Robert Hampton

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24th January 2014

The Mac: A Look Bac

http://www.allaboutapple.org/ (CC-BY-SA-2.5-it licence)

http://www.allaboutapple.org/ (CC-BY-SA-2.5-it licence)

Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the first Apple Macintosh. There’s a picture of it over to the right. Fans of Apple’s modern designs will probably not be too inspired by the… beigeness of it all. This product predates Jony Ive‘s arrival at Apple by nearly a decade, and Apple’s computers would remain stubbornly in the “beige box category” until the late 1990s.

The computing masses at the time didn’t quite know what to make of it. Instead of a black screen with a flashing cursor, users were presented with something called a desktop, and a strange device called a mouse. Instead of typing commands, you could move a pointer on the screen and click on icons to tell the computer what to do.

It wasn’t, as is often misreported, the first computer to use a graphical user interface or a mouse – Xerox had a product at least two years earlier. Apple themselves had already tried it a year earlier with the Lisa, which failed because of its astonishingly high price point ($10,000!). It was certainly the first to be successfully marketed and sold to consumers.

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6th October 2011

Chimes of Death

Screenshot of Apple.com web page showing "Steve Jobs 1955-2011"Oddly enough, I heard the news of the death of technology giant Steve Jobs this morning not through a computer or iAnything, but via that most old-fashioned of sources – the 7am news on BBC Radio 4. However, I immediately fired up the Twitter app on my iPhone, where everyone from Barack Obama to Wil Wheaton was weighing in with a tribute.

It’s impossible to overstate Jobs’ contribution to the world of technology, but his finest hour must surely be his masterminding of the turnaround in Apple’s fortunes. When Jobs returned to the company in 1996, it was near bankruptcy, seemingly defenceless against the rise of PCs and Windows. Many analysts believed that a return to profitability was impossible, and with a lesser person at the helm, they would probably have been correct. Without Jobs, Apple would have gone the way of Acorn, Commodore, Atari and countless other names from the early years of home computing.

With Apple’s co-founder back in charge, the company not only came back from the brink, but went on to incredible success with a new line of products. It’s true the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player and the iPhone wasn’t the first mobile phone, but Apple’s take on the concepts (with the influence of Jobs tangible in every detail of the designs) resulted in products that were genuine game-changers.

And now he’s gone, leaving some enormous shoes to fill. Apple, and the world in general will feel his loss for a very, very long time.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”