Five Years Ago

Five years back doesn’t seem like too long ago. But in computer age, that’s almost a lifetime. This is truer than you may think since product generations are only a year or two apart. We currently are on the second-generation iPad and the third will be here fairly soon. Let’s take a look at what Apple was doing five years ago.

All Macs were now Intel based – PowerPC was phased out.

Consumer Macs had Intel Core Duo chips – Mac Pro and Xserve had Xeon processors.

iSight camera was still being sold. This was a high-quality Firewire based web camera.

Mighty Mouse came with all new Macs (except the Mac mini).

iPod U2 Special Edition was still being sold.

iPod Hi-Fi was introduced. It sold for $349 and was supposed to be a high-end stereo speaker system for the iPod, but lacked a radio, placed the iPod on top of the unit where it could easily be knocked off and damaged, plus it was just over priced for most consumers.

Apple had 3 monitors in its product line – a 30, 23, and 20-inch Cinema Display.

I'm a Mac/I'm a PC ads were a big hit. The ‘Get a Mac’ campaign started May 2006 and ran thru 2010. These ads started a series of parodies and were ultimately copied. The current copycat is T-Mobile.

Product sample and pricing:

Fall of 2006 - The base model iMac was white plastic, 1.83GHz Core-Duo processor, 512MB of RAM (2GB Max), 160GB HD, OS x Tiger, iLife '06. Sold for $1299.

Today - iMac aluminum 21.5-inch, 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, 4GB RAM (16GB max), 500GB HD, Radeon HD 6750M graphics w/512MB Vram, OS X Lion, iLife '11. Sells for $1199.