This Day in Apple History

If you're ever in the market for a Silicon Valley hero you could do a lot worse than picking Steve Wozniak as your model for the ideal silicon valley millionaire.Woz was not only a great engineer, he also gave something back to community that many Silicon Valley folks…

iMovie is a the ultimate example of once prohibitively expensive media democratized for the average person. Credit Glen Reid for the truly clever programming but credit Steve Jobs with the passion for bringing low cost video editing to the masses. How convinced was Steve Jobs that iMovie would…

Steve Jobs has a many enviable qualities. His attention to detail, his ability to grasp what people actually want, his management style and presentation skills are all things that many CEO's envy.Anything, taken to the extreme, can yield less than desirable results. Steve's insistence that the Apple III…

Mac OS 8 was interesting for more than OS advances. It was interesting because the OS was supposed to be the first apperance of the all new operating system Copland but even more interesting because it effectively voided most of the contracts the clone makers had with Apple.To…

The iMac was a huge success for Apple. With a homerun like that, the question naturally arises "How can we repeat that with a laptop?" Apple's answer was the iBook. The machine had several shortcomings: it was heavy, the styling was questionable and the price was considered a bit high.

The programmer behind a lot of what was good about the original Macintosh was Andy Herzfeld. While Herzfeld had a rebel streak and couldn't abide corporate politics he was also smart enough to appreciate good ideas when he heard them.Herzfeld heard many good ideas when he attended a…

The G4 cube was hailed by the media as a design breakthrough. There is little wonder why, the small form factor and convection cooling made the cube a desirable computer for anyone who valued form and silent computing while still demanding near top of the line performance.The trouble…

If you were using iTools, Apple's suite of web enhancements used to help lure people into buying Mac OS 8, you got a nasty bit of news when you checked your iTools account."Today we announced .Mac, pronounced "Dot Mac," that replaces the Apple iTools service. In the two…

A Macintosh booting into Windows seems passe since the release of Boot Camp. Perhaps surprisingly, Boot Camp it isn't the first dual boot solution Apple offered. That honor goes to the LC 630 DOS caompatible.The Mac side of the machine was powered by a 33MHz 68LC040 and ran…

Most people with a bent for technology are aware how Xerox influenced Apple's development of the GUI. What many tech geeks are unaware of is how Kodak made the Mac a viable business.Sales of the nascent Mac had been in line with expectations for the first few months,…

In the great cavalcade of cat names the first one that really mattered was Jaguar, the code name for OS 10.2. The first iteration of OS X was code named Cheetah and offered as a beta version for $29.99. The second iteration was Puma and retailed for the, now, expected…

One of the first low cost PowerBooks introduced was the PowerBook 150. The price was nice but Apple made it clear that this wasn't the top of the line model, or even close.The PowerBook 150 lacked, for the time, the ever useful ADB port and sported a muddy…

The Mac's first business plan under the leadership of Steve Jobs was crudely produced but full of ambitious sales targets. Macs, the plan plainly stated, would cost $1500, ship in 1982 and sell over 2 million units in less than three years. The plan was too rosy. The…

On July 11 Kevin Britten, a resident of Hays Kansas, did something wholly unremarkable, he downloaded a song from iTunes.While downloading a song from iTunes requires very little effort Kevin was richly rewarded for his purchase of "Somersault (Dangermouse remix)." Not only did Kevin get the song, he…

Apple's first President, Michael Scott, had lost any real power shortly after Black Wednesday. Yet former, President Scott stayed on the payroll in no small part because Apple was about to stage a second offering of stock. With Apple's second successful stock sale completed, the sole reason…