Year 2008 in Review

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Year 2008 in Review

Postby Antony » Sun 28 Dec, 2008 5:05 am

Just before we say goodbye to 2008, it's a great time to take a look what happened this year. Two major products dominated the news headline around the world, iPhone 3G was released around the world, and the world's thinnest laptop - MacBook Air.

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Apple once again set an industry's first with the release of the world's thinnest laptop - MacBook Air in early January 2008. MacBook Air features 13.3-inch LED-backlit, full-size and backlit keyboard and only 0.4cm (0.16-inch) at its thinnest point (to 1.9cm the thickest point), weigh only 1.36kg (3.0 pounds).

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Embracing with 802.11n wireless technology, Apple released Time Capsule, a backup application that austomatically and wirelessly backs up everything on one of more Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Time Capsule also works as an 802.11n base station, providing wireless networking features as an AirPort Extreme Base Station. Apple also updates Apple TV to "Take 2" in January.

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On 11th July, Apple released the long anticipated iPhone 3G in 22 countries. With the release of iPhone 3G, .Mac service is renamed to MobileMe, and making the service more Windows friendly. Apps (available from App Store) becomes available for developers to design applications for iPhone 3G and iPod touch. (Antony queued outside Apple Store Sydney and bought his iPhone 3G on the first day of release.)

Perhaps the news headline was all around iPhone 3G, Apple did not forget iPod. Apple updated iPod touch with built-in speaker, and new iPod nano.

NBC Universal returns to iTunes Store in September, bringing a number of TV shows back for iTunes and iPod, Apple TV users.

On the Mac part, Mac Pro are now featuring 8-core as standard. MacBook Pro and MacBook have speed update in February, and in October, MacBook Pro and MacBook both joined the MacBook Air with the uni-body aluminum design. Resulting the entire MacBook family stronger and yet lighter. Together with the new environment friendly re-designed MacBook family, Apple also releases 24-inch LED Cinema Display, featuring thin aluminum and glass enclosure and Mini DisplayPort. In April, iMac has speed dump to 3.06GHz. Apple has once again led the industry on making products even greener.

On the software part, Aperture has moved up to version 2, version 2.1 with open plug-in architecture allowing third party developers to write plugins, filters etc for Aperture. With the release of iPhone 3G, iTunes 8 was released.

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On 19th June, Apple opened its first flagship Apple Store in Sydney, also the first one in southern hemisphere. This Sydney Apple Store is Apple's second largest Apple Store in the word with the longest Genius Bar. (Antony queued up for the Apple Store opening since 3.30am in the morning. He took some photos.)

Related threads:
[sdt=14322]Year 2007 in Review[/sdt]
[sdt=12733]2006 Year in Review[/sdt]
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Postby Don_HH2K » Wed 31 Dec, 2008 6:55 pm

In addition to Antony's list of Apple-centric happenings, I just noticed that there's a list of The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008. :wink:

Edit - Ars Technica just put out their top ten lists for Microsoft and Apple topics, as well as the top ten most read.
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