Apple’s Macintosh at 40: Celebrating a Legacy of Innovation and Future Trends in Computing

Apple’s Macintosh at 40: Celebrating a Legacy of Innovation and Future Trends in Computing.

The Mac, Apple’s longest-standing product, celebrates its 40th anniversary, maintaining its remarkable success despite being a smaller part of the company’s overall business. Twenty years back, on the Mac’s 20th anniversary, Steve Jobs confidently affirmed the Mac’s continuing significance to Apple, even in the iPod era.

A decade later, Apple’s revenue was heavily influenced by the iPhone, and the iPad’s triumph introduced another major product. During the Mac’s 30th anniversary, I questioned Apple executive Phil Schiller about the Mac’s ongoing relevance, to which he responded assertively, emphasizing the Mac’s perpetual role in Apple’s lineup.

Today, 40 years after Jobs introduced the original Macintosh in Cupertino, it seems appropriate to contemplate the Mac’s future. Apple’s upcoming financial results are expected to highlight robust Mac sales, among the best in its history. Additionally, Apple is set to unveil the Vision Pro, a new device joining its expanding array of products including the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with the Mac being just a small component of this range.

Despite its age, the Mac has never been more successful or seemingly insignificant to Apple’s financial results. It has undergone significant transformations, ensuring its survival but also tying it to a hardware design process heavily influenced by the iPhone. The journey hasn’t been easy for Mac users, who have defended the platform for most of its existence. The original Mac, priced at $2,495 (over $7,300 today), competed with the more affordable and hugely successful Apple II series. Apple continued to release new Apple II models even after the Mac’s debut, indicating its uncertain future within the company.

The Mac, with its revolutionary user interface, faced substantial resistance and struggled with limited market share once Microsoft adopted a similar interface style with Windows. Apple was near bankruptcy before Jobs’s return and the launch of the original iMac, which provided the necessary breathing space for developing Mac OS X and the iPod. However, the success of subsequent products brought additional challenges.

In the mid-2010s, Apple’s focus on the iPad as the future of computing and issues with Mac hardware, including an unpopular laptop keyboard and the failure of the 2013 Mac Pro, signaled the Mac’s possible decline. The platform seemed to be on life support, with the iPad poised for future growth.

Yet, a shift occurred. Apple began to show renewed interest in the Mac, promising a new Mac Pro and replacing the problematic keyboard. The most significant change was the transition from Intel processors to Apple-designed chips, similar to those in iPhones and iPads, indicating Apple’s clear vision of what a computer should be – resembling a Mac rather than an iPad.

Apple’s Macintosh at 40: Celebrating a Legacy of Innovation and Future Trends in Computing

This week, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, echoed the sentiments of Jobs and Schiller about the Mac’s future, acknowledging its foundational role in Apple and its evolution, especially in hardware. The switch to Apple’s own processors brought substantial improvements but also unique challenges, such as limitations with external GPUs and RAM upgrades. This change also impacted macOS as a software platform, allowing modern Macs to run unmodified iPad apps and encouraging developers to write software for all Apple platforms using a unified codebase.

However, this shift also reflects the reality that the iPhone dominates Apple’s attention, influencing the future of Mac apps, which increasingly resemble iPhone apps extended to the iPad and Mac. Moreover, the rise of web-based software and AI applications could significantly change traditional computing.

Despite these challenges, the Mac’s resilience through technological history makes it a tough contender to discount. Apple now views it not as a fading product but as its most powerful and complete device. Joswiak highlighted this by noting that Apple, one of the world’s largest companies, runs on Mac.

The Vision Pro, Apple’s latest computing platform, epitomizes this. It runs both iPad and native apps and introduces a new visionOS feature, transforming it into a Mac monitor. This innovation underlines the enduring significance of the Mac, a remarkable achievement for a 40-year-old computing platform.

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