A Look Back at Apple's 2003

Samvit writes "The end of the year is upon us, so it's naturally time for those retrospectives to start coming in. Ars Technica has a fantastic look back at Apple in 2003. 2003 was one of the biggest years for Apple, arguably the biggest in a very long time. Still, Ars is typically fair, so the author lays down not only the good in 2003, but also the bad and the ugly. There's a bit of prognostication going on too--a little something for everyone."

Comments

Re:Applause

[BWJones]

Apple constantly pushes the envelope forward with newer features (FW 800, bluetooth, 17 inch laptop), and the rest of the pack try to clone their offerings in a Windows world.

Not only these products, but we have Apple to thank for Firewire, being the first to install built in networking in their computers, the first to include CD-ROM drives in computers, the first to include GUI in consumer computers, the first to include plug and play hardware configuration (remember setting all those damn switches when installing hardware cards?), the first to include color support in their computers, their first to......well, you get the idea. One could go on and on here, but I agree. If any company has been responsible for driving growth in the personal computing market, it has certainly been Apple.

OS X claims pretty good "internationalization"

[ianscot]

I've seen people using the OS to browse and do basic office stuff in Japanese, anyway, in OS X -- they were using what (scrounging on Apple's site) Apple seems to call the "advanced predictive input method for typing, which guesses which character you want based on context." Said it was handy.

OS X claims to support:

"localized versions of English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Brazilian and Portuguese

with broad support for:

many additional languages, including Thai, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Hawaiian, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Armenian, Russian and Greek"

That would be the default install of 10.3. One of the intall disks for Panther is basically full of the international options; lots of users turn it off when they do the install, to save space on their hard drives.

Re:My problem with OSX

[imadork]

The lack of Hebrew support is a well-known "bug" in IE (and apparently most of Microsoft's Mac products). The Register has been following it for some time, I found a good article here.

Re:Applause

[Frymaster]

my favourite "firsts" for apple:

1984: first to include 3.5" floppies
1998: first to ship a machine without a 3.5" floppy

Don't forget USB

[BandwidthHog]

It's an Intel technology, but its uptake was pathetic until the iMac brought it to the masses.