When I realized that this newsletter would go out on January 24, I didn’t have to think any further about its topic. Forty years ago today, Steve Jobs formally introduced the Macintosh computer at Apple’s annual meeting. His presentation created the template for every memorable “Stevenote” product launch to come. Of course I was going to write about a milestone like that.
As I probably don’t need to explain, that first Mac brought the graphical user interface and the pointing device known as a mouse to mainstream computer users, as long as they could pay the list price of $2,495, or about $7,300 in 2024 dollars. Though its reception was rhapsodic, initial sales fell far short of Apple’s forecast. But the Mac hung in there and survived Apple’s near-death experience in the 1990s. In the 21st century, it’s both helped to drive the company’s resurgence and benefited from it: I just walked around the WeWork where I’m writing this, and every computer I spied was a Mac of some sort, except for one Surface Laptop. Not bad for a machine dating to the first Reagan administration.
The most celebrated part of that original Mac was its software interface, which brimmed with new ideas, despite the lazy conventional wisdom that it merely imitated work done at Xerox’s PARC lab. But at the moment, I’m most fascinated by its industrial design. That petite all-in-one beige case, created by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, was unlike anything anyone had seen until then—at least outside of a kitchen. Jobs is said to have latched on to the Cuisinart food processor as design inspiration.
That original Mac isn’t just iconic. It might even be the single personal computer you’d choose to illustrate the concept of “personal computer.” And because makers of Windows PCs never knocked off its design, it remains uniquely recognizable—certainly more so than a MacBook or iPhone, both of which proved so influential that you could lose track of them in the sea of look-alikes they inspired.
But if all the first Mac inspires is nostalgia, we’ve lost sight of how daring it was. Unlike Apple’s first blockbuster PC, the Apple II, it had a built-in display but no integrated keyboard. It also sacrificed most of the Apple II’s defining features, such as its dazzling color graphics and expansion slots.
In retrospect, it’s among the gutsiest gambits Apple ever made. Imagine the company introducing a new smartphone that has virtually nothing in common with the iPhone. You can’t—or at least it strains my imagination.
Compared to other PCs of the time, the Mac’s small size and unified design offered several benefits. First, it took up little desk space and made the computer easy to tote around: It even sported a handle for that purpose. Second, ensuring that every Mac user had the same crisp 9-inch monochrome display gave the experience a consistency that was lacking in most other computers, which users plugged into whatever monitor (or TV set) they chose.