The original Macintosh, released in January 1984.
Signature of Steve Jobs engraved in the case of the first Apple Macintosh computer
The Macintosh, or Mac, is a series of personal computers (PCs) designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc.
Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. This was the first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse. This first model was later renamed to "Macintosh 128k" for uniqueness amongst a populous family of subsequently updated models which are also based on Apple's same proprietary architecture. The Macintosh product family has been collectively and singularly nicknamed "Mac" or "the Mac" since the development of the first model.
The Macintosh, however, was expensive, which caused it to be overtaken in sales by the aggressively priced IBM Personal Computer and its accompanying clone market. Macintosh systems still found success in education and desktop publishing and kept Apple as the second-largest PC manufacturer for the next decade. In the 1990s, improvements in the rival Wintel platform, notably with the introduction of Windows 3.0, gradually took market share from the more expensive Macintosh systems. The performance advantage of 68000 -based Macintosh systems was eroded by Intel's
Pentium, and in 1994 Apple was relegated to third place as Compaq became the top PC manufacturer. Even after a transition to the superior PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line in 1994, the falling prices of commodity PC components and the release of Windows 95 saw the Macintosh user base decline.
In 1998, after the return of Steve Jobs, Apple consolidated its multiple consumer-level desktop models into the all-in-one iMac G3, which became a commercial success and revitalized the brand. Since their transition to Intel processors in 2006, the complete lineup is entirely based on said processors and associated systems. Its current lineup comprises three desktops (the all-in-one
iMac, entry-level Mac mini, and the Mac Pro tower
graphics workstation), and four laptops (the
Macbook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Pro with Retina display). Its Xserve server was discontinued in 2011 in favor of the Mac Mini and Mac Pro.
Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model. Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Mac computers, unlike most
IBM PC compatibles, where multiple sellers create and integrate hardware intended to run another company's operating system. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems,
designs, and prices. Apple also develops the
operating system for the Mac, currently OS X version 10.10 "Yosemite". Macs are currently capable of running non-Apple operating systems such as Linux, OpenBSD, and Microsoft Windows with the aid of Boot Camp or third-party software. Apple does not license OS X for use on non-Apple computers, though it did license previous versions of Mac OS through their Macintosh clone program from 1995-1997.
A prototype of the Macintosh from 1981 (at the Computer History Museum)
The original 1984 Mac OS desktop featured a radically new graphical user interface. Users communicated with the computer, using a metaphorical desktop that included icons of real life items, instead of abstract textual
commands.
The Macintosh project was begun in 1979 by Jef Raskin , an Apple employee who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. He wanted to name the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh, but the spelling was changed to "Macintosh" for legal reasons as the original was the same spelling as that used by McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., the audio equipment manufacturer. Steve Jobs requested that McIntosh Laboratory give Apple a release for the name with its changed spelling so that Apple could use it, but the request was denied, forcing Apple to eventually buy the rights to use the name.
(A 1984 Byte Magazine article suggested Apple arranged the spelling only after "early users" misspelled "McIntosh". However, Jef Raskin had adopted the Macintosh spelling by 1981, when the Macintosh computer was still a single prototype machine in the lab. This explanation further clashes with the first explanation given above that the change was made for "legal reasons.")
Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project in September 1979, and he immediately asked his long-time colleague, Brian Howard, to join him.[8] His initial team would eventually consist of himself, Howard, Joanna Hoffman , Burrell Smith, and Bud Tribble. The rest of the original MAC team would include Bill Atkinson, Bob Belleville, Steve Capps,
George Crow, Donn Denman, Chris Espinosa, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Larry Kenyon, and Caroline Rose with Steve Jobs leading the project.
Smith's first Macintosh board was built to Raskin's design specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (kB) of
RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×256-pixel black-and-white bitmap display. Bud Tribble, a member of the Mac team, 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 increased its speed from 5 MHz to 8 MHz; this board also had the capacity to support a 384×256-pixel display. Smith's design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which made production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had the complete QuickDraw picture language and interpreter in 64 kB of ROM– far more 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, its RAM was expandable to 512 kB by means of soldering sixteen IC sockets to accept 256 kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. The final product's screen was a 9-inch, 512x342 pixel monochrome display, exceeding the size of the planned screen.
The Apple Macintosh Plus at the
Design Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Burrel's innovative design, which combined the low production cost of an Apple II with the computing power of Lisa's CPU, the Motorola 68K, received the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin left the team in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs. Team member Andy Hertzfeld said that the final Macintosh design is closer to Jobs' ideas than Raskin's. After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at
Xerox PARC, Jobs had negotiated a visit to see the
Xerox Alto computer and its Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group's own ideas. 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.
However, Jobs' leadership at the Macintosh project did not last; after an internal power struggle with new CEO John Sculley, Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985. He went on to found NeXT, another computer company targeting the education market,
and did not return until 1997, when Apple acquired NeXT.
After the Lisa's announcement, John Dvorak discussed rumors of a mysterious "MacIntosh" project at Apple in February 1983. The company announced the Macintosh 128K —manufactured at an Apple factory in Fremont, California—in October 1983, followed by an 18-page brochure included with various magazines in December. The Macintosh was introduced by a US$1.5 million
Ridley Scott television commercial, "1984 ". It most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and is now considered a "watershed event" and a "masterpiece."1984" used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by a Picasso-style picture of the computer on her white tank top) as a means of saving humanity from the "conformity" of IBM's attempts to dominate the computer industry. The ad alludes to George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother.
This television commercial, first aired during Super Bowl XVIII, launched the original Macintosh.
Two days after "1984" aired, the Macintosh went on sale, and came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and
MacPaint. It was first demonstrated by Steve Jobs in the first of his famous Mac keynote speeches, and though the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, some labeled it a mere "toy." Because the operating system was designed largely around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten. This was a time-consuming task that many
software developers chose not to undertake, and could be regarded as a reason for an initial lack of software for the new system. In April 1984,
Microsoft's MultiPlan migrated over from MS-DOS, with Microsoft Word following in January 1985. In 1985, Lotus Software introduced Lotus Jazz for the Macintosh platform after the success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC, although it was largely a flop.
Apple introduced the Macintosh Office suite the same year with the "Lemmings" ad. Infamous for insulting its own potential customers, the ad was not successful.
Apple spent $2.5 million purchasing all 39 advertising pages in a special, post-election issue of
Newsweek,[30] and ran a "Test Drive a Macintosh" promotion, in which potential buyers with a credit card could take home a Macintosh for 24 hours and return it to a dealer afterwards. While 200,000 people participated, dealers disliked the promotion, the supply of computers was insufficient for demand, and many were returned in such a bad condition that they could no longer be sold. This marketing campaign caused CEO John Sculley to raise the price from US$1,995 to US$2,495 (about $5,200 when adjusted for inflation in 2010).[29][31] The computer sold well, nonetheless, reportedly outselling the IBM PCjr which also began shipping early that year. By April 1984 the company sold 50,000 Macintoshes, and hoped for 70,000 by early May and almost 250,000 by the end of the year.[33]
Jobs stated during the Macintosh's introduction "we expect Macintosh to become the third industry standard", after the Apple II and IBM PC. Although outselling every other computer, it did not meet expectations during the first year, especially among business customers. Only about ten applications including MacWrite and MacPaint were widely available, although many non-Apple software developers participated in the introduction and Apple promised that 79 companies including Lotus,
Digital Research, and Ashton-Tate were creating products for the new computer. After one year, it had less than one quarter of the software selection available compared to the IBM PC—including only one word processor, two databases, and one spreadsheet although Apple had sold 280,000 Macintoshes compared to IBM's sales of fewer than 100,000 PCs. Developers were required to learn how to write software that used the Macintosh's graphic user interface.
In 1985, the combination of the Mac, Apple's
LaserWriter printer, and Mac-specific software like Boston Software's MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker enabled users to design, preview, and print page layouts complete with text and graphics an activity to become known as desktop publishing. Initially, desktop publishing was unique to the Macintosh, but eventually became available for other platforms.
Later, applications such as Macromedia FreeHand, QuarkXPress, and Adobe's
Photoshop and Illustrator strengthened the Mac's position as a graphics computer and helped to expand the emerging desktop publishing market.
The Macintosh's minimal memory became apparent, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily. It also lacked a hard disk drive or the means to easily attach one. Many small companies sprang up to address the memory issue. Suggestions revolved around either upgrading the memory to 512 KB or removing the computer's 16 memory chips and replacing them with larger-capacity chips, a tedious operation that was not always successful. In October 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh 512K , with quadruple the memory of the original, at a price of US$3,195.[37] It also offered an upgrade for 128k Macs that involved replacing the logicboard. In an attempt to improve connectivity, Apple released the Macintosh Plus on January 10, 1986, for a price of US$2,600. It offered one megabyte of RAM, easily expandable to four megabytes by the use of
socketed RAM boards. It also featured a 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 Mac Plus was an immediate success and remained in production, unchanged, until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Macintosh in Apple's history. In September 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW, an application that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa. In August 1987, Apple unveiled HyperCard and MultiFinde.
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