Macintosh History

2004: iPod mini and photo, Faster 'Books and Power Macs, and the iMac G5

Dan Knight - updated 2008.02.09 - Tip Jar

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At Macworld Expo in January, Apple announced that 2 million iPods had been sold.

On February 20, the aluminum-encased iPod mini went on sale. The diminutive iPod used an even smaller hard drive than the regular iPod and stored 4 GB of data. It also introduced a new click wheel, which elimintated the need for four separate buttons in addition to the scroll wheel.

Apple was unable to keep up with demand for the mini for months.

The 4th generation iPod was introduced on July 19. It also incorporated a click wheel and added a new feature: shuffle.

On October 26, Apple rolled out the iPod photo, an iPod with a color display, a video cable so it could be connected to a television, and the ability to work with iPhoto to manage, resize, store, and display your digital photos.

The U2 special edition iPod was introduced at the same time, a black iPod with a red click wheel.

More Power for PowerBooks and iBooks

In April the PowerBook line got a refresh. The 12" PowerBook G4 jumped from 1 GHz to 1.33 GHz, moved to a 167 MHz system bus, and doubled video RAM. Battery life was rated at 5 hours.

The 15" PowerBook went from 1.0 and 1.25 GHz to 1.33 and 1.5 GHz and adopted Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics. The 1.5 GHz model acquired the backlit keyboard first seen in the 17" PowerBook in 2003.

The 17" PowerBook moved from 1.33 GHz to 1.5 GHz and had essentially the same motherboard specs as the 15" 1.5 GHz model.

At the same time, Apple updated the iBook line. The new entry-level 12" model was marketed at 1 GHz, although it actually ran at 1.07 GHz. The 14" iBook came in 1.07 GHz (nominally 1 GHz) and 1.2 GHz, and they were the first iBooks to ship with a SuperDrive.

Apple would refresh the iBook line again in October, moving the 12" iBook to 1.2 GHz and making AirPort Extreme a standard feature. The 14" iBook moved to a single speed, 1.33 GHz, and the two models were differentiated by a Combo drive vs. a SuperDrive.

The PowerBook line had to wait until January 2005 for its next update.

Power Mac Refresh

Apple updated the Power Mac line in June. All of the models now had dual processors, and speeds available were 1.8 GHz, 2.0 GHz, and a blistering 2.5 GHz. As before, the entry-level model used PCI expansion slots and had a 4 GB RAM ceiling, while the other two Power Mac had PCI-X slots and supported up to 8 GB of memory.

Apple introduced a single-processor 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5 in October. At $1,499, it was $500 more affordable than the dual-processor 1.8 GHz model.

A New iMac Design

iMac G5 Showing how the iPod now dominated Apple culture, the iMac G5 was introduced in August as being "from the creators of iPod". The new design mounted the logic board behind the flat panel display, which came in 17" and 20" sizes. Ports were on the rear, the optical drive was on the right, and the computer was elevated above your desk with an aluminum foot.

CPU speeds were 1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz on a system bus running at one-third of CPU speed, and the efficient cooling of the vertical design meant the iMac G5 was a lot quieter than the G4 iMacs had been - Apple claimed 25 dB quieter!

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office 2004 proved how important the Mac was to Microsoft. It not only had feature parity with the Windows version, it included features that weren't part of Office for Windows. Reviews were positive across the board.

There was no new version of Mac OS X in 2004.

Next - 2005: Mac mini, Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger', iSight iMacs, Dual-Core Power Macs, Hi-res PowerBooks, and More

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