Macintosh

The Macintosh (branded simply as Mac since 1998) is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Inc. since January 1984.

The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, the Apple TV digital media player, the AirPods wireless earbuds and the HomePod smart speaker.

The original Macintosh was the first mass-market personal computer that featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse.

The Macintosh 128K, originally released as the Apple Macintosh, is the original Apple Macintosh personal computer.

Early Macintosh models were expensive, hindering its competitiveness in a market dominated by the Commodore 64 for consumers, as well as the IBM Personal Computer and its accompanying clone market for businesses.

The industry jargon "PC" sometimes doesn't mean "personal computer" generally, but rather a Windows computer, in contrast to a Mac.

The Macintosh (branded simply as Mac since 1998) is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Inc. since January 1984.

For example, "PC" is used in contrast with "Mac", an Apple Macintosh computer.

Even after the transition to the superior PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line in the mid-1990s, the falling prices of commodity PC components, poor inventory management with the Macintosh Performa, and the release of Windows 95 saw the Macintosh user base decline.

The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. as part of its Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006.

Prompted by the returning Steve Jobs' belief that the Macintosh line had become too complex, Apple consolidated nearly twenty models in mid-1997 (including models made for specific regions) down to four in mid-1999: The Power Macintosh G3, iMac, 14.1" PowerBook G3, and 12" iBook.

The PowerBook G3 is a series of laptop Macintosh personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1997 to 2001.

Its current lineup includes four desktops (the all-in-one iMac and iMac Pro, and the desktop Mac Mini and Mac Pro), and two laptops (the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro).

iMac is a family of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers designed and built by Apple Inc. It has been the primary part of Apple's consumer desktop offerings since its debut in August 1998, and has evolved through seven distinct forms.

Its current lineup includes four desktops (the all-in-one iMac and iMac Pro, and the desktop Mac Mini and Mac Pro), and two laptops (the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro).

It is one of four desktop computers in the current Macintosh lineup, sitting above the consumer range Mac Mini and iMac, and serves as an easily-expandable alternative to the iMac Pro.

The first versions initially had no name but came to be known as the "Macintosh System Software" in 1988, "Mac OS" in 1997 with the release of Mac OS 7.6, and retrospectively called "Classic Mac OS".

Classic Mac OS (System Software) refers to the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9.

Apple has also developed a series of Macintosh operating systems.

The family of Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple Inc. includes the graphical user interface-based operating systems it has designed for use with its Macintosh series of personal computers since 1984, as well as the related system software it once created for compatible third-party systems.

(Although the Sinclair QL became available one month before the Macintosh family and thus was technically the first home computer with a graphical user interface, the QL never attained widespread commercial success.) Apple sold the Macintosh alongside its popular Apple II family of computers for almost ten years before they were discontinued in 1993.

With the release of MousePaint in 1984 and the Apple II GS in 1986, the platform took on the look of the Macintosh user interface, including a mouse.

However, the introduction of Windows 3.1 and Intel's Pentium processor which beat the Motorola 68040 in most benchmarks gradually took market share from Apple, and by the end of 1994 Apple was relegated to third place as Compaq became the top PC manufacturer.

In Apple Macintosh computers, the 68040 was introduced in the Macintosh Quadra, which was named for the chip.

The current version is macOS Catalina, released on October 7, 2019.

macOS Catalina (version 10.15) is the sixteenth and current major release of macOS, Apple's desktop operating system for Macintosh computers.

In the early 1990s, Apple introduced the Macintosh LC II and Color Classic which were price-competitive with Wintel machines at the time.

The Color Classic is the final model of the original "compact" family of Macintosh computers, and was replaced by the larger-display Macintosh LC 500 series and Power Macintosh 5200 LC.

The Macintosh project began in 1979 when Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer.

Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert best known for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.

Its current lineup includes four desktops (the all-in-one iMac and iMac Pro, and the desktop Mac Mini and Mac Pro), and two laptops (the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro).

It is one of four desktop computers in the current Macintosh lineup, sitting above the consumer range Mac Mini and iMac, and serves as an all-in-one alternative to the Mac Pro.

Intel-based Macs are capable of running non-Apple operating systems such as Linux, OpenBSD, and Microsoft Windows with the aid of Boot Camp or third-party software.

Apple came to see Windows as an unfair encroachment on their innovation in GUI development as implemented on products such as the Lisa and Macintosh (eventually settled in court in Microsoft's favor in 1993).

Since Apple's transition to Intel processors, there is a sizeable community around the world that specialises in hacking macOS to run on non-Apple computers, which are called "Hackintoshes".

A Hackintosh (a portmanteau of "Hack" and "Macintosh"), is a computer that runs a Apple Macintosh operating system ("macOS" or "OS X") on computer hardware not authorized for the purpose by Apple.

Early Macintosh models were expensive, hindering its competitiveness in a market dominated by the Commodore 64 for consumers, as well as the IBM Personal Computer and its accompanying clone market for businesses. In 1978 Apple began to organize the Apple Lisa project, aiming to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple II or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC.

Only the Apple Macintosh family kept a significant share of the microcomputer market after the 1980s without compatibility to the IBM personal computer.

In the early 1990s, Apple introduced the Macintosh LC II and Color Classic which were price-competitive with Wintel machines at the time.

Of those systems, Apple's Macintosh is the only one remaining on the market (and all Macintoshes since December 2006 are, in fact, Wintel-compatible, at the hardware level, at least).

Things had changed dramatically with the introduction of the 32-bit Motorola 68000 in 1979, which offered at least an order of magnitude better performance than existing designs, and made a software GUI machine a practical possibility.

It was widely used in a new generation of personal computers with graphical user interfaces, including the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and many others.

In 1978 Apple began to organize the Apple Lisa project, aiming to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple II or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC.

In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, he appropriated the existing Macintosh project, which Jef Raskin had conceived in 1979 and led to develop a text-based appliance computer.

His initial team would eventually consist of himself, Howard, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, and Bud Tribble.

She was one of the original members of both the Apple Computer Macintosh team and the NeXT team.

He wanted to name the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh, but the spelling was changed to "Macintosh" for legal reasons as the original was the same spelling as that used by McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., the audio equipment manufacturer.

Apple Inc. employee Jef Raskin named the Macintosh line of personal computers after the fruit.

The Apple Lisa project was immediately redirected to utilize a GUI, which at that time was well beyond the state of the art for microprocessor capabilities; the Xerox Alto required a custom processor that spanned several circuit boards in a case which was the size of a small refrigerator.

After two visits to see the Alto, Apple engineers used the concepts to introduce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh systems.