If you’re starting the new year off looking at new tools, Drafts Pro is half off for the first year right now. Drafts is the fastest and most flexible way to get something out of your head and into you computer.
Connected #534: The Rickies (January 2025) ⇢
It is time to name a new Annual Chairman, so the guys judge their 2024 predictions and make a new round of guesses for what 2025 may bring to the Apple faithful.
Dell, Dell Pro, & Dell Pro Max ⇢
I double checked; today is not April 1.
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Mac Power Users 778: Exploring the Task Management Environment ⇢
This week on Mac Power Users, David and I discuss the task managers we tried in 2024, and what we are currently using to get things done at work and beyond.
Oral History of Bertrand Serlet ⇢
I haven’t gotten very far into this interview yet, but Serlet’s history and career should be more widely known than it is.
The Story Behind the Initial Iteration of the Mac OS X Dock
On January 5, 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the Aqua user interface for the very first time. Stylistically, it was a bold departure from what had come before, and was no doubt created with the iMac G3 in mind.
The changes were more than skin deep, and no where was the influence of NeXT’s software more evident than the Dock, a place for users to stash documents, an easy way to launch applications, and generally anchor the user interface to the bottom or side of the screen.
Here’s how Steve Jobs described the Dock when it was introduced back in 1988:
The dock — It turns out that, when you’re running applications, things can get lost. These icons can get hidden and you might want to read your mail at a moment’s notice. So we allow you to take any icon and take it over to any one of these dock positions and it’ll snap in and dock. And the minute it docks, nothing can go in front of it. And so it’s a place to always have the applications that you use handy. You can customize it any way you want to, and nothing will ever keep these things from being a glance away. That’s what the dock’s all about. And if you decide that you need to use that right part of the screen for an awfully big window, and you don’t want to undock things, you can just slide it down and everything, but the little logo will go off the screen.
If that sounds familiar, it should, but the Dock in Mac OS X didn’t come straight over from what was then known as OPENSTEP. Instead, a friend of mine at Apple was hired to write it. Here’s James Thomson, writing about that 2000 event:
Towards the end of the presentation, [Steve] showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).
The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
The rest of the story is priceless.
A Brief Overview of the Pocket 8086; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows 3.0 in Real Mode
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by my buddy Kevin, and is the first in a series covering a weird and wonderful corner of retrocomputing.
I’m Kevin Lipe, 512 Pixels’ somewhat-official MS-DOS correspondent. Long time reader; second-time guest post.
I’ve only ever written for this site about software that’s as old as I am, and this series will be no exception.
Stephen and I have been friends for a very long time (ask him about buying forkbombr.net from me for two slices of pizza in 2008), and for most of that time, I’ve been obsessed with retrocomputing in all its various forms and fashions.
So naturally when the Book 8088 first started appearing in articles, I was intrigued. When its successor machine, the Pocket 8086, launched last year, I immediately texted Stephen: you have to let me review this thing.
He doesn’t always indulge my bad ideas, but for whatever reason, this one got the green light.
Just soak this thing in:
Why the Pocket 8086, though? Why should you — presumably mostly Mac users with a strong appreciation of the platform’s legendary past — care about a Chinese laptop version of a PC/XT made from scavenged chips and netbook parts? Why does it matter?
I often feel like computers, as tools for thought, went wrong somewhere. Steve Jobs’ comment that the Mac was supposed to be a “bicycle for the mind” resonates with me still: these things are supposed to help us do things and make things, things like create art, balance our budgets, run our businesses, communicate–things that have an impact on the world beyond ourselves. Or not! They’re supposed to make us more of what we are. It’s hard to feel that way about a Windows 11 PC, for sure, though I’m admittedly a Windows guy these days. The iPhone and iPad still feel a somewhat magical, but the further these technologies develop, the less they feel like tools for thought and the more they feel like subscription revenue generators.
In this, the first part of our little miniseries about the Pocket 8086, we’ll look at the device itself. Who is this thing for? Is it any good at the things it’s trying to be good at?
After exploring these topics, we’ll then set up the rest of our MS-DOS journey together.
What is This Thing?
The small computer sitting on my desk is one of a series:
- The Book 8088
- The Hand 386
- The Pocket 8086
- The Pocket 386
The exact lineage of these machines is a little murky and hard to follow due to the devices’ origins in the Chinese retrocomputing scene, but I’ll try to summarize as best I can:
They are all recreations of a past hardware in form factors that weren’t possible when the hardware was current. They are PC/XT compatible (or more capable in the case of the 386 machines) but they look like the netbooks we all loved so much circa 2009.
The exception here is the Hand 386, the form factor of which is, frankly, bonkers.
The rest all follow the formula of the beloved original Asus Eee PC: tiny screen, little keyboard, but a real PC, portable but a little bit thicc.
The only difference is that instead of running a custom hobbled Linux distro or Windows Vista on an Atom processor, these machines have hardware that hasn’t been current since the late 1980s. They are throwbacks to an earlier time (weapons for a more civilized age, maybe) when even a basic, bare-bones PC was thousands of dollars and only ran one application at a time.1
A Sidebar on the PC/XT
What is a PC/XT, anyway? The IBM Personal Computer, the Model 5150, was released in 1981. It had an 8088 processor, its RAM was expandable to 640kb, one or two floppy drives, a cassette port, and initially, no hard drive option.
By 1983, IBM felt it was time for a little refresh, and so released the PC/XT, for “eXtended Technology.” I wouldn’t say the technology extended very far, but the changes did result in a more usable system.
The XT’s improvements over the original PC were as follows:
- 10MB hard drive as standard equipment
- Eight expansion slots instead of the original five
- No cassette port
- fewer, higher-density RAM chips
The XT was, by all accounts, a very successful upgrade, especially when taken along with PC-DOS 2.0, which added a bunch of stuff nobody really uses like subdirectories and device drivers.
(Stephen and Quinn Nelson covered a lot of this in the final handful of episodes of their excellent podcast, Flashback.)
Ok, Back to These Weird Little Notebooks
The original Book 8088 was almost exactly what it sounds like: a notebook version of an 8088-based PC, with an NEC V20 processor featuring the same 8-bit data bus as the original IBM PC, CGA graphics, and an optional OPL3-based sound card. It ran a pirated open-source XT BIOS, and came with a bunch of abandonware, and certainly made waves on the little corners of Mastodon I inhabit where old computers are more popular than new ones.
But it was half-baked at best, with Compact Flash in place of a hard disk, a USB port that isn’t really a USB port, and a few other glaring flaws, but still: it was exactly what it was trying to be, and a small community of folks fell in love with it.
I don’t have any experience with the Hand 386, but it seems to be more of the same, just in a somewhat less sensical form factor, and it hinted at the future of the series, headed towards more capable hardware that could run an even wider array of old software.
People liked the Book 8088, but it had its problems. The Hand 386 was the same way. And so, a new generation of the hardware appeared: the Pocket 8086 and its 32-bit twin, the Pocket 386. Smaller than the Book 8088, but maintaining the laptop/clamshell form factor that’s been standard for laptops since the late 80’s, the Pocket 8086 is a more powerful, more polished version of the Book 8088, with a fully 16-bit processor (still an NEC, the V30 in this case) and VGA-capable graphics.
The Specs
The Pocket 8086 measures 4 5/16″ by 8 1/4″ and is an inch and a quarter thick with the lid closed. Mine’s made of translucent plastic, but it’s also available in a smoked translucent grey a la those special edition Nintendo 64’s that the kid down the street had but you didn’t.2
Inside is a 16:9 screen and possibly the smallest and worst netbook keyboard I’ve ever seen or attempted to use. It’s functional, though, and in place of the Windows key is a TURBO button, which more computers should have.
The machine has two speakers, some LED indicators… it’s a small but essentially normal laptop.
What’s less than normal is the hardware, and the ports.
The processor is an NEC V30, a pin-compatible but faster NEC version of the 8086, though the motherboard is compatible with the 8088/V20 as well if you move a jumper.
It’s got 768kb of RAM, an OPL3-compatible sound card, a 512MB CompactFlash card in place of a hard drive, a USB port that really only works with storage devices that are formatted to be readable by DOS, headers for a parallel port, serial port, PS/2 port, VGA output, and an 8-bit ISA expansion slot.
Mmmm, ports.
(The port dongles come in the box with the machine.)
There’s also a 3.5mm audio line out jack; take that iPhone 7.
The display’s built in controls are accessible with the function key, so pressing Fn+F4 brings up display settings like brightness and contrast, and also allows switching between the display’s native aspect ratio and the VGA chip’s native 4:3 ratio.
It boots pretty quickly, because it’s just (“just”) booting DOS and it’s doing it from a solid state device. No nostalgic gravel-rattling-in-a-box hard drive sounds, no floppy disks to flip. A single beep and you’re at a C:\> prompt, as God intended.
WTF is an NEC V30?
The processor here is interesting, and I can only figure that whoever is manufacturing these devices found a cache of salvaged devices powered by them. Wikipedia, of course, has a good summary of what these things are. NEC sold them directly to consumers as a drop-in replacement to make your computer faster, similar to something like the Zip Chip in the Apple II world.
There are also V20-specific extensions to the 8086 instruction set that make the chip even more performant. Given that the name of the game in PC compatibles is being nothing that a “normal” PC doesn’t do, it’s unlikely that there’s much DOS software outside of custom domain-specific tools that specifically targets these extensions, but it’s cool to know that they’re there, and the chip still performs faster than an 8086 on many of the same operations.
Apparently they were also used in a bunch of Irem arcade games and the incredibly-named Bandai WonderSwan.
Is it a Good Computer?
…this is probably the real question, right? And the answer is: it depends on what you mean by good and on what you mean by computer.
…But is it a Good Computer?
Maybe what you mean is, I like to do stuff on computers, and I like to have a decent computer on which to do stuff. Ignore the fact that this one runs DOS and maybe Windows 3 (again, more on this in a bit), or assume that these are the software tools that you specifically intend to use. Is it successful as a computer on which you can do stuff?
Kinda.
Keyboards are the primary way I interact with computers. I’m a writer with a day job at a big company, and I spend almost all my time on a computer writing something or reading something (lotta PowerPoint in there as well, but I’d prefer not to discuss it).
This one is technically a functioning keyboard. When you type on it, the keys that you press do appear to be directly connected to the letters that appear on the screen.
Sadly, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it; it’s too small, the layout is weird, the keys feel both too hard to press and like they’re about to break if you breathe on them wrong, and it’s generally a pain to use.
While the keyboard works, the “PS/2 mouse emulation” that is supposed to be able to make the cursor move around on the screen using the function keys does not work. I tried several times in the Windows environment that ships on the thing but it never seemed to do anything at all.
Admittedly, I don’t have a PS/2 mouse around anymore, so using the external port may be totally fine — but the documentation makes a big deal out of the PS/2 mouse emulation and as far as I can tell it’s completely non-functional.
The screen is not the worst laptop screen I’ve ever seen, but that’s because I’ve used old Thinkpads a lot, and I also had an original 800 x 480 Eee PC 701. (So did Stephen. We were Eee Bros.)
The panel gets the job done, and the ability to switch between aspect ratios is useful (and, truth be told, if I played more DOS games it would probably be essential).
It boots quickly as DOS generally does. The battery life is surprisingly good, but then again it’s a pairing of old computer hardware with new battery technology, so it probably should be. I’ve used the thing several hours without having to charge it and I can’t imagine one would want to use this for more than several hours at a time.
…But is it a Good (Retro)computer?
Maybe what you mean when you ask if it’s a good computer is something more like this: is it a good computer to do “old computer” stuff on? How good is it as a retrocomputer?
The answer to this question is: it’s pretty good! It’s fast, because of the CompactFlash storage. It’s compatible with a shockingly wide range of software, even up through Windows 3.0 (though Windows 2 might be the sweet spot if you really must have a GUI, or something like GEM).
If you use it with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it would probably be a very good tool for running old DOS applications and games. The catch is this: if you’re using an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor, you might as well just run whatever you’re trying to run in DOSBox-X and have access to a web browser while you’re doing it.
The Pocket 8086, then, finds itself in a weird niche: it’s a neat little computer for running old software in a portable way, but if you’re only worried about the software you might as well just use an emulator, and if you’re only worried about the hardware, you might as well use the real deal and join the crowd on r/retrobattlestations.
It does, however, offer one advantage over using real-deal old hardware, especially floppy disks: the CF card is easily removable, and just about anything will read the FAT partition, making data transfer very easy.
In the past when I’ve cooked up some plot to use an old machine as a “minimal writing environment,” there’s always been some Rube Goldberg scheme of hopping across machines from different eras to get files on and off the thing. (The worst example of this was getting things from a PowerBook 180 running System 7 into a Windows XP world, something I tried during college for a while.) The fact that I can just pop the CF card out of the Pocket 8086 and into a card reader, dragging and dropping files and programs off the thing, is a major ease of use improvement.
That said, IDE-to-CF adapters are all over the place for retro machines along with other Flash-based disk replacements and emulators. This experience is not really exclusive to the Pocket 8086, convenient though it may be.
What Comes on It?
Computers mean nothing without software. The appeal of a machine like this is that it runs what a similarly-equipped PC-XT(ish) machine would have been able to run, so what comes on the Pocket 8086 and how well does it work?
For one thing, there’s no way any of this software is actually legitimately allowed to be sold pre-installed on this computer. The OS is MS-DOS, version 6.22, and it also includes Windows 3.0. Theoretically a V30-equipped system will run Windows 3.1, but I can’t imagine it’d be worth the trouble.
There are a few applications pre-loaded on the thing, including Borland Turbo C and Turbo BASIC, and the Windows installation seems to work fine (other than the aforementioned lack of functioning mouse emulation). I’d imagine everyone buying this knows exactly what they want to actually use it for: a cherished collection of games they love, a favorite word processor (WordPerfect 5.1, of course), or something else. I don’t think the pre-installed software is really the point of the thing, other than to give users a starting place.
Windows: Keeping it Real (Mode) Goes Wrong
One of the things about the 8086 (and thus the V20/V30) is that it doesn’t have the protected mode of the later 80286 and beyond processors in the x86 family, but only works one way: real mode.
In real mode, the 8086 and its brethren could address a megabyte of memory directly, with no concept of multitasking or virtual memory, concepts used by operating systems to protect running processes from clobbering each others’ data while multitasking. Everything running on the computer could access every location within the computer’s memory. If you used the classic Mac OS and remember how frequently it crashed while showing a literal bomb on the screen, you know exactly how well this form of multitasking works.
In the more advanced protected mode, the processor has built-in mechanisms for managing memory such that processes can be, well, protected from each other. Multitasking becomes more tenable at the hardware level; certain rules about memory access become much easier to enforce within the processor itself. In the x86 world, this hardware debuted with the 80286 and the IBM PC/AT in 1984-85. But that’s not where we are with this little laptop; we’re firmly in 1978 with the original 8086 and its 20-bit segmented addressing.
By the time Windows 3.0 came out, this was already outdated technology, and I’d imagine that if Microsoft had felt they could get away with ditching it for Windows 3 without alienating too many users of existing PCs, they would have. But what good would Microsoft be if not for ridiculous levels of backwards compatibility?
That said, my real assumption is that it just has Windows on it so one can say “it has Windows on it.” Vogons has a great thread about what can actually run in real mode Windows; it’s not much, though you could cobble together a reasonable set of installed tools. I can’t think of a real reason one would prefer to work in this environment over DOS given the limitations of this particular crazy flavor of Windows.
The Question Without an Answer
There’s really just one thing I wanted to answer about the Pocket 8086, and it’s the one thing that’s eluded me as I’ve been pulling together thoughts and notes for this series: who is this thing for? I think there are three possible audiences for the Pocket 8086 who would actually find something here that they enjoy and/or appreciate using.
The gamers. The Pocket 8086 is well-spec’d to run classic games. Sierra games, Lemmings, even Wolfenstein 3D will run on it, and if you just want to have a little DOS laptop to load up with games and play, why not? In this case, for most games, the keyboard wouldn’t really be as big of a factor, either, because you wouldn’t really be trying to type on it, but rather only using whatever controls the game called for. You could even connect a joystick to the serial port (or parallel, I guess, though I don’t know how common those were). The “meh” display could be an issue for retrogaming enthusiasts, but I also think the portability and the “oh, that’s cool” factor of the fact that that the Pocket 8086 exists at all could be selling points.
Retrocomputing obsessives. This is, clearly, me. I like this thing even though it’s pretty bad at being a usable computer for any real length of time due to the God-awful keyboard. The fact is, it’s a little DOS computer built as though it’s a modern laptop. That’s cool!
Retrocomputing obsessives… in China. This Vogons.org thread, if you have time to read all the way through it, has some real insights into the creator(s) of the Book 8088 and what went into it: a very specific set of circumstances in China that led to the convergence of its retrocomputing scene with its wildly diverse electronics recycling and manufacturing infrastructure, combined with a guy who is really into this stuff and wanted to make something cool. Cultural differences aside, I think they fact that this thing is available in the States seems like more of a happy accident than anything, and probably was never the original intent behind the creation of this line of machines. That said, I’m glad it escaped into the wider world (this is where someone who isn’t me would make a tasteless COVID/lab leak joke, but you’ll have to supply your own, reader).
So What?
I think I explored the system itself pretty thoroughly here, though there may be some aspects of the hardware that I’m overlooking but is considered critical by somebody else out there, and I’m sure they’ll send Stephen an email about it, not me.
There are two more things I want to explore with the Pocket 8086 in this series: what happens if you try to use it for “”real”” “”work””? And what might we learn about computer productivity, tools for thought, and permacomputing from such an intentionally obsolescent device? Those will be coming soon, as soon as I write them.
It’ll take a while, because I keep having to stretch my hands out from this horrible keyboard, and WordStar ate my files a couple of times. What, do I look like George R. R. Martin?
Don’t answer that.
- To be fair, Macs at the time mostly only ran one application at a time, too, as the PC/XT came out before the 128k Mac, to say nothing of MultiFinder. ↩
- I didn’t expect a childhood trauma to be brought up when working on this article with Kevin, but here we are. —Stephen ↩
Apple TV+ Offering Free Viewing January 3-5 ⇢
Apple TV+ is ringing in the New Year by offering an all-access pass to customers all around the world. Enjoy Apple TV+ for free the first weekend of 2025 (January 3 through January 5), Apple TV+ will be free on any device where Apple TV+ is available. All you need is an Apple ID to see what all the buzz is about.
Over the holidays, a lot of family members praised Apple TV+ when talking about media, and rightfully so. Apple TV+ has some really, really good shows and movies, and the hit rate is pretty high for me.
Mac Power Users #777: Setup Nostalgia ⇢
On this week’s Mac Power Users, it’s MPU Holiday Special time! David and I reflect on our college Macs and how influential they would end up being on each of us.
2005: The End of the Mac’s PowerPC Era
In January 2006, the first Intel Macs were announced. We’ll deal more with that anniversary in a year, but for now, it’s worth walking through the final full year of PowerPC Macs.
Transitions happen for a reason, and exploring those reasons can tell us a lot about the priorities of the parties involved.
When the Mac moved from x86 to Apple silicon a few years ago, it was partially because Intel wasn’t delivering what Apple needed and partially because Apple was in a place with its own chips that the Mac would be radically better after the transition.
2005 wasn’t all that different from 2019. What had started as an exciting alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola to push back against Wintel’s dominance had broken down, with the PowerPC platform hitting a wall when it came to performance and energy consumption.
The clearest example of the problem was the PowerBook, which was never graced with a PowerPC G5 chip, as the thing just ran too hot for a notebook. There’s a reason this Photoshopped image made the rounds of Mac forums for so long:
With all of this said, it would be easy to consider the Mac in 2005 as a lame duck, just biding its time until the first Intel machines came along, but I think that’s selling these machines a bit short.
So, with all that set, let’s look back twenty years and see what Apple was up to in 2005.
January 2005
Updated Xserve
Apple started the year off with an update to the Xserve. The now-defunct server line had been upgraded to the G5 in 2004, but this update brought faster processors, more storage, and updated optical drives.
The updated Xserve retained the huge air intakes on the front required for the G5s to breathe. Just check out the differences between the G4 and G5 models:
The Mac mini
At Macworld 2005, Apple introduced an all-new Mac:
Apple today introduced Mac mini, the most affordable and compact Mac ever. Starting at just $499, Mac mini is the ideal desktop computer for anyone looking to get started with Mac OS X and features iLife ’05, the latest version of Apple’s innovative suite of software for managing digital photo and music collections, editing movies and creating music. Just two-inches tall and weighing only 2.9 pounds, Mac mini redefines design for the sub-$1,000 desktop.
“Starting at just $499, Mac mini is the most affordable way to enjoy Mac OS X and iLife,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Just plug in your display, keyboard and mouse and you’ve got an incredibly compact Mac for a price that almost anyone can afford.”
Twenty years later, I still love the look of the original Mac mini:
I remember this keynote well. Several of us were working on a redesign at our college newspaper before the semester started, and we spent most of the afternoon trying to refresh Apple’s site, which was struggling with everyone looking at this new Mac and the iPod shuffle introduced the same day.
At the time, I wasn’t surprised that the Mac mini shipped with a G4 inside. The Mac mini’s biggest feature was its small price, and a G5 would have increased the cost. Even though a G5 powered the iMac and Power Mac, most folks don’t mind having a G4 in Apple’s entry-level desktop aimed at switchers.
Updated PowerBooks
At the end of the month, Apple announced what would be the penultimate update to the PowerBook:
Apple today unveiled the fastest, most affordable PowerBook line ever, featuring PowerPC G4 processors running up to 1.67 GHz, faster hard drives and a faster 8X SuperDrive — all housed in the PowerBook’s signature aluminum enclosure. All new PowerBooks come standard with 512MB memory, faster graphics, integrated AirPort 802.11g, Bluetooth 2.0 wireless networking and two new Apple patent-pending technologies — the scrolling TrackPad and the Sudden Motion Sensor.
The TrackPad update enabled two-finger scrolling, as described on the product page:
Scrolling through web pages or large documents on a trackpad can challenge even the most nimble fingers. That’s why every PowerBook G4 features a new trackpad with scrolling capability. Just drag two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window. Change this feature to suit your needs: Customize your trackpad settings or turn off scrolling completely via System Preferences.
(Don’t miss the GIF on that page.)
This feature sounds super basic now, but it was a huge improvement at the time. So much so, that many users ran third-party software that enabled it on older machines.
To add scrolling, the trackpads in these machines used USB internally, as opposed to the older ADB standard, which first appeared in 1986.
If the scrolling trackpad was a feature users would notice every single day, the Sudden Motion Sensor was one that folks hoped never to have to experience:
Now every PowerBook G4 is equipped with Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor to help protect your most valuable asset: your data. The Sudden Motion Sensor senses change in axis position and accelerated movement. In the event of a drop or fall, the Sudden Motion Sensor instantly parks the hard drive heads so they won’t scratch the disks on impact, lessening the risk of damage and improving your chances of retrieving valuable data. When the Sudden Motion Sensor senses your PowerBook is once again level, it unlocks the hard drive heads automatically.
This update also brought some other goodies:
The new PowerBooks deliver increased performance with both the 15- and 17-inch PowerBook models offering up to 1.67 GHz PowerPC G4 processors and industry-leading ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics processors with 64MB or 128MB of graphics memory. All models now include 512MB of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM and faster 5400 rpm hard drives for demanding professional applications. The 17-inch PowerBook now features Dual Link support to drive Apple’s breakthrough 30-inch Cinema HD Display as an external monitor, and this feature is also available as a build-to-order option on the 1.67 GHz model of the 15-inch PowerBook.
Apple continues to lead the industry in integrated wireless communications, and every PowerBook now includes built-in AirPort Extreme 54 Mbps 802.11g WiFi wireless networking. Apple is the first notebook maker to include integrated Bluetooth 2.0 (Enhanced Data Rate) for up to three times greater data rates, up to 3 Mbps, for faster wireless connectivity to a range of peripherals including cell phones, PDAs, printers and headsets. Bluetooth 2.0 is also compatible with Bluetooth 1.2 devices such as the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse.
April 2005
Power Mac G5 Update
The Early 2005 Power Mac G5 was a speed bump over the June 2004 models. The high-end model moved from 2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz, but kept the most notorious feature of the previous model:
The Power Mac G5 offers 2.0GHz, 2.3GHz and 2.7GHz dual-processor models with a speed boost at the top of the line. The dual 2.7GHz model packs so much power into tight quarters that Apple designed a liquid cooling system for it, resulting in a cool tower that runs Photoshop nearly two times faster than a Pentium 4-based system. In fact, for most creative endeavors, the Power Mac G5 simply has no competition in its class.
Just look at this thing:
Here’s more on that liquid cooling system:
Take it up a notch without losing your cool. The top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 with dual 2.7GHz processors squeezes outrageous performance into tight quarters. To cool down those steaming circuits, Apple designed a sophisticated liquid cooling system that takes off the heat without bumping up the noise. Mac OS X dynamically adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on temperature and power consumption.
The dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5 features an innovative liquid cooling system that’s more efficient than a traditional heat sink. This system provides a continuous flow of thermally conductive fluid that transfers heat from the processors as they work. The heated fluid then flows through a radiant grille, where air passing over cooling fins returns the fluid to its original temperature.
I have a lot of bad memories of these things showing up to my Genius Bar with leaks.
This liquid-cooled, dual-processor 2.7 GHz system is the most striking example of what was going wrong with the PowerPC line. At the Power Mac G5’s launch in 2003, Steve Jobs promised that 3 GHz models were coming, but by the time WWDC 2004 rolled around, it was clear that his promise was going to be broken.
Apple never shipped a Power Mac G5 clocked at 3 GHz.
Mac OS X Tiger
April 2005 also marked the release of OS X Tiger, which introduced features like Spotlight, Dashboard, and expanded 64-bit support.
(See many, many more screenshots of Tiger over here, and you can snag its default wallpaper here.)
Tiger was the first version of Mac OS X to support Intel machines and would end up being the longest-running version, being on sale for two and a half years.
May 2005
“Ambient Light Sensor” iMac G5s Released
In May of 2005, the iMac G5 got a revision:
Apple today unveiled a new iMac G5 line with faster 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 processors, built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless connectivity and Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger,” the latest version of the world’s most advanced operating system. The new iMac G5s also include faster graphics, a new 8X SuperDrive with double-layer support, built-in Gigabit Ethernet for faster networking, and 512MB of memory across the line. Every new iMac G5 comes with iLife ’05, Apple’s award-winning suite of digital lifestyle applications, making it the ultimate consumer desktop for today’s digital lifestyle.
These systems were the first iMacs to ship with ambient light sensors, allowing the machine to adjust the screen brightness automatically based on room conditions.
June 2005: Switch Announced
WWDC 2005 brought monumental news: the Mac was switching to Intel.
Here’s a bit from the press release:
At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007. Apple previewed a version of its critically acclaimed operating system, Mac OS X Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac to the over 3,800 developers attending CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote address. Apple also announced the availability of a Developer Transition Kit, consisting of an Intel-based Mac development system along with preview versions of Apple’s software, which will allow developers to prepare versions of their applications which will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs.
“Our goal is to provide our customers with the best personal computers in the world, and looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It’s been ten years since our transition to the PowerPC, and we think Intel’s technology will help us create the best personal computers for the next ten years.”
“We are thrilled to have the world’s most innovative personal computer company as a customer,” said Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel. “Apple helped found the PC industry and throughout the years has been known for fresh ideas and new approaches. We look forward to providing advanced chip technologies, and to collaborating on new initiatives, to help Apple continue to deliver innovative products for years to come.”
I wrote about this back in 2018 for iMore1:
In his keynote address, Jobs addressed the challenges in front of Apple working with the PowerPC roadmap. Apple hadn’t been able to deliver the 3.0 GHz Power Mac G5 the company had promised:
“We can envision some great products we want to build for you, but we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap.”
(That’s a pretty sick Steve Jobs burn.)
According to Jobs, this all came down to a metric he called “Performance Per Watt.” In short, only Intel could give Apple the power they wanted in an efficient package. PPC was just too hot and too power-hungry for Apple to stay the course.
Despite the CPU change being announced in June, the first Intel Macs were promised for the next year, opening the door to a potential Osborne effect moment for the Mac. Jobs headed this off by promising that “some great” PowerPC Macs were still in the pipeline.
By my count, there was only one great PowerPC Mac left to come, but we’ll get to that shortly.
July 2005
Updated iBook G4
A month after the switch to Intel was announced, Apple revised its iBook G4 line, borrowing some of the features introduced earlier in the year in the PowerBook family:
Apple today enhanced its affordable iBook G4 line for consumers and education customers with faster Power PC G4 processors running up to 1.42 GHz, 512MB memory across the line, higher performance graphics and built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. The new iBooks feature two patent-pending Apple technologies made popular in the PowerBook G4 line, the scrolling TrackPad and the Sudden Motion Sensor, with prices starting at an affordable $999.
I find it a little funny that Apple’s press release didn’t include comments from Steve Jobs or Phil Schiller:
“The new iBook is the perfect portable for the go anywhere, do anything digital lifestyle of consumers and students,” said David Moody, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing. “With improved performance, double the memory, and new mobility features like the scrolling TrackPad, Sudden Motion Sensor and Bluetooth, the new iBooks are an amazing value.”
This would be the last update to the iBook; it was replaced by the MacBook in 2006.
Revised Mac mini
The same day, Apple “enhanced” the Mac mini by doubling the default memory to 512 MB, building in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth, and offering an optional SuperDrive:
The Mac mini lineup includes three models: 1.25 GHz Mac mini, 1.42 GHz Mac mini and the new 1.42 GHz Mac mini with SuperDrive for burning DVDs and CDs. The Mac mini with SuperDrive is the most affordable Mac for quickly and easily creating your own professional quality DVDs using iLife ’05, Apple’s award-winning suite of digital lifestyle applications. The top two models of the Mac mini now include built-in AirPort Extreme for 54 Mbps 802.11g fast wireless networking along with an internal Bluetooth module. With wireless networking, customers can place Mac mini almost anywhere and still have fast, convenient access to the Internet. Built-in Bluetooth enables cable-free communication with Bluetooth-equipped mobile phones and PDAs as well as popular peripherals such as the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Mouse.
September 2005
A Silent Mac mini Revision
In September 2005, Apple silently revised the Mac mini to use 1.33 and 1.5 GHz G4s. This revision also doubled the VRAM to 64 MB, and updated the pitiful 4200 RPM drives to faster-but-still-slow 5400 RPM units.
Weirdly, Apple did not update the Mac mini’s packaging or its website to reflect this change. The whole thing was weird.
After initial reports of the update surfaced, Apple did confirm the revision, issuing a statement to Jim Dalrymple:2
Some Mac mini systems may contain components that slightly exceed the published specifications. There are no changes to the published specifications or part numbers.
I think this is the weirdest product update in Apple’s modern history.
October 2005
The iMac with iSight
At an event at San Jose’s California Theatre in October, Apple announced a major revision to the iMac G5:
Apple today unveiled the new iMac G5 which features a built-in iSight video camera for out-of-the-box video conferencing and the debut of Apple’s breakthrough Front Row media experience. Front Row gives users a simple, intuitive and powerful way to play their music, enjoy their photo slideshows, and watch their DVDs and iMovies, as well as popular movie trailers from apple.com and music videos and television shows purchased from the iTunes Music Store, on their iMac from up to 30 feet away using the new bundled Apple Remote. The new iMac G5 comes in a sleek, new design that is even thinner than its predecessor, and starts at just $1,299.
“The new iMac G5 debuts our amazing Front Row media experience, and we think users are going to love it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Plus, the built-in iSight video camera delivers out-of-the-box video conferencing with friends and family, as well as hours of fun with our new Photo Booth application.”
When I mentioned that I thought there was one great PowerPC release after the switch to Intel was announced, I had this iMac in mind. It packed so many cool features, all highlighted on Apple’s site:
You’ve got the best seat in the house. The full-screen Front Row media experience — with its intuitive menus, large text and brilliant graphics — lets you browse the music, photos and videos on your iMac as easily as you browse music on your iPod. And the new Apple Remote lets you do your browsing from anywhere in the room. So gather your friends and dazzle them with a slideshow of your vacation pics, a home movie or a DVD. iMac G5 was born to entertain.
There’s an iSight camera built into every new iMac, so you can start a video chat (or join one) at a moment’s notice. There’s nothing to buy, nothing to attach, no cords to fumble with, no software to install or configure. Simply start up iChat AV, click your buddy’s video icon and you’re ready to chat with sight and sound — with up to three friends at once. Proper attire suggested.
The new Photo Booth application (included) turns your iMac into a modern-day arcade photo booth (minus the coin slot). Just pick a special effect like sepia tint, x-ray, bulge or squeeze. And smile. Presto — instant high-quality photo. Once you have the perfect pic, take advantage of Photo Booth’s connections to share it via Mail, save it in iPhoto or use it as your Address Book or iChat buddy picture.
Front Row is long gone, but its legacy lives on in the Apple TV. In fact, the original Apple TV’s operating system looked a lot like Front Row.
When Apple added a webcam to the iMac, it was mind-blowing, and it spread to notebooks when they switched to Intel the following year. Twenty years later, the MacBook Pro I’m currently typing on has an iSight camera.
This was an exciting iMac release, but it was quickly overshadowed by the Intel iMac that was announced just 87 days later. The Intel machine looked and cost the same as the G5, but was twice as fast.
The iMac G5 with iSight was sold for a couple of months after the Intel models hit store shelves, but quietly went away by March.
I can’t imagine many buyers of these machines were thrilled about how quickly Apple replaced them in the lineup.
It’s a weird situation, and I don’t know why Apple had such a great revision for the PowerPC iMac mere weeks before the Intel model was announced. Part of me thinks Apple hoped to ship this iMac in the summer of 2005, but that’s conjecture on my part.
The Final PowerBook G4
Just one week after the press event that included the iMac, Apple announced an update to the PowerBook G4:
“The Apple PowerBook continues to deliver the ultimate in portability, performance and innovative features,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Our mobile customers are going to love working on the new high-resolution PowerBook displays and appreciate the added productivity that one more hour of battery life delivers.”
The new higher-resolution PowerBooks provide significantly more screen real estate and include the 17-inch PowerBook with a 1680-by-1050 pixel resolution — 36 percent more than the previous generation — and the 15-inch PowerBook with a 1440-by-960 pixel resolution — 26 percent more than the previous generation. Ideal for business and creative professionals, the new 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks make reading text and viewing images even easier with brighter displays — up to 46 percent brighter on the 17-inch model. The 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks also provide up to an additional hour of battery life to get even more work done while on the road.
Given that the MacBook Pro was announced the same day as the Intel iMac, these systems had an even shorter lifespan, but that doesn’t mean that they were bad. Sure, this revision was less exciting than what the iMac received, but the displays on the final PowerBooks were quite nice:
With millions more pixels than previous models, each new 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBook gives you a brilliant workspace that rivals many desktop monitors. Spread out your tools, palettes, and timelines. Bounce from one productivity application to another. View your work from the top or side — easily share your work with clients or team members. Now you have a whole new reason to love your PowerBook.
A buddy of mine had one of these machines, and even though the MacBook Pro smoked it in terms of performance, he used and loved his PowerBook for years.
The Final Power Mac G5
The same day Apple revised the PowerBook, it announced an update to the Power Mac:
Apple today unveiled its new Power Mac G5 desktop line featuring the Power Mac G5 Quad, providing quad-core processing with two 2.5 GHz dual-core PowerPC G5 processors. All Power Mac G5 models now feature dual-core processors, a new PCI Express architecture and higher performance graphics options including NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 4500, bringing the industry standard for workstation graphics to the Mac.
“The Power Mac G5 Quad delivers the workstation performance our creative and scientific customers demand,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture, and the fastest workstation card from NVIDIA, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we’ve ever made.”
Gone was the 2.7 GHz G5, but the quad-core 2.5 machine was a beast. Here’s a bit from Apple’s site:
Enter the dual-core PowerPC G5 processor: one silicon chip with two independent 2.5GHz processor cores. Now take two of those chips and you have the Power Mac G5 Quad, for groundbreaking quad-core processing.
With four processing cores, you’ll have more 64-bit resources: more L2 cache, more Velocity Engines, and more double-precision floating-point units. Videographers can edit more footage, filmmakers can produce more real-time effects, designers and photographers can process more higher-resolution images, and researchers can crunch through data sets for faster results. Compare a quad-core Power Mac G5 to the fastest dual-processor G5 ever built, and you’ll experience up to 69 percent faster performance running popular professional applications. Or make that up to three times faster, if you’re comparing with a Power Mac G4.
The new dual-core PowerPC G5 combines two processor cores on a single silicon chip, providing double the computational power in the same space as a single-core processor. With four processor cores, applications can take advantage of four 1MB L2 caches, four 128-bit Velocity Engines, and eight double-precision floating-point units for a radical increase in desktop performance.
The last Power Mac G5 was also the first Mac to ship with PCI Express:
The new Power Mac G5 introduces a modern PCI Express architecture to the Mac platform. A future-savvy choice for your lab or studio, PCI Express opens up a world of high-performance system technologies and peripherals — and paves the way for emerging solutions for media and networking.
The all-new PCI Express architecture allows you to customize your Power Mac G5 to the needs of your workflow — providing tremendous power and productivity in a single system. As your needs change, you’ll have the flexibility to add solutions for emerging workflow scenarios, such as video capture cards from Blackmagic Design or AJA Video, data acquisition devices from National Instruments, or the Apple Fibre Channel PCI Express Card for connecting to Apple’s Xserve RAID storage solution.
This Power Mac would remain on sale much longer than Apple’s other October 2005 models, as the Mac Pro wouldn’t be announced until August 2006.
Something Between a Bang and a Whimper
As I wrote 4,000 words ago, writing off the final year of PowerPC Macs isn’t really that fair. 2005 saw the introduction of the Mac mini, a more powerful Xserve, updates to Apple’s entire notebook line, and meaningful improvements to both the iMac and Power Mac.
Yes, the Intel Macs that followed these releases were much faster and more flexible, but the 2005 announcements more than held their own. Even as it was working to move the line to Intel, Apple was paying attention to its PowerPC products. Apple did a better job with late-model PowerPC Macs than it did with the machines released in the run-up to Apple silicon, but that’s a story for 2040.
- I’ve saved that entire column as a PDF in case iMore goes away. ↩
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Let’s talk about the heartbreaking state of the Macworld website for a moment. The original URL for that Dalrymple article is broken, as are most URLs from that time frame. I resorted to that Wayback Machine URL because I couldn’t find it via Google or Macworld’s own site search.
I initially thought the latter was my fault, as Macworld’s search doesn’t work if you run an ad blocker. I disabled mine in Safari, just to be served with this monstrosity. Even then, the site search didn’t surface this article.
Macworld has been around since 1984, and could be an amazing resource for the Apple community, but instead an endless parade of terrible decisions made by corporate types have left it a broken shell of what it once was. ↩
DSKY Moonwatch ⇢
I’m pretty content with my Apple Watch, but MY WORD LOOK AT THIS THING.