Apple AirPort

Former MacFormat Editor Graham Barlow recalls how AirPort and Wi-Fi changed everything…

The first time I saw Steve Jobs in the flesh was in 2004. I was crammed into an empty warehouse somewhere in Docklands, London for the launch of the UK iTunes Store, with around 400 other UK journalists. I had only recently become the editor of MacFormat and had no idea how Apple press events worked, so I naturally assumed they would all be like this – Steve Jobs jetting over from California to perform a keynote, and a celebrity pop star to sing us back out to the car park. That would turn out not to be the case, but Steve obviously thought that the launch of the UK iTunes Store was a big enough deal to justify a trip to the UK in person, and Alicia Keys had been hired there to sing us out at the end.

But the real star of the show for me turned out to be AirPort. Back in the day, Apple was way ahead of the curve in Wi-Fi technology. Apple first launched AirPort in 1999, but by 2004, Wi-Fi still hadn’t become mainstream enough that we were used to it, so, when Steve did his party trick of casually picking up his MacBook (which was streaming music from iTunes) and walking around the stage with it, without the music stopping, I was amazed. To somebody used to Ethernet cables trailing out of everything, this looked like magic. Sure, the iTunes Store was interesting, but it was the magic of AirPort that stayed with me on the train back to the MacFormat office. Looking back, I should have put the two together, because wireless streaming turned out to be the key to the iTunes Store’s success. Steve kept stressing that iTunes’ real rival was not other music stores, but the MP3 file-sharing networks. At the time it was hard to see how Apple’s idea of paying for music could compete with the free, if illegal, trade in MP3s. But it was thanks to the convenience of streaming that Apple eventually won the day, by making legal music easier to use than the free alternative.

It wasn’t the iPod’s original sales pitch – a thousand songs in your pocket – that mattered anymore. It was about unlimited music in the cloud that you could instantly stream from wherever you were on any device. Streaming was the future, and Steve Jobs knew it before the rest of us.

ABOUT GRAHAM BARLOW

Graham Barlow is MacFormat’s Editor-inChief. He first edited the mag in 2004 when an Apple iBook with G3 processor running OS X 10.3 Panther was ‘cool’, and cost a month’s salary. As a podcaster, his favourite piece of Apple tech these days is his AirPods.