The Apple ][ is celebrating it's 35th birthday. Originally demoed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at a computer fair on April 16 and 17, 1977, the Apple II was the machine that put Apple on the map and then went on to catapult the personal computer revolution. What better way to celebrate one of the original PC's monumental birthdays than to use an Apple II simulator in Mac OS X?

Bundled within the XScreenSaver for Mac collection, the standalone Apple2 application is actually a completely usable VT100 Terminal emulator in the lovably awful Apple ][ style, complete with screen noise, random color flickers, a permanent caps lock, and other peculiarities unique to technologies of a bygone era. Whether you have distant memories of the ][ or never even used one, the simulator is a fun look at what computers behaved like 35 years ago.

• Download the XScreenSaver pack DMG, mount the disk image, and launch Apple2.app

Optionally, you can install the Apple2.saver screen saver as well. Not the most useful thing in the world, but it sure is fun.

Apple was busy dreaming about the future 29 years ago, long before the days of the iPhone, touch screens, cell phones, and even cordless phones. As this Apple product concept from 1983 shows, the company envisioned an Apple phone complete with a Mac-like OS, touch screen, touch keyboard, and even a stylus to navigate the onscreen elements. Of course this particular phone never went anywhere, but it does show Apple’s tradition of dreaming big and being years ahead of their rivals in imagination alone.

These particular concepts were created by one of Apple’s famous first industrial designers, Hartmut Esslinger of frogdesign. You can see more old Apple product concept pictures at fudder.de alongside a fascinating article about Apple’s early design, though it’s in German so the English translation is a bit rough.

Conceptually this one looks much more useful than the silly looking literal Apple phone from 1985, which was shaped like an actual Apple logo.

If you found the recent New York Times pieces on the making of Apple products to be interesting and “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory” to be enlightening, you’ll probably enjoy this ABC Nightline report on Foxconn.

ABC’s Nightline was given exclusive access to a Foxconn factory in China that assembles Apple products, providing a fascinating look at how Apple gear is made. You’ll see iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pro’s being put together manually by workers as there’s virtually no robots or automation, nearly all of the devices are assembled by hand. This means it takes a while to produce each Apple product, and a single iPad takes nearly a week to complete.

It’s not exactly a groundbreaking documentary, but if you are an Apple fan and user of Apple products, it’s worth watching. The show is about 15 minutes long and has been embedded below or you can watch it on ABCNews.com.

Growth of iOS, the mobile operating system that powers iPhones, iPads, iPod touch, and Apple TV, is exploding. To put iOS’s success into some context, Asymco crafted the above chart to demonstrate the growth curve relative to years of Apple products on the market. The most staggering observation? Apple sold 156 million iOS devices last year alone, that is over 30 million more units shipped than all 28 years of the Macs existence, where it has sold 122 million computers. Overall, the iOS platform totals over 316 million devices sold in a few short years.

Look to iOS to Understand Mac OS X
If you’re wondering why Apple has been pushing the Mac platform to more closely resemble iOS with the release of OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, this is it. The simplicity, familiarity, and success of iOS is too much to resist. PC’s, and Macs too for that matter, are indeed becoming the “trucks” that Steve Jobs predicted several years ago at D8 2010, becoming greatly outnumbered by the “cars” (in this case, iOS devices). Jobs’ now famous quote from that conversation:

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

The only thing Jobs’ was wrong about was how soon it would happen. As Asymco notes, it only took four years for iOS to overtake OS X.

Simplicity is the Future
None of this means the Mac is dead or dying though, in fact Mac sales are more impressive than ever before, but it does signify the changing roll of computers and how we define a PC. It makes us question who needs what hardware, and for what purpose. Frankly, for many users an iPad – or iPhone – is more than adequate to handle the routine tasks of daily technical life, be it reading or sending emails to browsing the web and listening to music. The Mac (and PC) will certainly still be around for those required to perform more complex tasks, but that market is undoubtedly smaller, and this has already been proven by the runaway success of iOS. As a result, traditional desktop operating systems are evolving towards simplicity. The Mac and PC are ultimately over-engineered and too powerful for the average users technical needs, this helps to explain Apple’s OS X strategy and Microsofts Windows 8 concepts, the power and underlying complexity is still there, but the experience is becoming simpler.

As DaringFireball noted when linking to the Asymco chart, “The lesson: simplicity sells.” If you have any doubts about this or where the industry is going, just look at that chart.

Want to see every Apple design ever released in 30 seconds of cheesy video? Of course you do. You’ll see everything from the Apple I to the QuickTake Camera to the LC III and of course modern gear like the iPhone and iPad. It looks like all the bases of Apple’s historical releases are covered here, although I’m not so sure the sock looking things at the end are genuine Apple gear.

Update: Apparently the socks at the end are real, yes Apple sells socks, well, for your iPod anyway. Thanks to those who pointed this out!

Adam Lashinsky, the author of the newly released book “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works”, recently appeared on an episode of InDay Speaker Series to discuss his work. The interview is about 50 minutes long and covers the corporate culture of Apple, how some internal processes work, and their legendary secrecy. If you’re interested in the business side of Apple, it’s worth watching the video below:

“Inside Apple” is available from Amazon.com for $16

Apple fans have another book to add to their reading lists, this time focusing on the business side of things. Titled Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, the reader gets an in depth look at Apple’s unique culture and internal processes, ranging from it’s legendary secrecy to how it creates and markets everyones favorite products.

Here’s the official description from Amazon:

INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.

If Apple is Silicon Valley’s answer to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the “DRI” (Apple’s practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).

Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO.

While Inside Apple is ostensibly a deep dive into one, unique company (and its ecosystem of suppliers, investors, employees and competitors), the lessons about Jobs, leadership, product design and marketing are universal. They should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

If you were a fan of the official Steve Jobs biography, you’ll probably enjoy this book too. You can get Inside Apple on Amazon.com for $16, Kindle and iBooks versions are also available.

As recently as 2002, most of Apple’s products were manufactured in the USA. What happened? Why is nearly everything, from Macs to iPhones, made in China now? The New York Times provides an in depth report on Apple’s move overseas, and it’s not as simple as you might think.

It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

If you enjoyed the “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory” podcast, you’ll probably enjoy reading this too, as it sheds some light on the business decisions driving factories like Foxconn. Here’s an example on the challenge Apple faced when hiring skilled engineers in the USA vs China:

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

The lengthy read also includes several anecdotes about Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, as well as plenty of quotes from other unspecified current and former Apple executives. If you’re interested in Apple and Apple history, don’t miss it.

Read New York Times: How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

iPhone is truly the device that changed everything, it reinvented the phone and what we expect of a handheld device, it forever changed Apple, and it has since defined the entire mobile industry.

All of that started 5 years ago today, on January 9, when Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld 2007 to unveil the very first iPhone, saying “I have been looking forward to this for two and a half years. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” and the rest, as they say, is history.

For a quick recap, the original iPhone had an aluminum back, glass multitouch screen, included a 2mp camera, ran at 412MHz, had 128MB of RAM, and was available in 4GB and 8GB, with a 16 GB options appearing later as the 4GB became discontinued. The devices main setback was the limitation to AT&T’s slow EDGE network, but regardless it was by far the most impressive and advanced phone on the market and sold out quickly, leaving smartphone competitors scrambling. iOS at the time was fairly basic and called iPhone OS, made from a heavily stripped down version of Mac OS X. Apps were limited to what Apple installed on the iPhone, which were things like Safari, iPod, Mail, Calendar, Photos, Stocks, Weather, Calculator, etc, and third party apps with the developer SDK didn’t come until a year later in early 2008.

Below are videos of Steve Jobs unveiling the very first iPhone, if you haven’t seen these and you are interested in Apple history, they are well worth watching:
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This is a classic picture of a young Steve Jobs giving the finger to an IBM sign in 1983, it’s been circulating again after all these years thanks to Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld who posted the high res copy to Google+. Here’s the text that was posted along with the amusing image:

In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here’s one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit. In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time. Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.

The book is his “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made“, which tells the story of how the original Macintosh was created. That subject was briefly discussed in the recent Steve Jobs biography as well.

The picture demonstrates the competitive nature of Jobs and early Apple, and although the image has been around a while this is the first higher resolution copy to surface. In the early days of Apple, IBM was largely considered the companies biggest competitor and enemy of sorts, as is demonstrated in the Ghostbusters spoof and of course the classic 1984 Superbowl commercial that launched the first Mac.