Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at some Apple products from the past.
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So Apple's product line wasn't always as refined as it is today. There was a period Apple went
through where they came out with all sorts of different types of Macs and also all sorts of
different types of peripherals for Macs. Let's start by looking at the Macintosh Portable.
Before the very first laptops there were these portable computers. This one came out before
the very first powerbook which would have been the Powerbook 100 a few years later. In 1989
Apple basically took the Mac SE and put it into this portable case with a large battery. If you
take a look at the design you could see it was pretty big and heavy and used a trackball as a
pointing device. The thing got maybe an hour of battery time. I used one for a little bit and it
pretty much felt like using a Mac SE but one that you could kind of carry with you like a briefcase.
Apple also came out with a Mac that was a TV. It was just called the Macintosh TV and was basically
a form of Mac from that era around 1993 but you could plug in a cable wire to the back and get
TV stations on it in a predigital cable TV era. It never really found a market.
There really wasn't much use for being able to use your Mac as a tiny cable television.
Then in 1997, twenty years after the first Apple computer, they came out with the 20th
Anniversary Macintosh. It actually was one of the first computers to have an LCD screen
built into it. That large square area at the bottom was a CD drive. So it had that built-in
as well though it was a weird vertical orientation. This was a limited edition Mac
and it was one of the most expensive Macs ever released if you adjust for inflation.
It costs $7500 for the base model. Now in addition to producing the original Apple
computer and the Mac Apple tried to come out with other products. We see now they have been
very successful with the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV but some earlier products weren't as successful.
Most well known of those is the Apple Pippin. This came out in 1996 and was basically like a set top
box version of a Mac. A lot of people claimed that this was Apple's attempt at a game console and it
did kind of have a game controller with it. But, in fact, Apple was really going for a multimedia
machine that you could plug into a TV. Something less expensive than a computer that you could use
to run a popular CD-ROM that were coming out at the time. A lot of the software produced
for it were in fact these multimedia interactive presentations. Not actually games. Apple hardly
sold any of these. They were a complete failure. But they were a precursor to the current set top
box. As a matter of fact today's Apple TV is everything that the Pippin was and way more.
Of course another device that Apple came out with was the Newton MessagePad. This was Apple's
early attempt at an iPad. But, of course, this was before wireless internet. WiFi just didn't
really exist then. So this was a completely off-line device. Image carrying this around,
heavier than an iPad, and only being able to do off-line things with it. It tried really hard
at handwriting recognition so you would just write with handwriting on it and it would try
to translate that to text. But in practice it didn't really work very well. But the method
used by its competitor, the Palm Pilot, that was a lighter, smaller, and less expensive device,
was much better. It had you write the characters in a special way. It turns out that that method
worked a lot better for entering data into a PDA, a personal digital assistant, in the pre-WiFi era.
Now Apple also came out with a lot of peripherals for
the Mac that are no longer around. Apple came out with a webcam back in 2003.
I had several of these. They were really cool devices. They were just called
iSight which is still a term Apple uses to describe some of its built-in cameras. They
look like this. You mounted them on top of your MacBook or iMac and they added a camera to it.
Now when CDs first came out computers didn't have CD drives in them so you
had to get an external one. Apple had one called the PowerCD. I had
one of these. It sat in this weird way on your desk taking up a ton of space
and the disk was held at an angle. You plugged it into your Mac and you were able to read data off
of a CD-ROM. You used it to play some of those early multimedia CD-ROMs on your Mac. A lot of
these were sold basically so people could play games like Mist and pretty soon Apple was putting
the optical drive into the Macs themselves so an external one wasn't needed anymore.
Here's a peripheral that isn't for a Mac. It's for an iPod. Apple actually produced a speaker set
that you put your iPod into the top of. It was a precursor to the Home Pod. It was just completely
off-line. You had to plug the iPod into the top and then you controlled the iPod as normal. It
would just play through the speakers. Now those three peripherals could be seen as pioneers in
their individual classes. Apple was either first or near the first to come out with them. For some
other peripherals Apple actually really did change the industry. These next three are examples.
The first is the Apple LaserWriter. If you think of which companies pioneered
laser printing you're probably thinking of printer companies like HP. But, in fact, Apple had one of
the very first laser printers out there. I mean this thing was out in 1985. But the LaserWriter 2,
this model here, that was quite a machine. I used one of these for years. They worked really well
and without much trouble. Using one of these you were able to replace much more
expensive machinery. I bet there's still some LaserWriter 2 out there that work just perfectly.
Apple also pioneered the digital camera. When you think of digital cameras you probably think of big
camera companies. But Apple was actually one of the first companies with a digital camera out.
Now check this out! This thing took pictures at the resolution of 640 by 480. That's it. It only
had enough memory to store eight of those pictures at a time. But it was still quite
a revolution. At the company I was working for at the time we used to have a polaroid camera,
take a polaroid of something we needed a picture of, and then scan it in with
a scanner. This thing made that process a whole lot simpler. You just take the picture.
Transfer it to your computer and you had a digital photo right away.
Apple was also pretty early in with scanners. It looked like this and like the laserwriter it
was really solidly built. It was built to be used everyday over and over again in business settings.
Now all these products are long gone now. Only collectors really have them. But a lot
of these really pioneered their individual product categories. After all it really was
in Apple's interest to come out with new ways to use computers so they could sell more of
them. Apple really doesn't really come out with these kinds of things anymore. One reason may be
because there are so many startup companies out there that Apple really doesn't need to pioneer
these anymore. Another company will do it. But another reason may be that Apple still actually
comes out with products like this. They just are hugely successful. I mean things like the iPhone,
the iPad, Apple TV, AirPods, and the AppleWatch are products quite like these. The difference is
that they're so hugely successful we don't consider them sideshows. They are central
products. So it may not be that Apple doesn't come out with products like this
anymore. They just come out with products that are so good that they stick around.
Hope you found this interesting. Thanks for watching.