Macintosh is a family of PCs originally created by Apple in 1984 with the brand name still in use today under the shortened name “Mac.” The main selling point of the original Macintosh was its graphical interface as up until that point all computers (with the exception of the commercially unsuccessful Sinclair QL which was released one month prior to the original Macintosh) had a text-based interface. The Macintosh was commercially popular but due to its high price-tag found most of its success in the desktop publishing and educational markets, instead losing the household and corporate market to the cheaper Commodore 64 and the IBM “Personal Computers.”
Technipages Explains Macintosh
The modern Mac has positioned itself solidly in the consumer and creator market by focussing on its easy to use productivity software suite, primarily for video, graphics, and photographic creation and editing.
The Macintosh while initially relatively popular struggled with its higher price-tag compared to the competing and cheaper Windows PCs while also having significantly less software available. When Founder Steve Jobs returned to the company he was able to turn around the popularity of the Mac, eventually the success of the iPod and later the iPhones led to satisfied Apple customers purchasing Apple Macs rather than Windows PCs.
The Mac operating system was originally based on the Lisa OS which was written for the earlier Apple Lisa computer. The modern Mac operating system is OS X, which is derived from the BSD Unix architecture, this allows for some interoperability of Linux based scripts and software. Apple has released the base of the operating system under an open-source licence as “Darwin”, Apple uses Darwin and then layers other software such as their “Aqua” interface on top of it to create Mac OS X.
Common Uses of Macintosh
- The Macintosh is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple.
- The original Macintosh computer had 128 KB of RAM and was renamed to Macintosh 128k when its successor the Macintosh 512k was released.
- Macintosh is a family of PCs originally created by Apple in 1984 with the brand name still in use today under the shortened name “Mac.”
Common Misuses of Macintosh
- Macintosh is another brand name for Apple computers.