Apple At 40: 12 Products That Changed Computing Forever
Apple reached its 40th anniversary this month, no mean feat in a tech industry littered with the names of long-gone giants. Here's a look at the 12 products that defined the company, and changed what we know as computing in the process.
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Apple celebrated 40 years of existence on April 1. It's a significant anniversary in any industry (and the ruby anniversary, if you're a traditional sort), but it's especially meaningful in an industry like computers. The list of companies that have come and gone since April 1, 1976, is long and contains names that were once absolute titans of the industry.
Apple's survival was not always a given. There have been several points in its history at which it was all but given up for dead by industry pundits. Even now, when it remains one of the larger corporations on the planet, there are plenty of people scrambling to be the first to write its obituary.
An anniversary like this is replete with publications writing about the major milestones in the company's history, and who am I to buck a trend? Instead of looking at major moments, though, I thought I'd look at 12 major products that have defined the company's history. Each has had a role to play in making the company what it is today.
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My goal here isn't to catalog every product Apple has released, or even every product that has had (or could have) a major impact on the company and its customers. There have been storage products and networking products, lots of software, and even complete platforms (Apple Watch) that aren't here.
Check back in another 10 years to see whether the world has changed enough to warrant their inclusion.
Many of us in the industry can define our personal computer use either by the Apple products we've used, or the Apple products we've reacted to by turning solidly to something else. I can't claim I was along for the Apple ride from the time of the Apple I, but I envied the Apple II and was at the Boston Computer Society in February 1984 when the Macintosh came out of the bag. I have my set of memories around Apple products -- what are yours? I would love to hear your memories -- and I promise to share some more of mine in the comments section below.
When Steve Wozniak went to the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, he didn't dream of starting a huge company. He did dream of building a working computer, though, and he did exactly that. The machine that he and friend Steve Jobs built and sold to the Byte Shop wouldn't be considered an advanced "maker" project these days. But in 1976, when it came to market, it had more complete on-board I/O than its competition, and was available in a couple of kit forms (of varying degrees of completeness.)
Where the Apple I was a hobbyist's computer, the Apple II was a consumer product, one that helped launch the personal computer revolution as a significant cultural force. Launched at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, an Apple II would remain part of Apple's product lineup for the next 16 years.
The Apple II was a complete computer system, one that didn't require the buyer to wield a soldering iron or touch chips on a board. While it wasn't over-powered, even for its early days, it had a built-in keyboard, built-in color graphics, and a built-in programming language. After floppy disk drives became available (supplanting the original tape drive storage) loading software and storing data became routine -- and the personal computer was off and running.
The Apple Lisa may be the ultimate example of a computer that didn't have to be successful to be very influential. It had an advanced graphical interface, a high level of computing power, and an astoundingly high price tag. The Lisa also had a number of internal architectural features -- such as preemptive multitasking and protective memory -- that wouldn't make it to the Macintosh operating system until MacOS X, some 15 years later. On the other hand the total ecosystem provided incredible hurdles for developers to clear, including the fact that you couldn't develop Lisa software on a Lisa computer.
While the Macintosh OS didn't come from the Lisa OS, there were significant similarities, most of them revolving around the graphical user interface. That GUI, and the one-button mouse, were the most obvious legacies of the Lisa for the products that were to come.
The Macintosh was the first personal computer designed for a graphical user interface that sold in significant quantities. It was introduced in 1984, with a Super Bowl ad that holds a permanent place in the annals of advertising history. The original Macintosh featured a slower processor, less memory, and less storage than IBM PC clones available for a similar price. It sold on the basis of the GUI and the idea that users didn't want a computer -- they wanted to complete tasks. In many ways, it's the argument that Apple has been making to the market ever since.
The Macintosh has never been the market leader in personal computers, rarely cracking into double-digit market share. It has, on the other hand, had a profound influence on the way we all use computers. Prior to the Macintosh, we were all happily using text-based user interface. Today, a preference for the command-line interface is as certain a sign of geek cred as exists. Apple has continued to develop the Mac -- both the current operating system and current hardware are vastly changed from the original -- but it's still the heart of Apple's computing business.
A new way of computing really demands a new way of programming, and Apple delivered with HyperCard in 1987. By now, we're all accustomed to the way that hyperlinks work. But, prior to 1991, this method of moving between documents was limited to people familiar with the work of Ted Nelson. Well, those people and the ones who had been using Apple's HyperCard to develop applications that displayed information without requiring anything in the way of normal programming.
HyperCard stacks (as programs were known) were used in education, and could be thought of as a way of organizing information without having to dip into database programming. This was accomplished in ways similar to those in which QuickBase, FileMaker, and other "minimal coding" databases work today. Its use of hypermedia links to move between cards influenced the developers of the World Wide Web, making it another product that had an influence beyond its market share. HyperCard has been gone for years, but its legacy is still seen every time you open a web browser.
In the late 1980s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) were a new idea. The Palm Pilot was still 10 years in the future, and most people kept up with contacts, schedules, task lists, and miscellaneous information in paper notebooks from Day-Timer, Filofax, Franklin, or similar companies. Into the paper fray came the Newton MessagePad, a handheld device that was expensive, relatively large, and underpowered for what it tried to do. Its handwriting recognition was famously inaccurate, and the product was finally killed by Steve Jobs after he returned to the company in 1997.
With all that, many of the Newton's concepts later found a home in more successful products, like the iPhone and iPad. More than that, the idea of a handheld device that could be programmed to do more than keep basic information was an early step in the direction of the apps (and app ecosystem) that would come to define mobile devices in the 21st century.
Throughout its history, Apple has shown a willingness to make a dramatic technology turn that carves a dividing line between existing products and those to come. It happened twice in Macintosh hardware, with changes from Motorola to PowerPC processors, then from PowerPC to Intel. And it happened with operating systems when Macintosh OS 9 became Mac OS X. The look, the feel, the operating system internals, were all different, and for Apple there was no looking back.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple after the NeXT acquisition, very little of the NeXT technology came with him. One thing that did, though, was the NeXTSTEP operating system, built on the Mach kernel. Mach wasn't Unix (nor was it Linux), but it contained pieces gleaned from BSD and was a very Unix-like platform. Mach is still the basis of OS X as it continues to evolve.
From 1976 until 2000, Apple was a computer company. In the first year of the new millennium, the company added something that would change its business for a long time to come: music. First came software to store and play digital copies of music. After iTunes, though, came something to carry your music with you -- the iPod.
Portable music players weren't new. Sony had built a huge business on its Walkman series of cassette and CD players beginning in the early 1980s. Digital music players already existed, as well. What Apple brought to the market was a combination of striking design and an attention to user interface that hadn't been seen previously in the market. Apple was suddenly selling small handheld devices by the millions, and the iPod wouldn't be the last.
iTunes predated the iPod by several months, and as Apple expanded its lineup of mobile devices the online store expanded right along with it. When Apple launched its next mobile device, the framework was in place for an online store for mobile apps. The store has, arguably, been as responsible for the company's success as anything it's done with hardware.
Today, the idea of an app store has spread far beyond Apple. Microsoft and Google each have them for their mobile device platforms. Thousands of enterprises use the term App Store to describe the method employees use to get the applications they need for their work computers and handheld devices.
Six years after the introduction of the iPod, Apple expanded its mobile device lineup with the iPhone, the first cell phone from a major computer manufacturer. Since then, critics, pundits, and fans have argued about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the hardware and its supported software, iOS. Meanwhile, consumers have bought the smartphones by the hundreds of millions.
The iPhone has become Apple's primary revenue driver, and has spawned competitors that vie with it in terms of size, features, and cost. From an enterprise standpoint, the iPhone is largely responsible for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, in which employees are willing to buy their own hardware rather than take what IT was willing to provide and support.
In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet device that was generally seen as an expensive toy that few people would want. More than a quarter-billion units later, the iPad and its competitors have dramatically changed the look, feel, and function of personal computers used by consumers and enterprise employees alike.
iPads have become common devices for those whose primary computer tasks involve consuming media and perform relatively limited data input. The surprising thing for many IT professionals is how many users have found their computer habits fall into precisely those patterns. Email, web applications, and communications are all suited to tablets and the iPad (with its curved edges and App Store ecosystem) remains a very popular platform for those who don't need everything a "real" computer provides.
There's a difference between transportable, portable, and mobile when it comes to computing devices. Laptop computers were firmly locked into the first two categories until Apple introduced the MacBook Air in 2008. The company drove the point home with the second release of the MacBook Air in 2011 -- a release that saw a 13-inch model featuring SSD storage instead of the earlier spinning disk, and an 11-inch model that was roughly the size of an iPad when the MacBook Air was closed.
Since then, Apple has continued to refine the MacBook Air to the point that it offers more than eight hours of battery operation at performance levels sufficient for most common personal productivity tasks. MacBook Air spawned a class of competitors known as "ultra-books" and remains one of the best-selling examples of the type.
It's notable that all of the products mentioned in this list were developed and released prior to Steve Jobs' death in 2011. There are many in the IT industry who openly question whether Apple will be able to continue its history of innovation without Jobs at the helm. While it's too early to know the answer, the company has the means (and the sales) to take some time to figure out the answer.
What do you think? Is Apple's era of innovation over? And would it bother you if that were the case? I'd like to know -- and I'd love to see your stories of how you've used (or reacted to) Apple products during the last 40 years. Let's meet up in the comments section below.
There's a difference between transportable, portable, and mobile when it comes to computing devices. Laptop computers were firmly locked into the first two categories until Apple introduced the MacBook Air in 2008. The company drove the point home with the second release of the MacBook Air in 2011 -- a release that saw a 13-inch model featuring SSD storage instead of the earlier spinning disk, and an 11-inch model that was roughly the size of an iPad when the MacBook Air was closed.
Since then, Apple has continued to refine the MacBook Air to the point that it offers more than eight hours of battery operation at performance levels sufficient for most common personal productivity tasks. MacBook Air spawned a class of competitors known as "ultra-books" and remains one of the best-selling examples of the type.
It's notable that all of the products mentioned in this list were developed and released prior to Steve Jobs' death in 2011. There are many in the IT industry who openly question whether Apple will be able to continue its history of innovation without Jobs at the helm. While it's too early to know the answer, the company has the means (and the sales) to take some time to figure out the answer.
What do you think? Is Apple's era of innovation over? And would it bother you if that were the case? I'd like to know -- and I'd love to see your stories of how you've used (or reacted to) Apple products during the last 40 years. Let's meet up in the comments section below.
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