History

New photo book, “Designed by Apple in California”, chronicles 20 years of Apple design

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From Apple’s news release:

Apple today announced the release of a new hardbound book chronicling 20 years of Apple’s design, expressed through 450 photographs of past and current Apple products. “Designed by Apple in California,” which covers products from 1998’s iMac to 2015’s Apple Pencil, also documents the materials and techniques used by Apple’s design team over two decades of innovation.

The book is dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs.

And:

“The idea of genuinely trying to make something great for humanity was Steve’s motivation from the beginning, and it remains both our ideal and our goal as Apple looks to the future,” said Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. “This archive is intended to be a gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years. We hope it brings some understanding to how and why they exist, while serving as a resource for students of all design disciplines.”

The book is available in two sizes:

  • Small (10.20” x 12.75”)
 US$199
  • Large (13” x 16.25”)
 US$299

Twenty years takes us back to 1996, the year CEO Gil Amelio made one of the most important decisions of his tenure, starting the process of bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. The NeXT deal was finalized on February 9, 1997.

New York Times in 2001: “Apple introduces what it calls an easier to use portable music player”

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Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times when the original iPod was announced:

Apple Computer introduced a portable music player today and declared that the new gadget, called the iPod, was so much easier to use that it would broaden a nascent market in the way the Macintosh once helped make the personal computer accessible to a more general audience.

And:

But while industry analysts said the device appeared to be as consumer friendly as the company said it was, they also pointed to its relatively limited potential audience, around seven million owners of the latest Macintosh computers. Apple said it had not yet decided whether to introduce a version of the music player for computers with the Windows operating system, which is used by more than 90 percent of personal computer users.

And:

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, disputed the concern that the market was limited, and said the company might have trouble meeting holiday demand. He predicted that the improvement in technology he said the iPod represented would inspire consumers to buy Macintosh computers so they could use an iPod.

Think they’ll sell any? I love the reference to that “relatively limited potential audience”.

The original iPod

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[VIDEO]: Stephen Hackett, of 512 Pixels, spends some quality time with the device that started Apple’s big comeback, the original iPod.

The garage where Apple was born and other tech birthplaces

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On my recent visit to silicon valley, I had the chance to visit the garage where Apple was born, Steve Jobs’ childhood home in Los Altos. Read the main post for some pictures and a link to a map showing other silicon valley startup sites.

NeXT-era Steve Jobs photos

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This is a small collection of 8 NeXT-era photos, each with a detailed caption. I thought these were worth a look.

My favorite is this one, taken in Palo Alto in 1986.

Here’s that caption:

NeXT design director Eddie Lee said that Steve had a way of “smiling shit at you” when he was getting mad. His head would go down and he’d make this sort of uncomfortable half smile, and you knew you were about to get crushed. Decisions in early team meetings such as this one were fraught with tension because the team was writing its business plan as it went along. One pivotal decision made was to build both the hardware and the software for the NeXT computer, a vastly harder prospect than their original idea to build only software. While still shaping every detail of NeXT in early 1986, Steve also had the incredible foresight to recognize that something amazing was happening with digital animation at Lucasfilm. He capitalized a new spin-off company with $10 million of his own money. They named it Pixar.

He looks so very young.

Apple buys out vintage software collection on eBay

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MacRumors:

An Apple collector who was selling his vintage Apple software collection on eBay received a surprise earlier this month when Apple itself bought out much of his software inventory for its software archives (via MacGeneration).

According to seller “Marcoguy,” he made several listings of various Apple CDs and received a message from someone asking to buy a dozen discs. When he went to ship the package, he noticed it was going to 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, Apple’s corporate address. Upon asking the buyer about the purchase, he was told that Apple maintains a lab at its headquarters containing archived materials. “We were missing some of the disks that you placed on eBay,” wrote the buyer.

Fascinating.

The most famous band formed each year since 1951

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Pretty Famous:

PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site by Graphiq, found the most famous band formed each year since 1951. To do this, they created a customized Band Score on a scale of 1 to 100 based on a weighted average of a band’s Wikipedia page views in the last 30 days, page views of album releases and total number of Spotify followers.

The bands with the highest Band Score from each year were then ordered into a list starting in 1951 and continuing to 2015. It is important to note that since Wikipedia page views are current, all of these bands have stood the test of time, and remained famous many years after they were formed.

Interesting methodology. Not sure how you’d come up with a better measure of fame without turning straight to sales numbers.

Regardless, I found this pretty interesting. Scroll down to the tool, type in a year, then start clicking the arrow just to the right of the band picture to step through other bands formed in that year.

California closes the Steve Jobs license plate loophole

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Ars Technica:

One of the many things Steve Jobs was famous for was his refusal to put a license plate on the back of his car, a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG. Jobs—or someone close to him—spotted a loophole in California DMV regulations allowing six months of grace before a license plate had to be attached to a new car. As a result, the Apple supremo maintained a rolling six-month lease on a series of new SL55 AMGs, replacing one with another just before the grace period ran out.

Steve’s license plates were the center of many an anecdote. Miss him.

Apple’s employee number one

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Craig Cannon, interviewing Apples’ first employee (beyond Steve Jobs and Woz), Bill Fernandez:

Craig: So at what point do Woz and Jobs come together and decide that they want to start working on Apple?

Bill: Okay, well during this Hewlett-Packard period when Woz and I were both there, Woz in the after hours designed his own Pong game. Pong was the first really popular, you know, video game that bars and pizza shops and restaurants could buy and put it in stores and people would come and put quarters in and play. So he built his own circuitry and used it with a small black and white TV set as the display.

Then a couple of things happened. He started working on building his own computer and he started attending the Homebrew Computer Club that was happening at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC.

So all of those things happened at the same time and then as his computer came together he would take it and show it off after the meetings. At some point there was enough interest shown that Jobs became aware of this. I don’t know if he went to the Homebrew Computer Club or just when he and Woz were together Woz was talking about it. Basically Jobs said, “You know, we could make printed circuit boards and just sell the computer already assembled so people wouldn’t even have to buy all the parts on the open market and figure out how to wire them together. We could just do it for them.” And so that was the beginning of Apple Computer.

Jobs got a printed circuit board made and he figured out where to get all the parts. They decided what to name the company and then, this is funny, Jobs got a front office front. There was a company at 770 Welch Road. If you look at the old literature that was their address, Apple’s mailing address. So there was this company on the second floor that had people who would answer the phone and depending upon what number was called would say, “Hello, this is Apple Computer, how can I help you?” And would receive packages mailed to Apple Computer and would mail things from Apple Computer. Jobs was working in his father’s garage and in his bedroom, you know, and this was like our front to make it look legit.

This is a nice, long interview, with lots of edge-on views of the stuff of legend, the birth of Apple.

Bid now on the Celebration Apple I, the computer that sparked a revolution

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From the Celebration Apple 1 auction site:

The “Celebration” Apple-1 is an original Apple-1 pre-NTI board that has many unique features, period correct power supply, original Apple-1 ACI cassette board (also populated with Robinson Nugent sockets), early Apple-1 BASIC cassettes, original marketing material, and the most complete documentation set of the known Apple-1 boards.

The “Celebration” Apple-1 is extremely rare not only because of the scarcity of Apple-1 computers, but according to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, no known PCB boards of this type were ever sold to the public. At this time, this is the only known Apple-1 to show the signs of starting out as a blank original-run board and not part of the two known production runs, so this board appears to be unique from all other known Apple-1 boards.

The “Celebration” Apple-1 was authenticated by Apple Expert and Historian, Corey Cohen. Mr. Cohen believes The “Celebration” Apple-1 has the potential to be “powered up” with minor restoration, but has recommended against it to maintain the board’s unique configuration.

The Apple-1 Computer is considered the origin of the personal computer revolution and was built in Steve Jobs’ parents’ home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, CA. 200 were hand-built by Steve Wozniak, but it is believed that less than 60 are still in existence.

If you bid on this, please let me know.

Length in days of every iOS beta

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This is pretty interesting, the kind of chart that bears some digging. iOS 5 is clearly the champion, with eight betas spanning more than 120 days.

Software rot

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512 Pixels:

There will be a day where some of my old machines will stop working. There will be a day where none of them work anymore.

As sad as that will be from a hardware perspective, it’s devastating in terms of preserving software. Old operating systems are sealed inside these machines. A dead Mac is really just a beige — or Bondi Blue — sarcophagus for the software stranded on its internal disk.

Preserving the textual contents of a document is one thing, but how do we preserve the experience? How do we save the applications and the non-textual data? Great piece by Stephen Hackett. Absolutely worth reading.

The secret history of Mac gaming

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This looks awesome. More pledges needed to make this book a reality. Worth it.

From the Synopsis:

Mac gaming welcomed strange ideas and encouraged experimentation. It fostered passionate and creative communities who inspired and challenged developers to do better and to follow the Mac mantra “think different”.

The Secret History of Mac Gaming is the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who made games and people who played them — people who, on both counts, followed their hearts first and market trends second. How in spite of everything they had going against them, the people who carried the torch for Mac gaming in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s showed how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful videogames could be.

An amazing list of contributors. Take a look.

Now that’s an Apple collection

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Stephen Hackett has quietly assembled an impressive collection of Apple gear, which he regularly photographs, sharing the images on 512 Pixels.

There are certainly holes in his collection. Anyone have an Apple II or Apple IIe they want to share with Stephen?

35 interface innovations that rocked our world

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This is posted by Xerox, so take the choices with that in mind. That said, this is a pretty solid list, an enjoyable read. I only wish there was a bit more depth (or a “read more here” link) for each one.

The time Steve Jobs killed a Q&A with bluntness

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[VIDEO] M.G. Siegler, writing about a closing keynote speech Steve Jobs gave at the 1997 WWDC conference (recalls that Steve Jobs was newly returned to Apple at the time):

It’s almost unbelievable how prescient nearly everything Steve Jobs says here actually is. If not all of it came to pass, nearly all of it did. And he spoke about things in great detail. As Rands notes, Jobs wasn’t underestimating the future, he was writing it, seemingly on the fly in that conversation.

Watch the video, embedded in the main post.