viernes, 26 de noviembre de 2010

Intel era

Apple discontinued the use of PowerPC microprocessors in 2006. At WWDC 2005, Steve Jobs revealed this transition and also noted that Mac OS X was in development to run both on Intel and PowerPC architecture from the very beginning. All new Macs now use x86 processors made by Intel, and some Macs were given new names to signify the switch. Intel-based Macs can run pre-existing software developed for PowerPC using an emulator called Rosetta although at noticeably slower speeds than native programs, and the Classic environment is unavailable. With the release of Intel-based Mac computers, the potential to natively run Windows-based operating systems on Apple hardware without the need for emulation software such as Virtual PC was introduced. In March 2006, a group of hackers announced that they were able to run Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. The group released their software as open source and has posted it for download on their website. On April 5, 2006 Apple announced the public beta availability of their own Boot Camp software which allows owners of Intel-based Macs to install Windows XP on their machines; later versions added support for Windows Vista. Boot Camp became a standard feature in Mac OS X 10.5, while support for Classic was dropped from PowerPC Macs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#2006_onward:_Intel_era

This is a link where  you can watch  a  evoluction of teh mac's computer and laps 

The New Beginnings

In 1998, a year after Steve Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced an all-in-one Macintosh called the iMac. Its translucent plastic case, originally Bondi blue and later many other colors, is considered an industrial design hallmark of the late 1990s. The iMac did away with most of Apple's standard (and usually proprietary) connections, such as SCSI and ADB, in favor of two USB ports. It also had no internal floppy disk drive and instead included a CD-ROM drive for installing software, but incapable of writing to CDs or any other media without external third-party hardware. The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 139 days, making the company an annual profit of US$309 million—Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took over as CEO in 1995. The "blue and white" aesthetic was applied to the Power Macintosh, and then to a new product: the iBook. Introduced in July 1999, the iBook was Apple's first consumer-level laptop computer, filling in the "missing square" of Apple's four-tiered consumer/professional laptop/desktop product strategy previously announced by Jobs. More than 140,000 pre-orders were placed before it started shipping in September, and by October it was as much a sales hit as the iMac.
In early 2001, Apple began shipping computers with CDRW drives for the first time.

Apple continued to add new products to their lineup, such as the Power Mac G4 Cube, the eMac for the education market and PowerBook G4 laptop for professionals. The original iMac used a G3 processor, but the G4 and then G5 chips were accompanied by successive new designs, dropping the array of colors in favor of white plastic. Current iMacs use aluminum enclosures. On January 11, 2005, Apple announced the release of the Mac Mini priced at US$499, the least expensive Mac to date.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1998_to_2005:_New_beginnings



When the brain has changed.

As for Mac OS, System 7 was a 32-bit rewrite from Pascal to C++ that introduced virtual memory, and improved the handling of color graphics, memory addressing, networking, and co-operative multitasking. Also during this time, the Macintosh began to shed the "Snow White" design language, along with the expensive consulting fees they were paying to Frogdesign, in favor of bringing the work in-house by establishing the Apple Industrial Design Group. They became responsible for to crafting a new look to go with the new operating system and all other Apple products.
Despite these technical and commercial successes, Microsoft and Intel began to rapidly lower Apple's market share with the Windows 95 operating system and Pentium processors respectively. These significantly enhanced the multimedia capability and performance of IBM PC compatible computers, and brought Windows still closer to the Mac GUI. Furthermore, Apple had created too many similar models that confused potential buyers.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1990_to_1998:_Growth_and_decline
Apple improved Macintosh computers by introducing models equipped with newly-available processors from the 68k lineup. The Macintosh Classic II and Macintosh LC II, which used a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, were joined in 1991 by the Macintosh Quadra 700 and 900, the first Macs to employ the faster Motorola 68040 processor. In 1994, Apple abandoned Motorola CPUs for the RISC PowerPC architecture developed by the AIM alliance of Apple Computer, IBM, and Motorola. The Power Macintosh line, the first to use the new chips, proved to be highly successful, with over a million PowerPC units sold in nine months
Apple replaced the Macintosh Portable in 1991 with the first of the PowerBook line: the PowerBook 100, a miniaturized Portable; the 16 MHz 68030 PowerBook 140; and the 25 MHz 68030 PowerBook 170. They were the first portable computers with the keyboard behind a palm rest, and with a built-in pointing device (a trackball) in front of the keyboard.The 1993 PowerBook 165c was Apple's first portable computer to feature a color screen, displaying 256 colors with 640 x 400 pixel resolution. The second-generation of PowerBooks, the 68040-equipped 500 series, introduced the trackpad, integrated stereo speakers and built-in Ethernet to the laptop form factor in 1994

Growth and decline

Microsoft Windows 3.0, which began to approach the Macintosh operating system in both performance and feature set, was released in May 1990 and was a less expensive alternative to the Macintosh platform. Apple's response was to introduce a range of relatively inexpensive Macs in October 1990. The Macintosh Classic, essentially a less expensive version of the Macintosh Plus, was the least expensive Mac until early 2001

 This  is a  comercial when the fisrt mac's laptop was  realized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1985_to_1989:_Desktop_publishing_era

Macintosh 128K . The first child.

The Macintosh 128K was announced to the press in October 1983, followed by an 18-page brochure included with various magazines in December. The Macintosh was introduced by the now famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, "1984". The commercial most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984 and is now considered a "watershed event" and a "masterpiece." "1984" used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by a Picasso-style picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on her white tank top) as a means of saving humanity from the "conformity" of IBM's attempts to dominate the computer industry. The ad alludes to George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother."
The limitations of the first Mac soon became clear: it had very little memory, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; and it lacked a hard disk drive or the means to attach one easily. Many small companies sprang up to address the memory issue, by upgrading the 128K Mac to 512 KB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1984:_Introduction

When everything stared.

Apple