Colophon
About & Sources
The Apple Core is an independent, unofficial tribute to four decades of Apple hardware. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc. “Apple,” “Macintosh,” “iPhone,” and related marks are trademarks of Apple Inc.
How the numbers are computed
Every figure on the site is derived from a small set of canonical, numeric fields stored per device (RAM in KB, clock in MHz, storage in MB, launch price in USD, year). The comparison engine then computes the relatable figures live:
- Memory multiplier. A fixed modern reference — a 16 GB Apple Silicon MacBook Pro (16,777,216 KB) — divided by the device’s shipping RAM. The 1984 Macintosh’s 128 KB yields ≈ 131,000×.
- Speed multiplier. One modern performance core (nominal 3.2 GHz) divided by the device’s clock. This is clock-only and approximate — it deliberately ignores cores, instruction width, IPC and architecture, all of which widen the real gap enormously. The UI states this everywhere the figure appears.
- Storage in photos. Base storage divided by ~4 MB, the size of a typical modern phone photo.
- Price today. Launch price multiplied by an approximate US CPI inflation factor for the launch year (BLS CPI-U annual averages, missing years interpolated). Rounded and labelled approximate.
On approximations. Cross-architecture performance and historical pricing are genuinely hard to make exact. Where a figure is an estimate, we say so rather than implying false precision. Spot something wrong? It lives in one file — data/devices.js — and is easy to correct.
Data sources
- Apple — official archived technical specifications and newsroom.
- EveryMac.com — comprehensive Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad spec database.
- Mactracker — community-maintained detailed model data.
- Wikipedia — launch dates, prices and historical context.
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics — CPI data for inflation adjustment.
Emulation & software
The “Live emulators” exhibit lets you boot a range of real operating systems — System 1.0, System 6.0.8, System 7.1, Mac OS 8.1 and Mac OS 9.0.4 via Infinite Mac by Mihai Parparita (an open-source WebAssembly build of classic Mac OS), plus an Apple II / DOS 3.3 emulator hosted by Will Scullin (apple2js). Each one downloads only when a visitor explicitly opts in. The “Apple II · BASIC”, “System 7” and “Aqua” exhibits are original HTML/CSS/JS recreations built for this site — including a small working Applesoft-style BASIC interpreter. We use only legally distributable system software and credit its provenance.
Advertising
The “Apple, Advertised” gallery documents sixteen landmark campaigns. Clicking a poster plays the ad inline via an embedded YouTube player (privacy-friendly youtube-nocookie.com; nothing loads until you click), with an “Open on YouTube” link as a fallback. The advertisements themselves remain the property of Apple Inc. and their respective agencies and uploaders; they are embedded here for historical and educational purposes.
Portraits
Founder and CEO portraits are free-licensed photographs from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY / CC BY-SA), self-hosted in assets/people/. The four executives without a suitable free portrait (Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, Michael Spindler, Gil Amelio) use stylised monogram avatars instead.
Imagery
Product photography comes from Wikimedia Commons (free-licensed images). The photos are downloaded and self-hosted in assets/devices/ so the site loads fast and works offline — the original source URL for every image is recorded in assets/devices/credits.json for attribution. Where no suitable free photo exists, the site falls back to an original in-browser vector silhouette, so nothing ever breaks. Photos remain the property of their respective authors under their Commons licences.
Built with
Vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no third-party runtime dependencies. Open index.html and it runs. See the README.md for the data model and how to add a device.
Last updated: June 2026