Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Apple: Revolutionizing Technology

About a week ago, Apple Inc surpassed Microsoft to become the World's most valuable tech company. Apple has certainly came a long way in becoming number one; as many would have expected this news to come sooner rather than later.

Let's take a look at some of the milestones which Apple has set over the last decade or so.

Personal Computing

In the late 1990s, Apple developed a range of proprietary personal computing systems called the Macintosh; consisting of the Macbook, Macbook pros, iMac and many others. The core of the Macintosh was the state of the art operating system, the Mac OS.

Not only does it have an out of the world user interface, the Mac OS was also an incredibly stable platform.

Wowing the computing world with its beautiful aesthetics and its amazing stability, the Macintosh successfully changed the face of personal computing.

The Macintosh was also a predominant feature in movies and television; making them a de-facto for coolness; cool kids and celebrities were seen owning a Macintosh, making it an integral part of American pop culture, which eventually spread on to the rest of the world.

Digital Music Revolution

In the year 2001, Apple introduced to the world the iPod, at that point of time no one would have imagined that there was a device that could contain one's entire music collection, and the iPod was more than capable of that.

The first generation iPod was capable of holding up to 10 GB of music (estimated over 2000 songs) ; the later generations of the iPod had improved capacity of up to 160 GB and it eventually became capable of storing and playing other multimedia files such as pictures and videos and even games.

To further monopolized on the success of the iPod, Apple released its own online media store called the iTunes Store, allowing users to purchase music that can be downloaded to their iPods.

The iTunes store was itself another revolution; with its intuitive user interface, it made purchasing of music easy, and ignited a whole new paradigm in the distribution of digital music. Being a robust platform, the potential of the iTunes store was exponential; and eventually it expanded from a music store to providing podcast, vodcast, videos, applications and even ebooks.

Mobile Technology

If you think Apple was already contented, you are so wrong. In the year 2007, Apple decided to redefine the mobile phone when they released the iPhone.

Although the iPhone had a very breathtaking user interface and some very advance features, the fact is, the market was already saturated with tons of smartphones What made the iPhone truly stand out were neither its aesthetics nor its features, it was the applications.

Riding on the success of the iTunes store, Apple added the App store to iTunes and this paved the way for developers to develop their and sell their own iPhone applications. These apps, which are available on the app store for free or at a reasonable pricing, opened up a world of possibilities for the iPhone, enabling the iPhone to do almost anything, be it using it to check the train schedule to using it as a multimedia player or even using it as a music tuner.This became the best reason for everyone and anyone to get an iPhone; and in a few years, the iPhone became the most popular mobile phone in the world.

A new shift in mobile computing: the portable touch screen?

Wherever they went they conquered and excelled, with the recently launched iPad, Apple certainly looks like they are going to reach another milestone in revolutionizing mobile computing with their touch screen technology.

Having already sold more than 2 million units in less than 2 months, will Apple do it again this time?

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