Forty Years of Apple's MacIntosh

canopic jug writes:

Forty years ago in January of 1984 was the launch of Apple's then new, graphical PC, the MacIntosh. Many sites are covering the milestone. What are Soylentils' thoughts on the different stages of MacIntosh hardware and software over time? Its old operating system, its current Mach microkernel plus Darwin-based operating system, and choice of CPUs have been quite defining. Has it lived up to the ambition of becoming a tool to amplify human intellectual capacity, a bicycle for the mind, of sorts? Have people learned how use computers or do the computers now use them?

That legacy has been long-lasting. For the first half of its existence, the Mac occupied only a slice of the market, even as it inspired so many rivals; now it's a substantial chunk of PC sales. Even within the Apple juggernaut, $30 billion isn't chicken feed! What's more, when people think of PCs these days, many will envision a Macintosh. More often than not, the open laptops populating coffee shops and tech company workstations beam out glowing Apples from their covers. Apple claims that its Macbook Air is the world's best-selling computer model. One 2019 survey reported that more than two-thirds of all college students prefer a Mac. And Apple has relentlessly improved the product, whether with the increasingly slim profile of the iMac or the 22-hour battery life of the Macbook Pro. Moreover, the Mac is still a thing. Chromebooks and Surface PCs come and go, but Apple's creation remains the pinnacle of PC-dom. "It's not a story of nostalgia, or history passing us by," says Greg "Joz" Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a rare on-the-record interview with five Apple executives involved in its Macintosh operation. "The fact we did this for 40 years is unbelievable."

Wired: Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules

And

Back to the Macintosh story, Apple's budget model challenged the IBM PC's 8/16-bit Intel 8088 chip with a Motorola 68000 processor, a 16/32-bit chip that could handle twice as much data in a single instruction. The differences were stark at the surface as well. The Macintosh was tiny compared to an IBM PC and the computer's motherboard and a floppy disk drive were built into the same case as its small, but sharp, black and white monitor, making for a small footprint on a desk. This was an important consideration at a time when desks weren't designed for computers.

The most important difference was the mouse and graphical user interface which made a computer much easier for anyone to learn to use. Apple didn't invent this concept that was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Macintosh was, however, the computer that took this idea out of the lab and demonstrated that this should be the way of the future.

Digital Trends: 40 years ago, Apple's original Macintosh started a revolution

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