What is the difference between Apple computers and the computers we use?

Apple Computer International Co., Ltd., or Apple Computer Inc., referred to as Apple Computer, and its English name is Apple Computer, Inc., is headquartered in Cupertino, California, USA. Its core business is computer technology products. Apple Computer's Apple II fueled the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, and the subsequent Macintosh relay continued to develop in the 1980s. The most well-known products are its Apple II, Macintosh computers, iPod digital music players and iTunes music store. It is famous for innovation among high-tech enterprises.

A brief history

The earliest Apple logo used before 1976

Early Apple computer, Apple IIc 1976, created by Steve Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Woz for short). Developed and sold Apple I computers that year.

The Apple II, the earliest personal computer, was released in 1977.

The revolutionary Macintosh computer was launched in 1984.

The Apple Macintosh G5, the earliest 64-bit personal computer, was launched in 2003.

In 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Intel processors would be used next year.

Before founding

Before they founded Apple Computer together, Woz was already an electronics hacker. Since 1975, he worked at HP and helped Steve Jobs design the Atari. video games. At that time, Woz rented a small computer from Call Computer, a time-sharing computer system service company founded by Alex Kamradt. Computers at that time could only print on paper, and the Silent 700 launched by Texas Instruments was the most cutting-edge dye-sublimation printer model at the time. Woz had seen an article in Popular Electronics magazine describing how to make a homemade computer terminal. Using off-the-shelf parts, Woz designed a teleprinter that could communicate with a computer. The department's printer, which can only print high-order English characters, can print 24 lines per page and 40 characters per line, and can be connected to a small computer from Call Computer. Alex Kamradt, owner of Call Computer, represented the design and sold a small number of machines. Woz began attending Homebrew Computer Club events in 1975. At that time, new microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and IMSAI triggered Woz to build microprocessors into his teleprinters, becoming a complete computer.

The only microcomputer processors available on the market at that time were the $9 Intel 8080 and the $0 Motorola 6800. Watts liked the 6800, but both were out of his budget. So he could only learn through observation and study, designing computers on paper, and waiting for the day when he could afford a processor. In 1976, when MOS Technology released the famous processor 6502, which cost only US dollars, Woz wrote a BASIC programming language version for this processor, and then designed a computer that could run this BASIC programming language. Since the designer of the 6502 is the same as the 6800 (since MOS Technology was founded by former employees of Motorola), Woz had earlier designed on paper a computer based on the 6800, which could use the 6502 as a computer with only minor modifications. microprocessor.

After Woz completed the machine, he took it to a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club and demonstrated his system to his fellow electronics peers. There, he met his old friend Steve Jobs. Jobs realized the commercial potential of these tiny hobby machines.

Apple Computer in 1990, Macintosh Classic

The Origin of Apple

Jobs and Woz decided to set up a company. They thought of several names. Jobs had After returning from this trip, he suggested to Woz that he name the company Apple Computers.

Early Years

In 1971, 16-year-old Steve Jobs and 21-year-old Steve Wozniak ("the two Steves") met through friends Get acquainted by introduction. In 1976, Jobs successfully persuaded Woz to not only assemble the machine but also sell it. Another friend of theirs, Ron Wayne, also joined, and the three formed Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976.

In May of the same year, Jobs negotiated with The Byte Shop, a local computer store. The person in charge said that he would only be interested in the computer if it was fully assembled. Store owner Paul Terrell is thinking further and wants to order 50 units and pay $0 per unit upon delivery.

After taking this order, in order to raise funds, he sold various valuable things of his own (such as computers and a Volkswagen van). Jobs went to Cramer Electronics, a large electronic parts distributor, to order parts. The store's credit department manager asked Jobs how to check out. He said: "I have an order for 50 computers from Byte Shop. The payment terms are cash on delivery. If you Give me a 30-day payment period, and I can assemble the computer within the payment period and pay off the bill after delivering it to Tyrell." The manager called Tyrell, who was attending the IEEE Computer Symposium in Pacific Grove, to inquire. , surprised by Jobs' tenacity, Tyrell confirmed the order to the manager and said that if Jobs delivered it to him, Jobs would definitely have enough money to pay for it. The three of them and two friends borrowed Jobs's family's garage to assemble and conduct marathon testing day and night, and finally delivered the goods to Tyrell before the deadline. Tyrell also paid Jobs as promised, making him The parts bill was paid off and a handsome profit was made to celebrate and keep as capital.

This computer, later named Apple I, had several notable features. At that time, most computers did not have monitors, but the Apple I used a TV as a monitor. Compared to later monitors, the Apple I's display function could only display a slow 60 words per second. In addition, the console's ROM includes bootstrap code, making it easier to boot. Finally, because of Paul Tyrrell's insistence, Wozniak also designed a cassette interface for loading and storing programs, running at a high speed of 1,200 bits/second. Although the design of the Apple I was rather simple, it was still a masterpiece and required fewer parts than other consoles of its class, earning Woz a reputation as a master of design. In the end, 200 Apple I units were produced at one time.

After this battle, Woz has successfully designed an Apple II that is more advanced than the Apple I. Jobs wanted to expand the company and get a loan from the bank, but Wayne withdrew because of the psychological shadow caused by the failure of the risky investment four years earlier. At that time, Apple Computer lacked financial resources. Jobs finally met Mike Markkula ("Mike" Markkula), who invested $92,000 and co-signed a $250,000 bank loan with Jobs. In January 1977, Apple Computer Company Officially registered as Apple Computer Co., Ltd. With funds and new designs in hand, the Apple II debuted at the first West Coast Computer Fair in April of the same year.

The biggest difference between Apple II and Apple I includes the redesigned TV interface, which integrates the display into the memory, which not only helps display simple text, but also includes images and even color display. And there's an improved case and keyboard. The Apple II is widely credited in the computer industry as the product that created the home computer market, with millions of units sold by the 1980s. The Apple II family produced a large number of different models, including the Apple IIe and IIgs, both of which could still be found in many schools into the late 1990s.

When Apple went public in 1980, they attracted more capital than any initial public offering (IPO) since Ford in 1956 and created more money than any company in history. Many millionaires.

Apple III and Lisa

In the 1980s, Apple encountered emerging competitors in the personal computer business. The most important among them is IBM, the "number one" in the computer industry. IBM's PC model, a computer running DOS (English abbreviation for Disk Operating System, licensed to IBM by Microsoft), has gained a large share of the enterprise computer market.

While small businesses were still using the Apple II, Apple felt it needed a newer, more advanced model to compete in the corporate computer market. Apple III designers were forced to comply with Jobs's extremely high and sometimes unrealistic demands, and Jobs reportedly found the cooling fan "inelegant" and omitted it, resulting in the computer being prone to overheating and forcing the earliest models to be recycled. In addition, the price of Apple III was high. Although an upgraded model was launched in 1983, it was basically impossible to recover the disadvantage of Apple III in the market.

At the same time, various working groups within Apple were working around the clock to design a completely different new personal computer. Many advanced technologies are used, such as graphical user systems, computer mice, object-oriented programming, and network capabilities. These people, including Jeff Raskin and Bill Atkinson, encouraged Steve Jobs to focus the company on computer capabilities. When they took Jobs to see Xerox PARC's work on the Alto in December 1979, Jobs decided that the future would be a graphics-intensive, icon-friendly computer that would only support the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh. Many PARC researchers such as Larry Tesler joined Apple Computer over the objections of their colleagues.

Apple used a pre-sale of one million U.S. dollars in initial issuance of shares (approximately ,000,000 U.S. dollars) as a condition in exchange for Xerox's promise to let Apple engineers work in the PARC research institute for three days.

Lisa made her debut in January 1983 with a net worth of US$995. Once again, Apple launched a product that was ahead of its time, but it was too expensive (a model Apple would follow over the next few years), costing Apple another chance to gain market share in the enterprise. The Lisa was terminated in 1986 and the remainder was buried in a Utah landfill.

The launch of Macintosh

The Lisa project was canceled midway through the development plan controlled by Jobs. Jobs immediately focused his attention on the Macintosh project, initially envisioning it as a "cheap Lisa." The Apple Macintosh launched in 1984 with a famous Super Bowl ad (based on George Orwell's novel "1984"), which announced, "On January 24th, Apple Computer will launch the Macintosh. You'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'. This was an obvious hint that the new Mac and its "easy-to-use" GUI would liberate computers and information from corporations and technocrats. Apple also mass-produced Apple evangelism ideas pioneered by Apple employee and later Apple man Guy Kawasaki.

The Macintosh continued Apple's success, but it could not reach the level of its greatest glory. During a visit to Apple's Cupertino headquarters by Bill Gates (now president of Microsoft), Jobs showed off a prototype of the Mac GUI. In 1985, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, which gave the IBM PC a GUI. Because of this, many companies also started making IBM PC compatibles, cheap PC replicas. Apple doesn't allow other companies to clone Macs. Although the first version of Windows was technically inferior to the Mac, it and a PC clone were much cheaper than the Mac, and soon a lot of software appeared on Windows as well.

In recent years

After the iBook G4 launched the Macintosh Portable, a laptop computer with unsatisfactory sales in 1989, a more popular laptop computer, the PowerBook, was launched on the market in the early 1990s. Designed in conjunction with Sony for the first time, it sets a modern form factor for today's popular laptops. It supports the screen through a rear hinge, opens the rear half of the rear platform to house the keyboard, and the front is a trackball (later changed to a touchpad). This product from Apple also includes operating systems (such as ProDOS, Mac OS and A/UX), network products (such as AppleTalk) and multimedia programs (QuickTime). In 1994, Apple updated its Macintosh product line and launched the Power Mac series. It is based on the PowerPC series of processors jointly developed by IBM, Motorola and Apple. This processor uses a RISC (reduced instruction set computing) structure, which exceeds the Motorola 680x0 series used in previous Macs and is fundamentally different. Apple's system software has been tweaked to allow most programs written for older processors to run in emulation mode on the PowerPC series.

After a power struggle with new CEO John Sculley in the 1980s, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Computer. Afterwards, in an effort to save the company, Apple bought the entire NeXT and its UNIX-based system NeXTStep, a move that brought Jobs back to Apple's management. One of his first actions as the new CEO was to promote the development of the iMac, which simultaneously saved the company from bankruptcy and gave them time to develop a new operating system.

In 2001, Apple introduced Mac OS X, an operating system based on Jobs' NeXT Step. It finally combines the stability, reliability, and security of UNIX with the ease of use of the Macintosh interface, and targets both professionals and consumers. OS X software includes methods to emulate older system software, allowing it to run software written before OS X. Through Apple's Carbon library, software developed before OS X can work with and take advantage of OS X features relatively easily.

At the beginning of 2002, Apple showed off the new G4 iMac for the first time. It consists of a hemispherical base and a digital flat-panel display supported by a rotatable neck. Production of this product ceased in the summer of 2004, with a G5 processor-based model demonstrated on August 31, 2004, and launched in mid-September. This model omits the base and hides the CPU and entire computer hardware behind the flat-panel display, supported only by streamlined aluminum feet. The new iMac, called the iMac G5, is the world's thinnest desktop computer, measuring about 5.1 centimeters (about 2 inches) thick.

More recent products include Apple's AirPort, which uses wireless LAN technology to connect computers of different brands, as well as iBooks and G4 computers.

Apple computers such as the PowerBook and newer iBooks and iMacs are often used as props in movies and TV series. Usually heroes or good guys use Apple computers, while villains or bad guys use PC compatibles. In the past, Apple used clips showing the PowerBook's features in the movies "Pop" and "Earth Strikes Back" as a means of advertising competition.

In addition to computer products, Apple also makes consumer devices. In the 1990s, Apple released Newton and coined the term Personal Digital Assistance, which was the earliest PDA. Although its sales were less than ideal, it became a pioneer in products such as the Palm Pilot and PocketPC. Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft began to acquire more new computer users than Apple. Apple's market share fell from 20% to 5% in ten years. The company struggled financially, and by August 6, 1997, Microsoft used $150 million to purchase Apple's non-voting stock in exchange for Apple dropping its lawsuit against Microsoft for copyright infringement and having IE built into every subsequent Macintosh. (Microsoft later sold all of its Apple shares.) Perhaps more meaningfully, Microsoft also announced that it would continue to support its Office series on the Mac version, and soon established a Macintosh software department. This reversed Microsoft's previous situation where the Mac version of the software lagged behind the PC version, and it also won several awards.

In May 2001, after careful consideration, Apple announced the opening of Apple retail stores. The store has two main purposes: 1. To curb Apple's declining market share; 2. To improve the poor marketing strategies of consignees. Initially, Apple retail stores were only open in the United States. At the end of 2003, the Ginza store in Tokyo opened, which was Apple's first Apple retail store outside the United States. After the Ginza store, the Osaka store opened in August 2004, the Nagoya store and the first European store in London, England, also opened one after another.

At the WWDC conference on June 6, 2005, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Macs would start using Intel CPUs starting in 2006.

Apple is not a PC, Apple is a way of life

Apple Computer uses the innovative spirit of "thinking differently" to create a new generation of computer image and the core of digital life for computer users. concept to provide consumers with more exciting choices.

Steve Jobs, the founder and current president of Apple Computer, said at the launch ceremony for iMac: "We are sinking into a situation where digital cameras, digital video cameras, and MP3 players are becoming more and more difficult to use. , we cannot simply combine them together, we need a so-called digital hub to allow us to connect these devices, make our digital life more convenient, and enhance the value of digital products."

His The words describe the core of the "digital lifestyle" advocated by Apple Computer. His purpose is to make Apple Computer the center for connecting various digital devices, allowing users to organically connect different digital devices together through software.

Nowadays, various digital devices are entering more and more deeply into our daily lives. They not only improve our work efficiency, but also make our lives more colorful. It can be said that we are living in a world surrounded by digital products.

The new iMac made its debut amidst people’s unlimited expectations and exclamations. It lived up to the expectations and brought another revolutionary development in the computer industry. It has an intoxicating design and exciting powerful functions. It fundamentally changes the previous dull relationship between people and computers. You can let it move away from you, come closer to you, and match any of your postures. Like a sunflower, it makes our digital life brighter, simpler and more exciting.

So, how does the new iMac play its core role in digital life? How do Apple's four digital tools bring powerful vitality to digital life?

The new iMac comes with the operating system, iMovie 2 for making home movies, iDVD 2 for making digital video discs, iTunes 2 for listening to digital music, and iPhoto for editing digital photos. The four pillars at the core of digital life.

Using these four software, you can easily process digital photos, listen to music, burn CDs, create DVDs, and even edit your own movies on iMac.

The new iMac allows your digital music player iPod, digital camera, digital camcorder and other digital devices to be organically combined and become the true core of your digital life.

It has been 20 years since the first personal computer was born. Apple's MAC computer is another force and is regarded as an outlier in the computer world.

It should be noted that Apple computers are divided into two series: home and commercial. The home desktop is called iMAC, and the home laptop is called iBOOK. The commercial desktop is called Power MAC, and the commercial laptop is called Power BOOK. All Apple computers are collectively called For Macintosh, referred to as MAC.

Let us learn about Apple computers and understand the characteristics of Apple computers by comparing them with PCs. If you are preparing to buy an Apple computer, the following will undoubtedly give you the necessary knowledge.

The Power PC chip used by Apple is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set) chip, while most PCs use CISC (Complex Instruction Set) chips. Power PC operates through multi-pipeline control and superscalar instruction sets, while CISC chips operate in a single-threaded manner.

The operating system of Macintosh is MACOSX. This UNIX-based core system enhances the stability, performance and responsiveness of the system. It takes full advantage of dual processors through symmetric multi-processing technology, providing unparalleled 2D, 3D and multimedia graphics performance as well as extensive font support and integrated PDA functionality. MAC OSX can support almost all MACOS9 applications through the Classic environment, and the intuitive Aqua user interface brings the ease of use of MACintosh to a new level.

The appearance of Apple computers has always been transparent, which gives people a noble and elegant feeling; the design of its iMAC machine is even more epoch-making, fully integrating the host and display, coupled with the colorful The translucent color soon became popular all over the world. MAC has added high-tech elements to the casing of its products. For example, the casing of the PowerBOOK notebook computer is made of 99.5% pure titanium alloy. It is the first time that materials from the space shuttle are used in notebook computer manufacturing.

MAC-specific CPUs include Power PCG3 and Power PC G4, which are jointly designed and manufactured by several major companies such as IBM and Motorola for Apple computers, especially Power PC G4, which can also perform 128-bit operations. . It uses a 0.18 micron process and copper connection process, a 483-pin ceramic CBGA package, the core integrates 33 million transistors, the operating voltage is 1.8V, and it can work stably without a fan for heat dissipation. There is no CPU cooling fan installed in PowerMACG4, only a uniquely shaped heat sink, which can reduce the noise of the machine's operation. It also shows that PowerPC has incomparable advantages over Pentium and Thunderbird. Because it is a 128-bit operation, the speed is beyond the reach of current 32-bit CPUs. The speed of a MAC can be increased exponentially when running graphics software. For example, in order to unleash the speed potential of PowerMACG4, Photoshop 5.5 has specially designed a plug-in program, which can increase the overall speed by more than 2 times, and the performance of some special effects rendering has been increased by 10 times. Therefore, Apple computers have always been synonymous with professional applications of graphics and images in people's minds, and its floating-point computing capabilities far exceed those of ordinary PCs.

The motherboards used in Apple computers are divided into low-end and high-end. They all have three 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots, two external IEEE1394400Mbps FireWire ports, built-in 10/100Base-T network card, 56KModem, 4 DIMM memory slots. However, the low-end only supports a maximum memory capacity of 1GB and the theoretical bandwidth is only 400Mbps, while the high-end increases these two numbers to 2GB and 800Mbps respectively through a more efficient memory controller, and has a 133MHz AGP2× slot and built-in An IEEE1391400Mbps FireWire port, which can be upgraded to use high-speed FireWire hard drives in the future. In terms of system bus, low-end Apple computers operate on a 100MHz FSB, while the high-end PowerMACG4 uses a 133MHz MPX bus architecture. The core of the MPX bus architecture is the PowerPCG4 processor and two related integrated control chips (Uni-N memory bus control chip and KeyLargo input and output device control chip). These two chips play the same role in the entire PowerMACG4 computer as ours The well-known Northbridge chip and Southbridge chip of PC computer motherboards. In the 133MHz MPX bus architecture, the Uni-N chip is responsible for memory, 10/100/1000Mbps network communication, FireWire interface transmission function and graphics card work; while the KeyLargo chip is responsible for storage function, wireless network communication function, USB transmission function , modem communication function, sound output function and power management function work normally.

The memory and hard disk on the MAC are similar to those on the PC. The memory is PC133 SDRAM, and the hard disk is IBM ATA66 and ATA100. Since the technology is the same, can PC hardware also be used on MAC? The answer is no. If you install PC-compatible hardware on your MAC, it will cause malfunctions.

In terms of graphics cards, the two competitors, ATI and NIVIDA, have spread the war from desktops to laptops, and from laptops to MACs. ATI’s dominance in laptops and MACs has begun to be lost to NVIDIA Shaken. Graphics cards for MAC include ATI and GeForce2MX. Among the three latest PowerMACG4 computers, Apple Computer uses NVIDIA's GeForce2MX graphics card specially customized for Apple computers. However, low-end 466MHz PowerMACG4, iMAC and notebook computers still use ATIRAGE128 as the standard configuration of the graphics subsystem. There is no difference in technical parameters between the MAC version of GeForce2MX and the PC version of GeForce2MX. However, since Apple computers and PCs use different operating platforms, NVIDIA has designed a special driver specifically for the video characteristics of MACOS. The biggest difference between the MAC version of GeForce2MX and the PC version is the display signal output port. The MAC version of GeForce2MX is equipped with two display signal output ports (MAC standard VGA 15-pin port and ADC display signal output port). For digital flat-panel displays that are only connected to the DVI (Digital Visual Interface) interface, PowerMACG4 also provides a DVI/ADC conversion cable, allowing users to use DVI digital flat-panel displays without any difficulty. So why should we specifically develop an ADC display signal input standard? This is because in order to keep the desktop of PowerMACG4 computer users clean, Apple Computer allows users to transmit display signals between the monitor and the host through a single ADC signal line and power the monitor, so that there is no need to provide a separate supply for the monitor. The power cord and signal cord are all ingenious.

In terms of displays, Apple computers also use CRT and LCD. Those using CRT are the iMAC series of MACs, and their picture tubes are mainly Mitsubishi's Diamond; those using LCD are mainly Apple's PowerMACG4 series. In addition, Apple has also launched its own brand of LCD: Apple Studio Display. Its LCD monitors are available in three sizes: 15-inch, 17-inch, and 21-inch.

In terms of audio, MAC has a built-in high-performance Odyssey audio system jointly designed by Apple and Harman Kardon. Inside the Odyssey sound system, there is a very unique set of sound guides. This set of sound guides conducts high-frequency sounds like a tweeter, creating an alluring sound field depth effect. Although the diameter of this set of Odyssey sound guides is only 34mm, it can also produce a bass effect that is usually only heard on high-end speakers (or expensive soundproof cars).

In terms of optical drives, the optical drive used by MAC is DVD, and ordinary CD-ROM has been basically eliminated by MAC. Currently, both G3 and G4 are CD-RW or DVD; at the high end, Apple has incorporated the SuperDrive drive into the 733MHz G4 model for sale. SuperDriver can back up up to 4.7GB of personal data through the iDVD burning software provided by Apple, or connect to a digital camera through a FireWire interface with a 400Mbps transmission speed to download pure digital video and audio signals to create DVD video discs with interactive functions.

As for the mouse, MAC's Apple Pro Mouse optical mouse has a glass shell, which is crystal clear and very beautiful. But its mouse has no buttons. In fact, the entire Apple Pro Mouse is just one button. You don't need to click with your fingers, just press the entire mouse gently, and there is no distinction between left and right buttons. In this way, your fingers will not get tired when using it. The mouse is a true oval, suitable for users with different habits, and can be used by both left and right hands. Apple's single-button mouse was introduced in 1984 and is a core part of Apple's "ease of use" concept. However, due to the lack of the "right-click" function that other operating systems have, you often have to run back and forth between the screen and the menu bar during operation, so it is not so convenient to operate.

MAC integrates three network communication functions: Ethernet communication, modem communication and wireless network communication. The most eye-catching one is the AirPort wireless network communication function. The AirPort base station has a 56-Kbps V.90 modem using an RJ-11 connector, and an RJ-45 connector to connect to the 10BASE-TEthernet Ethernet network. With AirPort high-speed wireless network technology, your PowerBook G4 can surf the Internet anywhere in your home or office. In addition, this transmission method has an obvious advantage: unlike infrared, radio waves must be straight lines without obstruction between two points of transmission; because radio waves can penetrate solids and be transmitted up to 150 meters away place.

Apple not only produces most of the hardware for MAC, but also develops the operating system used by MAC. Next, let’s take a look at its operating system.

The current operating system of Apple computers has reached OS10, code-named MACOSX (X is the Roman numeral for 10). This is the biggest change in the 15 years since the birth of MAC computers. The new system is very reliable, and many of its features and services embody Apple's philosophy.

In addition, the computer viruses that are now raging are almost all targeting PCs. Since the architecture of MAC is different from that of PCs, they are rarely attacked by viruses. The MAC OS Apple is able to produce computers according to its own technical standards and independently develop corresponding operating systems, which shows that its technology and strength are extraordinary. For example, Apple is like a combination of INTEL and Microsoft, with "both talent and appearance" in terms of software and hardware.

Many software companies have developed special versions for MAC, and now there are a lot of software available for MAC. For example, Microsoft has developed the MAC version of Office and the MAC version of IE browser for MAC. Apple has also launched a software that can simulate the WIin98 platform on a MAC and run some software for Win98. However, the compatibility is average and the speed of running PC games is relatively slow.

Most of the software surrounding Apple computers are professional products for image editing and processing, such as iDVD, which can create DVD discs, iTunes, which can compress CDs into MAC-style MP3, and iMovie2, which can create digital movies.

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