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
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
