dgh
The Mac turns 40 today. I’ve used 5 Macs in my life and still have all of them, though 3 are in the attic. I’ve used Windows and various flavors of Unix and I feel most comfortable in the Apple OS.
The Mac, short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The product lineup includes the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, and the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro desktops. Macs are sold with the macOS operating system.
Jef Raskin conceived the Macintosh project in 1979, which was usurped and redefined by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1981. The Macintosh has a 9-inch monochrome monitor built into the case, and was launched in January 1984, after Apple's "1984" advertisement during Super Bowl XVIII.
It’s never been without controversy.
Upon its January 1984 launch, the first Macintosh was described as revolutionary by The New York Times.[5] Sales initially met projections, but dropped due to the machine's low performance, single floppy disk drive requiring frequent disk swapping, and initial lack of applications. Author Douglas Adams said: "But what I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac."[6] Most of the original Macintosh team left Apple, and some followed Jobs to found NeXT after he was forced out by CEO John Sculley.[7]
Things got dicey for awhile.
Many new Macintoshes suffered from inventory and quality control problems. The 1995 PowerBook 5300 was plagued with quality problems, with several recalls as some units even caught fire. Pessimistic about Apple's future, Spindler repeatedly attempted to sell Apple to other companies, including IBM, Kodak, AT&T, Sun, and Philips. In a last-ditch attempt to fend off Windows, Apple yielded and started a Macintosh clone program, which allowed other manufacturers to make System 7 computers.[26] However, this only cannibalized the sales of Apple's higher-margin machines.[27] Meanwhile, Windows 95 was an instant hit with customers. Apple was struggling financially as its attempts to produce a System 7 successor had all failed with Taligent, Star Trek, and Copland, and its hardware was stagnant. The Mac was no longer competitive, and its sales entered a tailspin.[28] Corporations abandoned Macintosh in droves, replacing it with cheaper and more technically sophisticated Windows NT machines for which far more applications and peripherals existed. Even some Apple loyalists saw no future for the Macintosh.[29] Once the world's second largest computer vendor after IBM, Apple's market share declined precipitously from 9.4% in 1993 to 3.1% in 1997.[30][31] Bill Gates was ready to abandon Microsoft Office for Mac, which would have slashed any remaining business appeal the Mac had. Gil Amelio, Spindler's successor, failed to negotiate a deal with Gates.[32]
Oh, how I wish I had bought 1000 shares of Apple stock back then.
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