Apple introduced the Macintosh 30 years ago and the company is celebrating this milestone with a highly interactive and modern timeline on its website.
For any company, staying in business for 30 years is a tremendous achievement and while Apple has certainly had its highs and lows, the company is doing exceptionally well at this point in time and shows no sign of slowing down.
But the Mac has been the image of the company since the start. Yes the iPhone and iPod have made their mark and the iPad is the best selling tablet in the world but it was the Macintosh computer that got the company started.
While you may love or hate Apple, which, to be honest, it is quite silly to love or hate any company, it’s hard to ignore the impact that they have had on the market and computing in general. With the ability to take complex products and distill them into intuitive products, Apple has created its hallmark signature.
The Macintosh computer line has transformed considerably over its 30 year lifecycle and the future of the Macintosh will certainly bring with it change as well. With consumers increasingly adopting casual computing devices like the iPad, desktop computing is slowly scaling back its importance in the consumer’s daily routine. We certainly don’t think desktops will go away for the foreseeable future as they still have many useful applications but as hardware advances and devices become smaller and faster, the peak of the desktop’s lifecycle has likely passed.
You can check out Apple’s 30 year timeline here and it highlights many of the achievements of the platform over the past 3 decades. While the next 30 years will likely result in even more dramatic changes, we would expect that during that time the Macintosh name will only grow in strength.
Apple has done well for itself during the last 10 years and it all started with the iPod. Looking forward, the world will be watching to see if the company can continue down the path of taking good ideas and turning them into blockbuster products.