The Brad Hole

MacWorld is running a feature this week on the "'30 Most Significant Apple Products." I've been an Apple fan since the early 80s, so I figured I'd pipe in. :-) However, coming up with 30 "significant" products is challenging; very few Apple products truly deserve that tag, although the ones that do are monsters. So with that said, here's my list of 15.

15. QuickTime. Now a strong standard for video and audio media as well as the technology cornerstone of the iTunes Music Store, QuickTime started life in 1991 as an extension for System 6 on the MacOS.

14. AppleLink Personal Edition. No longer an Apple product, you may know it today by it's more familiar name, America Online (AOL). The first e-mail from space was sent from a Macintosh Portable on STS-43, albeit via a different version of AppleLink that predated AOL.

13. The Power Macintosh. A radical change in the Macintosh line, this represented what many folks refer to now as "The First Transition". With the Power Mac, Apple switched CPU architectures from the Motorola 68000 line to the PowerPC. Although it had a 68k emulator that ran old programs very quickly in software, developers also had to rewrite their apps to be PowerPC-native to take advantage of the true speed of this machine. This machine is notable mainly for the radicalness of the change and the ease with which Apple pulled it off.

12. The Apple ///. Significant isn't always good, and the Apple /// is the unfortunate example of that. Apple's first concentrated foray into the business market, the /// suffered from marketing and technical decisions that almost instantly relegated it to trivia status. Most famously, it suffered from overheating issues rumored to be caused by Jobs' mandate that it have no vents for aesthetic reasons. The solution to this problem - as suggested by Apple no less - was to lift the computer up 2-3 inches and drop it on your desk to reseat any chips that had become loose due to the heat. As a side note, I'd give my left nut to own an Apple ///+. :-)

11. The QuickTake. Apple introduced this digital camera in 1994, at the very genesis of the digital camera age. The first color digital camera for under $1000, it is one example of many where Apple pushed the envelope of technology years before it became popular. I don't believe there was a consumer mass-market camera that predated the QuickTake, although I could be wrong.

10. The Newton. The first consumer-level mass-market PDA (Apple even coined the PDA term), this predated the Palm Pilot by 3 years. "Eat up Martha!"

9. The Apple Computer-1, aka the Apple 1. Apple's first product, and the first personal computer to support a keyboard and monitor.

8. AIrport. Apple pushed wireless networking into the mainstream with the Airport. The first product of its kind, the Airport provided Mac users with wireless networking for a full year before similar products were made for Windows PCs.

7. Mac OS X. A radical reworking of the OS, it provided excellent backwards compatibility while being almost a total rewrite under the hood. The first release was a little rough, but there's no denying its speed and strength today.

6. The iMac. The iMac started the trend of dramatically simplifying Apple's product line, making a PC that focused on style and reinvigorating Apple's fortunes as a company. The iMac's stylistic impact was felt across the industry almost immediately, as other makers and peripherals rushed to come out in "colors" and stick an "i" on front of the name of their products. The iMac also single-handedly jumpstarted the USB spec as a major player by virtue of having no legacy peripheral support, thus requiring USB. Many USB peripherals shipped in "Bondi Blue" for the first few years after the iMac's inception, even for PCs.

5. The Disk II. The first mass-market floppy drive for a PC, this went hand-in-hand with the Apple II to deliver fast, reliable storage for home computers in a time of cassette tapes.

4. The iPod. One of Apple's most popular and most profitable products, it ignited the mp3 player industry and leads the field today, 5 years after its introduction.

3. The Laserwriter. This single-handedly started the desktop publishing industry.

2. The Macintosh. It's hard to overstate the importance of what the Macintosh brought to mass-market computing. It gave us a GUI for the masses, and did so with style and relative affordability. That the operating system and product line persist today is a testament to this.

1. The Apple II. This was the computer that ignited the home computer market in 1977 and showed that there was not only a demand for an easy-to-use, expandable and capable PC, but one that had staying power. The II's descendant, the Apple //e, was finally removed from Apple's price lists in 1993. That's a life span of 16 years for this family.