Apple iTools

» see itools.mac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in january 2000 i was sixteen, on a windows machine in ankara, on a 33.6k modem provided by ttnet. my email was a hotmail account because that is what everyone i knew used. itools was a thing for people who had spent two thousand dollars on a translucent imac, and almost nobody i knew in turkey had done that. mac penetration here was maybe one percent of households. the mac user i did meet through forums was a graphic designer with a g3 he had bought used.

steve jobs announced itools at macworld san francisco on january 5, 2000. the pitch was that apple owned both the operating system and the server side, so it could ship an integrated internet service for mac users at no cost. the bundle was a free mac.com email address, twenty megabytes of cloud space called idisk, a website builder called homepage that pulled files straight from idisk, a greeting-card service called icards, a curated kid-safe directory of about fifty thousand sites, and ireview as an editorial site directory. you needed mac os 9 to use any of it. the only thing windows users could see was a mac.com address in an email from a friend who had one.

the mac.com address became a status object in mac-using circles. you could tell who had been on apple's services since day one because their address ended in @mac.com instead of @me.com or @icloud.com. apple kept the original mac.com addresses working through every subsequent rebrand, partly out of respect for the early adopters who paid the $99 a year when itools became.mac in july 2002.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

idisk was the part that mattered. it mounted as a folder in the mac os finder and you could drag files to it like any other directory. there was a public folder that other itools users could read with a click. for the dial-up era this was a real product, not just a marketing wrapper. twenty megabytes was enough to hold a few months of photos at the resolutions cameras shipped in 2000, and you could pay one dollar per megabyte per year if you wanted more, up to four hundred and twenty megabytes.

homepage was a template-based site builder that pulled images and documents from your idisk. it produced sites at homepage.mac.com/yourname that looked like what they were: 2000-era apple template html. designers complained about the lack of control. everyone else found it easier than learning frontpage or claris home page.

~ what it became ~

mac in july 2002 added imap email, webmail, more idisk space, and a better homepage. it cost ninety-nine dollars a year. mobileme replaced.mac in july 2008 with sync features and a heavier web app. mobileme was killed by icloud in june 2012 after a year of public criticism over its reliability. the mac.com identity made it across all four services and is still functional on icloud in 2026, twenty-six years after itools launched.

~ the long tail ~

what itools mostly proved was the platform argument. if you own the operating system and the server stack, you can ship a glued-together service that none of your competitors can match without spending years on integration. google later did the same thing with chrome and the google account. microsoft did it with windows live, then microsoft account, then onedrive. apple itself iterated the playbook through three more renames before icloud settled into its current shape. itools is the start of the line nobody talks about because nobody used it long enough to remember.

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