Steve Jobs introduces the "Digital Hub" strategy at Macworld 2001

On January 9, 2001, Steve Jobs gave one of his greatest Macworld keynote presentations. The main topics included the original version of Mac OS X, the original SuperDrive and the original widescreen PowerBook G4.

But perhaps the most profound was the introduction of the "Digital Hub" concept in which the Mac would evolve into becoming the center of the digital lifestyle of the 21st century. It has been the subject of much discussion by Steve and his substitutes when talking about the Mac ever since. This definitely the beginning of something huge.

iMovie had already been around since 1999 and Steve introduced the original versions of iTunes and iDVD at this keynote. Interesting to note that in the second part of this video Steve refers to iTunes as "iMusic" - perhaps a code name during production?

It's amazing that as soon as Steve started on this topic everyone was spellbound and there was no applause from the audience for a good 11-12 minutes, quite possibly the longest gap between applauses in Stevenote history.

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[mariusmyk]

I must say, Mr. Jobs was amazingly precise in his prediction!

[Zeno Popovici]

Marker Felt ... no Comic Sans

[Streetdirectory dotcom]

Steve jobs will always be Steve jobs :)

[Danny Hodge]

But the idea could have failed. He was right about its importance.

[bamsb90]

He was pretty much right about almost everything. Nowadays, everything revolves around the PC. And we do live in a digital lifestyle with all our iDevices, digital cameras, and MP3 players.

[MrTechReviews101]

Amazing!! He was right on!

[Aiden Cameron]

You can clearly see that he's passionate about this. He's also right in some cases. It may have been ten years ago, but this is still relevant today. RIP.

[ariw2003net]

Kinda true. I think really what happened was that Apple won the digital lifestyle market and is moving on to newer markets. iCloud is pretty unrelated to the strategy Jobs describes in this video - but, of course, they still make and support products like iMovie, GarageBand, etc.

Really what sparked the change is that like Jobs said, at the time, the PC wasn't dying. Now it is, and Apple is at the forefront of the post-PC era.

[alexzz1234]

I can't believe 10 years later he discarded this strategy for the iCloud strategy (which is a lot easier)

[Alexander Brown]

"they don't have enough horsepower."

Say that to a 1.0 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM cellphone.