Apple history - page 15

October 12, 2011: Apple launches iCloud, a service that lets users automatically and wirelessly store content and push it to their various devices.

iCloud’s arrival marks the end of Apple’s Mac-centric “digital hub” strategy — and ushers in an age of inter-device communication and non-localized files.

October 9, 1991: A court orders Apple to pay $26.5 million to Apple Corps, The Beatles’ record label and holding company, for trademark infringement. The end of this Beatles versus Apple lawsuit marks the second time Cupertino is forced to pay the English rock band.

The ruling comes a decade after Apple swore it would never get into the music business.

October 8, 2014: Apple says it is “surprised” after GT Advanced Technologies, the supplier previously rumored to make ultra-strong sapphire glass displays for the iPhone 6, says it will file for bankruptcy.

The announcement appears to mark the end of the road for sapphire glass iPhone screens, a highly anticipated upgrade that promised to make devices more durable but never arrived.

October 5, 2011: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies at the age of 56 in his home in Palo Alto, California.

Jobs’ official cause of death is respiratory arrest arising from complications related to a rare type of pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier, and officially stepped down from his role as Apple CEO in August 2011, just weeks before his death.

October 3, 1994: Apple CEO Michael Spindler reassures the world that Apple “is not a lame-duck company.”

Why would anyone suspect that it is? The answer lies in collapsing Mac sales, massive layoffs and Apple’s $188 million quarterly loss. At 15 months into his stint as CEO, Spindler wants to reassure everyone that the worst is over.

Sadly, things will decline further before they start to turn around.

October 2, 1991: As the Cold War comes to an end, hell freezes over a second time as Apple and IBM agree to put aside their differences. Having been bitter rivals for the past decade, the two tech giants host a press conference at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco to unveil their new partnership.

“We want to be a major player in the computer industry,” Apple CEO John Sculley says. “The only way to do that is to work with another major player.”

Apple only shows off its finished products, which makes the company’s secret prototypes and early concepts all the more fascinating. Details of these first-draft designs usually don’t come out until years after Apple dreams them up and discards them. Even if you’re well-versed in Apple history, these alternate-history unreleased Apple products will intrigue and confuse.

The wild and crazy ideas go back more than 40 years. If anything, it proves that Apple continuously skates toward the next hit. The quest for innovation continues, no matter whether the company is in dire straits or cruising on success. Keep reading or watch our video to see the wildest Apple products that might have been.

June 12, 2007: With iPhone frenzy hitting a fever pitch in the buildup to the device’s launch, journalist Walt Mossberg sends the Apple world into a tizzy by whipping out a prerelease unit during a speech. The Wall Street Journal columnist is one of a handful of tech writers given early access to Apple’s revolutionary smartphone so he can put it through its paces for a review.

Speaking at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Presidents Forum, Mossberg says he isn’t sure whether he’ll give the iPhone a thumbs up. Worried doubters immediately fear Apple is about to drop a dud.

May 19, 1980: Apple introduces the Apple III at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California. After two years of development, the business-oriented computer arrives to follow the enormously successful Apple II. However, for a variety of reasons, the Apple III launch turns out to be the company’s first major misstep.

The Steve Jobs Archive’s first major release — a digital book titled Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words — will arrive April 11.

Despite the announcement coming in an email from the archive on April Fools’ Day, the news appears to be genuine. And that includes the part about the e-book, which is filled with Jobs’ emails, conversations, photos and more, being free online for all.

December 14, 1999: Apple acquires the domain name www.iphone.org, prompting years of speculation that Cupertino is considering building a cellphone. While the news generates interest, some take it as a warning sign.

Apple only recently abandoned the kind of non-computer projects like games consoles, PDAs and digital cameras that proved to be dead ends earlier in the decade. An Apple phone could never be a thing, right?

In some ways, it’s hard to remember what the world looked like before Apple arrived in 1976. The upstart company made computing consumer-friendly, fashionable and, ultimately, ubiquitous.

In just four and a half decades, Apple made a surprisingly big impact on the tech scene and the world at large.

As we look back on the company’s 45th birthday this week, we take stock of 45 ways Apple put a ding in the universe. Hit the highlights in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Get the free app to enjoy the stories on your iOS device. Or read them on the web via the link stacks below.

December 13, 1994: Apple strikes a deal with Bandai, Japan’s largest toymaker, to license Mac technology for the creation of a new videogame console called the Pippin.

The device, powered by a PowerPC 603 CPU and running a stripped-down, CD-ROM-based version of Mac OS, shows a struggling Apple is willing to take a chance on something new. Unfortunately, the Pipping becomes a total sales disaster.

Apple took a proverbial sledgehammer to the Unofficial Apple Archive, an online collection of more than 15,000 classic Apple ads and assorted other materials, last weekend. Cupertino’s legal team issued a slew of takedown notices to Vimeo and the Unofficial Apple Archive’s host provider, Squarespace, resulting in thousands of vintage Apple ads vanishing in the blink of an eye.

While I understand the reason for the takedowns, I really, really wish Apple hadn’t tried to wipe the ads off the internet. Fortunately, Apple could set things straight — by embracing both its past and its most ardent fans.

How does an autograph collector part with a favorite item? Dan Caldwell of Billionaire Collectibles sets the price high enough so that letting go is not so painful.

He has what is likely the only Steve Jobs autograph currently for sale, a signed work-anniversary certificate for an Apple employee. The $77,000 asking price on eBay is how much someone “will have to pay to peel it out of my hands.”

Taking a full-screen screenshot on a modern Mac or iPhone is just a matter of tapping a couple of buttons. But things used to be a whole lot more challenging, as longstanding Apple employee Chris Espinosa recently shared on Twitter.

Kids (and “how to” article writers) today don’t know how good they’ve got it!

Sam Henri Gold generously posted for all to see his extensive collection of Apple promotional materials. There are images going back to the 1970s, and videos starting in the 1990s.

During a commencement speech at Tulane this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave graduates a new twist on the old adage about finding a job you love. He also talked about Apple’s vision to “move humanity forward.”

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

This is Part 2 of a two-part section on Apple’s misadventures in manufacturing. Part I is here.

Steve Jobs carried his dream of end-to-end control over manufacturing to NeXT, the company that Jobs founded after being booted out of Apple in 1985. It was here that he learned a tough lesson about manufacturing: that sometimes it’s more trouble than it is worth. Or, perhaps more kindly, that great manufacturing capabilities mean nothing if you don’t have a product people want to buy.

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Steve Jobs always had a deep fascination with automated factories. He was first exposed to them during a trip to Japan in 1983. At the time, Apple had just created a new floppy disk drive called Twiggy. During a visit to Apple’s factory in San Jose, however, Jobs became irate when he discovered the high failure rate of Twiggy drives Apple was producing. More than half of them were rejected. Jobs threatened to fire everyone who worked at the factory

Imagine being an engineer assigned to help develop a device — and you’re not even allowed to see what it is supposed to look like.

Secrecy was so important to Apple on its first iPhone, the first prototype was not a handset but a large development board for team members to hook to a display to try out various functions.

Mark Pelczarski’s first contribution to the personal computing revolution came in a zip-lock bag.

With no App Store in 1979, Pelczarski bagged disks and photo-copied instruction manuals for what was then one of the first digital paint programs for the Apple II.

You can buy a piece of Apple history next month. An Apple-1 computer built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak will be auctioned off.

But bring your credit card. The auction house expects it to go for about $300,000.

This week on The CultCast: You’d never know it from Steve Jobs’ effortless keynote introduction, but the original iPhone was plagued with huge design and production issues that almost made Apple call it quits — right up until the day it was released! To commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, we’ll recount some of the incredible stories behind iPhone’s beleaguered early days, and celebrate how Apple pulled off one of the greatest device launches in history.

Our thanks to Shutterstock for supporting this episode. Kickstart your next interactive project with video clips or music tracks from their collection, and save 20 percent for a limited time at shutterstock.com/cultcast.

When legendary Mac repair shop Tekserve closed its doors last summer in New York City, Apple fans of a certain age experienced two deaths.

They bade goodbye to the original Genius Bar, technicians that had been servicing their devices for nearly 30 years. Those fans would also never again stare at Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection, which was quickly auctioned off to an unknown bidder for $47,000.

The collection returned to a museum display today, more than 4,600 miles away in the Ukraine. Its new home is at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.