The Mac Portable development project was launched in 1986, not long before Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple, and the product was first released for sale on September 20, 1989. It was featured on the cover of the November 1989 edition of MacUser magazine, which called it “by far the most complex piece of machinery devised by sale by Apple computer.”
While it incorporated a laptop-style foldable form factor with a front-mounted carry handle/lockdown lever, the Mac Portable weighed only about a pound less than contemporaneous Mac Compact desktops — a hefty 16 pounds, due partly to it having a robust lead-acid battery. It wasn’t cheap either, selling for a likewise heavyweight $6,500 — or $7,300 with an optional hard drive.
Category: Apple
App Store Taking Central Stage?
The App Store is believed to be the current center of Apple’s attention, as iPod sales are flattening after years of growth. The problem, says BusinessWeek, is that record labels are now more dependent than ever on Apple, as some 90 percent of US digital music sales are handled through the iTunes Store, and approximately 75 percent of all media players sold are iPods. CD sales are continuing to fall, which means that without Apple’s help, the record industry will further shrink.
‘There’s AT&T’
From iLounge’s review of the original iPhone:
There are some issues. First, there’s AT&T. If you’ve ever had doubts about the company, they’re not going to go away with iPhone: we’ve experienced very significant problems activating two of our iPhones, attributable not to iTunes but rather to AT&T, and its customer service has been atrocious. To say that they are making a bad first (or tenth) impression would be an understatement, and the shocking part is that in each of our situations (and others we’ve been following), the company can’t seem to do the right thing by people who are all but waving $1,500+ in fees in their faces. One wonders how bad the experiences need to be before Apple can hold them in breach of contract and work with other carriers instead.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire?
The FCC has posted Google’s responses to the government’s inquiry into the Google Voice app being banned from the App Store.
From reading through it, it seems that Apple did indeed reject the application, contrary to what Apple’s Phil Schiller stated a few weeks ago.
One Device to Replace Them All
Once someone has an iPhone, it is going to be tough to persuade them that they also need to spend money on and carry around a dedicated GPS device, point-and-shoot camera, or tape recorder unless they have an unusual need. But the real problem for other device manufacturers is that all of these iPhone features — particularly the always-on internet connectivity; the email, HTTP, and SMS capabilities; and the GPS/location features — can work in concert with each other to actually make better versions of the devices listed above. Like a GPS that automatically takes photos of where you are and posts them to a Flickr gallery or a video camera that’ll email videos to your mom or a portable gaming machine with access to thousands of free games over your mobile’s phone network.
A History Lesson on iTunes
About 10 months later, at Macworld San Francisco in 2001, Apple debuted iTunes alongside iDVD and the CD-RW-enabled Power Macs. While it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper (though 275,000 copies were downloaded in the first week), the “world’s best and easiest to use ‘jukebox’ software” definitely raised the bar for music players on the Mac, which were relatively sparse and rather pricey (SoundJam cost $40). By offering iTunes as a free download and installing it on every new Mac, Apple essentially cut down the competition at the pass–or at least put a good scare into them. “Apple has done what Apple does best–make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” said Steve Jobs at the time. “iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”
Snow Leopard More Popular Than Tiger, Leopard
At the two week mark, OS X Snow Leopard—despite having few user recognizable features—has sold more than twice the number of copies that Leopard did, and four times the number of copies that Tiger did. That makes sense given the $29 price and Apple’s higher percentage in the market these days.
Surely the $29 price — a full $100 less than most OS X upgrades — is helping drive sales, but I also think users see Snow Leopard as less dangerous of an upgrade.
On Websites
Webdesigner Depot, on Apple and Microsoft’s websites:
Which site is the winner? If you’re looking at usability alone, Apple comes out ahead. They have a better designed homepage that offers less choice, which means the user needs to think less.
They have consistent navigation across all of their pages. They use a lot of white space and sub-headings to make everything more readable, yet they keep things simple by not overusing too many different text treatments.
On 10.6’s UI Changes
After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.
10.6.1
What’s included?
• Improves compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
• Addresses an issue in which some printer compatibility drivers might not appear properly in the Add Printer browser
• Addresses an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
• Addresses an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
• Resolves an issue in which the Command-Option-T keyboard shortcut would sometimes bring up the special characters menu in applications such as Mail and TextEdit
Jobs, on the Touch
Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”
The Difference Between News, Blogging and Bad Blogging
Earlier today, the site MacJournals recommended TUAW’s coverage of Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” media event to their readers via Twitter. A few hours later, they followed up with this:
We wouldn’t have recommended TUAW liveblog coverage had we known how vicious it would be. We’ll know for the future.
This didn’t go over well with TUAW. Here’s the crux of MacJournal’s reasoning:
However, we found today’s coverage viciously unaware and unsympathetic of anything beyond TUAW’s own narrow view of the technology world. TUAW aggressively dismissed anything that wasn’t a new product announcement, said that Apple’s failure to meet false rumors were “legitimate complaints,” and provided no context for why anyone should have believed any of the rumors other than the fact that they were actual rumors.