Jose_R.A.M
04-02-2006, 04:03 PM
From TMcnet (http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/04/02/1529176.htm)
Business Day (South Africa) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Apple is far beyond the realm of Granny Smith TOBY SHAPSHAK IT MIGHT have been mistaken for being an April fool's joke a fruit company that made some new-fangled thing called a personal computer. Indeed, Forrest Gump thought he had invested in this fruit company in that movie about synchronous happenstance.
t was today, 30 years ago, that Apple Computer was formed. By June 16, it had become a watershed year in South African politics, but in the computer world, the unheralded fruit would start its own revolution that has ultimately made computing an everyday phenomenon, turned Microsoft into the biggest software company in the world and helped create the internet revolution.
Without these early PCs, IBM would never have branched away from the massive mainframes into these desktop computers, nor hired a small company called Microsoft to put its DOS operating system on these machines.
It took two years from its launch for the Apple II to be released, for $1295. The Macintosh, or Mac as everyone called it, was a stunning design icon in its day. But inside, it was probably more revolutionary. The most important contribution it made was something called a graphical user interface, or GUI, which is the icon-based operating system that Windows would copy and make the world's default. Although this had first appeared in the groundbreaking Lisa computer in 1983 which was arguably overpriced at $10000 it paved the way for the much cheaper Mac machines.
The Mac was just one of a string of industry firsts for Apple, which popularised technology that is now an everyday part of our lives: GUI-based computers, a novel device called a mouse, colour monitors, the floppy drive and then the much smaller stiffy, first to come with a CD-ROM and then to abandon the stiffy altogether, and first with cabling technologies like USB and FireWire. Even though Apple is the current media darling because of the unprecedented success it has had with its market-dominating iPod music player and one billion song-selling iTunes Music Store, it wasn't all plain sailing for the originator of personal computing. Apple refused to licence production of its computers in the same way that IBM did and lost out to the market-dominating rise of Windows computers.
Ten years after founder Steve Jobs formed Apple with Steve Wozniak in his parents' garage, and after taking the company public in December 1980, Jobs was fired. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me, he said last year in a now famous address to graduating students at Stanford University. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Over the next five years, he started two other significant companies, NeXT and Pixar. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, when Apple bought NeXT, Jobs returned to Apple and the technology developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's renaissance. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January for $7,4bn, but first he had leveraged the deal to get Disney to sell prime-time TV shows through the iTunes Music Store.
Back at Apple in 1996, Jobs revitalised the company with radical design and a return to the all-in-one Macs that had made the company famous. The iMac debuted in 1998, with 150000 preordered. Designer Jonathan Ives, who continues to rack up prestigious and well-deserved design awards, has turned the beige box of computing into high design. His inspired design has been a continuing success, with two more incarnations of the iMac, the wondrous iBook and PowerBook (now MacBook Pro) laptops and the market-storming iPods.
Apple's design genius has always been that function defines form to make it simple and attractive, but also incorporates styling that makes it beautiful, not purely practical," says Robin Olivier, director of Digicape, an Apple reseller based in Cape Town. Globally, Apple has sold more than 42-million iPods, including a new version that plays video. MP3 players had been around for a while before Apple launched the iPod, but somehow they never captivated the wider audience. They were pretty much restricted to gadget fans, says Olivier. Now, you can buy an Apple at Woolworths' design stores or at kiosks in Look 'n Listen. The name is synonymous with computing innovation, portable music and sexy design. If Apple has its way, it will be Apple for Life and its aim to make its user-friendly software and gadgets the heart of capturing life's defining moments. Not bad for a fruit.
Business Day (South Africa) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Apple is far beyond the realm of Granny Smith TOBY SHAPSHAK IT MIGHT have been mistaken for being an April fool's joke a fruit company that made some new-fangled thing called a personal computer. Indeed, Forrest Gump thought he had invested in this fruit company in that movie about synchronous happenstance.
t was today, 30 years ago, that Apple Computer was formed. By June 16, it had become a watershed year in South African politics, but in the computer world, the unheralded fruit would start its own revolution that has ultimately made computing an everyday phenomenon, turned Microsoft into the biggest software company in the world and helped create the internet revolution.
Without these early PCs, IBM would never have branched away from the massive mainframes into these desktop computers, nor hired a small company called Microsoft to put its DOS operating system on these machines.
It took two years from its launch for the Apple II to be released, for $1295. The Macintosh, or Mac as everyone called it, was a stunning design icon in its day. But inside, it was probably more revolutionary. The most important contribution it made was something called a graphical user interface, or GUI, which is the icon-based operating system that Windows would copy and make the world's default. Although this had first appeared in the groundbreaking Lisa computer in 1983 which was arguably overpriced at $10000 it paved the way for the much cheaper Mac machines.
The Mac was just one of a string of industry firsts for Apple, which popularised technology that is now an everyday part of our lives: GUI-based computers, a novel device called a mouse, colour monitors, the floppy drive and then the much smaller stiffy, first to come with a CD-ROM and then to abandon the stiffy altogether, and first with cabling technologies like USB and FireWire. Even though Apple is the current media darling because of the unprecedented success it has had with its market-dominating iPod music player and one billion song-selling iTunes Music Store, it wasn't all plain sailing for the originator of personal computing. Apple refused to licence production of its computers in the same way that IBM did and lost out to the market-dominating rise of Windows computers.
Ten years after founder Steve Jobs formed Apple with Steve Wozniak in his parents' garage, and after taking the company public in December 1980, Jobs was fired. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me, he said last year in a now famous address to graduating students at Stanford University. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Over the next five years, he started two other significant companies, NeXT and Pixar. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, when Apple bought NeXT, Jobs returned to Apple and the technology developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's renaissance. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January for $7,4bn, but first he had leveraged the deal to get Disney to sell prime-time TV shows through the iTunes Music Store.
Back at Apple in 1996, Jobs revitalised the company with radical design and a return to the all-in-one Macs that had made the company famous. The iMac debuted in 1998, with 150000 preordered. Designer Jonathan Ives, who continues to rack up prestigious and well-deserved design awards, has turned the beige box of computing into high design. His inspired design has been a continuing success, with two more incarnations of the iMac, the wondrous iBook and PowerBook (now MacBook Pro) laptops and the market-storming iPods.
Apple's design genius has always been that function defines form to make it simple and attractive, but also incorporates styling that makes it beautiful, not purely practical," says Robin Olivier, director of Digicape, an Apple reseller based in Cape Town. Globally, Apple has sold more than 42-million iPods, including a new version that plays video. MP3 players had been around for a while before Apple launched the iPod, but somehow they never captivated the wider audience. They were pretty much restricted to gadget fans, says Olivier. Now, you can buy an Apple at Woolworths' design stores or at kiosks in Look 'n Listen. The name is synonymous with computing innovation, portable music and sexy design. If Apple has its way, it will be Apple for Life and its aim to make its user-friendly software and gadgets the heart of capturing life's defining moments. Not bad for a fruit.