iPad 2 launch sell-out

As predicted by many, the launch of the iPad 2 here in the UK was a sell-out. Up and down the land multitudes queued, some of them overnight, to get their hands on the new device. At the flagship London Store, by the time the doors opened, the queue was doubling back on itself. A store representative said that stocks of the basic 16GB 3G model in white had already sold out before the store even officially opened, simply from going down the queue and taking pre-reservations.

It was the same story elsewhere, with Curry’s Docklands Store selling its allocation of 100 once again before the store had officially opened! With over 1 million sales in the US on its first day of release, its looking like the iPad 2 is bound to be an overwhelming success around the world.

OS X 10 years old this week

This week we have seen the 10th anniversary of the debut of Mac oS X. It shipped March 24th 2001 and yet it seems that OS X has been around forever. Of course, some of us are old enough to remember System 6.0! For most folk, especially those coming to the Mac platform as a result of the iPod or the iPhone will only know of OS X.

To remind us all of the start of it all, check out this video:

Now, the first version (Cheetah) was somewhat buggy and so Apple quickly followed it up with version 10.1 (Puma). Still, OS X ushered in the era of  the Dock, Terminal, Mail, Address Book, TextEdit, AppleScript and PDF support along with full multitasking, Aqua and OpenGL. Compared to the Classic version of the Mac oS, it was much more elegant, modern-looking and based on UNIX.

Puma was much more stable and was a free update for those who had invested at the start with Cheetah. It not only squashed most of the bugs that came with Cheetah but made it easier to do CD and DVD burning using Finder and iTunes, DVD playback, better printer support, ColorSync 4.0 and Image Capture.

So, a lot has happened since that important date 10 years ago and Mac OS X has gone from strength to strength. Much of the success has been driven by Steve Jobs but we shouldn’t forget the great team of engineers, software and hardware engineers and the marketing and sales teams that all have made it possible. Lets hope that Apple  finds some special way of marking this milestone. In the meantime, Happy Birthday OS X!