What Does The Mac Do Now That It’s 20 Years Old? Apple’s 30th Anniversary Annihilation Revisited
I asked Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, what does the Mac do now that it’s 20 years old, the same question I asked Jobs for the mac’s 20th anniversary and Apple’s senior vice president of marketing for the mac’s 30th.
And then something changed. Only people inside Apple know for sure, and they’re not telling, but Apple suddenly seemed to start caring about the Mac again. It convened a journalist roundtable to proclaim its love of the Mac and professional users, promising that a new Mac Pro would appear years before it would actually be put on sale.
Apple itself was on the brink of bankruptcy when Jobs returned, shipped the original iMac, and gave the company breathing room to develop Mac OS X and the iPod. The success of some of the products led to more concern.
In the mid-2010s, a lot of Mac users felt some of those same bad vibes that we hadn’t felt since the depths of the late ’90s. In an ad that questioned the concept of a computer, Apple was promoting the future of computing, which was the iPad.
Mac hardware was stagnant. Years of bad reviews, complaints and class action lawsuits came from the unpopular and unreliable laptop keyboard design Apple released. After the debacle of the trash can-shaped 2013 Mac Pro, Apple prepared to stop making the high-end Mac at all, replacing it with a boosted-spec iMac Pro instead. When shiny new features showed up on the Mac, they were limited or broken.
The first M1 Macs offered vastly improved power consumption and extended laptop battery life because they were so much faster than their predecessors. 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).
Apple Silicon also has implications for the future of macOS as a software platform. Modern Macs are able to run unmodified iPad apps, along with the Mac Catalyst feature, which can be used to add more native Mac functions to existing codebases without knowing how to write a traditional Mac app. Developers are encouraged to write software for all of the Apple platforms using one codebase, thanks to the introduction of Swift and SwiftUI.
And that’s if the future of traditional PC environments even involves traditional apps at all. More of the software desktop and laptop users rely on, like Slack and Discord, is built with web technologies and placed in a web wrapper. Even more apps are able to reside entirely in a browser. And of course, AI applications threaten to upend everything we know about how we use software.
It is not hard to bet against the Mac due to how well it has survived. 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. As she said, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world on Mac. Fair point.
And consider the Vision Pro, Apple’s newest computing platform. Out of the box, it’ll run iPad apps as well as native apps. But Apple’s also pushing another visionOS feature, one that necessitated 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. It’s not bad for a 40-year-old platform.
The Macintosh SE/30 was the most popular of these beige all-in-one with black and white screens. 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). It was upgradeable, and it was accessible and accessible.
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 abandoned plastic and began to push the limits of the congenial minimalism of Macs to an uncomfortable degree.
The plastic design adopted by Apple products is still used for many years afterwards. The first iPod, the white MacBook, and the iMac G4 were released in this era. This period of Apple design also clearly inspired other products, like the clear blue plastic George Foreman iGrill.
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. The company also brought ports back in a big way, endowing its 14- and- 16-inch Pro models with HDMI, SD Card, and even MagSafe, which was taken away during the dark times. Apple also released a MacBook Air in 2022 with MagSafe.
The next year, Apple put the same chip in a totally redesigned iMac that, for the first time since 2001, came in colors. 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. The original aluminum- encased Mac Pro and many other macs from the ‘90s are included. All of them have their fans, and many also have their drawbacks — whether it’s the chipping paint and fragile hinges of the so-called TiBook or the compact but woefully underpowered 2015 12-inch MacBook, with its single USB-C port.