This Day in Apple History

At one time the Newton, a largish Apple PDA, had Apple's hopes for the future pinned to the take anywhere device. Sales, as most remember, were very slow. Still the Newton, in the years since its introduction, had gained some traction in the market. Apple hoped to capitalize on the…

With the introduction of the sunflower G4-based iMac it was obvious that Apple was heading away from clunky CRT monitors and towards flat panel goodness. Still, few expected Apple to completely eschew the bulbous CRT in their monitor line due to the still relatively high prices of LCD screens.

The Apple III is likely the worst computer Apple ever produced. Not because of any inherent problem with the specifications. Compared with the competition the specs were solid. What was lacking was the execution.The clock chip didn't work, the computer had no fan and would overheat, the sockets…

In what would prove to be a four-year ordeal, Microsoft was slapped with an antitrust suit by the U.S. Justice Department and twenty states. Apple fans the world over read the headlines and rejoiced.The reason why the lovers of all things Apple were elated wasn't as clear. Microsoft…

Jef Raskin criticized Steve Jobs for having unreasonable expectations, especially when it came to how much time was realistic when undertaking a project. His criticism was justified, at least when it came to the first incarnation of the Mac. Jobs' timelines might have been unrealistic but his belief…

The PowerBook 500 series was notable for several reasons. The prices weren't unusual; the machines went from a semi-modest $2,270 to a wallet busting $4,840. The interesting part was all the firsts. First built in stereo speakers, first PMCIA card, and first NiMH battery. The really stunning…

The Mac XL was never a huge seller, the machine featured a display that made the graphics and letters looked stretched and, with dual floppy drives, didn't fit very well into the Macintosh design paradigm. So it wasn't very surprising when the poor selling model was discontinued.The odd…

Apple had offered plenty of servers throughout its existence but the servers always looked exactly like the top of the line professional Mac being offered at the time. The reason that they looked so similar is because Mac servers were pro models with the configuration tilted towards the server side…

Apple had ditched the System 7.7 iteration of Mac OS in an effort to kill the clone makers. That didn't stop the software from actually showing up renamed as System 8.0. System 8.0 featured many improvements to System 7.6--a multithreaded finder, an appearance manager and some under-the-hood optimizations.…

When Apple was talking up its next generation operating system, Rhapsody, one of the selling points was "develop once deploy everywhere." The project was called Yellow Box and promised developers an opportunity to write the code a single time and have it work on both Macs and PCs.The…

The biggest difference between a G3 chip and its successor the G4 was Altivec. Altivec, renamed Velocity Engine by Apple for marketing purposes, added a 128 bit vector execution unit that promised to speed up graphically intensive tasks significantly.That wasn't the only good thing about the G4. The…

What's 20% thinner and two pounds less weighty than its predecessor? Why, the PowerBook Lombard, of course.This fan favorite of the PowerBook line sported peppy G3 processors running at either 333 or 400 MHz and a very nice price, for the time, of $2499. The battery life was…

Umax, an early Apple cloner, released the clunkily named SuperMac C500 LT/140 with little fanfare. The machine offered 140 MHz of processing power, a Motorola 603e, 1.2 GB of hard drive space and 16 MB of standard RAM. Those aren't the most impressive specs for the time but…

A PowerPC 603e, 180 MHz of raw processing power and up to 80 MB of RAM-- sounds like a passably powerful nineties Macintosh. Throw in an active matrix 10.4 inch display and a weight of 4.4 pounds and you have one highly desirable PowerBook.The weight savings were realized…

From the Apple I to the current day, Apple has publicly maintained a deep commitment to education. The commitment paid off when Apple announced a mammoth order it had landed for iBooks.Henrico County Public School System agreed to buy 23,000 of the G3 powered white beauties in order…