Keynote Apple Program Archives

A new and completely unofficial archive of all things Apple is attempting to make almost 44 years of the company’s official videos, ads, and imagery available to browse online. 9to5Mac reports that The Apple Archive currently contains just under 1TB of data, comprising over 15,000 files, and it includes everything from print ads, to TV spots, WWDC sessions, internal training videos, and even a collection of macOS and iOS wallpapers.

The whole collection is well worth browsing through, but there are a few particularly interesting inclusions. This unreleased social ad for the long-delayed-then-cancelled AirPower charging pad is fascinating. Not only does it show off how Apple might have marketed its wireless charger had it actually released, but also because the ad is so clearly in an unfinished state, offering the kind of work-in-progress insight that we so rarely get to see from a company like Apple.

Or how about this huge collection of internal videos which includes this particularly excellent video on Apple’s early patenting strategy (skip to the 4:15 mark if you don’t believe me) and this 1995 guide on how to photograph “VR” scenes. The archive includes a very 80s “I’m Different” TV ad that aired nine years before the well-known video of Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s iconic “Think Different” ad campaign.

The Apple Archive is the work of Sam Gold, who started putting it together after the EveryAppleVideo YouTube channel was unceremoniously taken down. After experimenting with starting his own YouTube channel, a Google Drive folder, and even attempting to work with the Internet Archive, Gold finally settled on using Vimeo to host the archive’s video content.

This collection is by no means finished. Gold is constantly on the lookout for higher resolution content, the videos are also having subtitles added where possible, and they’re also being transcoded to save on space.

The archive is an excellent dose of nostalgia for Apple fans. It might not have the same level of finish as Apple’s official coffee table book, but then again it doesn’t come with a $300 price tag.

A teenager named Sam Henri created a YouTube account with every Apple video ever made, from commercials, keynotes, and miscellaneous videos going back to 1980. YouTube censors made him take it down, even though it appeared Apple itself didn’t seem to care. But Reddit stepped in and created a torrent of the 80GB archive that anyone can download.

Screenshot from one of the Apple videos.

The Unofficial Apple Archive

The videos were originally hosted by a YouTube channel called Every Apple Video. In April Sam saw a post on Reddit warning that it was being taken down. So he created his own channel with videos from archive.org, YouTube, archived versions of Apple’s own website, and videos from other Redditors.

Sam wanted to help preserve Apple’s history:

Apple has played such a huge part of my life. I remember getting the 1st generation iPod nano on my sixth birthday, making my first iMovie, and coming home early from school to watch the iPad 2 keynote… Apple is not only a company, it’s a ‘tipping point’ for my generation, and to archive it feels like a responsibility.

YouTube removed his channel a week later, citing “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.”

Data Hoarders

Sam went to the r/Apple subreddit and asked for help. What should he do with the 80GB video cache? After being directed to the r/DataHoarder subreddit, the members of which are experts at storing data, they helped Sam by hosting the files on a private server and creating a torrent of them.