The Top 8 Stevenote Moments. ..which is a cool article,
But I want to take a moment to highlight the 1999 keynote where the Clamshell iBook is unveiled.
Usually there is some (*snicker*) amount of hyperbole in these keynotes, but during this segment I can't help but mostly agree with Steve Jobs on what made the Clamshell iBook so exciting at the time. It really was an amazing portable for someone who did a lot of rough traveling and the specs aren't exaggerated as exciting. Michelle, the author of the article linked above, may disagree. But as a long, long time owner of a blue and white Clamshell (that matched my Perl Cookbook, oh lord I'm a geek) I can safely say that I wasn't let down.
In fact I'd say the iBook and the Mac OS X Public Beta were two big helpers in my career path. It's possible one of the factors in my hire at Tucows was that I had the audacity to sport the "iPurse" at my interview.
Early chatter about OS X drove me to experiment with FreeBSD from a Linux user's perspective, which increased my knowledge of both exponentially, and having the iBook itself let me do it anywhere... which, you know, when you're in your early 20's is important because you're never home.
Time goes by of course and 9 years later you can't help but chuckle at the specs that were pretty hot upon release. I have an iPod Touch sitting on my desk that has a 400MHz Arm processor and 128MB of RAM, and it's smaller than a deck of cards.
Current laptops and notebooks are obviously much "better" at the present moment, but none of them have inspired me as much as the first generation iBook had. The missing element is charisma.
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