Ten years ago: here comes Mac OS 9
On October 22, 1999 Apple launched Mac OS 9, its major new release of the Macintosh operating system.
The last boxed edition of the “classic” Mac OS line carried a retail price of 99 USD (with a 20USD rebate for customers who owned Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6) and featured new Internet tools such as Sherlock 2, which was lauded by CEO Steve Jobs in the press release.
The updated version of Apple’s search tool was explicitly modified with a plugin system so that the new Sherlock could access search engines, websites, services and even follow auctions, helping the users with information retrieval but also shopping and online commerce.
To launch the operating system Apple Authorized Resellers (among which were chains such as CompUsa, Sears and Fry’s) held throughout the following weekend special Mac OS 9 “Midnight Madness” events, Apple Demo Days and in-store promotions.
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
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 pace of Mac OS X releases
On the 19th of May 2004 Avie Tevanian, then Apple Chief Software Technology Officer told a technology conference that Apple would slow the pace of its operating system releases.
The next one, Mac OS X 10.4, codename Tiger, was not to follow the “one major release per year” rule kept in the past years and would be closer -in development and release- to a 20 month cycle.
Let’s take a look at the schedule Apple actually kept since march of 2001, when (not counting the public beta) the first version of Mac OS X was released to the public:
- 10.0 CHEETAH – Date of release: 24 March 2001
- 10.1 PUMA – Date of release: 25 September 2001
- 10.2 JAGUAR – Date of release: 23 August 2002
- 10.3 PANTHER – Date of release: 24 October 2003
- 10.4 TIGER – Date of release: 29 April 2005
- 10.5 LEOPARD – Date of release: 26 October 2007
The dates show us that it took only 6 months to go from 10.0 to 10.1 and that 10.2 was released the following year: this reinforces the common opinion of “Puma” as a quick and much-needed fix for a still incomplete and immature operating system. So we have 11 months between “Puma and “Jaguar” and 14 months until “Panther”.
Mac OS X 10.4, “Tiger”, was released after 18 months, more or less as stated by Tevanian. On the other hand it took 30 months for “Leopard” to come out and the wait for 10.6, codenamed “Snow Leopard”, could be in the same ballpark.
Apple has stated it will show and give an almost complete “developer release” of 10.6 at the 2009 WWDC which means the sixth version of Mac OS X won’t come out before 24 monthts: maybe even a bit longer if we take into account Apple’s fondness of releasing during Autumn or Spring.
The picture of Avie Tevanian (from the 1999 WWDC) is “courtesy of Apple”.