iChat

» see apple.com/ichat as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ichat was mac-only at the hardware layer. msn was the cultural default in turkey at the same time, and between the two i never had a reason to open ichat. on the windows side of the divide, msn messenger handled everything from text chat to the late-2000s webcam that everyone added once broadband got fast enough. ichat sat on the other side of the apple wall and did the same things for people who had bought into the powerbook ecosystem.

apple shipped ichat on august 24, 2002 as part of mac os x 10.2 jaguar. it was the first officially supported aim client native to mac os x, which meant any aol screen name worked on the mac out of the box. you signed in and your buddy list appeared. iphoto had launched seven months earlier and itunes was already a year and a half old. ichat completed the digital-hub picture as the messaging piece.

the version that mattered most was ichat av in june 2003, which made the mac the first commodity computer with credible built-in video chat. by 2005's ichat av 3 you could run four-party video conferences on a single g4. the xmpp support added that year let ichat connect to google talk and any jabber server. the final version was ichat 6 in 2011, which added yahoo messenger and plugins. one year later mountain lion replaced ichat with messages, the unified app that pulled imessage in alongside the older protocols. ichat as a brand was retired on july 25, 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

ichat's underrated piece was the protocol pluralism. by 2005 a single ichat install could speak aim and xmpp/jabber, with yahoo messenger added by the later versions. that was the high-water mark of the multi-protocol im idea on the mac, parallel to what adium and pidgin were doing in the open-source world. apple's specific bet was that the network you used did not matter, because the client was where the user lived. that bet was correct for about five years. the entire model then collapsed under the weight of mobile messaging, where the network and the app stopped being separable.

~ what got buried with it ~

what got buried with ichat was the version of the messaging internet where you could pick your client independent of your network. messages, the app that replaced ichat, eventually deprecated xmpp and pulled the focus inward to imessage. the same shift was happening across the industry, with facebook messenger walling off and whatsapp absorbing the carrier sms business in most markets. by the time ichat was retired the multi-protocol client was already a relic of an earlier internet. ichat's video architecture survived inside facetime, which apple split off as a separate product in 2010 and kept developing. the typing-indicator dots and the speech-bubble interface survived into messages and from there into the global vocabulary of how chat looks.

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