If possession of any one app could ever be considered an instant ticket to membership in the Cult of Mac, this is it. Mactracker has been around since early 2001, and we’ve talked about it before on our site (Giles Turnbull thought it was so fantastic he included it in his list of 50 Mac Essnetials); but last week a newly-updated version hit the Mac App Store — which is enough to earn it a spot as today’s Daily Freebie.
The app lists painstakingly complete data on every Mac product ever made in an elegant, searchable, easy-to-use interface. The new update even brings with it the ability to track your Macs’ serial numbers, service work performed, etc.
The app is free, but we think a little donation at the app’s website (which is where those who’re allergic to the App Store can also download the app directly) is money well spent.
Fast Co.Design has a very interesting Apple history artifact posted up today: the birth of the Mac, as told by Jef Raskin, the late founder of the Mac project. Jef’s son Aza wrote the piece and provides scans of the original document if you’re into authenticity instead of legibility.
It’s worth noting before you dive in, which I highly recommend, that Raskin’s vision for the Mac was very different from what Apple actually produced once Steve Jobs took over the development team. Raskin wanted the most unified hardware and software imaginable. One screen, one keyboard, one processor, one memory configuration, no expansion slots, one box. Oh, and he wanted a printer built into the box.
He also wanted to get rid of all modality in a computer. So, for example, if you started typing, the word processor would open and capture what you were typing (rather than having Clippy note that you’re writing a letter). A lot of that stayed in, but Jobs made it much more powerful and, ultimately, diverse and fragmented a platform than Raskin ever envisioned (see the Canon Cat for that).
As Aza Raskin notes, his father’s philosophy is much closer to what’s going one with the iPhone and the iPad. After all, you can have any iPad you want, so long as it comes in brushed aluminum.
This item of controlling appearance is quite significant: for example it is impossible to write a program on the Apple II or III that will draw a high-resolution circle since the aspect ratio and linearity of the customer’s TV or monitor is unknown. You can probably promise a closed curve, but not much more. You cannot promise readable characters, either. Therefore, a predictable, documentable system must be entirely under Apple’s control. LISA is Apple’s first system to allow us to design in context, without depending on chance for the all-important visual aspects of the computer’s output.
Well said. And one of the few places Jef and Steve really saw eye-to-eye, in the long run.
John Sculley, Apple's ex-CEO, talks for the first time about Steve Jobs. Illustration by Matthew Phelan.
In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
Jobs and Sculley ran Apple together as co-CEOs, blending cutting edge technology (the first Mac) with cutting edge advertising (the famous 1984 ad) and world-class design. But it soon soured, and Sculley is best known today for forcing Jobs’ resignation after a boardroom battle for control of the company.
Now, for the first time, Sculley talks publicly about Steve Jobs and the secrets of his success. It’s the first interview Sculley has given on the subject of Steve Jobs since he was forced out of the company in 1993.
“There are many product development and marketing lessons I learned working with Steve in the early days,” says Sculley. “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.”
He adds, “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.”
It’s commonly believed that Apple wouldn’t have nearly gone out of business if it had only licensed the Mac operting system to other computer makers, like Microsoft did. But John Sculley explains why that was impossible:
With the invention of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs commercialized modern graphical computing. But he oversaw another invention from that era that was just as brilliant but no one mentions these days.
There’s a great scene at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness’ character assess his career in the British Army and admits it’s been a disappointment. Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley takes a similar look at his stint at the top of Apple, and says the company made a big mistake when it hired him as CEO. It’s the most surprisingly frank admission I’ve ever heard anyone make about their career.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did on his return to Apple was kill the Newton, the brick-sized messagepad that some blame for dragging the company towards bankruptcy. But John Sculley argues that the Newton actually prevented Apple from going out of business.
When Steve Jobs went to visit Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, the two inventors agreed that products aren’t invented — they are discovered.
Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.
The revamped Spaceship Earth ride at Disney’s Epcot Center has a special “Steve Jobs section,” according to the lifthill blog, which tracks news about rides and roller coasters, and was invited to a special preview.
But once at the Steve Jobs area, which is supposed to depict the birth of Apple computer in a garage, the lifthill blogger noticed that the lone figure in the garage looked a lot more like Wozniak than Jobs.
The figure is facing the wrong way, so it’s hard to tell, but it’s wearing the same shirt as Wozniak in a famous early photograph copied below, and has similar hair and beard. Conspriacy theorists note that Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney– but I can’t believe he cares that a section of Epcot bears his name or likeness (or not).
Anyway, there’s no second figure in sight, so one of them is slighted. And so too is the third Apple-founder, Ron Wayne, but no one cares about that.
But what is that thing the dummy Woz/Jobs is sitting in front of? It ain’t no Apple I or II — the first and only machines Woz created more or less single-handed. It looks like a big wooden Mac, but none of the Mac prototypes looked like that — they were much more finished.
