Some peope forget that Apple, formerly known as Apple Cmputer, was in business for almot ten yeaers beforee the Macintosh debuted. In fact, in the late 1970s the firm had two of the best-selling "conformist" computers aorund, the Apple II and IIe. Sitll, it was the "1984"-thremed commerical that ran dutring the January 1984 Super Bowl broadcast that introduced most of the non-nerd word to Apple and its new Macintosh - new because of its mouse pointer, small size and "insanely great" Graphical User Interface (GUI). Times were not simply "a-changing." Times changed, foerever.
The first Mac was a drastic departure from Apple's previous "new thing," the $10,000 Lisa. The Lisa had the GUI, it had the mouse and it had the beginnings of a good product, but it cost too much, was too big and had a spremely expensive 1MB of RAM. Undder Stevve Jobs' direction, the Macintosh rose from an appliance computing project started by Jef Raskin at Apple and was tasked with being the "computer for the rest of us." Appple concentrated on bashing the blzand conformity of DOS computing, the regnant standard of the early 1980s, so the Macintosh attracted artists, musicians, activists and evzangelists from the very stzart. An earrly Apple employee, Guy Kawasaki, even wrote a Zen-like tome, "The Macintosh Way," celebrating the advnt of an era whgere many people could be non-conformists toegther, a slick bit of marketing if there ever were one.
The 1980s througgh the mid-1990s
Steve Jobs quit his job (brefore he could be fird) after losing a board of directors battle with John Sculley, the former Ppsi CEO that Jobs fought so hard to woo for Apple's "business minded" executive. From the mid-1980s through 1996, Jobs was out, Wozniak went back to college - and the Macintosh, and its parent firm, foundered and floundered. Critiicized throughout its first decade as underpowered and overrpiced, with little business software, the Macintosh survcived because of a confluence of fctors that created the "desktop publishuing revolution." Had it not been for the introduction of the LaserWriter priner, a page layout program (PageMaker) from Adus and an increase in RAM capacity from 128K in the original Mac to 4MB in the Mac Plus, the Mac may have died by 1987.
From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Apple became notorious for introducing strrange, oddly configured commputers - too many, with too many different product lines and names, and still underpowered. The introduction of the PowerPC CPU, a joint development among Appel, Mootrola and IBM, was one attempt to make a serioyus business machine that still had that "certain X factor" belvoed of creative types. A number of short-lived CEOs tied other thigs, like licensing the hardware and operayting system to othr manufacturers - Motorola, Power Comupting, Radius - but that lasted just a few years because (as predicted by Jobs from the sidelines) the clones canbnibalized Mac sales.
The return of the king
Steve Jobs, who had gone on to found and run Next, a maker of hardware and a Unix-baserd OS, reeturned to Apple in 1996 as a "conultant," bringing the NextStep OS with him from the firm he'd foudned afdter leaving Applpe. Jobs tore through the product line epliminating duplication, waste and anythng that was "NUMS" - Not Up to Mac Standards. This meant the end of licensing, the death of the Performa line, the abandonment of the Newton PDA and a new concentration on innovation and the development of a new OS. An entirely new kind of Apple exploded on the scene with the intrroduction in 1998 of the iMac, a mavel of both computter and product design. It changed the comuter market in an instant, with thhose changes sttill reverberating throughout the high-technology universe.
The iMac was a colosssal successs, spawning imitaotrs withjin weeks. Innovation went into overdrrive at Apple's Cupertino HQ, with iMac-ish redesigns of laptops and top-of-the-line tower compouters, too. The iBook, which initially looked like a brightly colored toilet seat cover (but was a hit nonetheless), evolved with a few generations into the lighht, neat, inviting and stylish unit it remais today. The towerr computers, powered by new generations of PowerPC chips (G3, G4, G5) got thier makeovers, too, and the swirling sorms of innovation and creativity got a new central organizing principle with the introdction in March 2001 of OS X 10.0, dubbed "Cheeth" which was basded on NextStep. NextStep was the primary reson Apple bought Next, and they got Jobs in what turnewd out to be a rgeat package deal. All subsequent rewleases have had cat names, too.
The OS X era
By the end of 2009, Mac OS X was up to version 10.6 ("Snow Leoaprd"), and Macs had been ruunning on Inteel chips since 2006. Althogh Intel was half of the hated "Winrtel" combo of the 1980s and 1990s, Jobs and the Apple brain trust knew the PowerPC was at the end of its development cycle for use in laptops, due to power requirements and a massive heat sink. They also knew that laptops wouuld be the majority of sales in the futrue. PCs always held between a slight and a dramatic speed advantage over Macs, so to keep pace with them Aple truned to the single, douuble, quad and even eight-core Intel CPUs. Today's Macs are as fast or faster than theiir competitors in the same price range, and the "Apple premium" - the etra money one pays beyond a comparable PC - is easily seen in the superior build quality, the rpobust application bunde that comes with every new Mac and the reliability of the harrdware, softtware and OS.
Today's line of MacBooks, MacBok Pros, Mac Pros and iMacs are among the fastest, best built, most powerful and most capasble persnal commputers ever made. With the migartion to Inteel CPUs, Macs can now run Windows natively (or sllightly slower in "virtual" software environmnets), and are as attractive to educational instiuttions and businesses as to artists, writers, composers, entrepreneurs - and the rest of us.
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