The surprising success of the iPod mini
Introduced during the January 2004 Macworld keynote as “the world’s smallest portable music player to hold up to 1,000 CD-quality songs” the iPod mini was made available in the USA more than a month later, on the 20th of February.
In a February press release it was mentioned that there were “over 100,000 pre-orders” and Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller stated that the response to iPod mini has been off the charts” foreshadowing the impact that the model would have.
The extraordinary reception of the iPod mini surprised even Apple which originally planned the model to just go after the high-end flash-based devices.
Hence, at the end of March, another press release was issued, warning that worldwide availability was postponed to July, due to the “much stronger than expected demand in the U.S. far exceeding the total planned supply”. In the release Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations Tim Cook was quoted saying that
“The iPod mini adds further momentum to the iPod, which is already the leading digital music player in the world.”
If we take a look at statistics by early 2004, Apple knew it had a hit with the iPod: in less than three years, the device had captured 31% of the U.S. market for mp3 players. Thanks to the release of the iPod mini Apple’s market share grew during 2004 and in January 2005 was at a staggering 65%.
As to which were the winning factors of the iPod mini making it the most successful iPod model ever the answer is simple and yet manifold. It was small in size and weight, extremely portable, designed with great care and with an eye to wearability.
It was also marketed as a must-have fashion item, not just encased in a stylish curved aluminium body but offered in five colors: silver, gold, pink, blue and green. In the following years Apple reproduced many of those characteristics in the second and fourth generation of the iPod nano which very much resembles a mini and in the second generation of the iPod shuffle.
The iPod mini and iPod nano pictures are “courtesy of Apple”
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
Apple’s subtle path to thinnovation
On the 10th of May 1999, during the WorldWide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced the PowerBook G3 Lombard and Mac OS 8.6.
Although both have been overshadowed by other products (the Pismo and Mac OS 9), they nonetheless represent important steps in Apple’s hardware and software evolution.
One could argue that the search for “thinnovation” which brought us the MacBook Air in 2008 started with the Lombard, which is more powerful than the 1998 Wallstreet and yet 20% thinner. Mac OS 8.6 offered a similar breakthrough in extending the battery life of old and new portables, up to an incredible 5 hours and -using two batteries- even 10 hours of mobile productivity.
This is why at the MacDay, the annual gathering of italian Mac users near Bologna, on the 10th of May 2009 Storie di Apple celebrated the two products with a short presentation called “La sottile innovazione di Apple”.
Since I believe the slideshow sums up nicely the key points of the importance of the PowerBook G3 Lombard and of Mac OS 8.6 (which even had the beginnings of multithreading and protected memory), I created a translated version of the slideshow.
You can find it in the Stories of Apple Documents Archive from where you can freely view and download it in PDF format.
It’s a small experiment which -if appreciated- can and will be repeated in sharing information about the history of Apple, so please send feedback and comments.
The birth of the iPod Division
At the end of May 2004 Apple’s organization underwent a major shakeup. Three years after the introduction of its digital player, the Cupertino company created a new iPod division.
Jon Rubinstein was appointed Head and his role changed from “Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering” to the new “Senior Vice President iPod Division”.
The rest of Apple’s activities at the time were redirected into the Macintosh Division, with Timothy Cook at the helm.
Although Cook’s role was widened, his formal status didn’t change, at least according to the Executives Profiles page on the Apple website where he kept the old title of “Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations”.
The reorganization reflected the growing importance of the iPod at Infinite Loop, in particular after the introduction of the enormously successful iPod mini.
Five years later the iPod division came to an end when Apple’s digital walkmen joined the iPhone in the new “Devices Hardware” division, headed by new Senior Vice President Mark Papermaster
The screenshots of Jon Rubinstein are from cached versions of the Apple.com website on the Internet Archive and are “courtesy of Apple”
The little Quadra
The Macintosh Quadra 605 was the smallest and lowest-model from the high profile professional lineup when Apple still used 68k CPUs from Motorola.
Unlike the much bigger 700, 800 and 900 models, the 605 was offered in a horizontal slim “pizzabox” case, which closely resembled those of the LC line.
While the innards of the 605 were indeed shared with that of the Performa/LC 475 -featuring a 68040 and a floppy drive- on the other hand the design of the case was unique, a fact that many books and websites overlook, incorrectly reporting them as identical.
The design of the Quadra 605 is much rounder and stylish and looks like a slimmed down version of the Quadra/LC/Performa 630. Gone is the front hoof of the LCs and the 605 lies flat, not inclined, on the surface, sporting four cute “feet” similar to those that adorn the base of the 630, 800/840 and 7×00 models.
The 605 can be seen as the missing link between the LCs and the 630: thanks to its small width and a clean front panel without a second slot for the optical unit, it has a very appealing design, which is minimal and elegant at the same time.
Image taken from Wikipedia