So originally Apple was this textbook example of a firm started in a bedroom and now it's this corporate behemoth that textbooks are being written about. There has to have been a moment when it stopped being one and became the other -- and whatever day that was, it looks like it happened in this week of June 4 through 10.

When we started researching the company's four decades, and the two decades of MacNN, we pretty quickly decided to cover it through this week by week slicing. Seeing the events of the same week across the years from 1976 to 2016, it had a lot going for it. The contrast between the bedroom and the boardroom was one, the comparison between Steve Wozniak's Cream Soda Computer and the iMac was another. You have to wonder, though, whether we're going to hit a week in which nothing happened.

This is the 23rd week of the series and there's no sign of a slowdown yet. What there is, and specifically what there is this week, is a startling change. In the week of June 4 through 10 from 1976 to maybe 2007, the story of Apple is clearly one of people. Yet in this same week from 2007 to today, it's more about products.

It isn't really: Apple is still a group of people and we still hear their stories, but the torrent of products we now get is combined with the secrecy of the company to hide the personal side. Yet as interesting as, say, each new version of the iPhone is, once the iPhone 4 is out, the preceding iPhone 3GS fades from view whereas what the people do just becomes increasingly interesting.

Woz and US

The people and their stories are interesting, but that doesn't mean they're always so very well known. One of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's biggest moves -- financially for certain and perhaps also creatively -- came to an end this week with the last day of his second US Festival in 1983. That concluded on June 4 and while we can't pin down a specific date for this, within a few days, certainly less than a week, Woz walked back into Apple and asked for something to do.

The first US Festival was in September 1982 and so we'll cover it more in the week September 3 through 9 later in the year. We can't drop the name 'US Festival' on you and not explain it, though: you doubtlessly assumed it was US as in United States but no. It was meant to be us as in all of us together. Why Woz spelt it in capitals and whether people realised what he meant is anybody's guess.

What's a lot clearer is that it was an extremely, perhaps supremely expensive pet project. You cannot believe the roster of talent at these shows, though perhaps if you've followed Apple for any length of time at all, you won't be remotely surprised that U2 was there. So were The Police, The Clash, Van Halen, David Bowie, Stevie Nicks...

Woz is believed to have lost up to $24m over the two years of the festival. Here's a short peek showing you the scale of the events:

You're still wondering how it could be that expensive but here's an example. Van Halen were booked for the second festival in 1983 -- they performed on Heavy Metal Day, Sunday May 29 -- and were going to be paid $1m. Their contract had a condition that no other artist be paid more than them, though, and a late decision to ask David Bowie along meant the costs plus fees exceeded that. According to promoter Barry Fey in a detailed behind-the-scenes feature in The Orange County Register, Bowie was in Europe on the Let's Dance tour.

"David tells me: 'We'll have to interrupt our tour and charter a 747 to bring our equipment and get it right back again,'" says Fey. "So I went to Steve [Wozniak]: 'David's gonna cost you a million and a half, but it's gonna cost you an extra half a million for Van Halen.' He just shrugged his shoulders: 'So?' The addition of Bowie ultimately cost $2 million."

That would be the $1.5m expense and fee for Bowie plus an extra half million to comply with Van Halen's contract. Said Woz at various times: "It is my money and my festival. I can only do about 40 more of these."

It's easy to look at the astonishing cost of it all and how Woz didn't do 40, he didn't do any more after this week in 1983, but there's a good argument that the US Festivals prepared the way for all major festivals that followed. Stewart Copeland of The Police has claimed that the US Festivals should be "up there with Woodstock".

There were 670,000 people at this week's second US Festival. With that number of people, there were going to be problems: there were two deaths, one of which was believed related to a drug deal gone wrong.

Stoned rumors stick

This week saw the start of Apple's Real People ad campaigns. You've never heard of it -- except you have. It's one of those cases where the official name is somehow supplanted by a summary of the campaign: this is what we know as the Switcher one.

It's not up there with the Mac vs PC ads even though it was theoretically the same idea: it was about getting people to move from Windows to Apple. What the Switcher -- sorry, Real People -- ads did was have, well, real people talking about why they ditched PCs and how much better their lives were since using Macs. If you do remember the campaign, though, you remember it for this.



That's Ellen Feiss, then a student, who it was alleged to have filmed the ad while stoned. Look at her, though. Look at her eyes. That's exhaustion. You've been there. You haven't been the subject of an Apple ad campaign, though, and that tends to stick with a person. Especially with a woman, as unpalatable a fact as that is. Speaking to MacEnstein five years later, Feiss talked about the attention she got from the ad.

"It was creepy from the beginning. It was always one of the worst aspects about the whole thing. I was famous but not that famous. It's not like I had to get a body guard, but my parents stopped letting me go out alone for a while. It was an annoying balance and the constant commentary I was constantly reminded of pissed me off. Plus a lot of my fame seemed to me to be based on the fact that I seemed to be a vulnerable (stoned) young girl. That is never who I was or am.

"I don't want that kind of gendered fame and I was never proud of the fact that a bunch of dudes on the internet thought I was hot, or ugly or stoned or stupid or any of the other things people talked about. That being said, a lot of my fans have turned out to be nice, intelligent Mac using people. Mostly men but a few women too."

Feiss was not paid for the interview used in the ad campaign, filmed by documentary maker Errol Morris who would win an Oscar the next year for his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Feiss did, though, get a free iPod. It didn't come with U2 on it, though flash forward to this week and June 6, 2006 and there was the new U2 iPod.

iPods begat iPhones

We said that a torrent of products began from this week around 2007 and of course that's the year the iPhone was unveiled. In this week, though, we saw the iPhone 3G in 2008 (June 9), the iPhone 3GS in 2009 (June 8) and the iPhone 4 in 2010 (June 7). These are all dates of when these phones were announced; in each case the shipping would take place some weeks later. Which means that the iPhone 4's Antennagate will be covered in the week July 11 through 17.



Alongside iPhones there tend to be iOS announcements and on June 6, 2011 we got iOS 5 which Apple said was significant for how it brought in Newsstand (deceased), Notification Center (still little used) and iMessages (okay, doing fine). Curiously downplayed in Apple's press release -- it did get a mention in the obligatory Steve Jobs quote but then is the last feature detailed -- was what was called PC Free. In a similar way to the Real People/Switcher name, nobody ever called it PC Free.

We don't call it anything. This is a feature but it feels more like the way things ought to be: iOS 5's PC Free introduced the way that you can set up and backup or sync your iPhone without plugging it into your Mac or PC. This date and this version marks the point when we were liberated from our computers, and also when we started failing to fully backup our iPhones.

Every iPhone user just automatically and immediately used this PC Free feature without ever looking back. That's the forgotten benefit of iOS 5 whereas the big change in iOS 6 may never be forgotten: Apple Maps.



Apple Maps and iOS 6 were revealed on June 11 2012 and it was a pretty big surprise for us and perhaps also for Google. Today Apple Maps is arguably on a par with Google Maps but in 2012 it wasn't and the headlines were all about how poor it was, how Apple was arrogant to think it could just replace Google like this. Maybe Apple was arrogant, certainly Apple Maps had problems, but Apple had no choice.

Up to this point, one genuine advantage that Android phones had over iPhones was that they included turn by turn driving directions. Google provided that service and so could have done for Apple's iPhones too, but not surprisingly, the company liked having a reason for people to buy Android. That said, Google did really want to put its Latitude service on its iPhone maps app and Apple would not agree.

Latitude was a lot like Find My Friends in that it would let you automatically send your pals your real-time location. You do know that your best pal is Google, though, right? The benefit to Google was all that tracking data and presumably this is why Apple refused. So you never saw Latitude on iPhones and if you ever heard of the service, you've forgotten it because so has everyone -- including Google. In 2013, Latitude joined the long, long and increasing ranks of services that Google says will change the world, shortly before switching them off forever.

So in retrospect Apple Maps was probably necessary but it was also clearly buggy. Sufficiently so that whatever iOS plans Apple's Scott Forstall had for the future were forestalled by iOS 6's Maps problems. The failures in Apple Maps led to Forstall being directed to the door which led to hardware designer Jony Ive's increasing role in software. That led to iOS 7 which was a radical change to the iPhone and iPad, unveiled this week on June 10, 2013.



It was one of those radical changes that radically changes how you see what came before it: try looking at iOS 6 or earlier now without wincing. The new iOS 7 design, which broadly speaking continues today with iOS 9, is minimalist where the old design was plush. Curiously, it was the old design that was based on skeuomorphism but it was the new design that taught the world that word. As in "skeuomorphism is rubbish". Skeuomorphism is making a digital product seem familiar by giving it the appearance of things we're familiar with in the real world. So the old iCal had a tiny bit of 'torn paper' the way a real desk calendar would.

Goodbye MobileMe

Apple switched off skeuomorphism and it switched off iOS 6 with the release of iOS 7 and that's typical of the company. You can't go back, even if you want to. Everything is brilliant, innovative, thin and magical, until the next thing comes out. So it was with MobileMe which Apple would tell you was the bee's knees, until June 6, 2011 when the bee got new knees with iCloud.

That's the same date that iOS 5 was released and part of that PC Free functionality is down to iCloud. So much now of Apple technology is tied to this and for all that we still have outages and odd problems, iCloud is gigantically better than MobileMe or its ancestors, dot Mac and iTools.

Arguably, iCloud is so successful that it gets forgotten and so it should be. It's got its fingers in everything from apps like Pages to syncing your keychain of passwords and yet it's disregarded when other services are much more high profile.

For a brief while, that included iTunes Radio which was announced on June 10, 2013. Arguably it included or at least should've included iAds, revealed on June 7, 2010, but not really a big success.

It definitely includes two items that were both announced this week, specifically on June 8, 2015: Apple Music and Apple Pay. it's hard to believe that's just a year ago, especially if you've become accustomed to paying with Apple Watch.

One more thing

We said there was a torrent of products and apart from iPhones, it's chiefly been a deluge of software releases. This week saw a giant hardware change, however. Giant. It wasn't one machine, it was all of them. From this point onwards, Macs were moving to Intel.



That's the entire WWDC keynote and it's an interesting watch for how Steve Jobs builds to the transition and then explains it. You can go straight to the announcement part, however.

Posterior revelations

There was one particular hardware release in this week which now seems a little different than it did when it was unveiled in a sneak peek on June 10, 2013. Apple doesn't do sneak peeks very often. It probably did so this time because it was feeling the heat from professional Mac users who were saying that the company had abandoned them and the Mac Pro line they had relied on, for no longer innovating.

Apple has got to be as aware as any other company when it's being persistently criticized for something, but it doesn't usually bend in the wind to put people right. It did this time, though, with the reveal of the new Mac Pro -- alongside Phil Schiller directly referring to criticisms during its unveiling. This is when he stopped listing features and specifications to drop an aside that went "Can't innovate, my ass".

If it were meant to be the return of the Mac Pro and the silencing of critics in 2013, it didn't succeed. Not in the long term. As powerful and new as it was, we're now again at the same place where pro Mac users think the Mac Pro isn't being updated.

June 6 2011 was also the last WWDC and in fact the last Apple Keynote presentation anywhere, for Steve Jobs. He died 121 days later on October 5.

-William Gallagher (@WGallagher)