By Jason Snell

January 24, 2024 9:51 AM PT

Mac at 40: The eras tour

Before I started writing my piece on the Mac’s 40th anniversary for The Verge, I was thinking of different ways to plot out the arc of the Mac’s history. I ended up going with the fact that the Mac has been the underdog for most of its existence, but I also considered plotting the Mac’s history as defined by the Mac’s four distinct processor eras.

The Innovation era (Motorola 680×0)

The early days of the Mac were about justifying its existence as the first and most popular¹ personal computer with what’s now a familiar graphical user interface style rather than being driven by a command line.

The IBM PC and the emerging DOS PC clone standard weren’t the only enemies here. Plenty of other platforms existed in the early days, including the one that generated most of Apple’s revenue, the Apple II.

History tends to flatten everything into simple narratives, so you might expect that the moment the Mac was introduced, Apple began pivoting away from the Apple II. That did not happen. Apple didn’t discontinue the last Apple II model until nearly a decade into the Mac’s existence. After the Mac was introduced, Apple kept introducing new Apple II models: The compact IIc three months later and the 16-bit IIGS more than two years later.

But the Mac started winning hearts and minds, especially in the design community, where the prospect of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphics and typography was just too powerful to ignore.

During this era, the Mac expanded, perhaps most notably with the Mac II, which was a more traditional standalone box with card slots and support for external monitors. The System, as Mac OS was called back then, also continued to advance, reaching a pinnacle with version 6.0.8 and then blowing right through it with the next milestone release.

System 7 was this era’s major reinvention of the Mac, and its introduction in 1991 gave the original Mac OS a decade of additional life. It was a game-changer, with proper multitasking support, system extensions, a revamped Apple Menu, file sharing, aliases, AppleScript, and a new full-color interface.

The Desperation era (PowerPC)

But by the early 90s, Microsoft had made the graphical interface of Windows passable (with version 3.1) and then extremely Mac-like (with Windows 95). Apple was feeling pressure on the software front, and Motorola’s 6080×0 series processors were also reaching the end of their life.

In came PowerPC, a new chip series from an alliance of Apple, Motorola, and (of all companies!) IBM. The transition from Mac to Power Mac (as the first PowerPC-based Macs were named) led to a lot of trepidation in the Mac community, but Apple executed the whole thing incredibly well, including using clever code-translation software to ensure that older Mac apps would still run. (This transition would set the standard for subsequent Mac chip transitions, all of which were executed smoothly.)

This is more or less where I began my career as a professional Mac person rather than just a user and fan. The PowerPC transition was solid, but the overall market was getting ugly. Windows 95 really did change the game, because while old-school PC fans hated the Mac-ification of their computers, most regular people really did like the graphical interface!

Real talk: For Mac users, Windows 95 was a pale knock-off. But for PC users, it was good enough to completely eliminate any possible reason to switch to a Mac. That, combined with the rapid speed increases of Intel’s processors, made the “Wintel alliance” of this era basically a Death Star of computing. These were dark times.

Apple cycled through CEOs during this era and made a desperate stab at licensing Mac OS to clone-makers, a move aimed at expanding the market that ended up just cannibalizing Apple’s own Mac sales. (I admit that I bought a Power Computing clone during this era. It was great.)

Meanwhile, Mac OS was also reaching the end of its life cycle. Microsoft was working on a modern version of Windows, Windows NT, that added modern memory management, multiprocessor support, and many other features. Mac OS was patched and patched again to create ramshackle solutions to things like multitasking and multiprocessor support, but it was clear that Apple needed a new solution.

Unfortunately, the company botched its own next-generation Mac projects—and it had more than one. It went so far as to announce one, Copland, as “Mac OS 8″—and even showed it off at WWDC one year. It never shipped. What shipped in Mac OS 8 was a re-skinned version of System 7 with some extensions to keep the plates spinning while Apple’s desperation increased.

Apple’s Mac OS desperation ended up saving not just the Mac but the entire company. Rather than buying the shiny, new, and untested BeOS from former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gasseé, CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock went with a more battle-tested, tried-and-true operating system: NeXTStep, from Steve Jobs’s NeXT. Oh, and Jobs came along in the deal… as an advisor. Sure. Yep.

You know the rest. Jobs took over, NexT became Mac OS X, the G3 iMac revived Apple’s fortunes and kept the company alive long enough to fund OS X development and the creation of the iPod and Apple retail stores, and things stabilized.

The Halo Effect era (Intel)

The PowerPC alliance was falling apart. IBM’s new G5 processor gave the Mac some speed advantages over Intel PCs, but they suffered from heating problems that forced some Power Mac models to be liquid-cooled and utterly precluded Apple from building a G5 laptop. Famously, Steve Jobs said on stage that IBM would be supplying a G5 processor running at a gaudy 3GHz… but IBM never delivered.

NeXtSTEP had run on Intel processors, and deep within Apple, the OS-on-Intel skunkworks project had continued. This was its moment: Apple announced it was embarking on another processor transition, this time to Intel. The enemy had become an ally.

Psychologically, this was an enormous move for Apple. Intel had spent years branding itself as the standard in computing. Even when PowerPC chips had speed advantages over Intel chips, to explain why a chip with a lower clock speed was actually faster required a lengthy lecture about chip architecture that would put almost anyone to sleep. Apple’s sales pitch for the Mac was now a lot simpler: We have the same chips that they do.

It doesn’t seem like much, but during this period, it was incredibly reassuring. The iPod had helped rehab Apple’s brand with people who had never been Mac users before. It drew them to the new Apple retail stores, and the Mac was right there. People who had never had a fondness for Apple products now asked themselves: If I love this iPod so much, maybe I would like Apple’s computer, too?

It was called the iPod Halo Effect, and it was real. The fact that Macs ran Intel processors was an extra reassuring bullet point. A lot of people bought their first Macs during this period, reassured in part by the fact that Boot Camp and virtualization software existed that would allow them to also use Windows software in a pinch. (Most of them never needed to, but it eased their anxiety.)

During this era, the Mac was on the upswing. But as the iPhone and iPad entered Apple’s product line and siphoned off attention from the Mac, the platform suffered from a deep malaise in the 2010s. I have theories about why this happened, but no tangible evidence. Maybe it was just the natural effect of focusing on other platforms, or maybe there were specific decisions made inside Apple to put the Mac on life support while it built a new computing platform based on the iPad.

Either way, the late 2010s Mac was plagued by bad laptop keyboards, OS updates that lacked complete support for new features on iOS, a dearth of new Mac software, and a couple of compatibility-breaking OS updates that wiped out lots of apps from the early days of OS X. It was a bad decade for Intel, too, and that showed in a bunch of lackluster chip updates that couldn’t match the innovation going on in Apple’s other product lines.

The Graduation era (Apple silicon)

What a way to break out of the malaise! Apple switched the entire platform to chips based on the ones it had designed for the iPhone and iPad over the previous decade. Now, rather than being starved of the attention given to other Apple platforms, the Mac was being reinvigorated by the fruits of that labor.

Apple silicon Macs were faster than Intel Macs and far more power efficient. When the COVID pandemic hit, loads of people bought new Macs, driving the Mac to its two biggest sales years of all time. Not bad for a 40-year-old computing platform.

The big question is, what happens next? Nothing ever ends, after all. As I mentioned in my Verge article, the Mac’s move to Apple silicon can be viewed as a Faustian bargain. Apple’s long-term goal seems to be for developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac all together. In the end, does that mean that the Mac will be a container for “legacy” apps while most new apps are coming from Apple’s other platforms or the web?

It’s possible. But that prospect is better than a scenario where the Mac just can’t keep up because it doesn’t run any new apps. I’d also argue that the Mac has a unique position among Apple’s platforms: Not only is it where software development is done, but it’s also the only platform that can run iPhone/iPad apps and full Mac apps. It’s a superset of Apple’s platforms, not a subset. That’s a powerful place for the Mac to be.

I’m optimistic about the future of the Mac. Tech products come and go. The iPod was the biggest tech product of the early to mid-2000s, and these days, when you see the word, you’re more likely to think it’s a misspelling of “iPad.” Somehow, through three chip transitions and two entirely different operating systems, the Mac has survived.

More than that, the Mac has thrived. More people are using Macs today than at any other point in its existence. That’s miraculous, and it’s a testament to the Mac’s ability to change with the times while continuing to appeal.

Here’s to the next era, wherever it might take us.

If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.