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 Apple IIsi
Codenamed “Centossa”, the Apple IIsi was the swan song of the Apple II line: dating back to the first half of 1988 and envisioned as an heir of the IIgs.
The Apple IIsi predates the Mac IIsi with whom it shares not only the name but also some form elements and is probably one of the lesser known Apple products of the Eighties. Its mastermind is Jean-Louis Gassèe, head of R&D after Jobs departure and it si just one of the many projects which were started after the successful launch of the Mac II in 1987.
The industrial design of Apple IIsi is of course heavily based on the form factor of the Apple IIgs for hardware reasons, but also shines on its own, thanks to the work of Ken Wood and Robert Brunner of the Palo Alto studio Lunar Design. In fact this was proably one of the jobs that helped Brunner later becoming the head of a reformed Apple IDG (Industrial Design Group), envisioning new guidelines and a brand new direction after the frogdesign era.
The people behind the Macintosh
“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. I can’t spend enough time here, unfortunately, because I have other responsibilities. But every spare moment I have, I dash back because this is the most fun place in the world.
This is the neatest group of people I’ve ever worked with. They’re all exceptionally bright, but more importantly they share a quality about the way they look at life, which is that the journey is the reward. They really want to see this product out in the world. It’s more important than their personal lives right now.
The Apple II had a magical feel about it. You couldn’t quantify it, but you could tell. The Macintosh is the second thing in my life that’s ever felt that way. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. You know somehow that it’s the start of something great. So everyone wants it to be perfect and works really hard on it. Everyone feels a personal responsibility for the product.
The Macintosh is the future of Apple Computer. And it’s being done by a bunch of people who are incredibly talented but who in most organizations would be working three levels below the impact of the decisions they’re making in the organization. It’s one of those things that you know won’t last forever. The group might stay together maybe for one more iteration of the product, and then they’ll go their separate ways. For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product. We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.”
Steve Jobs in 1984 in the first issue of Macworld
Wendy and Lisa and the Macs
The Macintosh is an important tool for musicians Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of Prince fame.
In the last years the artistic duo has been hard at work scoring music for movies and TV shows and Apple products play a substantial role.
An example is the Heroes series soundtrack which is
played entirely by Melvoin and Coleman themselves and is produced on three Intel Macs and a hard drive RAID system.
In the picture -taken from a Heroes “behind the scenes” programme- you can see that while Lisa plays looking at the footage Wendy is using a black MacBook.
CLImax: yet another shell before Mac OS X
There are many misconceptions about the Macintosh before the arrival of Mac OS X. One of them is the absence of a shell, a command line interface.
Although it is true that until 2001 Apple never provided one out of the box, there have been many ways to obtain such an interface, including Apple’s own MPW package for developers and a plethora of third parts applications and utilities. Among these was an AppleScript command interface for the System 7 called CLImax that was developed around 1996 by Drew Thaler.
Since we interviewed Drew a while ago about his work for Apple we also asked him to tell us the background story about this peculiar shell for the so-called “Classic” Mac OS.
Drew Thaler: I was in university at the time, and everyone in the engineering department spent a lot of time using the command-line interfaces on Unix systems. (SunOS, HP-UX, Apollo, etc.) The Mac had a few types of command-lines — MPW, MacPerl, and so on – but there was no reason to use most of them, because really the way you interacted with the Mac was through GUI apps and that’s where your data was kept.
But there was a text-based way to talk to the GUI applications on your Mac: AppleScript.
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