Macintosh

My favourite computer of all time. I don't even know where to begin on this one. I had the pleasure of seeing a real life Macintosh last year in London and my god I was really pushing myself to not touch it. I don't think it was working or maybe it was but wasn't switched on. It was in a design museum along with some more of my favourite Apple computers; the Apple IIGS and the iMac G3.

I'm completely fascinated by the history of the Macintosh. Its debvelopment, its purpose, its marketing, its artistry, its failure. I'll try to cover as much as I can but I'll definitely be coming back to this to edit and add stuff.

Development

The Macintosh started development in 1979 with Jef Raskin leading it. It was going to be a consumer computer, low-cost and easy to use. During this time, Steve Jobs was on the Lisa team, the first Apple computer to use a GUI and mouse, but by 1982, he was kicked off the team by the Apple board of directors for demanding too much of the team and so he moved to the Macintosh team. The Macintosh was never meant to have a GUI but instead just a text-based machine until Jobs took over its developmetn and decided to make it a less expensive alternative to the Lisa.

Jobs gathered employees from around Apple, even some externally, to join the Macintosh team and they went on to be known as pirates. In January, 1983, during an off-site repeat at Carmel, Jobs famously said "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." He was trying to encapsulate the past spirit of Apple, back when it was just him and a small group of people working in his parents garage. No bureaucracy, no formality. Some team members believed that that 'pirate' spirit didn't last for long as the team "were growing more like the Navy every day." Macintosh was the computer to introduced Apple's philosophy of software and hardware being tightly intigrated.

Marketing

One of the most famous adverts came from the Macintosh. "1984" introduced the world to the Mac. It aired on January 22, 1984 in the Super Bowl. The heroine represented the Macintosh and Big Brother was of course meant to be Big Blue, IBM. It, of course, all draws from George Orwell's novel Ninteen Eighty-Four. Pretentious? Definitely, but that's the way Steve Jobs did it. Clio Awards added the ad to its hall of fame. The Apple board hated the ad but Steve Jobs and John Sculley had already bought the ad time for the Super Bowl. Jobs and Wozniak ended up going halfs on the ad time to have it aired because they both loved the ad despite the slots getting sold.

As great as that ad is, its not my favourite ad to come out of the Macintosh marketing. In October, 1984, Apple made a Ghostbusters spoof to their Worldwide sales staff meeting in Hawaii. It's 4 minutes long of 80s campness with the Ghostbusters theme playing with altered lyrics, "Blue Busters". Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and John Sculley are actually in the video themselves.

Downfall

There was a lot of controversy around the price of Macintosh. Apple CEO John Sculley insisted the computer would sell for $2,495 because of the advertising and publicity costs. That was $500 more than Steve Jobs had wanted to sell it at and he blamed all of Macintosh's downfall on the price. Macintosh did indeed have issues outside of its cost though. It was a very underpowered machine with only 128k memory (hence it later being called Macintosh 128k) and when you compare that to the 1,000k of the Lisa that shipped a year earlier, you start to notice how little that is.

The machine got insanely hot too, being nicknamed 'the beige toaster' because of that and its shape. Macintosh didn't have any fans because according to Steve it would "distracted from the calm of the computer." Sales were not good and after the Lisa was discontinues a year later, Apple began to sink. In such a short span of time, the computer's launch went from being one of the greatest moments in Silicon Valley to having Jobs demoted then quitting from his own company. Just before that he even pulled the plugs on the Lisa to save Macintosh as Apple plummeted.

Legacy

Despite all the previously mentioned failures of the Macintosh, it's still so loved to this day because of the way it revolutionised personal computing. You could say Steve Jobs was right about it changing how people think about computers. It made them asccessible to everyone. The short instruction manuals, the visual orientation, no need to buy external harward to impliment, the way it was marketed, it was so easy to use. And of course, the aim at a cheaper price was going to make it even more accessible.

To this day, GUIs draw inspiration from that of Macintosh's System 1 OS. Susan Kare is the one to thank for many of the icons and typefaces were familiar with on computers now. I can't even imagine what the computer I'm using right now would look like without the Macintosh having existed (I say using a Windows OS... Now that's an even longer story), would I even be using a computer?

Okay, okay, I'm really putting Macintosh on a pedistal right now but it really is so influential. If you're using an Apple computer right now then know that that is a successor of Macintosh. Pretty much every Apple product greets you with a cursive 'Hello' which directly comes from Macintosh. This was an important computer!

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