What a year for Apple! It introduced new products and perfected old ones at a whirlwind pace, from the start of January right on through to the year's end.
It was almost impossible to keep up and, in retrospect, it seems as if January was eons ago, with innovations from then now industry standards and icons.
The year started with a tsunami of new products. Keynote (a new presentation application) and Safari (Apple's new web browser) seemed directly to attack Microsoft's PowerPoint and Internet Explorer. So far, they have been outstanding successes.
Also at the beginning of the year, Apple put some finishing touches to its famous iApps and reintroduced them as the iLife suite. Together, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes and iDVD once again raised the bar with their cross-application integration and professional features.
As if this was not enough, Apple established another precedent by introducing its first 'presumer' application for video-editing, Final Cut Express, which came with most of the features of Final Cut Pro but had a consumer-friendly price.
During MacWorld San Francisco, Apple floored everyone with its huge 17-inch and the tiny 12-inch aluminium PowerBooks. These impressive machines broke the one-gigahertz speed barrier for Apple portables and introduced Firewire 800, USB 2 and Bluetooth short-range wireless. They also came with superdrives that burned DVDs and CDs. In addition, Apple introduced Airport Extreme, which doubled the data rate of the previous Airport wireless networking technology.