2002 - fourteen

Below is a chronological timeline of the year's defining moments, featuring key quotes from Steve Jobs, followed by my own personal thoughts and reflections on experiencing this historic era firsthand. January 7, 2002 — Macworld San Francisco 2002 Steve Jobs debuts one of the most stunning pieces of industrial design in desktop history: the flat-panel iMac G4 (affectionately nicknamed the "Sunflower"). It features a floating 15-inch LCD attached to a pivoting chrome arm anchored by a compact hemisphere base. We have been working on this for two years. I know some of you wanted this sooner, but I think you'll agree it's going to be worth the wait. This is the best thing I think we’ve ever done. Apple launches iPhoto, completing the trifecta of its core "Digital Hub" multimedia lifestyle software alongside iTunes and iMovie. Apple updates its consumer laptop lineup with the first 14-inch iBook G3 for $1,799. March 20, 2002 — The 10GB iPod & Widescreen Cinema HD Display Apple aggressively scales up its breakthrough music player by launching a thinner 10GB original iPod, effectively doubling storage capacity to advertise "2,000 songs in your pocket." For high-end creative visual studios, Apple ships the massive 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, boasting a crisp $3,499 active-matrix LCD wrapped in a translucent, easel-style desktop frame. iPod lets you easily put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it anywhere. With the new 10GB iPod, you can listen to your music continuously on six round-trip flights between San Francisco and Tokyo and never hear the same song twice. April 29, 2002 — The eMac Apple rolls out the eMac, a powerful, standalone desktop computer featuring a flat 17-inch CRT display. Originally designed as an affordable, rugged machine built exclusively for education markets, intense consumer demand from everyday buyers forces Apple to open up the eMac for general retail sale just a few weeks later. Consumers have spoken, and they want the eMac. The demand for this machine from our retail customers has been off the charts. Today, we are answering that call by making the eMac available to all consumers through our retail stores and online shop. May 6, 2002 — WWDC 2002 (San Jose) In a legendary piece of corporate theater, Steve Jobs stands next to a smoke machine and a physical coffin to stage a mock funeral for Mac OS 9. Apple gives engineers a comprehensive look at Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), demonstrating the debut of the native system-wide instant messaging client, iChat. We are introducing over one hundred and fifty new features. But more importantly, we are introducing core technologies that will redefine what you can do on a desktop. We have a brand-new graphics engine called Quartz Extreme that unloads the entire window-rendering pipeline directly onto the graphics card's GPU, freeing up your main G4 processor to do raw computing work. It makes the entire system feel like fluid silk. July 17, 2002 — Macworld New York 2002 The top-tier consumer desktop gets a major screen boost with the rollout of the 17-inch widescreen iMac G4. Apple officially transitions its online utility suite by killing off the free iTools framework to launch .Mac, a paid $99-per-year subscription ecosystem introducing cloud email, antivirus backups, and synchronized digital bookmarks. Up until this event, the iPod was a niche luxury for Mac-only purists. In New York, Jobs expanded the lineup to a thinner 10GB model, a massive 20GB model, and replaced the physical scroll wheel with a solid-state touch wheel. And it was now available on Windows. The iPod has taken the world by storm, and today we are making it even better. We are introducing the second generation of iPods, including a massive twenty-gigabyte model that lets you carry four thousand songs in your pocket. We’ve replaced the mechanical scroll wheel with a beautiful, solid-state touch wheel that has no moving parts to wear out. September 10, 2002 — Apple Expo Paris 2002 Steve Jobs takes the international stage to unveil two massive ecosystem applications: iCal (Apple's native digital calendar layout) and the public beta of iSync, a groundbreaking utility that bridges Mac calendars and contacts directly to early mobile phone handsets via Bluetooth. Looking back, the 14-inch iBook stands out as one of my absolute favorite laptops of all time. I was instantly drawn to its clean, minimalist aesthetic and its legendary battery life. Yet, despite having that beautiful portable, the reality of my year was defined by a massive dose of video games and music. Because of that, nothing captured my excitement quite like the arrival of the second-generation iPod later that year. With that solid-state touch wheel in hand, the rest of my digital life became all about soaking in the massive performance leaps of Mac OS X Jaguar and exploring Apple's ever-expanding suite of built-in applications.