The 20th anniversary of the release of iBook: a thin and light notebook that can be carried directly

After returning to Apple in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs proposed a 2×2 product planning matrix to simplify Apple's bloated product lineup at the time. The grid is divided into four blocks, horizontally for professional/consumer areas and vertically for desktop/portable products.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the birth of that consumer portable product: Jobs launched the iBook on stage at the 1999 Macworld Expo in New York, and today is exactly the 20th anniversary.

Jobs' Product Planning

Targeting mass consumers and students, the iBook easily stood out from other notebooks of the era with its unique clamshell design. The original colors included blue and orange, and later graphite, indigo and lime green were added.

You can carry it with you.

The original iBook was priced at $1,599 (about 11,000 yuan), equipped with a 12.1-inch display with a resolution of 800×600, a full-size keyboard and trackpad. It also had a retractable handle on its hinge so that people could carry it. Apple called it "iMac to go", meaning a mobile iMac (a desktop computer at the time). Although it weighed 6.7 pounds (about 3 kilograms), it was considered a thin and light notebook 20 years ago.

The shell-shaped body is a bit cartoony

The iBook was the first mass consumer product to support wireless networking. The 802.11b standard allowed speeds of up to 11 Mbps. At the time, supporting WiFi was considered a very advanced feature. However, its wireless network card was not standard and had to be purchased separately for $99. At that time, Apple's wireless network card was called AirPort. In addition to this, users also had to buy a wireless router. At that time, most people still plugged in network cables, and wireless routers were also a rare thing.

So you see, Apple was quite ahead of the times in its laptops 20 years ago, and later on completely canceling the network port and the USB port were just follow-ups to this behavior.

Jobs demonstrated the wireless networking capabilities of the iBook on the stage of the launch event. He walked across the stage with a laptop and opened a website. He then put it in a hula hoop to prove that there was no cable connection. What seems natural now (WiFi surfing the Internet) caused cheers at the scene at the time.

WiFi support is now standard, but it was a rare feature back then

In addition, young Phil Schiller jumped from a high place with an iBook in his hand, using this exaggerated and crazy behavior to demonstrate that it can transmit data wirelessly at any time.

It was also the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and Schiller quipped: "This is undoubtedly a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for wireless networking."

The laptop featured a 300MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 3.2GB hard drive, 32MB RAM, ATI Rage Mobility graphics, 10/100 Ethernet, a CD-ROM drive, and up to six hours of battery life. To keep costs down, it had no FireWire ports, video output, or microphone, just one speaker and a USB port.

Then, in May 2001, Apple introduced a redesigned iBook that looked less cartoony and more like a regular laptop, and in 2006, the colorful look became a pure white polycarbonate MacBook, and then came the arrival of the metal body. This product went from colorful plastic to metal, but it will always be an important part of Apple's history.