Just like the LaserWriter so many years before. So concurrently with the iBook, Apple introduced the AirPort Base Station, a bulbous silver device that provided Wi-Fi networking capabilities. So it only made sense for Apple to have its own branded networking hardware that integrated well with its products. Wi-Fi was novel technology still unknown to most people. Wi-Fi wasn’t part of business networking yet, and it wasn’t something you’d find in most houses. In fact, the iBook was the first mainstream computer to include integrated wireless networking technology. It, too, was colorful and used many of the same components as the iMac.Īpple saw a great way to differentiate the iBook from other computers by reducing its dependency on being “wired.” While it included a network jack, it also could communicate wirelessly using a then-nascent technology called Wi-Fi. Building on that popularity, it introduced a new portable computer aimed at consumers and students, the iBook. It came out with the iMac, a colorful all-in-one computer that radically (at the time) shipped without a floppy drive and included integrated (wired) networking and a CD drive. Why AirPort MatteredĬoincidentally, at about the same time, Apple saw an excellent opportunity to grow the popularity of the Mac line. That’s not a place Apple was particularly eager to participate, so it dropped its printer line. So just about every laser printer worked with the Mac, and it had become a low-margin market dominated by companies like HP, Lexmark, Brother and others that could compete at scale. While Apple was competing – and losing market share – to Windows PCs, Macs were still the de facto standard in many graphic design and publishing businesses. Eventually, LocalTalk connectors would give way to Ethernet, whose cost of implementation dropped as more PCs shipped with Ethernet jacks pre-installed.īy the late 1990s, PostScript laser printers were a fact of life in just about every office in the country. The pace of this connectivity accelerated after Farallon Computing released its PhoneNet adapter, a LocalTalk-compatible device that used less-expensive twisted-pair telephone cables.įor many years, Macs and LaserWriters (and then later, many other brands of printers) were networked together in perfect harmony, while PCs and other devices struggled to have any connectivity. Macs and LaserWriters could be connected easily using LocalTalk boxes, creating de facto office networks overnight. Computer networking was big and complicated to use, but LocalTalk changed that. The other remaining piece of the puzzle came shortly after that when Aldus created PageMaker, the first widely popular desktop publishing application.Īpple introduced another genuinely disruptive technology in the LaserWriter by making it networkable. Embedding PostScript in the LaserWriter, Apple kickstarted the desktop publishing market into existence. Steve Jobs and Apple had worked out an arrangement to license the then-fledging PostScript technology, a programming language that made it much easier and more cost-effective for computers to produce detailed, scalable images and text. At about $7,000, the LaserWriter was more affordable and more capable. In fact, Hewlett-Packard had only introduced its desktop laser printer a couple of years earlier, for about $12,000. Enter the LaserWriter, Apple’s first laser printer.Ī black and white laser printer is mundane by today’s standards, but at the time, it was revolutionary. They were slow, very noisy, and produced lousy-looking copy. Personal computers and printers had gone together for years, but state of the art was still dot-matrix printers. Less than a year after Apple released the Mac, Apple introduced a groundbreaking product called the LaserWriter. To get some perspective on this, let’s set the WABAC machine for 1985. Apple hasn’t needed its own line of networking gear for many years, but let’s remember how truly disruptive AirPort was. Apple says once its current stock of supplies is depleted, that’s it. Last week Apple made official news we’d suspected for a very long time: It’s discontinued the AirPort line of network routers.
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