Looking back at the Macintosh 40 years ago

Mac in the age of iPod: Apple is no longer important than it was in the early 2000s, or when the Mac started to fall into disrepair

I asked Steve Jobs about the relevancy of the Mac in the age of iPod, when it was 20 years old. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: “of course” it would be.

And then something changed. Only people inside Apple know, and they are not saying, but Apple seems to have begun caring about the Mac again. It promised a new Mac Pro wouldn’t be on the market for years and that it would be made by the end of the year.

It felt very much like the Mac had lost its way and that Apple was putting it on life support. All signs pointed to Apple having declared the Mac a legacy platform, while future investment and growth would happen on the iPad.

Some Mac users felt some of the bad vibes they hadn’t felt since the depths of the late ’90s. The ad that questioned the entire idea of a computer was one of many promoting the iPad as the future of computing.

The entire product line was converted to run on Apple-designed chips such as the ones in the iPhone and iPad, after the Mac Pro was shipped.

That has resulted in some huge advantages — the first M1 Macs were so much faster than their predecessors and offered vastly improved power consumption that extended laptop battery life. But it’s also led to some peculiar distortions, such as the release of a Mac Pro that can’t use graphics cards. Modern Macs have high-speed integrated GPUs and RAM that can be very fast, indeed, but at the cost of an inability to use industry-leading external GPUs (or, for that matter, RAM upgrades).

That’s great news for the Mac in the sense that developers will be able to write apps for iPhone and iPad and get Mac in the bargain. But it highlights the truth of today’s Apple platforms: the iPhone is such a huge part of Apple’s business that it gets the lion’s share of attention. The future of Mac apps (beyond the maintenance of existing longstanding codebases like Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, and stalwarts like Bare Bones’ BBEdit) increasingly looks like iPhone apps extended to the iPad and Mac to reach users in more places.

And that’s if the future of traditional PC environments even involves traditional apps at all. More of the software that is used on desktop and laptop computers is built with web technologies and placed in a web wrapper. Even more apps are able to reside entirely in a browser. Artificial intelligence applications threaten to change how we use software.

Considering how long the Mac has been around, it is hard to bet against it. Even Apple seems to have come around from seeing it as a product fading away into retirement to seeing it as the most powerful and complete device it makes, capable of doing everything the iPad and iPhone can do, plus all the stuff traditional computers can do. After all, as Joswiak told me, “We run Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, on Mac.” It was a fair point.

The Vision Pro is an Apple computing platform. It will run native apps for iPad as well as native apps for iPad. Apple is pushing another visionOS feature that necessitates a complete rewrite of the Mac’s screen sharing infrastructure: you can use the Vision Pro as a big Mac monitor.

It remains to be seen how well it’ll all work, but the fact remains that Apple’s shiniest new toy is… a Mac accessory. Not bad for a 40-year-old computing platform.

The pinnacle of these beige all-in-ones with black-and-white screens was the Macintosh SE/30 in 1989. It looked a lot like the first Mac, but it was faster, could be equipped with an internal hard drive, and it supported up to 32MB of RAM (though you could ultimately cram in 128MB). Just about every part of it was accessible and upgradeable, including the CPU.

Ten years after the original iMac, Steve Jobs pulled the first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope and Macs in general became Serious Business. Apple put the limits of the congenial minimalism of the Macs to an uncomfortable degree after abandoning plastic.

For years afterward, Apple products adopted an approachable plastic design. This era saw the release of the white MacBook, the first iPod, and what I won’t hesitate to call Apple’s coolest computer design, the iMac G4. The George Foreman iGrill was inspired by the period of Apple design.

Since then, Apple Silicon chips have come to every part of the Apple line, sticking them in MacBook Pro models, the Mac Mini, the new Mac Studio (the Mini’s chunky and powerful big sibling), and even the Mac Pro. During the dark times, MagSafe was taken away from the 14- and 16-inch Pro models, but now they have it back. Apple also released a MacBook Air in 2022 with MagSafe.

The iMac that was put in the next year was completely redesign and came in colors for the first time in over a decade. Seven of them! It came with a 24-inch, 4.5K retina display, a new Magic Keyboard with a Touch ID sensor, but just two Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports (plus two more standard USB-C ports if you upgraded).

There are so many more iconic Macs than I’ve mentioned above — computers like the titanium PowerBook G4 (the “TiBook”) or the colorful clamshell iBook. There is an original Mac Pro, and a lot of non-Apple Macs from the ‘90s. Many of them have drawbacks such as the TiBook with its chipping paint and fragile hinges, or the compact but woefully underpowered MacBook, with its single USB-C port.