.
iSync 2.0 shipped with OS X Tiger in April 2005. With this release, Apple made the hard work of syncing data between Macs the system’s responsibility, leaving iSync alone with its ever-growing list of third-party devices.
iSync 2 received updates as part of 10.4.4, 10.4.6, 10.4.7 and 10.4.9, each time adding support for new devices.
iSync 3.0 shipped with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and 3.1 shipped with Snow Leopard, but few new devices were added in the time between.
While Apple supported a decent number of handsets, a growing third-party plugin community sprung up to extend the program even further.
As did all other brushed metal apps, iSync received a new UI with Leopard:
With Mac OS X Lion, Apple removed iSync from OS X altogether.
In Conclusion
While iSync never saw the wide-spread use of some of the other brushed metal applications, it was a critical component to many nerds’ workflows. It’s wasn’t flawless — no sync system ever is, it seems — but it was one I relied on heavily. I used it for years to sync various Palm OS devices and iPods. In today’s world of iCloud and Google’s offerings, local Bluetooth sync seems old-fashioned, but it felt like magic at the time.
PowerPCs in space ⇢
Turns out, the PowerPC G3 chips that powered Macs for years are still powering hardware, albeit in space:
The RAD750 is a radiation-hardened single board computer manufactured by BAE Systems Electronics, Intelligence & Support. The successor of the RAD6000, the RAD750 is for use in high radiation environments experienced on board satellites and spacecraft. The RAD750 was released in 2001, with the first units launched into space in 2005.
As Thomas Brand points out, the RAD750 can be found in all sorts of cool missions include the Deep Impact comet chaser, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kepler space telescope and Mars Curiosity rover.
I bet my Clamshell iBook would do okay in space. That thing is crazy durable.
The Snow Leopard Moment
With iOS and OS X on an annual release cycle, some Apple watchers have expressed a desire for a “Snow Leopard” moment this year.
But what does that phrase even mean? How does it apply today, six years after Mac OS X Snow Leopard was announced?
No New Features
Released in 2009, Mac OS X Snow Leopard will best be remembered by this slide at its announcement:
In re-watching Apple’s 2009 WWDC keynote, that “0 new features” slide doesn’t tell the whole story:
The fact that 10.6 was introduced by Bertrand Serlet says a lot. Here are the three major points he made on stage:
- Snow Leopard was a better Leopard. The release was full of refinements and little touches.
- 10.6 brought new under-the-hood technologies to the Mac that the platform relies on today.
- Exchange support was added to the Mac with 10.6, after being added to iOS previously.
There are a sea of complexities under those three tentpoles.[1] Serlet claimed that 90% of the projects within OS X were refined between 10.5 and 10.6. QuickTime X and Safari 4 shipped with the OS, and things like Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL and much more robust 64-bit support all shipped with Snow Leopard, as well, no to mention Exchange support, which was a big step forward for the Mac in enterprise environments.
All that said, however, Snow Leopard lacked the laundry list of new features that OS X customers had grown use to. In his review of 10.6, John Siracusa wrote:
This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a “time out?” I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.
Many of these same developers applauded the “150+ new features” in Tiger and the “300 new features” in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?
He continues:
The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: “We’re adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we’re going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We’re not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we’re going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers.”
Snow Leopard was heralded as a “love letter to Mac developers.” The phrase surfaced again last year, and was thrown around a lot after WWDC 2014, and for a long list of good reasons. Swift, third-party keyboards, Extensions, TouchID APIs, better notifications and more showed up with iOS 8.
The difference between iOS 8 and Snow Leopard is that former brought many user-facing features, while the latter only really had one: Exchange support.
Busy Apple is Busy
With WWDC coming up, the annual topic of what Apple will highlight is back on my mind. Here’s a list of potential talking points, in no particular order:
- New Apple TV hardware
- Apple TV SDK
- New Apple TV service
- iOS 9 preview
- Music streaming service
- Native apps for Apple Watch
- Updated Mac hardware
- Mac OS X 10.11 preview
While it’s possible that all of these things will make it into the Keynote, it’s a whole hell of a lot of stuff to talk about.
Everything on that list is exciting, and with Apple on the hook for annual releases, chances are iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11 are just around the corner.
The problem is — of course — that Apple may be stretched too thin. Pundits have said that for years, and that bulleted list a few paragraphs up is a little frightening in that regard.
Tapping the Brakes
I don’t think the market will let Apple slow down on iOS, however, The space is competitive, and Android is looking better and better each year.
It’s interesting to think about what a Snow Leopard moment for iOS could look like. Apple could tidy up the new features in iOS 8,[2] and polish the rough bits, turning iOS 8 into a mature mobile operating system not a mere rung in the iOS ladder to the sky.
Likewise, I’d be fine with OS X slowing down a bit. While the yearly release cycle keeps things fresh — and in step with iOS with features like Continuity — but it feels like just about the time each version of OS X gets good and stable, a new version comes down the pipe.
Chances are, of course, that my dream of a slower 2015–2016 cycle won’t come true. The pragmatic thought is that some of this stuff will get a mention at WWDC, but Apple will follow-up later in the year in more detail.
(My money is that this is will be their approach for native Watch apps. The company has said WatchKit will be replaced with native apps later this year, so a mere mention at WWDC may be enough to hold the community over.)
This summer — like the past several — promises to be busy for those of us in the Apple space. I’d like a breather, but I don’t think we’re going to get much of one.
Apple’s first homepage ⇢
“Smorgasbord” being a navigation item on this site sums up everything wrong with Apple in 1994.
On the MessagePad 2000 ⇢
My buddy Thomas Brand has put together a nice set of links to celebrate the 18th birthday of the Newton MessagePad 2000.
I owned a 2000 for several years in college, complete with Wi-Fi card, keyboard and carrying case. It synced contacts, calendars and more with my PowerBook G4 via an ADB/USB adaptor. I could send and receive email, take class notes and more all on the little green machine.
While some of my classmates would use laptops, no one was using anything like the Newton. This was around 2005 — two years before the iPhone would be announced. Needless to say, I got some looks, but I didn’t care. The Newton was fast, easy to use and offered a lot of things that just weren’t possible at the time without a laptop.
I ended up selling my MessagePad to pay off my wife’s engagement ring, but every once in a while, I cruise eBay looking for a replacement. One of these days, I’ll pull the trigger.
How to build an app that will run from System 1.0 to Yosemite ⇢
Mind-blowing stuff.
The Internet in Your Pocket ⇢
A year ago, Federico, Myke and I looked back at the original iPhone keynote. It’s hard to believe the announcement was eight years ago.
Ten years of Mac mini ⇢
Brian Stucki:
This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.
To celebrate a decade of working with the Mac mini, I’ve put together a timeline of hightlights from the last ten years.