There’s more to Apple than that
At the end of February Pete Warden tweeted about Apple letting go forty people from the Final Cut Pro teams in LA and Austin.
Although the news was actually followed by an encomiable plea to help some of those people find good jobs elsewhere, it was widely reported with the effect of putting Apple in a bad light and casting dark clouds on Final Cut Pro’s future.
Laying off so many people had to mean that the product wasn’t doing particulary well, right?
Well, not necessarily. AE Portal news remarked that the FC teams seemed to have been cut confidently before the NAB, which is a major Pro media event, and also reminded us that Adobe had laid off much more people: “about 600 workers in 2008 and another 680 in 2009 (about 9% of its workforce each time)”.
It’s also important to take into account how big the developer teams at Apple really are and then try to put the numbers in perspective. Some interesting hints come from Mike Evangelist who was a director of product marketing at Infinite Loop from April 2000 to July 2002.
In 2006, in a comment section of his blog, Evangelist answered that the Final Cut team “was above a hundred” when he was there and that he was wstrong>”sure it’s much larger now”. So, no need to fear.
Image from www.roughlydrafted.com
Braeburn Capital, Apple’s fruitful reserve
The braeburncapital.com url redirects to Apple’s main website, apple.com
How come?
Who is this Braeburn Capital and what relationship does it have with Apple?
Some of the answers come from a simple enquiry to the WhoIs database.
There we can see that the domain was registered in the October of 2005 and, more to the point, read that the “Registrant” is:
Apple Inc. 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA 95014 US
Also, under “Technical Contact” the address is:
c/o Apple Computer Treasury Braeburn Capital, Inc. 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA 95014 US
From this and a series of other searches it comes out that in the autumn of 2005 Apple created and incorporated a firm to manage its cash and short-term investments.
Between 2003 and 2005 Apple’s cash reserve almost doubled, growing from 4.6 to $8.7 billion, mostly thanks to the enormous success of the iPod. To manage these assets in the best possible way Braeburn Capital has been set up in Reno, Nevada.
Nevada was chosen because -unlike California- the state has no corporate income tax, no capital-gains tax, and the state doesn’t share information with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
And the name? This also looks to be a very conscious choice from Apple. Like the McIntosh, the Braeburn is a type of apple, known for a unique combination of sweet and tart flavour and its ability to store well.
Image taken from Wikipedia.
The other new features of Mac OS 9
The most touted feature of Mac OS 9 was the new Sherlock 2 but there were lots of other new features, mostly related to the development and coming of the NeXT generation operating system, Mac OS X.
Mac OS 9 had multiple users, Voiceprint password, Keychain, automatic updating, encryption, Internet File Sharing, Internet AppleScript, and Network Browser. Many of these were direct equivalents of Mac OS X features which were concurrently developed or even backported.
The reason was of course to make the Mac OS more powerful and more modern but also to ease the transition to OS X, which at the time was believed to start in less than an year
Image taken from Toastytech.com
The October 2009 MacBook: bye bye, Firewire
MacBook (May 2006)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Late 2006) (November 2006)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Mid 2007) (May 2007)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Late 2007) (November 2007)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Early 2008) (February 2008)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Early 2009) (January 2009)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Mid 2009) (June 2009)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: 1
MacBook (Late 2009?) (November 2009)
USB: 2 2.0
Firewire: none
The “Fat” Mac
On September 1984 Apple released the follow-up to the Macintosh, addressing one of the major complaints of potential buyers.
Sold for USD 3,300 (or 3200, according to some sources), the Macintosh 512K was nicknamed “Fat Mac” for its increased (four-fold) RAM memory but was otherwise identical to the original Macintosh, as one can see from the dual-purpose motherboards.
In an 1984 interview in Byte with three of the original designers of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin actually revealed that the expansion was planned since the beginning and wasn’t an afterthought.
At the question
You started with 64K bytes and it was released with 128K bytes, and there is constant talk of a half-megabyte Mac. When did a half megabyte creep into the design philosophy?
Raskin answered:
Very early on Burrell [Smith, the motherboard designer, nda] pointed out that it’s very easy to make a design, once you had the 68000 in place, where you could just take out 64K-bit chips and put in 256K-bit chips. I’ve always believed that you just simply take the largest chip that is economically feasible to use in terms of the memory, and if they’re bit-wide chips and you use 8 or 16 of them, then that should be the size of your memory. [...] Burrell loves designing for it, software part portion had no trouble handling that, and it was was very clean. When the 256K-bit chips come you just plug in all those and everything runs just about the same.
And things ran just about the same, but better: the 512k greatly improved application usage and even some operations helping avoid issues such as the “Disk Swapper’s Elbow”.
It was discontinued in April 1986, replaced by the 512Ke which had bigger ROMs (128K instead of 64) and used more capacious 800KB floppy disks.
The motherboard in the picture was gently provided by Maurizio Buso