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The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc.. Named after the McIntosh apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface. The current range of Macintoshes varies from Apple’s entry level Mac mini desktop, to a mid-range server, the Xserve. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted towards the home, education, and creative professional markets. Production of the Macintosh is based upon a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system. This is in contrast to PCs, where different brands of hardware run operating systems such as Microsoft Windows.
Original Macintosh computers used the Motorola 68k family of microprocessors, before switching to Motorola and IBM's PowerPC range of CPUs in 1994. Apple began a transition from the PowerPC line to Intel's processor architecture in 2006, which for the first time allowed Macs to run any x86 operating system natively. Current Macintoshes use the Intel Core, Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon 5100 series microprocessors. All models of Macintosh are pre-installed with a native version of the latest Mac OS, which is currently at version 10.4 and is commonly referred to by its code name of 'Tiger'.
1979 to 1984: Development
Part of the original Macintosh design team, as seen on the cover of Revolution in the Valley.
Left to right: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, a Macintosh, Bill Atkinson, Jerry Mannock.The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was given permission to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of the Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year as Apple employee #282. Over the years, Raskin hired a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, and Andy Hertzfeld.
Smith’s first Macintosh board design was built to Raskin’s specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256Ã256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. (The final product used a 9-inch, 512x342 monochrome display.) Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa’s graphical programs on the Macintosh, and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000, but made it faster, bumping it from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384Ã256 bitmap display. Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, and because of this, production of the board was significantly more cost-efficient.[1] The final Mac design was self-contained and had far more programming code in ROM than most other computers; it had 128 KB of RAM, in the form of sixteen, 64 kilobit (Kb) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, it was expandable to 512 KB of RAM by means of soldering sixteen 256 Kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips.
The innovative design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs’ ideas than Raskin’s.[2] After hearing about the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were clearly influenced by the one designed at Xerox. Jobs also commissioned industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger to work on the Macintosh line, resulting in the "Snow White" design language; although it came too late for the earliest Macs, it was implemented in most other mid- to late-1980s Apple computers.[3] However, Jobs’ leadership at the Macintosh project was short lived; after an internal power struggle with Apple’s new CEO John Sculley, Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985, went on to found NeXT, another computer company, and did not return until 1997. Sculley undermined what the Mac team had been trying to do with the price of the Macintosh, when he artificially inflated the Mac’s price from US$1,995 to US$2,495
1984: Introduction
The announcer's dialogue in Apple's 1984 ad, as it appears on the screenThe Macintosh was officially announced on January 22, 1984, with the now-famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott. This commercial showed a woman, played by Anya Major, who defiantly throws a sledgehammer at a Big Brother-like video screen (which represented IBM). This was symbolic of Apple challenging the text-based computers that dominated the market at the time. The Mac itself went on sale for US$2,495. It came bundled with two useful programs designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint. Although the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, it was too radical for some. Because the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven programs had to be redesigned and rewritten; this was a challenging undertaking that many software developers shied away from, and resulted in an initial lack of software for the new system. Many users, accustomed to the arcane world of command lines, labeled the Mac a mere “toy.”
1985 to 1989: The desktop publishing era
In 1985, the combination of the Mac, Apple’s LaserWriter printer, and Mac-specific software like Boston Software’s MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker (now Adobe PageMaker) enabled users to design, preview, and print page layouts complete with text and graphics, an activity known as desktop publishing. Desktop publishing was unique to the Macintosh, but eventually became available for PC users as well. Later, programs such as Macromedia FreeHand, QuarkXPress, and Adobe Illustrator strengthened the Mac’s position as a graphics computer and helped to expand the emerging desktop publishing market.
The limitations of the first Mac soon became clear: it had very little memory, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; and it lacked a hard drive and the means to attach one easily. Although by 1985 the Mac’s base memory had increased to 512 KB, and it was possible, although inconvenient and difficult, to expand the memory of a 128 KB Mac, Apple realized that the Mac needed improvement in these areas. The result was the Macintosh Plus, released on January 10, 1986 for US$2,600. It offered one megabyte (MB) of RAM, expandable to four, and a then-revolutionary SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals—such as hard drives and scanners—to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 KB capacity. The Plus was an immediate success and remained in production until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Mac in Apple's history.
The Macintosh II, the first expandable Macintosh.Other issues remained, particularly the low processor speed and limited graphics ability, which had hobbled the Mac’s ability to make inroads into the business computing market. Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II, which used a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor. This marked the start of a new direction for the Macintosh, as now, for the first time, it had open architecture with several expansion slots, support for color graphics and a modular break out design similar to that of the IBM PC and inspired by Apple’s other line, the expandable Apple II series. Alongside the Macintosh II, the Macintosh SE was released, the first compact Mac with an internal expansion slot (a processor direct slot specific to the machine. The SE shared the Macintosh II's “Snow White” design language, as well as the new Apple Desktop Bus mouse and keyboard that had first appeared on the Apple IIGS some months earlier.
With the new Motorola 68030 processor came the Macintosh IIx in 1988, which had benefited from internal improvements, including an on-board MMU. It was followed in 1989 by a more compact version with fewer slots (the Macintosh IIcx) and a version of the Mac SE powered by the 16 MHz 68030 (the Macintosh SE/30). Later that year, the Macintosh IIci, running at 25 MHz, was the first Mac to be “32-bit clean,” allowing it to natively support more than 8 MB of RAM, unlike its predecessors, which had “32-bit dirty” ROMs (8 of the 32 bits available for addressing were used for OS level flags). System 7 was the first Macintosh operating system to support 32-bit addressing. Apple also introduced the Macintosh Portable, a 16 MHz 68000 machine with an active matrix flat panel display. The following year the 40 MHz Macintosh IIfx, costing US$13,000, was unveiled. Apart from its fast processor, it had significant internal architectural improvements, including faster memory and a pair of dedicated ASIC's. Code had to be specifically written to utilize the ASIC's in order to utilize the extra speed that they gave the Macintosh IIfx; however, even normal code executed faster due to the other improvements.
1990 to 1998: Growth and decline
The Macintosh Classic, Apple's early 1990s budget model.Microsoft Windows 3.0, widely seen as the first version of Windows to challenge the Mac in both performance and feature set, was released in May 1990 and was a usable, less expensive alternative to the Macintosh platform. Apple's response was to introduce a range of relatively inexpensive Macs in October 1990. The Macintosh Classic, essentially a less expensive version of the Macintosh SE, sold for US$999, making it the least expensive Mac until the re-release (and subsequent price cut) of the 400 MHz iMac in February 2001. The 68020-powered Macintosh LC, in its distinctive “pizza box” case, was available for US$1800; it offered color graphics and was accompanied by a new, low-cost 512Ã384-pixel monitor. The Macintosh IIsi, essentially a 20 MHz IIci with only one expansion slot, cost US$2500. All three machines sold well, although Apple’s profit margin was considerably lower than on earlier machines.
1991 saw the much-anticipated release of System 7, a 32-bit rewrite of the Macintosh operating system that improved its handling of color graphics, memory addressing, networking, and co-operative multitasking, and introduced virtual memory. Later that year, Apple introduced the Macintosh Quadra 700 and 900, the first Macs to employ the faster Motorola 68040 processor. They were joined by improved versions of the previous year’s hits, the Macintosh Classic II and Macintosh LC II. The latter was upgraded to use a 16 MHz 68030 CPU.
At the same time, the first three models in Apple’s enduring PowerBook range were introduced—the PowerBook 100, a miniaturized Macintosh Portable built by Sony; the 16 MHz 68030 PowerBook 140; and the 25 MHz 68030 PowerBook 170. They were the first portable computers with the keyboard behind a palm rest, and with a built-in pointing device (a trackball) in front of the keyboard.
In 1992, Apple started to sell a low-end Mac, the Performa, through nontraditional dealers. At Apple dealers, a mid-range version of the Quadra series called the Macintosh Centris was offered, only to be quickly renamed Quadra when buyers became confused by the range of Classics, LCs, IIs, Quadras, Performas, and Centrises. Apple also unveiled the miniaturized PowerBook Duo range. It was intended to be docked to a base station for desktop-like functionality in the workplace. The PowerBook Duo was dropped from the Apple product line in early 1997.
The next evolutionary step in Macintosh CPUs was a switch to the RISC PowerPC architecture developed by the AIM alliance of Apple Computer, IBM, and Motorola. Since its introduction, the Power Macintosh line proved to be highly successful, with over a million units sold by late 1994, three months ahead of Apple’s one-year goal. In the same year, Apple released the second-generation PowerBook models, the PowerBook 500 series, which introduced the novel trackpad.
By 1995, Microsoft and Intel were rapidly eroding Apple's market share with their respective Windows 95 operating system and Pentium processors, both of which significantly enhanced the multimedia capability and performance of the PC. In response, Apple started the Macintosh clone program to regain its foothold in the desktop computer market. This program lasted until August 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and pulled the plug on the whole operation, reasoning that Apple was losing a lot of money in the clone market. He thought Apple should instead focus on the future
1999 to the present: New beginnings
In 1998, a year after Steve Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced an all-in-one Macintosh that was similar to the original Macintosh 128K: the iMac, a new design that did away with most Apple standard connections, such as SCSI and ADB, in favor of two USB ports. It featured an innovative new design; its translucent plastic case, originally Bondi blue, and later many other colors, is considered an industrial design hallmark of the late 1990s. The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 1998, making the company an annual profit of US$309 million — Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took over as CEO in 1995. At MacWorld 2000, San Francisco, Steve Jobs bragged that they had sold over 1.35 million iMacs the previous quarter; one every six seconds. The Power Macintosh was redesigned along similar lines.
In 1999, Apple introduced a new operating system, Mac OS X Server 1.0 (codenamed Rhapsody), with a new GUI and powerful Unix underpinnings. Its NeXT-like GUI left many Mac users disappointed, and wondering what the next generation of the Mac OS GUI would look like. Mac OS X was based on OPENSTEP, the operating system developed by Steve Jobs’ post-Apple company, NeXT. Mac OS X was not released to the public until September 2000, as the Mac OS X Public Beta, with an Aqua interface, much different from Mac OS X Server 1.x. It cost US$29.99 and allowed adventurous Mac users to sample Apple’s new operating system and provide feedback to the company on what they wanted to see in the actual release.
The MacBook Pro is the first Macintosh notebook to use an Intel processor. It was released at Macworld 2006.In mid-1999, Apple introduced the iBook, a new consumer-level, portable Macintosh that was designed to be similar in appearance to the iMac that had been introduced a year earlier. Six weeks after the iBook’s unveiling, more than 140,000 orders had been placed, and by October the computer was as much a sales hit as the iMac. Apple continued to add new products to their lineup, such as the eMac and Power Mac G4, as well make two major upgrades of the iMac. On January 11, 2005, Apple announced the release of the Mac mini priced at US$499, the least expensive Mac to date.
In recent years, Apple has seen a significant boost in sales of Macs. Many claim that this is due, in part, to the success of the iPod. The term halo effect has been coined to indicate the effect of satisfied iPod owners, who purchase more Apple merchandise, on the overall sales made by Apple. The iPod digital audio players have recaptured a brand awareness of the Macintosh line that had not been seen since its original release in 1984. From 2001 to 2005, Macintosh sales increased continuously on an annual basis. On October 11, 2005, Apple released its fourth quarter results, reporting shipment of 1,236,000 Macintoshes— a 48% increase from the same quarter the previous year.[4] Starting with the introduction of the iMac Core Duo and the MacBook Pro on January 10, 2006, Apple has gradually switched from PowerPC microprocessors to microprocessors manufactured by Intel. Apple completed that transition on August 7, 2006 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, with the introduction of the Mac Pro
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