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TechStuff Classic: The Macintosh Story Part 3

Published Dec 29, 2023, 10:17 AM

From the return of Steve Jobs to the most recent Macs, we look at how the computer has changed over the years.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio.

Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.

I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? It is time for another classic episode, and for the last two Fridays we have been publishing reruns from twenty seventeen of The McIntosh Story. It's a three part series.

So this is the conclusion as of twenty seventeen of the Macintosh Story. So if you missed parts one and two, you can look back at the last two fridays and catch up. The original publication date for this episode was June ninth, twenty seventeen. So let's listen to The Macintosh Story Part three.

So if you don't remember, Part one of this series covered the people responsible for launching the first macin Tosh, which came out in nineteen eighty four. The second part largely focused on the Mac from about nineteen eighty five up through the point where Steve Jobs returned to Apple. So between nineteen eighty five and nineteen ninety seven, Steve Jobs was effectively forced out of the company he had co founded, and then in nineteen ninety seven he returned to Apple. So this third part we're going to pick back up right around that time, which requires me to do a little backtracking just so that we're all on the same page.

So it's nineteen ninety seven.

The Apple CEO at the time at the beginning of nineteen ninety seven was Gil Emilio, and he was in charge during the time where Apple started looking at developing the next generation of operating systems. It had been developing operating systems in house, tried to develop a brand new operating system for the power PC microchip as a partner ship.

With Motorola and IBM.

It became known as the Aim Projects because it was Apple, IBM, and Motorola and it was meant to be a competitor to Intel and the Windows operating system.

And how well that partnership was working, they.

Were looking at acquiring a company in order to get a new operating system on board, and they were looking at two different companies that were each founded by a different former member of the Apple team.

One of those two companies was called Next.

Next was a company that Steve Jobs founded after he had left Apple. He was trying to create a new computer standard, a new type of computer for the educational industry, and Next was the computer system he developed. It was not really a super success. It was modest in its successes. It was a very expensive machine. Again, like many of the stories I've told about the Macintosh, not only was it expensive, but it was hard to get developers to make software for it.

So it was not a bad idea.

It just didn't have a lot of support and it was really expensive, so it didn't get a huge number of purchases out there.

Well.

Apple acquired Next, and as a result they also kind of acquired Steve Jobs.

He came along with the company.

Jobs would then convince the Board of directors that Emilio needed to go. I mean, he had led the charge about acquiring Next, but he had also made some decisions that Steve Jobs viewed as being incredibly negative for the health of Apple as a company. Apple stocks were at a twelve year low when gill Emilio was CEO. The board agreed with Steve Jobs and removed gill Emilio from the position of CEO, and then Steve Jobs essentially became the CEO of Apple, although originally he was just called the interim CEO. He would later become the permanent CEO, but in the meantime he was the interim CEO, which would mean that he was just keeping the seat warm for somebody else. It just turned out he was keeping the seat warm for himself. He didn't turn the company around instantly, but he did get to work right away. The day after he was named interim CEO of Apple, he launched a new project that would really pay off in nineteen ninety eight, and that was the iMac. He started that the day after September sixteenth, nineteen ninety seven. He started that iMac project, So he didn't waste any time once he stepped into that role. Now, nineteen ninety seven was also the year that Apple decided to rename the operating system for the Macintosh. If you remember in our last episode, they had started calling the operating system a pretty simple name. The name was System. So the first mac operating system was just System one point zero. The last version of System using this naming style was System seven point five point five or seven dot five dot five if you prefer. Starting with version seven dot six, they decided to rename it and they went with macOS eight. Now, what's more, this version of the opering system wasn't compatible with the Mac Plus. It was the first of the operating systems that Apple had designed that would not work on the old Mac Plus computer. If you remember, Macplus was the longest lived Macintosh on the market. It had been developed by Apple and manufactured for four years. That's a long time in the computer business to keep making the same model of computer. But they had stopped making mac Pluss for a long time. They just continued to support it by developing operating systems that could still run on a Macplus. Just would update your Macplus to the latest operating system and you're good to go.

Well, Mac OS eight was the first.

Operating system that would not run on a Macplus. So this was sort of the mark of Macplus marching into the sunset. It was over. It was an obsolete form at that point. You could run old stuff on it, but you couldn't run anything new on it.

Now you might wonder why.

They changed the name of the operating system from system to macOS, and I'll explain that in just a minute. But another thing that Apple discontinued continued at this point was its licensing program, or at least it really changed that licensing program that had been rather disastrous for Apple over the last couple of years. So what had happened was Apple had, before Steed Jobs came back on board, Apple had started to license out its technology to other computer manufacturers, which meant that other companies could make computers that were Mac compatible. Essentially, they were called Mac clones, and there were several companies that were doing this, and they were making cheaper versions of Macintosh hardware. It was in a totally different form factor. It didn't look the way a Macintosh looked, but it ran Macintosh operating systems and programs. So you could go out and buy a clone from one of these companies that was fully licensed. They were not breaking the law or anything, and you could run that Mac operating system and software on your Mac clone for much less money than it would cost for you to buy an official Macintosh, which meant that ultimately Apple was undercutting its own sales. Why would you go out and buy an official Apple Mac if you could get a comparable system for much less money somewhere else. Steve Jobs didn't really care for this. He thought it was a terrible idea, and so he wanted to renegotiate all those licensing agreements. So once the term was coming up, you wanted to renegotiate where the royalty fees would be much higher, so that every sale of a Mac clone would guarantee Apple a certain percentage of the revenue. Now, of course, that doesn't make the manufacturing companies all that eager to sign a new agreement. It means cutting into their profit margin, and it would mean that they would have to start raising the prices of their computers to regain that lost profit margin. But that would mean that the higher priced computers would be in direct competition with the Apple computers.

It would just mean a lot.

Of tough decisions on the part of these licensed companies. So there was a lot of resistance on that, and that's when Steve Jobs decided to really make a move. You see, the agreement that they Apple had with these clone companies was that they could continue to make clones of Mac computers as long as they were in the System seven range. If they were in that System seven range, then you could continue to make Mac clones. But once they renamed the operating system from System to macOS, that part of the agreement no longer was valid because it was a different operating system at least in name, and that's what the agreement had said, that as long as it was system, they could continue to make them. It meant that all the macclone companies could not make the most up to date version of the Macintosh, they couldn't include the latest version of the operating system without paying another hefty license fee, and as a result, one by one these licensed companies began to get out of the macclone business, until by the middle of nineteen ninety eight none.

Of them were doing it anymore.

So within about a year, Steve Jobs stopped this cloning program that was going on from its predecessor. Now that in full was a pretty good decision, at least from a sales perspective for Apple. Back in nineteen ninety five, Apple had sold four and a half million Max, so at four and a half million Max nineteen ninety five, but then it started this clone program where it began to license the technology to competitors, and in nineteen ninety six sales of Max dropped to four million units, so five hundred thousand units fewer than the year before. Now, you never want to see the number go down when you are in a company, you always want that graph to go up into the right, not down into the right. That's a bad graph if you're in a sales department. It was worse the following year, in ninety seven, the writing was on the wall because sales had dropped to two point eight million units. So two point eight million from four point five is awful.

Now.

To be fair, there were other mitigating factors that were also affecting this. For example, Microsoft launched Windows ninety five, and that really affected sales at the end of ninety and throughout ninety six and ninety seven. It was a very powerful operating system. It was much friendlier than previous versions of Windows. People said, oh, this is more like what I expect from Apple, and so people began to become more happy with Microsoft's approach to a graphic user interface or guey operating system. So there were other factors besides the fact that there were cheaper clones on the market than Apple computers. But all of this together meant that getting rid of that clone program just made sense. And that's exactly what Steve Jobs was able to do through this renegotiation process and then by changing the operating system name.

Now I'm going to keep talking about Steve.

Jobs because his history and mac history are so closely tied together. Remember, the Macintosh started not as one of Steve Jobs's projects. It was an Apple project, but it wasn't headed by Steve Jobs. It wasn't until Steve Jobs was removed from a Lisa project, and then he decided to get involved with the McIntosh project. But from that point forward, the Macintosh was really affected by Steve Jobs. Even when he was away from the company, a lot of his decisions would end up finding their way into the Macintosh generation after generation. He made some more big changes to Apple.

In nineteen ninety eight.

For one thing, Steve Jobs shut down the Newton project. The Newton was a personal digital assistant that had become the butt of a lot of jokes thanks to ah inconsistent, let's say, imperfect design and implementation. It had a handwriting recognition feature that frequently did not work very well and was made fun of on The Simpsons. Among other things. Steve Jobs also decided to streamline the product lines in the computer and printer divisions. He started to eliminate some of the types of computers they were selling. He thought that they needed to refocus and start selling a more narrow band of computers and make sure that they got that right, as opposed to selling a wide variety of computers that are of varying degrees of quality. Now, one of the lines of computers that survived this process was the Mac. He decided that the Mac had some value to it. It did not need to be completely done away with or replaced with some other name. He wanted to reinvigorate it, but not to completely scrap it and start over. So the biggest jump for Apple was the introduction of the iMac. This was a new attempt for Apple to push into the consumer market in a really big way, and the basic iMac was a pretty decent machine for its era. It had a two hundred and thirty three megahertz G three CPU, had thirty two megabytes of RAM, a four gigabyte hard drive, a CD ROM drive, and an Ati Rage two CS graphics card with two whole megabytes of video memory. Now, Apple originally stated that the iMac could support up to one hundred and twenty eight megabytes of RAM, which users could upgrade. So this was one of the times where you could actually boost the performance of your machine by adding in extra memory to the device yourself, something that Apple would eventually get away from to the point where if you wanted anything upgraded, you're really stuck. Often you don't have an option at all unless you just go out and buy a new computer. Which I mean, if you're selling computers, if that's the business you're in, if you could convince your users to just buy a new computer every time they needed something a little more powerful, that's lucrative.

If there's enough people who will actually do it.

Well, the iMac you could upgrade, and again, Apple originally said that you could upgrade up to one hundred and twenty eight megabytes of RAM, but people found out that you could actually upgrade it beyond that, depending upon on the RAM you bought, because not all RAM chips were compatible, but some were, and in fact, some users found out that depending upon the chip they bought, they could get up to five hundred and twelve megabyte modules working on an iMac, which meant that you could get a maximum amount of RAM of around a gigabyte. Now, that was pretty impressive by nineteen ninety eight standards. The computer and display of the iMac were paired together, so the computer and display were one big unit that you would plug a keyboard and mouse into and it looked a lot like a television set. The display was a fifteen inch display. It did not have the basic one anyway, did not have a floppy disk drive. In fact, this marked a trend for Apple where it began to get away from including floppy drives in their computers, and eventually other computer manufacturers began to follow suit and stopped including floppy drives in their machines. So this was the beginning of the end for the floppy disk drive as a storage media. It began to go into obsolescence. But the display on the iMac was a cathode ray tube display a CRT. I talked a lot about CRTs in the History of TV podcasts, So if you want to know how a cathode ray tube works, listen to my History of Television podcasts because I talk about in detail there. But the thing to remember is that these machines are take up a lot of space. So these are those big, clunky TVs from yesterday that you might have seen, not like flat screens. Those are you know, either LCD or LED or plasma displays. But the original IMAX for CRTs, so they were a little hefty. As a result, they could support a resolution originally anyway of oneenty twenty four by seven sixty eight or ten twenty four by seven sixty eight if you prefer now. Later in nineteen ninety eight, Apple introduced an updated version of the iMac that had better graphics card with more video memory, and the most recent version of the Mac operating system, which was at that point macversion Mac OS version eight point five.

And on top of the iMac.

Apple also introduced new power books in their laptop lineup, which included a curvy laptop that was called the Wall Street power Book. And I this every now and then Apple would come out with a product that I just don't get the esthetics. If you don't know what a Wall Street PowerBook looks like, do an image search on Apple Wall Street power Book. Because this thing just does not appeal to me. It was kind of funky. It also suffered from a design flaw. In the early models, the hinges were a little weak, which meant that once they wore out, the laptop screen wouldn't stay in place anymore. It would start to fall over, which is pretty inconvenient for a laptop. So it wasn't the best product to ever come out of Apple. The Wall Street line also had a few other issues. For one thing, it was noticeably slower than the desktop powermas that were coming out at the time. And you'd expect that to a point. But when you're selling these laptops at a premium price and you're saying this is the field version of the desktops that you can get for your basic home setup, it's not great when it works significantly slower than the desktop version. All Right, So we've come up to our first little break here. Now after the break, we're going to talk more about some interesting developments from Apple, including some changes in port systems, as well as some interesting esthetic choices to really set Apple apart from the herd. But before we get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

All right. So around this time.

Apple introduced a new protocol that really took a large part in the Macintosh from that point forward, and that was FireWire.

Now, originally you had to.

Get FireWire expansion cards so that you could get a FireWire port in your mac but over time, FireWire would become a standard port in the Macintosh lines for several years. Now, if you don't know what FireWire is because it's largely been replaced at this stage. It is a protocol, a technology for moving data from one device to another, and it's meant to move a large amount of data in a small amount of time. So it's really essentially similar to other types of ports that you would find on computers, like Scuzzy ports back in the day, or us B ports or USBC today used to be three point zero style ports.

Now.

At the time, FireWire was a big advance from Scuzzy, at least your basic Scuzzy. Unless you were using top of the line Scuzzy ports with the best cables that money could buy, you weren't maxing out your speeds that high. In fact, Scuzzy Ultra had about a ten megabytes per second top speed for data transfers, which is not bad except if you're trying to transfer very large files let's say video files are very high quality audio files.

That was a little slow.

And remember that the macline of computers was frequently being used by video producers audio producers for a lot of creative applications like that, as opposed to your productivity software, which was typically viewed as a Windows machine duty Max were taking on all these really high end and very demanding applications when it comes to audio and video production, so they needed something that would allow you to transfer data at faster speeds.

Now, firewires initial.

Capabilities stretched up to the four hundred megabits per second range. Now megabits versus megabytes very different.

Right.

A bit is one single unit of information, it's either a zero or a one.

A byte is.

Eight of those collectively, So four hundred megabits is equivalent to around fifty megabytes per second, but that's like five times faster than Scuzy Ultra was. So Apple was looking at reinventing data transfers from device to device using the FireWire as their primary protocol, and also over time they had the plan and they implemented this to increase the capability of FireWire to move at greater and greater speeds, so over the generations of the technology, it could move more information in a shorter amount of time, so it would become a standard port on max from about two thousand and one to two thousand and eight and God's development in the late nineties, but really got wide rollout by about two thousand and one and over the next seven years, it was standard on almost every Mac that came out from Apple. Also, in nineteen ninety eight, Apple discontinued quite a few machines from their lineup. They officially stopped supporting all of the Motorola processor MAX that preceded the switch to the power PC microchip. Now, remember Motorola still had involvement in developing the power PC chips, but the chips that were in Macintosh computers prior to power PC chips were all Motorola chips. So at that point Apple said, well, we're not going to support those anymore. Everything is going to now depend upon this power PC microchip because that's what we're putting in our MAX from this point forward. They also discontinued support for the Apple two line, which is pretty incredible that they had supported Apple two all the way up to.

Nineteen ninety eight.

Now, they had discontinued manufacturing the Apple two long before that, but they continued to support it all the way until nineteen ninety eight when they officially ended support. That really tells you how long that Apple two's life was, because remember that was introduced. Apple two came out like in the late seventies, early eighties. So the fact that it lasted all the way to nineteen ninety eight and at least some capacity in Apple support was amazing. So it was really the last hurrah for the Apple two. I still love the Apple two, and I wouldn't mind finding one just to mess around with one, but I doubt that I could easily find one in good working order at this stage. I wish I could, because I loved the Apple two. Now, the following year, nineteen ninety nine, Apple released some new Imax. Like the previous episodes, I'm not going to cover every single model Apple released, which would just make this episode incredibly dull. But one thing I want to mention is nineteen ninety nine because the Imax came out in a selection of new colors. It wasn't just this beige computer that had been kind of Apple's trademark ever since the old Apple two days. You could get a selection of different colors which included blue, purple, orange, green, or red, but Apple called them different names.

You could get an iMac.

And blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime, and strawberry.

And I gotta be honest with.

You guys, even though I'm the dude from tech stuff who from the beginning has been accused of having an anti Mac bias. And even though these machines are woefully outdated by today's standards, I really still big the designs of these early Imax, these nineteen ninety nine Imax and these bright colors.

They're really appealing to me. I would love to have one in grape or lime.

So I guess this episode is ultimately a Jonathan wish list of old computers that are obsolete, that are no longer supported, that don't run any useful operating system or software at this point, but I still kind of want so the Apple two and a nineteen ninety nine iMac are on that list. There's just something really appealing about those vibrant color schemes. So look up nineteen ninety nine imas to get a look at what these these brightly colored machines look like back in the day, and maybe you'll agree that they're They've got a certain appeal to them. They are big, clunky machines because these are not flat panel displays. These are still CRT.

Machines, but I don't know, they just seem kind of friendly to me. Now.

Apple also introduced a desktop tower style computer called the Yosemite PowerMac G three.

Some people refer to this one.

As the Smurf, and the reason they do that is the case was blue, it also had white accents, and it had sort of a transparent cover over the white aspects. The design included a drawbridge like door that could fold down to the right of the computer that would allow you to add expansions to the actual motherboard, and you could even open the computer while it was working, like you could have the computer on and open it up and it would still run because all the modules were still connected to that hinged door. It's kind of neat, not really any point of doing that, but it's neat that you could do it. Apple offered a three hundred megahertz version initially in this Yosemite computer, but by June nineteen ninety nine, so within a few months of introducing it, they discontinued the three hundred megahertz version and instead relied on a more powerful four hundred and fifty megahertz model. They also used a similar design for their Power Machine like this was for their high end users who were hoping to use it for like video production and that sort of stuff. This was Apple's PowerMac G four, and the US government initially called this computer this desktop personal computer, high end personal computer, but still a personal computer. They called it a supercomputer. Now why did they call a personal computer a supercomputer. Well, this was the first Mac that could perform one billion floating operations per second, or otherwise known as a gigaflop, and at the time, gigaflop was considered a capability that was in the supercomputer range. So the US government said, technically, this PowerMac is a supercomputer. The case was essentially identical to the Yosemite tower I just described, only this one was white, graphite gray and had silver accents. And I guess this was meant to make it look more professional and business like and less sort of sleek and fun.

I suppose it still.

Was a very nice design. The top level Max in this model line introduced a new type of motherboard called the saw tooth, which allowed for a more powerful machine overall. You could fit more memory, you could fit a faster processor, you could fit a better graphics card to it, so it was a more powerful machine overall. But there were various lines in this G four model, so the entry level did not have this saw tooth motherboard. It was only the higher end models that did. The entry level had a motherboard that was modeled after the Yosemite design, so it had a slightly less powerful approach. Now, this was a particularly potent machine. If you've got the top of the line G four power Mac, then you had a machine that was comparable or actually faster than a pen Tum three processor computer from the IBM compatible lines, and PENDM three's were known to be screaming back in the day. Today they're slow as a snail, but back in the day that was cutting edge if you were going the Intel Slash Windows route. So the Apple computers were no slouch. They could go head to head with the fastest machines coming out from Intel's side. But Apple did do something that was kinda lousy to their customers when they introduced this PowerMac G four, and it was all because of a supply chain issue. We're going to take a quick break, but we will be back with more about the Macintosh story in just a moment.

So one of the.

Things that computer manufacturers in general have run into are these supply chain problems where one element or maybe more than one element in some cases, is being held.

Up up by the.

Suppliers of the specific components that are going into the computer. In this case, it was the microprocessors. Apple was finding that Motorola could not supply five hundred megahertz processors at the rate that Apple needed them, which was unfortunate because Apple had a bunch of orders for five hundred megahertz PowerMac G four computers. So Apple did something that a lot of people found a bit questionable. The company scaled back all their models by fifty megaherts, so instead of selling a five hundred megahertz machine as their top machine, they went with a four hundred and fifty megahertz machine as their top machine. This refers to the processor speed, so how fast is the CPU inside the powermax four hundred and fifty mega hurts? Obviously fifty mega hurts slower than a five hundred megahertz machine. And then four hundred and fifty mega hurtz machines were scaled back to four hundred megahurts, so on and so forth, so everything took like a half step back from where it was supposed to be. But Apple did not change the prices of their models, so the top model was still the same price even though it had a less powerful processor than what was originally planned. And Apple customers got a tiny bit peeved about this, understandably so that they were paying a premium price for something that was less powerful than what they were promised. So this was a pretty nasty little situation for Apple. Fortunately the company was able to rectify things in like a week, but it still was a rough week over at Apple Computers due to this little kerfuffle. And yeah, so people who talk about Apple being a company that sets a premium price, it's stuff like this particular incident that reinforces that idea. Now, the Wall Street power Book ended up taking a bow. In nineteen ninety nine, they discontinued the Wall Street and decided to launch a new model of power Book that was code named Lombard. And this was the first power book Mac to have a USB port on it, so it was revolutionary at the time, and it was the fastest laptop line at the time of its debut, not fastest for Apple. The PowerBook Mac that was code named Lombard was the fastest laptop on the market period when it came out. It also had a bronze translucent keyboard which I think actually looks more brown than bronze and was in my mind, really unattractive. That's my own personal perspective on it. Maybe that's that anti Mac bias kicking in again. But the specs were really impressive, even though I found the esthetic to be not terribly attractive. Taking a page from their success with the iMac, Apple also introduced a laptop for the education market called the iBook. This was a bit chunkier and more rugged than their PowerBook line. It was less powerful, didn't need to be as powerful as the power Book, but it still had a lot of curved lines in the design. I kind of dig the eyebook. It does look a little unwieldy, especially compared to the laptops that Apple produces today, but it has again a kind of a friendly look to it.

I think. Now.

One thing that really helped Apple out at this time, something that was completely outside of Apple's.

Control, was a little thing called the Y two K scare.

And you may, oh, my drugs not remember what this was about things changing so scory and people like to forget, But the Y two K bug or the y two K scare was all about how some lazy computer programmers and computer scientists had really made a terrible design decision that frightened the pants off a whole bunch of people back in the late nineties.

So here's that's what it was all about.

I'm going to give you a quick summary because I could do a full episode.

In fact, I have done a full episode about Y two K.

The problem was that programmers were a little lazy back in the day, and when some programmers were designing various architectures, they took a shortcut when it came to designating years, and they used a two digit method of designating the year. So if you put eight nine as the two digits, then the computer knew you meant nineteen eighty nine. But you're probably already spotting the problem, which is that once you got to nineteen ninety nine, you're going.

To roll over to two thousand.

But computers only had two digits to tell what the year was going to be, so ninety nine to zero zero could be interpreted as nineteen hundred instead of two thousand, and a lot of different computer processes could screw up. As a result, you had things that were pretty easy to imagine going haywire, like a financial software that is calculating stuff like interest, Well, if it rolls back one hundred years, that's really going.

To mess things up.

But people were worried about all sorts of stuff, like computers just stop maybe they could stop working, and not just computers, but other devices too that were working on microchips that had this kind of architecture. So people were worried about getting stuck in elevators or what would happen on a plane.

Well, Apple didn't have.

To worry about this because their programmers didn't use that convention when they were designating years, so they didn't have to worry about running out of time with two digits. So with time continuing to pass as it does and two thousand coming along, people began to think, well, maybe we should get Apple computers because they don't suffer the same weakness as other computers that have this two digit problem. So, yeah, it doesn't do you any good if your computer thinks it's nineteen hundred and suddenly decides to put on an Edwardian suit and start talking about the latest George Bernard Shaw play. That doesn't help you out if you want to do some modern computing. And the macOS didn't have that issue. So people started to look at Macintosh computers and sales increased for Apple. Now, whether or not that had anything to do with the y two K bug is hard to say because there's so many other variables that play here, but it's probably something that factored into at least a few people's decision to switch over to the Macintosh platform because.

It was y two K proof. In fact, power PC.

Max, not the old Motorola ones, but the power Pc Max actually allow computers to keep good time up to the year twenty nine and forty, so we're good for now. Even if you're using an obsolete Mac you don't have to worry about the operating system suddenly thinking it's nineteen hundred, because it's going to keep on chugging along until the hardware breaks. Because I guarantee you that hardware will break before the year twenty nine and forty, and if it doesn't, I'm guessing you won't be around. That's not a you know, that's not a slam against you. It's just I'm recording this in twenty seventeen, and I don't think people in the year twenty thousand are still.

Listening to tech stuff. If you are, thanks for listening. You're awesome.

Now, In case you were curious, the world did not end in two thousand spoiler alert. But Apple did introduce some new stuff that year, like the Cube. This was a desktop computer that was shaped like a cube. It was five hundred and eighty one cubic inches and it was a really powerful machine for its time. This was also the year that Apple previewed the macOS ten using the Roman numeral for ten, which is an X. Now that led me, the ignorant person that I was at the time, to call it MACOSX, which got lots of people laughing at me for calling it mac OSX. But if you're gonna be using a bunch of letters in the name of your product, don't use a Roman numeral to design its operating system number.

So it's macOS ten.

And sometimes I still say MACOSX because sometimes I just like to have a little fun at my own expense. Now, moving ahead to two thousand and one, Apple again boosted the power.

Of its various computers. Nothing new there.

Pretty much every year Apple would update its line of existing computers and increase their abilities by putting in more powerful processors, putting in more memory, giving it a few different ports, so again I'm not going to cover all of those changes, so I'm just going to cover the big, big differences. They also introduced some new color schemes in their iMac line, so you could buy the Blue Dalmatian or flower Power. These actually had designs, not just a solid color. They actually had you know, designs on them that I find almost but not quite completely unappealing.

So I don't want either of those.

If anyone's listening and they want to get me the wish list of items I've talked about, like Apple Two's and the iMac you know, lime or the iMac Grape, that's cool, but don't get me a blue Dalmati or flower Power.

I don't need them. They're just not for me.

The company also released a lighter, more powerful iBook sometimes called the Ice Book, and Apple created the quicksilver version of its PowerMac G four line, And they also opened up their first two Apple stores in two thousand and one. Now there's hundreds of the things, but back in two thousand and one they were brand new.

It was the first time.

Apple had opened up a retail space of its own, and of course that ends up being a popular destination for people all around the world. There are Apple stores that get crowds of tourists because they are particularly interesting in their design and layout. Oh. That's also the year Apple launched the next product to help define the company as its new identity.

That would be the iPod.

But we talked about the iPod in our History of MP three P podcast, so I'm not going to.

Cover it here, but just to say that two thousand.

And one marked a real turning point in Apple's history, because that was the moment when Apple began to really expand beyond personal computers and printers and workstations. They began to get into personal electronics in a serious way. The Newton was kind of a failure, but the iPod was totally the opposite. iPod was a runaway success, particularly once you got a couple of generations in and really took off once iTunes became a real player in the data management or music management space. Now, two thousand and two was more of the same, with tweaked computer designs, some boosted performance, and not much else. Apple did create a new line of macs for educational institutions. They called it the eMac E for Education. It was housed in an iMac like CRT style case, the stream was flat, it wasn't curved, but it still was a cathode ray tube that was providing the actual image that you saw in there, so big bulky case, in fact, really big and bulky. The basic model weighed fifty pounds, but it cost a little less than one thousand bucks, So Apple was really trying to price these computers in a way where education systems would be able to shell out the bucks to buy them, because again Max were pretty expensive and a lot of education systems just didn't have the budget to buy Macintosh computers. So this was Apple's attempt to kind of get into that market with a slightly less powerful computer. In two thousand and three, Apple began introducing Max that were no longer backwards compatible with the old classic Mac operating system, and this began the March of Obsolescens for those old OS builds. The company continued its trend of updating machines, but again there were no major revolutions that happened. In two thousand and three, Apple did introduce the PowerMac G five with the IBM power Pc nine seventy CPU that gave the Mac a processor speed of between one point six to two point zero gigahertz, depending upon the model that you bought. This computer generated so much heat that it required nine cooling fans to manage it. Nine fans inside of this computer so that it would not overheat. The case was also made out of aluminum, which is a very effective conductor of heat. Which is good because a lot of heat gets generated inside the machine, it transfers out to the case, and the case transfers it out to the air around it. But yeah, these machines got pretty toasty. Well, we've got one last section to go through to talk about the history of the Macintosh and get up to present day. But before I jump into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.

Jumping out into two thousand.

And four, the big news that year for Apple was a redesign of the iMac Now. The older CRT versions were replaced that year with a new flat panel display version. The computer was in the same housing as the display, with an optical drive to the right of the screen and all the ports helpfully on the back of the darn thing. I hated that design decision, by the way, to have all the ports on this computer on the back. I understand it was necessary for the layout for the motherboard, but man, it was so irritating to have to plug everything into the back of the machine in order to use it, including stuff like your mouse and your keyboard, that kind of thing. But this looked like a flat panel television on a stand. The entire computer was housed inside of this thing. Big dramatic change from those big, bulky CRT sets of the iMac before, and a totally new design, brand new aesthetic move for Apple, and it kind of started Apple down the pathway of that smooth white two thousand and one ish aesthetic that they became known for. A lot of Apple's products would end up following that same sort of design philosophy, but this was one of the earliest ones. And I actually had an iMac in this style, although it wasn't a two thousand and four iMac it was a bit later. It might have been as ley as two thousand and six, but I definitely had one of these max. It was the only Mac I've ever owned. I liked it just fine. I just never bought another one.

So kind of cool.

This two thousand and one ish approach very different from the lollipop colorful approach of the crt Imax from just a few years earlier. And in two thousand and five we got the Mac Mini. Now by we, I mean the general Wei. I never owned Mac Minie, but this was a really cool idea too. This was a desktop computer in miniature, and it didn't have a built in display. There was no display that came along with it. But you would get this tiny little computer, and I mean it was tiny. It was six and a half inches per side and two inches tall and that was the whole desktop and you would just connect that to an existing display using whichever port you needed. And it was bargain priced, at least as far as Apple is concerned. It was on sale for four hundred and ninety nine dollars. That's dirt cheap with Apple. So it gave people the opportunity to own a Mac as long as they already had a display, or they didn't mind buying a display and a keyboard and all that other stuff, or a bargain price compared to the other Macs that were on the market at that same time. One drawback to this design was that you couldn't expand it. You couldn't add more memory or change it in any meaningful way, because it was so small and everything was packed so tightly together that there was no room to expand it at all, so if you bought one, you were pretty much stuck with the initial specs that it came out with. That same year, Steve Jobs made a big announcement, so this is again two thousand and five. He said that future Max would move away from power Pc chips that had provided Mac processing power for the last decade or so, and instead Apple would make a move to Intel. Intel would supply the future CPUs to all Macintosh computers that would be released after that point. Those first Mac Intel's would not go on sale until the following year, and it worried a lot of Mac users because not all software is compatible with various microprocessor architecture. So if you have operating system and software that was designed to work on the power Pc platform, it might not work on the Intel platform. And if those programs are important to you and your business or whatever you're using your Mac for, then upgrade to a new Macintosh could be harmful to you. So for example, here at how Stuff Works, we use very specific editing suites.

For our video and audio stuff like this podcast and video series.

We use very specific types of software for that on Macintosh computers. If we were to upgrade to a new processor that could not run those old programs, we would be kind of stuck. Now, Apple's solution for this was to release a power PC emulator. It's called Rosetta, named after the Rosetta stone, which of course was used to help translate hiro glyphics back in the day. So Rosetta was an emulator, which means it's a program that simulates another type of technology, in this case another type of microprocessor, the power PC style microprocessor, and this would allow you to continue to use some of that legacy software even on these Intel powered machines. Also in two thousand and five, Apple introduced.

The Mighty Mouse. You can't see this audio listeners, but.

I'm making a very unimpressed face into the webcam I'm using for the Twitch stream of this episode. Remember you can always go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff if you want to watch an episode live as I record it. Well, the Mighty Mouse was a mouse that had more than just one button capability. The Macintosh was famous for shipping with a mouse that only had one button, and if you wanted other types of functionality, You had to hold down a key on the keyboard while pressing down on the button. The Mighty Mouse actually had ability to use the left side of the mouse or the right side of the mouse, or you could squeeze both sides and create three different types of controls with this mouse, or three different types of commands with one mouse.

So it still felt like one button, but.

You could press the left side of the button down, or press the right side of the button down, or squeeze it, and that would allow you to execute different commands in various programs. Why not just make a mouse with extra buttons, with each button dedicated to a specific function.

Because Johnny Ive.

Who's a chief designer over at Apple, and Steve Jobs hate buttons, I guess they just don't like them. They like the aesthetic of a smooth, buttonless type of device, even if it means that they are stressing form over functionality. Now, maybe again that's my anti Mac bias, but I like functionality over form. I want something to work first and then look nice. I don't want it to look nice and then just work. Okay, but that just shows the difference of approach I take to technology than Apple takes.

Now, Apple would.

Argue that they value both equal, that something needs to look amazing and work perfectly. I would argue the Mighty Mouse does not white achieve that. That's my own personal opinion as someone who had a Mighty Mouse and an iMac and I despise that mouse a lot, but again antimac bias, so don't pay too much attention to me. The company also began to ship dual core Power Max at this time, using dual core processors. This is part of a new era in computing at this point where we started to see these multicore processors find their way into consumer computers. Now, I'll likely do a full episode about what multicore core processors are and how they work and why it's important at a later date. I've covered it a little bit in previous Tech Stuff podcasts, but just know that it would take a full episode to really explain this. But it was a big advance for Macintosh computers at the time.

Now, in two.

Thousand and six, the first Intel Max started to hit store shelves, and the biggest drawback for Mac users was that these machines wouldn't support any classic macOS applications. So if you had those legacy apps you depended on, you couldn't run them on those machines. You had to keep an older Mac around, or you had to create an emulator to run them. And that's the problem in general with legacy systems. As the hardware gets faster, sometimes you lose support for older software, and that's still a problem if you really depend on that older software to do something. Like I said before, with audio and video production here at how stuff works, that could be an issue. Anyone who used garage Band with Macintosh computers knows that the various evolutions of the garage Band software and the changes to the Mac operating system in Mac processors meant that sometimes you would end up losing features that you thought were absolutely important for you, and you had to stick with older, obsolete machines just to get stuff done. The company also introduced a new line in laptops. They called this new line the MacBook Pro, which of course you can still find today. These are higher end Mac laptops, so these are meant for power users. They're more expensive, they have more features, they're they've got faster processors. It's essentially you know your sports vehicle version of the Macintosh laptops. People really hated this name when it first came out. The MacBook Pro was replacing the old PowerBook line, and people really liked PowerBook and they hated the name MacBook. But today MacBook is standard, and I think most people probably don't even remember the old power Books, and they probably don't remember that they put up a fuss when it went from PowerBook to MacBook. The moral of that story is people hate change, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. Now, nothing of real significance happened in the Macintosh history in two thousand and seven, other than Apple making flat screen Imax and brushed aluminum instead of white plastic.

So let's skip ahead to two thousand and eight.

I'm not going to spend time on a year where not really anything happened. Now, this was the year that Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air, which was a big deal in a small package. It was the thinnest MacBook at that point, and at.

It was amazing.

It was three quarters of an inch thick, which is incredibly thin for a laptop, especially one as powerful as the MacBook Air, and it weighed in at three pounds. It had no optical drive, so you couldn't insert any kind of CD or DVD into it. But it did have a sweet aluminum body, and it had one port on it, which was a single USB two point zero connector port, and that was behind a little door. You had to open the little door to access this port because ports, I guess, spoiled the computer's lines otherwise. Also, if you wanted to add more ports, it would have meant having to create a thicker version of the MacBook Air, which was not what Steve Jobs had in mind when he actually, you know, when he launched this project to create a super thin MacBook, so it ended up having just one port. From that point forward, Max and their various lines received regular updates and a refresh to their appearances, but that was mostly it. Right, the future MacBooks would largely follow simple trends in that you'd get.

Faster processors, better graphics. Ports would change.

Eventually you would get better resolution on your displays as well. They'd get more expensive, they'd get thinner, and they'd get lighter. But that's pretty much the trend. There wasn't anything really revolutionary after this point, nothing that jumped completely out of the line of what you would come to expect from Apple. There were a couple of exceptions, a couple standouts. The MacBook Pro in twenty twelve came in a model with a retina display that was the first MacBook Pro to actually have a retina display that's similar to the display you find in iPhones of that time, is a very high definition, high resolution display. And in twenty thirteen, Apple introduced a cylindrical case for a new Mac Pro, so you suddenly had a tower that was a cylinder instead of a rectangle style, which was what was common at the time. And the cylinder was gorgeous. It looks like it belongs in some sort of science fiction film. It's kind of a high tech supercomputer sort of look to it. And this Mac Pro was really meant to work as a server or a workstation. It wasn't necessarily meant to be your own personal computer. They were pretty darn expensive when they came out, and it was a really unique esthetic something that stood out. However, I can tell you that some of the video team here at how Stuff Works have a few strong opinions about the performance of this specific model of the MacPro, and they are not entirely positive. May just be our own experiences with them, but something that they found somewhat frustrating is a good word searching for a word that wouldn't be too harsh.

Frustrating is a good one.

But this was another example of Apple taking a dramatic departure from the general esthetics that were prevalent in personal computers at the time and trying to make it their own. One thing else I need to mention before we conclude, really, obviously a moment that really changed the direction of Apple overall and the Mac in particular, was the death of Steve Jobs.

He passed away in twenty eleven.

We did an episode called One More Thing all about Steve Jobs where we talked about this, and this obviously had a monumental impact on the company as a whole. He had already stepped down as CEO earlier before his passing, but he was still very much a president set Apple up until a couple of months before his death, and he had handed the reins over to Tim Cook to become the new CEO. But it had been Jobs, along with a top tier level of designers like Johnny Ive, who had really set the direction of Apple and the esthetic direction for products like the Macintosh computer line and the MAX that followed. It would be another couple of years before Jobs's direct influence would no longer be a major factor in MAX. And this is largely because the products that launch on any given year have been in development for a while behind the scenes. So while Steve Jobs passed away in twenty eleven, it would be another year or two before his direct influence was no longer a living component of the MAX that followed. But this did mean that Apple started having to produce computers without that guidance from Steve Jobs himself, and that some people ended up pointing out as being an issue. Some people say that the changes to the macline post Steve Jobs haven't been terribly inspirational or innovative. Others have said that been more frustrating as Apple has continued to change things up. Remember in two thousand and eight they stopped making FireWire a standard on all Macintosh computers.

By a couple of years.

Later, they started moving toward well, actually really this year they started moving in last year they started moving toward USB s ports and abandoning things like the thunderbolt connectors. So there have been changes, a lot of them have been changes that some Apple users have been very upset about because they feel like Apple is ignoring consumer needs and is instead demanding that consumers follow in the footsteps that they are forging, which is mixing metaphors.

But never mind it.

But I would say that that's been Apple's history all along. Apple has made very strong decisions to go in certain directions that require users to follow suit or they get left behind. That's the history of Apple. It might be frustrating, but it's not out of character. It is something that has been part of the company culture from the earliest days, I would argue.

And that concludes the three part Macintosh story as of June ninth, twenty seventeen. I'll have to check and see if I've done updates since then, because clearly a lot can happen in six years seven years, so we will look and see what kind of updates we can do. Maybe it could be a shorter episode, because a lot of the really traumatic stuff happened all the way through its early years, right with the formation of of the Macintosh in the first place, and a lot of the things that have happened since then have been largely iterative. Although you could argue that Apple developing its own processors is a huge part that we should touch on, So maybe I will do an update in the near future. In the meantime, I hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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