Partner Spotlight: Apple

Apple® and ATTO share a similar origin story. Both companies were started by a duo with a vision who took a chance and started building products in their homes. Each quickly achieved success with innovations that in many ways ushered in the current digital era.

Apple Computers, Inc. was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, building the first Apple computers in Wozniak’s garage. Approximately 200 of those first units were sold before Jobs and Wozniak released the Apple II, which revolutionized the computer industry with its color graphics and other forward-thinking features. The Macintosh® was introduced in 1984 and it wasn’t long before design and video editing applications appeared. This heralded the beginning of a new era in digital content creation and, inevitably, a need for more and faster storage. This is where ATTO Technology enters the story.

ATTO’s founders, Tim Klein and Dave Snell recognized that one major cause of slow systems was data storage bottlenecks. The new digital design software that was quickly gaining ground in the Apple community was particularly sensitive to these bottlenecks. ATTO’s first product, SiliconDisk, was a precursor to today’s solid-state disk drives, addressing storage speed through the use of RAM. From there ATTO focused on solving connectivity problems with their groundbreaking host adapters. Both product lines became quite popular in the Apple community.

Since then, ATTO has developed products that helped to drive the revolution in digital content creation providing Fibre Channel (FC), Ethernet, RAID and SAS/SATA connectivity solutions for Mac® platforms. Our history of testing and developing for Macs provides a unique experience that allows us to optimize performance and throughput specifically for Mac environments.

The developer relationship with Apple enables ATTO to be first to market with compatible macOS® drivers for Fibre Channel HBAs, SAS/SATA HBAs, and Ethernet SmartNICs (our ATTO Celerity™, ATTO ExpressSAS® HBAs and ATTO FastFrame™ SmartNICs respectively). As a pioneer in Thunderbolt™ enabled solutions, ATTO has worked closely with Apple to provide connectivity to high-performance FC and SAS/SATA storage, along with Ethernet networks using the diverse line of ATTO Thunderbolt ThunderLink® products. Additionally, ATTO Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator enables macOS users to have a reliable and highly interoperable connection to any iSCSI storage.

Apple continues to lead the world in innovation with the Mac Pro®, Mac Studio MacBook Pro®, Mac mini®, iMac® and iMac Pro® lines. Apple’s macOS provides seamless experiences across all Mac platforms and empowers content creators with breakthrough performance, features and services. The latest Mac Pro platform pushes the technology envelope and gives creative professionals a powerful platform that can help them develop next-generation content.

ATTO has the broadest portfolio of Mac-ready adapters providing the Apple Mac Pro and macOS Monterey with Thunderbolt™, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and SAS/SATA connectivity. ATTO is proud to be a long-standing member of the Apple developer community, and, as always, ATTO adapter hardware and drivers offer future-proof compatibility.

See all ATTO Apple solutions.