Apple’s longest-running product, the venerable Macintosh, turns forty years old today and yet, it’s never been more successful.
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… 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… 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.
MacDailyNews Take: The state of the Mac is strong.
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That’s great, but those are coattails. Modern Apple: give it up. Your woke CEO and useless modern engineers are going to drive you into the ground. I choose Apple today not because they are ‘good’, but because the alternative is somehow even worse, and technology is very much a necessary evil at this point.
The founders of Silicon Valley are smacking their heads at their progeny. The Mac is good because it is a 40 year-old product, and to an extent that applies to the iPhone, too, somebody else did the hard work. It’s easy to build on something that is already great. Smarter and more in touch people built those things. The rest in 2024? Pfft. What a joke, and very disappointing. To think that anyone but a teenager or their emotional equivalent wants to strap heavy hardware to their face to get through their day is very simply put the height of stupidity, and the absolute epitome of technologically fueled helplessness. Grow the eff up, Apple.
At this point I am BEGGING for someone to create an alternative, and again, I was a ‘fight back for the Mac’ guy. 🙄 The schadenfreude part of me would love to see Apple fail again, after some of us supported their a**es through the hardest of times; for that stock to be like toilet paper.
You seem bitter, Jamie.
Forty years old and no good financial software that will run on it. I have to keep an old Mac around so I can keep running Quicken 2007. WTF? If capitalism worked, this wouldn’t be the case.
Quicken has dropped support for all platforms other than the web. You’re clinging to a world that has already gone.
I’m not yet ready to expose all of my financials to the interwebs so I’ll just keep clinging to the old world as long as I can. It’s not dead yet.