What 10 years of Apple did to its main product

How time flies! In the year 2000, I was just finishing high school, listening to Bush, and becoming acquainted with Windows 2000. Back then, I knew very little about Apple, and I'd certainly not heard of the Bondi Bubble iMac (the first iMac was released in 1998). In 2010, well...how things have changed for me!

And, as illustrated by Brett Jordan in the graphic above, things have also changed at Apple.

It's incredible to think that the iPhone has taken center stage at Apple over the last three years. As noted by some of our commentators, there has been a real lack of Mac-centric news recently. Sure, there was the update to the iMac a few months ago, but it's glaringly obvious that the Mac has taken a back seat to the iPhone -- certainly in the limelight department. In fact, I'm reveling in the fact that I'm writing about the iPhone and the iMac at the same time!

Today, the Mac is the center of our digital hub, but it's no longer the center of our digital world. When we leave the house / office / room where the Mac lives, it's the iPhone ( iPad / iPod touch) that is constantly in our hands, and Apple knows it!

Of course, we have to come back to our Macs eventually (in my case, repeatedly, everyday) because the iPhone can't do everything that we want it to, or even some of the things that we want done well, yet. But just looking at this picture shows how far things have come, and how the direction taken by personal computing is becoming even more personal.

The only feature of the iPhone 4 that doesn't beat the iMac of yesteryear is screen real estate. The processor and RAM are double the capacity of the iMac, the iPhone's storage is 2 gigabytes larger, and it's flash-based memory. And of course, it's tiny in comparison. As noted by Obama Pacman, it's Moore's law in effect.

But when will it end? In 10 years time, will we have an iPhone that's five times smaller than the current one, but more powerful than the personal computers of today? Who knows? That might be a weird phone, but anything could happen. For now, I'm still stuck with my iPhone 3G, and I think it might still have some Bush on it. In the meantime, I'm just looking forward to getting the iPhone 4!
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