Apple's Technical Feats of the Decade
Saturday, January 2, 2010 at 11:26PM It's Apple-retrospective time all over the internet, and everyone's talking about Mac OS X, the iPod and iPhone. I wanted to take a minute and reflect on ten lower-level technical innovations that Apple produced in the past decade which are probably unremarkable to any marketing-oriented discussion but which moved the state of the art on in some way.
Bonjour (neé Rendezvous)
Remember the old days of networked printing? Yeah, it was a pain. It's cute that we don't have to do that any more. Bonjour sat out its early days in relative obscurity, dutifully finding our printers for us, until the iPhone came along and, suddenly, it was really important to have an automatic way of discovering other devices on the network.
Just imagine a world today in which your iPhone apps had to be manually configured to find their desktop counterparts? Horrible.
WebKit
2003 opened with a boom when Steve Jobs announced Safari. At the time, it was thought a wildly ambitious project for Apple - or, indeed, anyone - to try and take on the onerous task of 'keeping up with the internet'. In many ways, the story of WebKit has been a case study in Alan Kaye's dictum that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Safari has always been a relatively fast browser, but the early days were spent playing catch-up. It's in the past few years, in which the WebKit engine has also been in the vanguard of standards compliance, that the engine has received serious attention.
DVD Encoding and Burning
Taken somewhat for granted today, but remember when Steve Jobs announced that Apple had worked out how to use the PowerPC Velocity Engine to dramatically cut the time it would take to encode a DVD? iDVD hasn't had a lot of love recently, but it was a big deal in its time.
Time Machine
Every geek wishes that their relatives kept better backups. With Time Machine, from its big, chunky On/Off switch to its trippy time-warp UI, we're now in a position where it might actually happen. In Leopard, for the first time, Mac OS X now bugs you to set up a backup drive every time you connect an unknown volume to your Mac.
Time Machine is really a big deal.
Unibody Laptops
Anyone who owns a unibody laptop will tell you that it's an utter delight to handle and use. For years, all laptops have been built along the same lines: a strong frame on which the skin panels 'hang'. The unibody idea changes everything, and enables the amazing MacBook Air along with the solid-as-a-brick MacBook Pro line.
Eliminating Device Drivers
Remember drivers? Yeah, me neither. Between building in the common device class drivers like USB Mass Storage and PTP and setting up a dynamic printer driver install technology in Snow Leopard, Macs have never been more compatible with 3rd party hardware than they are today.
Exposé
Some people don't like Exposé, but those people are wrong. It arrived in Panther, and I've been addicted to it ever since. It hasn't been perfect. In particular, try using Exposé with a screenful of text documents on a Mac running Leopard. In Snow Leopard, however, almost all the problems have been addressed, and Exposé has never been more useful.
Aperture
Aperture's a tough sell to some people, but let me take you back to November 2005. All we had was iPhoto and Photoshop, both of which were fairly destructive editors, although iPhoto would let you 'revert to original'. What Aperture attempted was nearly beyond the capabilities of the hardware of the time: a live-rendering fully nondestructive end-to-end RAW workflow.
The standard practice for those shooting RAW back in 2005 was to betch-convert the RAW files from the camera to some other form for manipulation, usually TIFF or PSD. Aperture saved the time and disk space required and kept photographers working with the camera files as long as possible.
Certainly, Aperture has had a few mis-steps along the way but I think it deserves a mention for what it tried to do so early on in the professional photographers' migration to digital. I also suspect it's not entirely fanciful to say that, were it not for Aperture, Lightroom might never have made it out of the Adobe Labs.
Bonjour Sleep Proxy
I've mentioned the new-in-Snow-Leopard Bonjour Sleep Proxy before. This is a technology whereby all a machine's bonjour broadcasting can be taken over by a Time Capsule or Airport base station while the machine goes to sleep. When any service is resolved by another machine, the base station will wake the serving machine and hand off the requests to it. This dramatically improves the usability of bonjour-discovered services like iTunes streaming when machines are set to go to sleep.
Grand Central Dispatch
The near and medium-term future is multi-core, and GCD is Apple's way of preparing developers and their software for a new world in which concurrency is the default and synchronised code is the exception where necessary. We're not there yet, and the hardware is far more parallel than most software today can usefully use, but it's important that Apple is giving a lead on this.
Other Honourable Mentions
I don't have time to write about each one, but some other important technological things that Apple did in the 2000s include:
- Rosetta - made the PPC/Intel transition a non-issue for almost everyone.
- Instruments - performance analysis tools unlike those on any other platform.
- Boot Camp - who would have thought it would ever happen?
- Safari and iTunes for Windows - very high-fidelity ports.
- Migration Assistant - rocky start, but coming of age now.
- Back to My Mac - another rocky start, and still a bit shaky, but I think this technology has a big future.
Reader Comments (21)
If you think iTunes for Windows is a high-fidelity port, you’ve not used enough. iTunes/Mac is bad, but iTunes/Windows is an utter bloody fiasco as soon as your library contains more than a handful of items.
iTunes/Windows is an utter bloody fiasco as soon as your library contains more than a handful of items
Like I said..."high-fidelity port" :-)
Another which comes to mind is Carbon, without which Mac OS X would have been a really hard sell. Take your old Mac OS app, change about 10%, and voila, you have a Mac OS X app with proper multitasking and protected memory. Oh and your app still runs on Mac OS 9 too.
Minor point: Rosetta wasn't really Apple technology - the core of it was licensed from (Manchester-based) Transitive.
You forgot the Cocoa Finder!!!!!111one
At an even lower level, I think Darwin is Apple's most important technology of the past decade. Sure, the project began in the 90's with the purchase of NeXT, but this decade has shown us how far Apple has been able to extend a well-designed OS.
We've seen Darwin morph from a young, immature kernel to the backbone of Apple's product lineup for the next decade. All Macs, iPhones (& iPod touches) and almost certainly the tablet will run some form of OS X, and therefore Darwin. I'm not positive but I'd venture to say that Apple TV and Time Capsule, Airport Express & Extreme run some form of Darwin (the latter three without the components related to the GUI, of course).
Compared to XP, Vista, 7 and WinMo, it's obvious to see the advantage of maintaining one system. Apple is a hardware company, no doubt, but they realized the importance of software early on in the design of OS X. They're reaping the benefits now and for a long time to come.
The Unibody is a joke. Everyone I know with one hates theirs because of all the problems with them.
My mid-2007 Santa Rosa MacBook Pro is rock solid and still going strong after two and a half years.
Compare that to the five (5) replacement unibody MacBook Pros my friend has gone through in less than six months.
These things may help us Mac users, but they are hardly successful innovations if they don't crossover to the world of PC. Things like Firewire are true innovations. Then there's all the industrial design innovations - iMac, Mac mini etc both of which have been copied by quite a few PC makers by now.
No.the unibody macs are awesome. I got a unibody aluminum mac book (before they became mac pros) and white mac book...and the unibody aluminium macbook feels better then my white macbook
Time Machine was not only technological genius (it really was!), it was also a huge PR win for Apple. You see, it was shameful and embarrassing that Mac OS software didn't include a free, super-easy-to-use backup utility despite nerds like me wagging our fingers at non-techie relatives for not backing up. But if Apple came out with standard backup software, the implicit admission is that yes, their hard drives fail just like those in any other computer. Instead, they released Time Machine, and put all their marketing focus on it being a way to recover documents in the event of human error. So users got the backup software they needed (really, how many non-techies are going to know about and download SuperDuper) and Apple didn't have to admit that their harddrives are no better than anyone else's. Genius.
I think your friend has been extremely unlucky. I'm typing this on a few month old 3.06GHz 8Gb ram 17" Unibody MBP and I can honestly say it's absolutely awesome.
The only thing I can't quite make my mind up about is which keyboard is better - the old style or the unibody.
@Trick I think when Fraser says unibody, he means the physical design structure of the casing, not the computer itself as whole. I have unibody 15 and it has never been damaged or had a problem and it's been through hell and back, but my friend who has the same machine has had a few problems like your friend. The one thing my friend and I can both agree on though is that the physical build of the machine is unlike any other and it truly is a much stronger, sturdier, and well built piece of machinery. It's much nicer than my old Powerbook G4 flexing in my hand or bending at the seems apart or together where the top plate piece and the bottom frame piece met. Also nice is not having the screen frame crack or splits from the back screen piece. Again, simply a much better structural design.
I'm typing on a 2005 15" Powerbook with a 2009 MacBookPro transferring files in the back room. Both have been super solid machines (though it's a little premature to judge the MBP just yet.) It was the 2007 Santa Rosa MBP that had two top cases and one logic board replaced. Finally, Apple threw in the towel. Hence, the new MBP. Now to make sure the new iMac doesn't have the dreaded screen flicker return...
Oh Aperture! You break my heart. Lightroom is a dog's breakfast and well, just where is version 3?
What about 8 hr laptop battery FTW?
Bonjour Sleep Proxy I didn't even know about.
(I guess it's one of those things that just worked without my having to think about it.)
I'm so pleased to see an annotation of Apple Innovation. I've always thought that Apple should have a series of commercials hi-lighting their feats of innovation from the basic elements of the OS through the Newton to the "tablet of today" (I hope ;^).
As a general "innovation" from Apple, I think they made "cool" something that was part of the function of the device. The iPod looked (and still looks) gorgeous, but is ridiculously easy to use (compared to the micro button micro screen micro font MP3 players that are abundant in the bargain buckets of stores). The MacBooks and iMacs are immaculately designed. Just look at a half decent spec Dell or HP computer or laptop - it's not a patch on the lean elegance of their Mac counterparts.
I think the greatest innovation from Apple this decade was to force all the major computer manufacturers (and software houses) to think about the style, usability and form of their products. They are still lightyears behind... I mean, in terms of computers what was the last piece of digital equipment you bought (that wasn't apple) that you thought was beautifully designed and produced?
I find iTunes on Windows to be just fine and I definitely find it to be snappier than the latest Windows Media Player. It takes a little long to launch but otherwise works just fine.
iTunes on the Mac and Windows are both great. Use it on both daily without issue.
Adobe have acknowledged that Aperture helped validate the existence of a market for non-destructive Raw editing, it had been in development for many years http://lightroom-news.com/2007/02/11/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story-2/
Aperture has had a bit of a sad existence however. V1 was too slow and blighted by the extreme hardware requirements, and version 2 was a late update and then has had little love. You can see why Lightroom is the leader (even among Mac users)
@ian fairchild - the beta expires in April 2010, so chances are it will be released in Q1.