50 years of Apple pushing tech forward, for better or worse

Overview

50 years of Apple pushing tech forward, for better or worse

Over the last 50 years, Apple reimagined personal computers, catalyzed the era of the smartphone, enlarged an i Phone and called it the i Pad and garnered a strong position in wearable tech through its Watch series and its Air Pods. It also popularized software and services like its App Store, Face Time, i Cloud, i Messages and many more. For a lot of us, the first time we pinched-to-zoom on a photo was likely on an i Phone.

Details

However, Apple gives and it takes away. Things have had to change, be removed and consumers have to move on to whatever's new. For better or worse, the weight of Apple's influence has led to entire product categories following suit. Or, more typically, there's resistance, complaining and then… following suit. With the benefit of hindsight, most of these cases are examples of Apple seeing where technology was going and getting ahead of a transition that would have been inevitable. Often, these transitions have caused short-term pain for some, but time has proven Apple (mostly) correct about dropping older tech.

As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said: murder your darlings. Here are some of the darlings we’ve lost over the years.

This is a two-parter. The i Mac G3 marked Steve Jobs' return. The colorful all-in-one Mac was a new start in many ways. In 1998, Apple ditched the standard ports and myriad cable types of personal computers, going all in on USB and a little-known thing called the internet. (In fact, that’s what the ‘i’ in i Mac stands for.)

In doing so, it also ditched the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive — although it did have a read-only optical disk drive. Even with sluggish internet and USB transfer speeds at the time, the convenience was plain to see and it led to a decade of thumb drives of ever-increasing storage limits. High-capacity alternatives to the floppy disk, like the Zip disk and even Minidisc, attempted to bridge the gap, but never gained the widespread traction and adoption of the original disk drive. But flash drives and, later, internet-based file storage quickly made them obsolete anyway. Apple was just a little early with its dismissal.

Despite Apple’s i Pod being the de facto music player at the time, it was supplanted by the company’s own biggest hit: the i Phone. At its peak, the i Pod made Apple the zeitgeisty tech company it is today. It dominated the MP3 player market, and by 2006, i Pods were responsible for 40 percent of the company’s revenue. And that was before the era of Apple including a free U2 album with every i Tunes account.

When the i Phone launched in June 2007, it was swiftly followed by the i Pod Touch in September. This was the i Phone without the phone part — indicating how the company saw the future of music listening. You didn’t need an i Pod if you already had an i Phone in your pocket. It’s the best example of Apple cannibalizing a product that defined a decade with something far more impressive and, eventually, more successful.

It was a slow death. Ignoring the countless MP3-playing rivals, (RIP Zune), Apple dropped the classic i Pod in 2014. It soon did the same to the tiny i Pod nano and i Pod shuffle in 2017. Finally, the company discontinued the i Pod Touch in May 2022.

The physical smartphone keyboard (2007 plus change)

When the i Phone’s capacitive screen and touch keyboard landed, there was a learning curve. Moving from physical keys (whether it was a 9-key alphanumeric version or the Black Berry’s QWERTY experience) to a touch screen, especially on the tiny 3.5-inch panel of the first i Phone, wasn’t easy.

But it was the future. Physical keyboards took up physical space on devices — especially as those screens grew and grew. The adoption of touch keyboards sped up, thanks to third-party keyboard apps on Android, like Swype, Swift Key and many others, introducing different input methods, smarter predictive text, typing algorithms and even touch heatmaps. Software keyboards were intrinsically more versatile, supporting multiple languages, infinite key arrangements and eventually emoji galleries. A colon-ellipsis smiley soon didn’t hit the same.

The Mac Book Air, introduced by Steve Jobs in 2008, was famously pulled from a manila envelope to demonstrate its ultraportable design. To achieve that slimness, it had to ditch the internal optical drive entirely, making it the first Mac Book without one. That move kickstarted an era of ultraportable laptops.

It was a major break from what laptop users were used to, and Apple tried to offer people some options. Apple introduced "Remote Disc," a feature which allowed the Air to wirelessly use the optical drive of a nearby Mac or PC, and offered an external USB Super Drive as an optional accessory. (I've used mine exactly once since I bought it in 2013.)

While it was considered underpowered compared to Windows competitors, the original Mac Book Air set a new design standard for the industry. It positioned Apple’s Macs for a future of App Store software installations, faster internet connectivity, and the rise of streaming media, cloud storage, and the rest. Apple’s Mac Book Pro and Mac Books eventually followed suit, ditching optical drives in 2012.

In the early days of the i Phone, Apple famously refused to support Adobe Flash. This was in the early 2000s, too, when much of the web was built with Flash for animations and video support. The i Phone and i Pad notably lacked support, creating a fractured browsing experience for years.

In April 2010, just as the first i Pad arrived, Steve Jobs published his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter, criticizing its poor security and a lack of touch-friendliness. Many Flash games and interfaces interacted with the mouse cursor's precise position, something that was invisible on the touchscreen i Phone.

It was also a calculated move. By denying Adobe access to the rapidly growing i OS user base, Apple forced developers to choose between sticking with the aging Flash or embracing open standards like HTML5. Also, by making Flash-based games and tools incompatible, it nudged those developers (and i Phone users) toward the App Store for those very games and tools (and more). There, Apple could curate and monetize those creations.

It was a slow death: Adobe finally discontinued Flash in 2020.

In a move described by Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller as "courage,” nixing the headphone socket ended up becoming the biggest headline to come from the i Phone 7 launch in 2016. Every flagship i Phone since has lacked the jack, with the most recent i Phone to include it being the original i Phone SE.

To make the change more palatable, Apple bundled a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter (expect more dongle chat later) with the i Phone 7, 8 and X. In-box headphones also swapped from the typical jack to Lightning. Naturally, this meant you couldn’t charge the phone while you listened to music, unless you already had a pair of wireless headphones.

Of course, this move was ultimately instrumental in making true wireless earbuds ubiquitous. While Apple wasn’t remotely the first company to introduce wireless earbuds (and then headphones), the removal of the headphone jack undoubtedly sped up adoption. Pour one out for the Bragi Dash, the Jabras, the Jaybirds of this world.

Conveniently, alongside the aforementioned i Phone 7, Apple announced the Air Pods. Features like one-tap setup and automatic pairing brought the convenience people expected of Apple and put it into a tiny white case.

Despite early resistance and "bragging" from rivals who clung onto the headphone jack, at this point, the socket is mostly confined to cheaper smartphones or phones aimed at audiophiles (hi, Sony) or mobile gamers (ASUS ROG).

Eventually, the i Pad Pro also lost its headphone jack, and the rest of the company's tablets followed. The only non-Mac device to keep the jack? The i Pod Touch, which had one until its discontinuation in 2022.

2016 was the year of donglegate. Apple’s Mac Book Pro redesign that year was another drastic shift in the laptop's history. Chasing ever-thinner profiles and less port fuss, Apple stripped away nearly every legacy connector that professionals relied on. This was particularly jarring after the previous-generation Mac Book Pro (2015) was often cited as the peak of utility, with a Mag Safe charging port, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB-A ports, not to mention a full-size HDMI port and an SD card slot.

Those were replaced with four (or on the cheapest 13-inch MBP only two!) Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports and a headphone jack. For power users (like some Engadget editors), it demanded dongles (possibly multiple ones) in order to connect your USB-A thumb drive, wired internet, SD cards, external screens and well, at that point, pretty much everything. Many were particularly furious with the loss of the Mag Safe charging connector. Of course, this also meant that one of those USB-C ports would be used primarily to charge the MBP. This sped up the availability of USB-C peripherals and accessories — perhaps because everyone was sick of carrying around so many dongles and hubs — but we still have USB-A devices. HDMI is everywhere. I still have SD Cards.

Eventually, Apple course-corrected itself. The 2021 Mac Book Pro redesign reintroduced the SD card reader and HDMI port, and even Mag Safe returned, freeing up a USB-C port.

Key Takeaways

• 50 years of Apple pushing tech forward, for better or worse

• Over the last 50 years, Apple reimagined personal computers, catalyzed the era of the smartphone, enlarged an i Phone and called it the i Pad and garnered a strong position in wearable tech through its Watch series and its Air Pods

• However, Apple gives and it takes away

• As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said: murder your darlings