For Mac users, 2000 was a year that began with the cool blue waters of Aqua and ended in a storm of red ink. It began with Steve Jobs dropping “interim” from his CEO title, only to find himself struggling with the company’s first serious financial crisis since its return to profitability. It was the year of the Cube, and the year in which Mac OS X got tantalizingly closer to reality. But it was also the year in which a fairy-tale comeback was transformed into something more akin to a nail-biting suspense drama as users — and Wall Street — wondered if Jobs could once again work his magic on the computer industry.
It was a busy year for Apple and the Mac, and looking back at the past 12 months proved to be a big job. So the editors and reporters from MacWEEK and MacCentral have joined forces to review the most important Mac events of 2000:
Brad Gibson looks at Apple’s financial performance, noting one analyst’s analogy: “It’s like Apple came around a bend in the road driving 90 miles an hour and slammed right into a brick wall.”
Dennis Sellers reviews a year’s worth of Mac trade shows: Macworld Expo San Francisco, Macworld Expo Tokyo, Macworld Expo New York and Apple Expo in Paris.
Stephen Beale and David Read cover Apple’s Y2K hardware: new laptops, new iMacs, dual-processor Power Mac G4 systems and the G4 Cube.
Stephen Beale looks at the year’s software rollouts, including Mac OS X Public Beta, Microsoft Office 2001, graphics upgrades from Adobe Systems and Macromedia and a host of products from smaller vendors.
Peter Cohen covers developments in Macintosh games and graphics cards, including ATI’s Radeon, Nvidia’s moves toward the Mac market and the end of the line for 3dfx.
Joe LiPetri reviews major developments in digital imaging hardware: printers, scanners, digital cameras and displays.