July 12, 2004: Apple boasts that the iTunes Music Store has sold its 100,000,000th song, and marks the occasion with a generous gift for the lucky downloader.
The song in question is Zero 7’s “Somersault (Dangermouse remix),” purchased by Kevin Britten from Hays, Kansas. The 20-year-old receives a personal phone call from Apple CEO Steve Jobs congratulating him. Britten also gets a 17-inch PowerBook, a 40GB iPod and a gift certificate for a massive 10,000 (!) iTunes songs.
July 8, 1991: The first QuickTime beta arrives, making it possible for people to play movies on their Macs for the first time, with no extra hardware needed.
The innovative software showcased Apple’s commitment to pushing technological boundaries and set the stage for the seamless integration of video into everyday computing.
July 1, 1976: The Apple 1 goes on sale, becoming the first computer ever sold by the Apple Computer Company.
Arriving the same month Jimmy Carter was nominated for U.S. president, Family Feud debuted on TV, and the United States celebrated the 200th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the Apple 1 is only produced in small numbers, and sells for the unusual price of $666.66.
Arriving on this day in 1993, the Macintosh LC 520 was among the first of Apple’s LC 500 series of medium-price Macs.
Selling for $2,000, it was particularly popular in educational institutions, a market Apple continues to pursue today. If you went to school in the decade of Nirvana, Bill Clinton and Pulp Fiction, this could well have been the Mac you used!
Sometimes affectionately called the “cheese grater,” the original Power Mac G5 first went on sale on June 23, 2003 — offering what was then Apple’s fastest-ever machine and the world’s first 64-bit personal computer.
Check out the video of Steve Jobs introducing the computer 13 years ago today.
June 13, 1989: Canon Inc. invests $100 million in NeXT Inc., the computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple.
The massive cash infusion gives Canon a 16.67% stake in NeXT. It also helps the money-losing company find a direction that ultimately leads Jobs back to Cupertino.
In the music industry, they talk about the “difficult second album.” Fortunately that didn’t hold true when it came to Apple releasing its highly successful second-gen iPhone, which it unveiled for the first time on June 9, 2008.
Adding GPS, 3G data and a higher-quality build than its predecessor, the iPhone 3G was arguably just as revolutionary for what it did on the software side. iOS 2 arrived at the same time, and introduced push email, turn-by-turn navigation and, most significantly of all, an App Store — something Steve Jobs had previously been adamant Apple would’t allow.
Check out the debut of the iPhone 3G below.
For years, Apple has been under pressure to open an Apple museum. The company’s rich and storied past has its fans clamoring for a central repository of that history.
Word from the company: No. Apple’s leaders say they are more interested in the future than the past.
In fact, the most complete historical collection of all things Apple is nowhere near Cupertino. The serious Apple fan must travel to, of all places, Savona, Italy.
Legendary Silicon Valley tech adviser and former Apple board member Bill Campbell had died.
Campbell was popular for dishing out wise advice to top tech leaders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos, and was popularly known by his nickname, “The Coach.”
This week on The CultCast: We look into the past at some of the most pivotal moments in Apple’s 40-year history. Plus: Why the iPhone 7 Plus may be your only choice for dual cameras; what it’s like downsizing from the iPhone 6s to the SE; and we pitch our favorite new tech and vote on which is best in an all-new Faves N Raves!
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode of Cult of Mac’s weekly podcast. It’s simple to build a website that looks beautiful on any device that visits at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off.
Apple turns 40 today and, while a lot has changed since the company’s early days, it seems that questions about government snooping have not.
ABC News today released footage from a vintage interview in which a very young Steve Jobs debates computers on a 1981 episode of Nightline.
In addition to trotting out his “bicycle for the mind” metaphor, Jobs also talks about how best to stop the government from snooping on your computer, a topic that seems very timely in the aftermath of Apple’s battle with the FBI.
Check out the Steve Jobs interview below.
Over the past 40 years, Apple has been many things to many people. Innovative or imitative, premium or overpriced, saintly or evil — everybody’s got their own take on what Cupertino and its revolutionary products mean.
While Apple was founded on April Fools’ Day in 1976, the company and the profound impact that its shiny devices have made on our lives is truly not a joke. Here’s what Cult of Mac staffers said when asked to describe what the company means to them in a single word.
Apple turns 40 years old today, and what a journey it’s been: from a promising homebrew startup to an underdog fighting off bankruptcy to an industry-straddling behemoth with $233.7 billion in revenue, all thanks to the vision of the co founder of apple.
It’s impossible to boil down every significant Apple event into one story, but we did our best to pick out the 40 most significant moments in the company’s past.
Check out these key moments in Apple history below.
In case you didn’t know, Apple turns 40 today. To celebrate, the company is giving a wink to longtime fans with a cheeky nod to its past.
A pirate flag flying outside Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop is a reference to the “Jolly Roger” pirate flag flown by the original Macintosh team when it was developing Apple’s (arguably) most iconic computer back in the heady days of the early ’80s.
Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers, he was just a super-nerdy kid who loved to operate HAM radios. In a new video interview detailing the most formative moments in his totally geeky life, Woz explains how he went from tinkering with electronics to teaching himself binary by 5th grade, and then made a machine that played tic-tac-toe in 6th grade.
Woz eventually got so good with machines that he could design a mini-computer in two days. Those skills led to his creation of the Apple II computer, which put his and Steve Jobs’ fledgling company on the map.
Watch as Woz recounts his childhood obsession with computers, during the humble beginnings of Silicon Valley, below:
John Sculley may be best known to a generation of Apple fans as the CEO who made the company choose between him and Steve Jobs. But he’s also a successful investor, mentor and entrepreneur — as well as the person who increased Apple’s sales from $800 million to $8 billion during his decade at the top.
In an interview with Cult of Mac, Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, tells why he doesn’t wear an Apple Watch, makes the case that AAPL stock is undervalued, explains how the Steve Jobs movie twisted facts, and talks about his new book Moonshot and the future of entrepreneurism.
Only a handful of products Steve Jobs introduced to the world became flops, but three years after he was kicked out of Apple, the tech visionary unveiled his biggest failure ever: the NeXT computer.
Video footage of Jobs’ first major public appearance since he left Apple in 1985 was lost to the world until researchers for Aaron Sorkin’s movie came across two videotapes of the NeXT’s gala unveiling at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in 1988.
‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.
From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.
But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
To the derision of the entire internet, Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone has an inelegant hump on the back.
Turns out, this isn’t the first time Apple design chief Jony Ive and his team have “humped” a thin design.
Between Alex Gibney’s The Man in the Machine documentary and the new Steve Jobs biopic, there’s no shortage of viewing material at the moment if you’re interested in Steve Jobs.
But Netflix-subscribing Steve Jobs completists may want to check out one other Jobs artifact: 2012’s Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. And you’d better hurry up, too — because it disappears in November.
Steve Jobs had a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant in the workplace, but a new video released by Apple on the 4th anniversary of the Apple co-founder’s death gives fans a closer look at Steve’s softer side.
The never-before-seen video was sent to Apple employees yesterday and obtained by ABC. It shows the former CEO talking about everything from his management strategy (based on the Beatles) to why he wears ripped jeans.
Watch it below:
For years, Pop Chart Lab’s Insanely Great History of Apple has been one of our go-to Christmas recommendations for the Mac fan in your life. Now those devious bastards have updated it with all of Apple’s latest and greatest products, right before the holiday.
Apple just keeps trying to crack the lucrative nut known as your living room. From a gimmicky Macintosh TV in the 1990s to a “hobby” Apple TV in the mid-2000s, Cupertino keeps trying to come up with ultimate digital hub for our homes.
So far, Apple has failed to deliver a magical device that will tame all our televisions. Here’s a brief history of Apple’s TV efforts — a two-decade push aimed at ensconcing an Apple machine at the center of our domestic universe — ahead of next week’s likely Apple TV refresh.
Anyone who’s followed Apple for a long time knows the company has not always been the kind of world-beating success it is today. An entire book could be written about Apple’s failures over the years — and there are the doomsday predictions to prove it.
But Apple has succeeded in taking those seemingly disastrous mistakes and learning valuable lessons from them. The graphical user interface of the Apple Lisa? Apple learned that sometimes you need to stick with good ideas for a while before they catch on. The takeaway from Apple’s QuickTake Camera? Rushing to beat everyone else to market isn’t always the best idea.
A new infographic runs down 21 of the biggest Apple flops in history — and what Cupertino learned from them. If you’re a long-time Apple fan it’s a great trip down memory lane. If you’re a newcomer, it’s a fascinating introduction to how Apple has learned from even its most grievous errors and become the undisputed giant it is in 2015.
People are calling The New Yorker profile of Jony Ive the most important thing written about Apple in quite a while, and I’d have to concur.
Not only is it full of fascinating details, it puts Ive at the center of Apple, where he belongs. As the piece’s author, Ian Parker, writes: “More than ever, Ive is the company.”
This is something that’s been true for a couple decades, but still isn’t apparent to most people — even veteran Apple watchers. Such is the company’s secrecy, and the tendency of the public to equate everything Apple does with Steve Jobs, that the true story has yet to be told. Ive has not gotten the credit he deserves.