Article Preview - iMac: The First 10 Years : September 2008
Article Preview - iMac: The First 10 YearsApple NotesPublished in SOS September 2008 Technique : Apple Notes This August represents the tenth anniversary of Apple shipping the original iMac, so we take the opportunity to sit back and reminisce on how Mac technology has changed for musicians over the last decade.
One hundred and 20 months. 3653 days. 87,672 hours. 5,260,320... Well, you get the idea. No matter how you look at it, 10 years is quite a long time — and in terms of music technology, it seems even longer. Ten years ago our Macs were beige boxes, the G3 processor was an object of desire, Emagic, Steinberg and Opcode were still independent companies, and musicians made music with applications like Logic Audio Platinum 3.5, Cubase VST/24 4.0 and Pro Tools|24. If you couldn't afford Digidesign's audio hardware, you'd have been making the most of your Mac's inbuilt audio ports, and the lucky ones might have been using something like a Korg 1212I/O card. It really is astonishing to consider how technology changes. It's also astonishing to consider how companies change. Ten years ago Apple was considered anything but a success; and despite the return of Steve Jobs the previous year, few could have (or, indeed, would have) predicted the rejuvenation of the company's iconic brand, which has seen Apple become both relevant and desirable for a whole new generation of consumers and musicians. But perhaps the most interesting thing is that it was 10 years ago when two of the seeds for Apple's current success were planted: firstly, the purchase of the in-development Final Cut video-editing software from Macromedia, and secondly, the release of the iMac, which began shipping almost 10 years ago to the day from when this article will be published: August 15th 1998. Hello (Again) At the introduction of the iMac, a few months before the product shipped, Steve Jobs said that it came from "the marriage of the excitement of the Internet with the simplicity of the Macintosh." And although the iMac was indeed the computer aimed at both the consumer and education markets that would make it easy for people to get online, the then-interim CEO said the letter 'i' meant more to Apple than just the Internet, showing a slide that presented four other words: individual, instruct, inform and inspire. Giving such meaning to a single...
Published in SOS September 2008 | Friday 21st November 2008 December 2008
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