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

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.

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

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

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

Apple had in fact been developing a programming language derived from Scheme and Lisp and had called it ‘Dylan’.

It was created in the early 1990s and was originally intended for use with the Newton platform. Unfortunately the implementation did not reach sufficient maturity in time, and the development of the platform was instead done with a combination of C and NewtonScript, invented by Walter Smith.

The Dylan language internally was code-named Ralph and only later adopted its name, chosen by James Joaquin. It supposedly stood for “DYnamic LANguage”.

After Bob Dylan took legal action Apple was forced to reach a confidential out-of-court settlement to obtain the rights to trademark Dylan. The Cupertino company briefly released the language for 68k-based Macs in the fall of 1995, with a “technology release” version available (”Apple Dylan TR1″) that included an advanced IDE.
The same year Apple promptly abandoned the effort.

Fortunately the language has survived and is actively maintained by a group of volunteers, the Gwydion Maintainers.
During the Nineties two other parties contributed to the design of Dylan and developed their implementations. One was a commercial IDE for Microsoft Windows, done by Harlequin and the second was an open source compiler for Unix systems, done by Carnegie Mellon University. Both of these implementations are now open source and available online -as Open Dylan and Gwydion Dylan- for a variety of platforms thanks to the aforementioned Gwydion Maintainers.

The image of Bob Dylan is from the Apple ‘Think Different’ campaign and is taken from Red Light Runner Store.

It is a good and praiseworthy idea but unfortunately, in the description there are a couple of major inaccuracies which undermine the effort.

In the post it is stated that

On October 17, 1998 Apple released Mac OS 8.5, the first operating system that ran solely on Macintoshes with PowerPC processors. As far as system software upgrades go, this was the end of the line for any Mac built before the Power Macintosh 6100, introduced in March 1994. Earlier Macs ran on some variation of 680×0 processors and were supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment. Emulation works, but it also slows things down. By 1998, Apple decided it just couldn’t support 680X0 emulation for a number of reasons, but chiefly among them was speed.

The Mac OS 8.5 was surely the end of Mac based on the 68k family of processors, but Apple kept on making and selling machines based on this hardware platform long after the release of the Power Mac 6100 in March 1994.

Macs such as the PowerBook 280 and the Quadra/LC 630 were launched during 1994 and even the following year, in the April and August of 1995 Cupertino introduced non-PowerPC models such as The Performa 580 and the PowerBook 190cs.

And those Macs were not “supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment”. It was the way around: Macintoshes based on the PowerPC chips had to use emulation to be compatible with the (operating) System (which was later called Mac OS), which was still full of 68×000 code.

During the late Nineties Apple kept on slowly cleaning up the Mac OS code by “a PowerPC native, multi-threaded Finder” (does this ring a bell?) in Mac OS 8.0 and transitioning away from the old CISC CPUs by first limiting support to 68040 Macs with release 8.1.

Image taken from www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~schaelss/vintage/index.htm