Twenty years ago, on the Mac’s 20th anniversary, I asked Steve Jobs if the Mac would still be relevant to Apple in the age of the iPod. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: “of course” it would be.

Yet, 10 years later, Apple’s revenue was increasingly dominated by the iPhone, and the recent success of the new iPad had provided another banner product for the company. When I interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller for the Mac’s 30th anniversary, I found myself asking him about the Mac’s relevance, too. He also scoffed: “Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever,” he said.

Today marks 40 years since Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino, and it once again feels right to ask what’s next for the Mac.

Next week, Apple will release financial results that will reinforce that Mac sales are among the best they’ve been in the product’s history. Then, a day later, Apple will release a new device, the Vision Pro, that will join the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in an ever-expanding lineup of which the Mac is only one small part.

As the Mac turns 40, it’s never been more successful — or more irrelevant to Apple’s bottom line. It’s undergone massive changes in the past few years that ensure its survival but also lash it to a hardware design process dominated by the iPhone. Being middle-aged can be complicated.

Mac against the wall

Mac users — and I’ve been one of them for 34 of those 40 years — have been on the defensive for most of the platform’s existence. The original Mac cost $2,495 (equivalent to more than $7,300 today), and it had to compete with Apple’s own Apple II series, which was more affordable and wildly successful. The Mac was far from a sure thing, even at Apple: in the years after the Mac was first introduced, Apple released multiple new Apple II models. (One even had a mouse and ran a version of the Mac’s Finder file manager.) It took a long time for the Mac to emerge from the Apple II’s shadow.

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.

Apple itself was on the brink of bankruptcy when Jobs returned, shipped the original iMac, and gave 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 some of those same bad vibes that we hadn’t felt since the depths of the late ’90s. 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 stagnant. Apple released an unpopular and unreliable laptop keyboard design that led to years of bad reviews, complaints, repair programs, and class action lawsuits. After the debacle of the trash can-shaped 2013 Mac Pro, Apple prepared to stop making the high-end Mac at all, replacing it with a boosted-spec iMac Pro instead. Shiny new iOS features would appear limited or broken on the Mac — when they appeared at all.

It felt very much like the Mac had lost its way and that Apple was putting it on life support. All signs pointed to Apple having declared the Mac a legacy platform, while future investment and growth would happen on the iPad.

And then something changed. Only people inside Apple know for sure, and they’re not telling, but Apple suddenly seemed to start caring about the Mac again. 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.

Over the next few years, that Mac Pro shipped, the laptop keyboard was replaced with a new model, and most notably, Apple committed to converting the entire product line from running on stock Intel processors to running on Apple-designed processors like the ones in iPhones and iPads.

Without saying a word publicly, Apple seemed to be acting like it knew exactly what a computer was — and that it looked like a Mac, not an iPad.

Meet the new Mac

This week, I asked Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, the same question I asked Jobs for the Mac’s 20th anniversary and Schiller for the Mac’s 30th: as Apple adds yet more platforms and priorities, what does the Mac’s future look like?

No surprise, Joswiak gave me pretty much the same answer: “The Mac is the foundation of Apple… and today 40 years later it remains a critical part of our business,” he said. “The Mac will always be part of Apple. It’s a product that runs deep within the company, and defines who we are.”

But Joswiak also pointed out how much the Mac has changed over that time to stay relevant, particularly on the hardware front. And indeed, the last few years have brought arguably the most drastic changes to the Mac’s hardware in its entire existence. By adopting Apple’s own processors, the Mac has inherited the priorities Apple used in designing those chips for iPhones and iPads.

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. But it’s also led to some peculiar distortions, such as 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).

Apple Silicon also has implications for the future of macOS as a software platform. 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.

That’s great news for the Mac in the sense that developers will be able to write apps for iPhone and iPad and get Mac in the bargain. But it highlights the truth of today’s Apple platforms: the iPhone is such a huge part of Apple’s business that it gets the lion’s share of attention. The future of Mac apps (beyond the maintenance of existing longstanding codebases like Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, and stalwarts like Bare Bones’ BBEdit) increasingly looks like iPhone apps extended to the iPad and Mac to reach users in more places.

And that’s if the future of traditional PC environments even involves traditional apps at all. More of the software desktop and laptop users rely on, like Slack and Discord, is built with web technologies and placed in a web wrapper. Even more apps are able to reside entirely 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 how well it’ll all work, but the fact remains that Apple’s shiniest new toy is… a Mac accessory. Not bad for a 40-year-old computing platform.

The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up.

After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s. Apple had spent a decade frittering away the Mac’s advantages until most of them were gone, blown out of the water by the enormous splash of Windows 95. It was the era of beige desktop computers chained to big CRT displays and other peripherals.

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to an Apple that was at death’s door, and in true Princess Bride style, he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities. Apple didn’t have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been experimenting with colors and translucent plastic in Apple’s otherwise boring hardware designs.

With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan. Essentially, Jobs went back to his playbook for the original “computer for the rest of us,” the Mac, to sell simplicity. The Mac’s mouse-driven graphical interface may have changed the course of the PC world, but its all-in-one design just hadn’t clicked. Jobs decided it was time to try again.

The anti-computer

The iMac contradicted every rule of the PC industry of the mid-’90s. Instead of being modular, it was a self-contained unit (with a built-in handle!). Beige was out, and translucent blue-green plastic was in. The iMac looked like nothing else in the computer industry.

But the iMac wasn’t just a rule-breaker when it came to looks. Jobs made a series of decisions that were surprising at the time, though he’d keep repeating them throughout his tenure at Apple. The iMac gave no consideration to compatibility or continuity and embraced promising new technology when the staid PC industry refused.

Since the 1980s, Macs connected to accessories via a few standard ports: SCSI (for fast connections to devices like drives and scanners), serial (for printers, modems, and local networking), and Apple Desktop Bus (for keyboards and mice). Mac users had built up ecosystems around all those ports, separate from the incompatible serial and parallel ports in the PC world.

Jobs threw all that stuff in the trash and started again. Instead of old ports, the iMac would use a new standard that hadn’t really caught fire in the PC world: Universal Serial Bus, or USB. 

The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so, but it doesn’t get enough credit for essentially kick-starting the USB revolution. (I can type on a 25-year-old iMac USB keyboard attached to a 2023 Mac Mini with no adapters! What stunning longevity.)

Straight outta Bondi

Though LCD screens certainly existed outside of a laptop in 1998 — Apple shipped the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh the previous year — they were considered too small and expensive to be used in a desktop context. (In fact, Apple toyed with shipping a high-end iMac with an LCD screen from the very beginning, but it proved to be far too expensive.)

Ive’s design embraced the big, bulbous shape of the electron gun housing that tapered out behind the display and covered it all in a two-tone aqua and white plastic shell. The aqua color was dubbed Bondi blue, which Ive described as having been inspired by the color of the water at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, and the semitransparent plastic (including ventilation holes and handle) gave you a clear view of the metal interior structure of the computer.

The front and bottom of the iMac were primarily a more opaque white plastic with a ribbed pattern of vertical stripes. The aqua color and vertical ribbing would be echoed a couple of years later in the original Mac OS X interface, Aqua. Yes, the iMac was so successful that Apple designed its next-generation operating system to match its industrial design.

Mac OS X was hardly the only product built to match the iMac. The iMac inspired a new generation of product designers to clad their products in colorful semitranslucent plastic. It wasn’t just computer accessories — just about any consumer product that had a plastic piece that could easily be swapped out was rereleased in a colorful iMac-inspired version.

None of these products would look like this if it weren’t for the original bondi blue iMac.

The exemplar of the iMac design fad was probably the George Foreman Grill, which didn’t melt your grilled cheese any faster but did it under a blue plastic shell. (The geniuses behind George Foreman Grills were big fans of Apple, which culminated in the release of the iGrill in 2007, combination grill and iPod speaker.)

The success of the iMac also informed Apple’s hardware design for years to come, but there were limits to its influence. When Apple’s next-generation Power Mac tower arrived in a blue and white coating, professional users rebelled. (Subsequent models were a more stately gray, and to this day, Apple prefers to release all of its “Pro” products with little to no color.) Apple’s first consumer-focused laptop, the iBook, was a bulbous and brightly colored cousin to the iMac, but after a few years, it was redesigned to be a white plastic rectangle instead.

Still, Jobs had seen the potential of an unchained Ive. Not all of Apple’s next hardware products would be hits — remember the Xserve? — but Ive was experimenting with other materials beyond translucent plastic — most notably, stainless steel and aluminum. The iPod featured plastic on the front and stainless steel on the back. Over time, Apple’s products would largely drop the plastic and be built out of metal.

I’d like to think that the original iMac design was so influential that its echoes continue to ring throughout the product design world. A few years ago, I bought a Nissan Leaf. It’s bright blue with a strangely bulbous backside. It took me a couple of years to realize I was basically driving a child of the iMac.

Computing heresy

With Apple having embraced the fledgling USB standard, peripheral makers had a real opportunity to rev up their production of USB accessories. But when Apple announced the iMac, very few USB products actually existed. In the three months between the iMac’s announcement and its release, those accessory makers scrambled to announce and ship their trackballs and keyboards and printers and — most of all — their floppy disk drives.

In a stunning bit of computing heresy, the iMac had no 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The floppy drive was standard equipment on literally every computer in existence in the mid-’90s. Even if you had hard drives or larger removable media like Zip or Jaz disks, your computer had a floppy drive, too. In the era before USB thumb drives, sharing data with other people generally meant copying it onto a diskette.

But Apple reasoned that most people were consumers, not creators. The computer could boot from its internal tray-loaded CD-ROM drive in a pinch, and that drive could install third-party software and play games and other entertainment titles. (Entertainment CD-ROMs were a thing in the 1990s. Ask your parents.)

Critics were apoplectic. How could Apple design a computer without writeable, removable media? Apple’s answer was right in the product’s name: the “i” in iMac stands for internet. If you wanted to send a friend a file, why not just email it to them?

The platformless era

Selling the iMac as an internet appliance was a stroke of genius. It came with a built-in modem, leading to the definitive iMac TV commercial — you plugged the iMac into power, plugged a telephone wire into its modem jack, and you were online — there was no step three.

After Windows became dominant, the Mac’s greatest liability was simply its incompatibility. One of the reasons to get a computer at home during this era was to run the same programs you ran at school or work. And while many schools had Macs, few businesses did outside of the design and publishing industries. While Apple had built up a community of customers who felt the product was superior to the competition, most people just opted for the default, and that was Windows.

But the rise of online services and the internet in the mid-1990s gave Apple a unique opportunity. On the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. Once you connected, you were using AOL or CompuServe or just your local internet provider and a web browser or email app. While some sites didn’t function if you weren’t using Internet Explorer for Windows, most worked fine.

So, if you were a family looking to get on the internet, why wouldn’t you buy an iMac? It worked with the internet, would look great on a desk or table, and was easy to get up and running. And sure, if you wanted to run Microsoft Office, they made that for Mac OS 8, too. 

“i” for everyone

Upon its release, the iMac became so well known that it may have even eclipsed the Apple brand for a little while. It was at least a strong enough signifier that Apple began using it on other products. The iBook laptop was an obvious choice, but in 2001, the company chose to reuse the branding for its new music player, the iPod.

The iPod didn’t connect to the internet, but it didn’t matter. Apple was declaring that the “i” stood for another cool Apple product you’d want to buy, and people bought an awful lot of iPods. Apple began slapping the lowercase “i” in front of a lot of its hardware, software, and services, culminating in the release of the iPhone and iPad.

Those products (and the iMac itself!) are still with us and bear so much brand recognition that it’s unlikely Apple will ever change their names. But throughout the rest of Apple’s product line, Apple has spent the last decade de-emphasizing the prefix. 

These days, Apple itself is the brand name, usually attached to a generic word or two. (The strong implication is that the Apple version of the thing is always going to be the one you want.) So now, we live in an era of the Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, Apple TV, Apple News, and Apple Fitness Plus. iBooks became Books. iCal became Calendar. (I don’t know why iCloud hasn’t been renamed, but here we are.) 

Funding the future

While PC makers spent many years trying (and failing, for the most part) to make iMac knockoffs, it was really a transitional device. While Apple still has a nice business selling iMacs to families, schools, and hotel check-in desks, most of the computers it sells are laptops.

Still, I think the iMac pointed the way to the era of ubiquitous laptops. (What is a laptop but an all-in-one computer? Fortunately, laptops don’t weigh 38 pounds like the iMac G3.) From the very beginning, the iMac was criticized as being limited and underpowered. Apple frequently used laptop parts in the iMac, whether it was for cost savings or miniaturization reasons. Today, Mac desktops use more or less the same parts as Mac laptops.

But perhaps the iMac’s strongest legacy is Apple itself. The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

Jason Snell worked at Mac magazines for 20 years and was lead editor at Macworld for a decade. Now he writes about Apple at sixcolors.com and podcasts at relay.fm and theincomparable.com.

It’s hard to believe it now, but in the early days of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, nobody was paying attention. Well, almost nobody.

These days, when Apple announces a media event, the world’s press descends on the Bay Area to cover every last product announcement. But when I was at Macworld, we only sent one person to the announcement of the iMac in 1998 — and that was really as a courtesy, since we expected nothing particularly interesting. (Nobody made that mistake again.)

The announcement of the iPod in late 2001 was in the same Town Hall auditorium that hosted last week’s iPhone SE and iPad Pro announcements, but back in 2001 there were plenty of empty seats. The whole world wasn’t watching Apple back then — but the Mac web certainly was.

Just as Mac user groups and bulletin boards were a key part of Apple’s community in the mid-1980s, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Mac web was a gathering place for the tiny minority of people who loved Apple’s stuff. If you didn’t live through it, you probably won’t believe it, but back then Apple was a tarnished brand coveted by a tiny fraction of computer users who were generally dismissed as magazine designers and cultists.

One of the amazing things about going on the internet for the first time is discovering that you’re not alone. All those things that you love, that people think you’re weird for loving? The internet is full of people just like you, who love that thing too! In the ’90s that’s what happened with websites covering Apple and the Mac. We formed a giant user group of people who loved this thing that everyone else thought was irrelevant at best and idiotic at worst: the Mac.

When I got my first job at a monthly Mac magazine, nobody was on the web yet. (I once asked a leading light at Ziff-Davis Publishing if we could put up a website for my magazine, and he told me that “the future is on CompuServe.”) Outside of the user groups, the magazines were the only place to find out what was going on with Apple. But the web opened the floodgates, and in short order there was an avalanche of Apple-themed sites. Ric Ford’s Macintouch, MacCentral, MacNN, MacRumors, Daring Fireball — they all provided news, rumors, and opinions to a community of rebels and cast-offs who refused to give up and switch to Windows 95.

Those new sites didn’t have huge advertisers and corporate masters to serve, like the magazines did. They exuded the spirit of the Mac community, diving deep into niche areas simply because they loved the subject matter. For years, MacWEEK magazine was the Apple rumor source of record, but as it faded away, it was replaced by rumor-centric sites that felt no fear (and oftentimes, no journalistic pangs) about spilling the beans. In those early days, anyone could (and did) put up a shingle and start writing about the stuff they cared about. Some of it was awful, some of it was brilliant. Talented people from all over the world could shine (and did) all without access to a printing press and a big budget.

At Macworld, I saw this firsthand: MacCentral, a news site started by a bunch of guys in Nova Scotia, Canada, became one of the preeminent Apple news sites on the web. Macworld‘s parent company bought MacCentral and for many years it far surpassed the traffic of Macworld, a brand that had been covering Apple since day one of the Mac’s existence. It was a site fueled on love of the platform and an understanding of the community that only the web could provide.

In the early 2000s, the tone at Apple events started to change, not just because of the growing interest in Apple thanks to the iMac and the iPod. The web was a huge factor, too. At several Apple media events during that period, I was given a very stern look and told that live-blogging was not permitted during the event. (Can you imagine?) I got around the restriction by sending descriptions of what was being announced to a staff writer back at home base, who converted the descriptions into full paragraphs in a constantly updated news story.

Apple eventually gave up on banning live-blogging and, after all the 3G Hotspots brought by members of the press overwhelmed a Wi-Fi demo and infuriated Steve Jobs, the company embraced providing the press with internet access at every event. Still, for years if you brought a camera to an Apple media event you were told to sit in the back row and not take too many pictures or you’d be thrown out.

Today it’s hard to imagine that those early days were real. Now everyone cares what Apple does, whether it’s to praise or damn it. Live-blogging is so common it’s almost a cliché, and these days Apple live-streams its events so most people don’t need to rely on a blog to tell them the news anyway. And most importantly, technology and culture — not just Apple, but all of it — has gone mainstream.

Just as the internet has gone from being a place for nerds to hang out and debate Star Trek to a place where most of the world lives, tech companies and products are no longer a strange niche that nobody cares about.

Forty years ago, Apple was a company building computers for hobbyists. Thirty years ago, it was the maker of an innovative computer that was going to have a tough time against cheaper competition. Twenty years ago, it was a cult phenomenon on its last legs, loved by a core group but abandoned by everyone else. Ten years ago it was the resurgent creator of the iPod.

And now? Now we’ve all got supercomputers in our pockets, whether we use a Mac, a PC, or no computer at all. The web is everywhere. This is the world Apple helped build. Apple’s building an on-campus auditorium three times the size of the old Town Hall. Can you imagine what the next decade will bring, let alone the next 40 years?