The first spot is titled ‘Yaoband’s Verse,’ and follows a Chinese musical group as they scour the countryside and urban streets, harvesting live sounds for their electro-pop compositions. It documents how they use iPad both to make music, and to connect with their fans, in new ways.
The second spot, ‘Jason’s Verse,’ brings it home to the the U.S. – Detroit, to be exact. Resident Jason Hall uses his iPad to help organize a weekly group bike ride through his city. Hall is co-founder of Slow Roll Detroit, and he uses the rides to raise awareness of the revitalization of Detroit from the ground level.
As the popularity of MacBook Air continues to grow, so do the many ways users customize these ultralight notebooks. ‘Stickers,’ a brand-new spot from Apple, showcases the creativity of these folks. Fun stuff (and if you watch carefully, you’ll spot at least two references to recent Apple acquisition Beats Audio).
A new 60-second TV commercial spotlighting the iPhone 5s, Parenthood, was posted by Apple last Sunday. In it, parents are shown using their iPhones to teach kids how to brush their teeth, as well as using it as a baby monitor, to find a lost pet, and to turn down the room lights. This dovetails neatly with Apple’s recent announcements surrounding HomeKit, a platform for smart home devices.
It also happens to be a clever, warm and engaging piece of advertising.
The first Apple computer was a kit. These early versions were hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and first shown publicly at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. This club was an informal, Silicon Valley-based group of electronic enthusiasts and technically-inclined hobbyists. In other words, nerds – über nerds, with a number of infamous hackers and future entrepreneurs among its members.
Apple I creator Steve Wozniak
The Apple I was essentially a motherboard, with CPU, RAM, and basic text/video chips on a single board (see above). You had to build your own enclosure, and provide your own keyboard and monitor. But it was a fully functioning system on a single circuit board, it was reasonably affordable – and that was a breakthrough at the time. Apple had incorporated a few months earlier (on April 1st), but this was their first product to make it to market.
[A side note: A little over a year later, Connecting Point – then known as TEAM Electronics, on E Street in Grants Pass – would become one of the very first retailers in the world to sell and service the newly-introduced Apple II – launching a decades-long partnership between the two companies that persists to this day.]
Its $666.66 price tag works out to about $2,800 in 2014 dollars, adjusting for inflation – which may seem a bit steep for such a rudimentary device. But recent auctions have seen original Apple I’s selling for as much as $50,000. They’re extremely rare, and an important part of computing history. The Apple I paved the way for the revolution to come.
So check your attic. Scour your garage. Look under the bench in your cellar workshop. You may be sitting on a goldmine.
Today, Apple announced a new entry-level iMac priced at $1099 – $200 less than the previous entry-level model (which, like all the other iMac® models, remains current). It retains many features identical to its two 21.5-inch brethren:
21.5-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology, 1920×1080 pixels
8GB DDR3 memory (not expandable)
FaceTime HD camera
Built-in downward-firing stereo speakers
Dual microphones
Headphone/optical digital output
Four USB 3.0 ports; Two Thunderbolt ports; SDXC card slot
Gigabit Ethernet; 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0
Apple Wireless Keyboard and wireless Magic Mouse
OS X Mavericks operating system
So what’s different? A few key changes have been made to reduce the cost:
1.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, with Turbo Boost up to 2.7GHz. Contrast this with the substantially faster (2.7GHz and 2.9GHz) quad-core processors in the other two models. The L3 cache is smaller, too, and shared by the two processor cores.
500GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive, in place of the 1 TB hard drives in the other models.
Intel HD Graphics 5000, in lieu of Intel Iris Pro graphics in the $1299 model, and the 1GB NVIDIA GT 750M graphics in the $1499 model.
To better see how the new model fits in with the other 21-5-inch models, click here.
AVAILABILITY: We’ll be accepting orders for this new iMac model immediately. Fulfillment will depend on initial supplies and demand, which could push delivery to as much as two weeks away.
Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, and Macintosh are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
