Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules

The pioneering PC revolutionized how people interact with computers. As the Mac enters its fifth decade, Apple says it will continue to evolve.

On January 24, Apple’s Macintosh computer turns 40. Normally that number is an inexorable milestone of middle age. Indeed, in the last reported sales year, Macintosh sales dipped below $30 billion, more than a 25 percent drop from the previous year’s $40 billion. But unlike an aging person, Macs now are slimmer, faster, and last much longer before having to recharge.

My own relationship with the computer dates back to its beginnings, when I got a prelaunch peek some weeks before its January 1984 launch. I even wrote a book about the Mac—Insanely Great—in which I described it as “the computer that changed everything.” Unlike every other nonfiction subtitle, the hyperbole was justified. The Mac introduced the way all computers would one day work, and the break from controlling a machine with typed commands ushered us into an era that extends to our mobile interactions. It also heralded a focus on design that transformed our devices.

That legacy has been long-lasting. For the first half of its existence, the Mac occupied only a slice of the market, even as it inspired so many rivals; now it’s a substantial chunk of PC sales. Even within the Apple juggernaut, $30 billion isn’t chicken feed! What’s more, when people think of PCs these days, many will envision a Macintosh. More often than not, the open laptops populating coffee shops and tech company workstations beam out glowing Apples from their covers. Apple claims that its Macbook Air is the world’s best-selling computer model. One 2019 survey reported that more than two-thirds of all college students prefer a Mac. And Apple has relentlessly improved the product, whether with the increasingly slim profile of the iMac or the 22-hour battery life of the Macbook Pro. Moreover, the Mac is still a thing. Chromebooks and Surface PCs come and go, but Apple’s creation remains the pinnacle of PC-dom. “It’s not a story of nostalgia, or history passing us by,” says Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a rare on-the-record interview with five Apple executives involved in its Macintosh operation. “The fact we did this for 40 years is unbelievable.”

You could summarize the evolution of the Mac in several stages. The first version kicked off a revolution in human-computer interaction by popularizing the graphical user interface in a compelling package. Then came its design period, characterized by 1998’s iMac. Steve Jobs, recently restored as CEO, used it to put Apple on the path to recovery, and ultimately glory. That design acumen was extended into the realm of software with the development of Mac OS X, launched in 2001. The 2010s were marked with an accommodation of the Mac to the mobile-oriented universe that Apple had seeded with the iPhone. And more recently, the most exciting developments in the Mac have been under the hood, boosting its power in a way that unlocked new innovations. “With the transition to Apple silicon that we started in 2020, the experience of using a Mac was unlike anything before that,” says John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.

Ternus’ comment opens up an unexpected theme to our conversation: how the connections between the Mac and Apple’s other breakout products have continually revitalized the company’s PC workhorse. As a result, the Mac has stayed relevant and influential way past the normal lifespan of a computer product.

The iPhone, introduced in 2007, quickly became an insanely successful device, dominating Apple’s bottom line. But the iPhone didn’t replace the Macintosh—it made the Mac stronger. At first, the effect could be seen in how the spirit of mobile interactions was transferred to the Mac, translating touchscreen gestures to the touch pad, and even allowing mobile and desktop apps to interact. “Our goal is to make those products work really well together, to create that consistency,” says Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of human interface design. (He hastens to add that all Apple products work as stand-alones as well.)

In the past few years, Mac innovations sprang from the transition to custom Apple silicon chips first pioneered to power iPhones. “I joke that we had to create the iPhone to create the scale to build the Mac we wanted to build,” says Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. Ternus also notes that the iPhone’s contribution to Apple’s bottom line has been very good to the Mac. “As the business has been successful, it's enabled us to invest and do the things we always wanted to do,” he says.

One example of that, I mention, must have been the recent boost to battery life in Mac notebooks. “When we broke physics?” jokes Joswiak. Indeed, the almost daylong span, 22 hours of battery life in some Macbook Pros, can feel life-changing. Again, this was a collateral effect of efforts to extend battery life in the iPhone.

“When we first started working with Apple silicon, it honestly did feel for us like the laws of physics had changed,” says Ternus. “All of a sudden, we could build a MacBook Air with no fan with 18 hours of battery life,” he says. “The best arrow in our quiver is efficiency. Because if you can improve efficiency, everything gets better.”

For the past few years, the form factors of Macintoshes have been fairly stable. Could a Mac in the future look totally different, as when the iMac morphed from a basketball to a lamp?

“There’s definitely the possibility for a revolution in the future,” says Molly Anderson, a leader in industrial design at Apple. “When we start a new project, we don't start by thinking of the constraints of how popular our existing products are. We're always focused on trying to design the best tool for the job.” Joswiak adds that it has taken courage to keep changing the Mac to keep it on the forefront—always, of course, in a deliberate fashion. “The road to tech hell is paved by people who can do things because they can, not because they should,” he says.

Could the next wave of big changes to the Mac spring from the same creative well that developed Apple’s newest product line, based on what Apple calls “Spatial Computing”? The Vision Pro, flag-bearer of that mixed-reality category, ships next month. Dye says that it’s 100 percent possible it influences the Mac, noting that the headset has already been shaped by the PC’s innovations. “The Mac experience already is on Vision Pro,” he says, referring to how it’s possible to navigate through apps or browse the web on the headset—or even tap a virtual keyboard—as you would with a Mac, but using a new set of gestures. “It’s bringing the Mac experience in your space with the freedom to have your windows anywhere you like,” he says. But I’m assuming that if the Vision Pro is successful, we might see its own interface conventions, like controlling the device without touching anything, migrate Mac-wards.

Dye says that this cross-product influence comes from having designers taking an Apple-wide perspective rather than being siloed into groups focused on individual products. “What’s been so successful for us is really one studio full of designers across hardware and software design, and also sound design, material design, colour design,” he says. “We're up to like 50 disciplines now, including haptics and things like that. We've worked really hard to keep it all together in one space, designing every product that Apple makes.”

Over the years, the range of Mac offerings has expanded and then narrowed. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he was appalled by a proliferation of vaguely differentiated models, some identified only by mysterious numbers. His solution was to limit the Mac to four models: one each in the consumer and Pro categories. These days, though, Mac buyers have to make some calculations before choosing. The price and performance curves of the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro series overlap. And desktop users have to figure out the comparative virtues of the iMac and the Mac Mini. And where’s the line between a high-end iMac and the super-pricey Mac Pro? At least that’s my view—the Apple execs don’t see it that way.

“I think it’s incredibly simple!” says Joswiak of the current Mac family. “We have a consumer lineup with an incredible Macbook Air available in two sizes, we have an iMac, and we have an iMac Mini. On the Pro side, we have this incredible MacBook Pro, we have Mac Studio, and we got the Mac Pro.” Uh, doesn’t that prove my point?

I remind the Apple folk of some of the Mac’s less triumphant models. Not surprisingly, they don’t want to dwell on the subject. When I utter the phrase “butterfly keyboard,” no one takes the bait. They shrug when I say that the most beautiful Mac might have been the ill-fated G3 Cube. But they do engage me on the subject of the recent cancellation of the Touch Bar, first introduced in the 2016 MacBook Pro. Can’t win ’em all! “In many cases, we're going to take bold swings at big ideas and work hard to see where they take us,” says Federighi. “Sometimes those learnings turn into future evolutions. Sometimes we take a step back.”

One trend almost certain to provide an evolution is AI. My mention that some companies—cough, cough, Microsoft—have added an “AI button” to their keyboards got a group guffaw. “Oh, that’s a huge innovation,” says Joswiak in a mocking tone. More seriously, Federighi says that Apple was an early AI adopter, and that Apple silicon made every post-2020 Mac AI-equipped. “We tend not to wag this in your face, but AI is an enabler of the scenes and features that just work, down to what I hope is the attractive portrait blur right behind me,” he says, referring to the fuzzy virtual background to his video window, one of a zillion visual effects Apple has implemented in recent years.

Before our video conference ends, I pop a final question: Will Apple be selling Macintoshes 40 years from now?

“It’s hard to imagine there being an Apple and not having a Mac,” says Joswiak. “It is in our blood—it's a product that defines who we are.” Federighi takes a shot at explaining why, in an industry where the standard is ephemeral, the machine that Steve Jobs introduced might be immortal. “The Mac has been able to absorb and integrate the industry’s innovations,” he says. “With each major technology wave, from graphical computing to the internet to even creating tools for mobile, the Mac has taken potential and turned it into intuitive creative tools for the rest of us. With seemingly disruptive waves like spatial computing and AI, the Mac will renew itself over and over.”

Hey, if we can have an octogenarian president, why not an 80-year-old Mac?

Time Travel

My own first exposure to the Macintosh was in late 1983, when I was working on a Rolling Stone feature about the birth of Apple’s new computer. Later, on the 10th anniversary of the launch, I published Insanely Great, a history of the Mac. Not to brag—oh, hell, I’m bragging—but I think I captured the nature of the achievement as well as the oversized character of Steve Jobs, who led the team. Reading it today is a reminder of how the Mac established standards that are now taken for granted.

If you have had any prior experience with personal computers, what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a “prompt,” consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background, little pictures called “icons” appear, representing choices available to you. A word-processing program might be represented by a pen, while the program that lets you draw pictures might have a paintbrush icon. A file would represent stored documents – book reports, letters, legal briefs and so forth. To see a particular file, you’d move the mouse, which would, in turn, move the cursor to the file you wanted. You’d tap a button on the mouse twice, and the contents of the file would appear on the screen: dark on light, just like a piece of paper.

This seems simple, but most personal computers (including the IBM PC) can’t do this.

“When you show Mac to an absolute novice,” says Chris Espinosa, the twenty-two-year-old head of publications for the Mac team, “he assumes that’s the way all computers work. That’s our highest achievement. We’ve made almost every computer that’s ever been made look completely absurd.” …

This creative extension is the secret of Macintosh: It was not only designed to be easy to learn for people who recoil at the thought of working a computer, but it’s whizzy enough to delight its designers. “We are bringing computers to the people for the first time,” says Macintosh Software Wizard (as it says on his card) Andy Hertzfeld. “We want the man on the street to get Mac and feel the incredible potential. Like when I got my first stereo.”

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