The Rise and Fall of Macs: An Implication for the Future of Computers in Silicon ”Apple Silicon” (and Other Software Platforms)

And as revolutionary as the Mac’s interface was — it was the first popular personal computer to have a mouse-driven, menu-oriented user interface rather than a simple command line — it also had to overcome an enormous amount of resistance for being such an outlier. Once Microsoft truly embraced the Mac’s interface style with Windows, it took over the world, leaving the Mac with measly market share and diminishing prospects.

Something changed after that. Only a few people inside Apple can say for certain, but Apple seemed to start caring again about the Mac. 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.

The company was close to insolvency when Jobs came back and shipped the original iMac, as well as giving the company breathing room to develop Mac OS X and the iPod. And yet, the success of some of the products that followed led to more consternation.

In the mid-2010s, a lot of Mac users felt the bad vibes they hadn’t felt in a long while. Apple was promoting the iPad as the future of computing, most notably in a 2017 ad that questioned the entire concept of a computer.

Mac hardware was not moving. Apple released an unpopular and unreliable laptop keyboard design that led to years of bad reviews, complaints, repair programs, and class action lawsuits. Apple planned to stop making the high-end Mac after the debacle of the trash can-shaped Mac Pro. When the new features appeared on the Mac it was limited and broken.

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. Some strange distortions were caused by 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).

There are implications for the future of macOS as a software platform in Apple Silicon. Modern Macs can run unmodified iPad apps, and iOS app developers can use the Mac Catalyst feature to add some more native Mac functionality to their existing codebase without needing to know how to write a traditional Mac app. Apple’s 2014 introduction of Swift and 2019 introduction of SwiftUI have encouraged developers to write software for all of Apple’s platforms using one codebase.

Traditional apps will not be part of the future of traditional PC environments. More of the software used on the desktop and laptop PCs is built with web technologies and placed in a wrapper. More than one app can be found in a browser. And of course, AI applications threaten to upend everything we know about how we use software.

Still, considering just how much technology history the Mac has survived, it’s 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.” 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 if it will work, but Apple has the most new toy ever, a Mac accessory. Not bad for a 40-year old platform.

The pinnacle of these beige all-in-ones with black-and-white screens was the Macintosh SE/30 in 1989. It was faster, could be equipped with an internal hard drive, and supported up to 32MB of RAM, even though it could only fit in 128MB of storage. Just about every part of it was accessible and upgradeable, including the CPU.

Mac desktop computers were hit by Apple’s compression obsession. The iMac during this time was cleverly conceived and pretty, though in a rigid way that was everything the original iMac wasn’t. Its back tapered to a convincing lie of an edge that was only 5mm thick, giving the illusion of impossible thinness, and the models from 2014 to 2020 had gorgeous, sharp 5K retina displays. It seemed like it had a place even though it was a little impractical.

Apple products were made from plastic for a long time. 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 clear blue plastic George Foreman iGrill is an example of how this period of apple design inspired other products.

The MacBook Air that came out in 2020 was so amazing that nobody anticipated. The M1 chip was Apple’s new generation of super-efficient Arm processors, and it was in the same Chassis as the last Intel model. Its CPU performance was, unbelievably, faster than even the best Intel processor in the 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro, and the battery felt like it could go all day long.

The next year, Apple put the same chip in a totally redesigned iMac that, for the first time since 2001, came in colors. There are 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).

The Titanium PowerBook G4 is one of the more unique Macs, and there are many more like it. There’s the original aluminum-enclosed Mac Pro (the “cheese grater”) and a whole slew of non-Apple Macs from the ‘90s. 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.