Peter Cohen has penned a fabulous «History of Hard Drives» for BackBlaze. He walks us through the earliest days of mainframe-related storage to today’s SSDs, with lots of historic photos to illustrate the timeline. I love lore of all sorts—particularly computer-related lore—and I gobbled up this post. That said,  I don’t often link to company blog posts as a Cool Stuff Found, but Peter talks about his employer very little—the focus is the history. If you’re a nerd, it’s a great read.

Apple new coffee table book: Designed by Apple in California comes in two sizes, 13-inch at US$199 and 16-inch at $299, and both contain some 450 photographs of Apple products that look back over the years. What’s not to like? Still, these days, Apple’s self-conscious celebration of its past does open it up to some playful parody. Watch this glorious send up of the Apple book by the Late Show. All in good fun, of course.

Apple rolled out a new commercial for MacBook Pro with Touch Bar called Bulbs. The 1 minute, 37 second spot features flashes of some big (and small) inventions using exploding lightbulbs as a metaphor. In fact, MacBook Pro doesn’t appear until the final 10 seconds, accompanied by the tag line, «Introducing a tool for all the ideas to come.» We’re then shown a finger sliding back and forth on the Touch Bar to scrub through a video of another exploding lightbulb. The imagery is compelling, and seems likely to catch people’s attention, with the Apple message pounding home at the end. It’s one of my favorite spots in recent months.