30 years of Mac isn't just a big deal for Apple, it's a big deal for anyone passionate about personal computing, anyone who experienced the punch cards and tape decks, the command lines and mismatched components that came before. And for anyone who, thanks in part to the Mac, never had to experience them. Whether you use a Mac today or not, personal computing as it currently exists right now simply wouldn't be the same without the contributions of the people at Apple and on the Mac team. We've been writing about it all week — everyone has been writing about it — and now it's here. The candles are lit. The song is being sung. The party is about to begin. And what a party it is! Here are 8 amazing tributes to the original all-in one, the 1984 Mac that had us all at "Hello!".
- There are new displays at Apple Retail Stores featuring the 3 treatment and ever-changing light patterns in the 6 rainbow colors of the original logo.
- Apple Retail Store employees have new black shirts with the 3 treatment, and new badges with "Hello" written in the 1984 Mac style.
- Apple.com has a new section all about the 3 year anniversary, asking you to share your first Mac.
- Apple HQ in Cupertino has posters up on display at IL1 with the 3 treatment made out of the names of every Apple employee, in their badge order. There's also a giant Mac poster, a beer bash, a t-shirts, a speech from Tim Cook, and a performance by OneRepublic
- Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, along with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi, will be on ABC News tonight to talk about what 3 years of Mac means to him, and to the company.
- Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Bud Tribble have given interviews about the past, present, and future of the Mac to Macworld and Wall Street Journal.
- Original Mac team members will be at the Mac 30th Celebration tomorrow night for panel discussions and giant community party.
- Peter Cohen has put together a retrospective here at iMore on the Mac's remarkable 30 year journey.
Just over 30 years ago I went to my father's new office, saw a Lisa sitting on the desk, touched a mouse for the first time, and smiled in delight as I dragged every graphical icon on the desktop to the miraculous trashcan. I wasn't allowed to touch the Lisa again, but I did eventually get a Mac, and it's safe to say my life has never been the same.
We're leaving the comments wide open. Please do take a moment and let us know how, if at all, the Mac has influenced your life. What has the Mac meant to you?
Reader comments
8 amazing tributes to 3 years of Mac!
Also curious: If you've never used a Mac, or you've used one but switched to something else, what failed to catch or keep you?
I"ve never used or owned a Mac only because I still can't afford one. One of these days. Enjoying my iPad Air though.
It's very interesting. Since 2007, I've honestly tried Apple products. I started with an iPod and I sold it. I bought a macbook pro and an iPhone 2 years later and I sold it. It sounds like I was almost disappointed with the experience. Part of me was.
But I found that every PC I purchased (which were dell tablets at the time), I wanted to hackintosh it to the point of putting ubuntu on it and the ubuntu mac osx theme. So it's a love - hate thing with me and mac. I appreciate the speed of the OS, but at the time I felt for the money, I could do better. I suppose it was also a staunch almost blinding fanboy zealot of Windows. To me, it was like why should I use a mac when I have Windows which does things much better? As age sets in, I realize both OSes and strategies have their strengths and limitations. However, vendors on the Windows side have improved, but mac ultimately makes for a better mouse (trackpad) experience.
Now I have (yet again) purchased a macbook pro 15 retina (late 2013 maxed out specs) and an iphone. I appreciate the mac this time because of OSX surprisingly and the trackpad. Not much else honestly. I may ditch the iphone moving forward, but I think the macbook pro may be a keeper for the next few years
The advent of the Mac in labs catapulted my research dramatically. Easy to utilize analysis software assisted with separating the wheat from the chaff in my results and allowed opened new horizons when it came to experiments.
As an undergrad, my knowledge of the Mac helped not only my grades but also helped me land my first major job out of school and several since then. It's also been indispensable with increasing efficiency in my current position. As emotionally attached I have been to my Macs over the years, I always tell people that "the Mac allows the computer to get out of the way so that one can get down to actual work." As the saying goes, everything is easier on a Mac.
Loved your 30 year perspective. That's something I would have done!
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All Peter, all great!
My first experience with A Mac was at our little community college. Used Aldus Pagemaker back in the day for desktop publishing. Cutting edge and state of the art at the time!
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Ha! I was used to PageStream on the Amiga, but then transitioned to QuarkExpress on the Mac and ended up setting 2 books. Eventually I went to InDesign. No matter what computer I had at home, my design work was almost always on Mac.
I remember journalism school and long nights on OS 9 and quark crashes. It was awful.
OS X, as much as the iPod, saved apple. If people had tried to adopt the iPod and they had to deal with OS 9, I can't imagine there ever being a macbook air.
I bought my first Mac (15" MB Pro) in 2009 and cannot see a reason to ever go back to a windows machine again. I used MS Windows from Win 95 up through Win XP at home prior to my Mac purchase. I felt a large chunk of my computer time was spent simply maintaining the machine. With the Mac, I rarely have to do anything to it. I had a hard drive fail a year ago, but a trip to a local store for a new one and restoring from Time Machine had me up and running the same day with no data loss.
At work I still use Win 7 and I just prefer the MB Pro.
Never owned a Mac, due to price. We happen to be the same age. First experience with a Mac was in elementary school. Strangely in middle school I used an Apple II a few times and then we got Windows.
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Best Android app ever!
The Apple logo doesn't show on Android where you are using it in place of a zero. The title reads, "8 amazing tributes to 3 years of Mac!" Same throughout the article.
Beamed via my Moto X from the iMore Android app.
Back in 2001 I bought my first desktop computer, a Sony VAIO Slimtop PCV-LX910 using Windows 98SE. I had it for 5 months and power system failed, so rather than having to ship it to California and wait a month for repair, it was replaced with a new Slimtop using Windows ME. I had that computer for over a year and it had a trojan horse, a failed optical drive and dead pixels on the screen. So, in 2003, I elected to buy an Apple iMac and I never looked back. I have never used anti-viral software on any Apple computer and have had no problems. I have purchased upgrades to the iMac every 3 to 4 years, and I have also purchased a MacBook and a MacBook Air, two iPods for my wife, the original iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 for myself and my wife as well as 2 iPad 2s. We have been very happy owning all our Apple products. In 2010 I had to use Windows computers for about six months at work and they would crash about every other day, while my MacBook just continued to work. Apple by far makes the best devices. Before getting the original iPhone, I had a Samsung i330 (the first color screen smart phone) followed by the Treo 600. Good products at the time, but the iPhone blew them away. I'm a corporate pilot and our company uses the iPad Mini for charts and since we also have WiFi we can also use it to track real-time radar, get updated weather and communicate with our company and the wife while enroute. It's been a real pleasure using Apple products for the last 10+ years.
My fist experience with a Mac was through a friend that felt everyone should have a Mac. I played around with it and haven't looked back since. I don't know what kind of laptop it was, but the intuitive of the software is what sold me.
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My first experience with a mac was in elementary school. I think it was an Apple II - using a program to learn to type, and Oregon Trail (of course!). My first purchase was the original (I think) macbook back in 2002, and I have been attached ever since. Right now I have to use a PC laptop for school- required by the IT department. I am vying for the new MacBookPro, but waiting until I graduate in 2016 so that I can actually spend time using it. Cannot wait to get back on the other side.
Updated with some more info on the festivities at Apple HQ in Cupertino: t-shirts, Tim Cook speech, and OneRepublic performance.
Nice to see Apple pulling out all the stops for the 30th birthday of Mac. It certainly deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated!
During the early eighties I wanted an Apple II because I heard about a sound sampling system for it (Greengate DS3). Much cheaper than a Fairlight, but still way over my budget. I was mostly using an Atari 1040ST during the mid-late eighties for music programming, but my first experience with a Mac was around 1990 after a friend leased one (I think it was an SE, but I can't remember clearly). In 1994 I acquired a Quadra 650, and soon after, I was running a Pro Tools system on it (connected via NuBus). Very much cutting-edge in those days and I had more disk space - connected via SCSI - than anyone I knew. Since then I've owned several Macs, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They've been with me, in one form or another, for 20 of my 29-year working life.
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I came home from school one day in 1992 - I was in 2nd grade - to find a Mac IIsi set up in my basement. I'm not even sure I knew what it was but, oddly enough, I already knew how to use it. It had a very subtle almost goofy sense of humor to it, which I related very much with. Within a month or so, I was using Kid Pix, learning about the world on an encyclopedia floppy disk, and playing Myst. Eventually I'd write e-mails on AOL to my crush who lived around the corner from me. I had the sense, even at that early age, that it wouldn't get much better, in all these areas. In a way, maybe with the exception of Garageband and Logic, it really hasn't. It's evolved, obviously, and there have been glimmers of that first technological charm and magic, but I don't know if those first impressions can ever be bested.
My first Mac was a Power Macintosh 8600/250, with an AppleVision/ColorSync 750AV 17-inch display. The 8600 was my first experience using a Mac; it was also the most powerful computer I had owned at that time. And compared to my PCs, my Mac was far easier to use and maintain. Connecting peripheral devices like a music keyboard, camera, and printer, for example, was a cinch. Furthermore, the ability to easily upgrade the processor and install additional memory, drives, and expansion boards meant years of fulfillment for home, school and entertainment. Switching to Macintosh has enriched my computing experience by allowing me to accomplish the things I wish to do without fighting janky system software and hardware. The 8600 still occupies a special place in my heart and basement.
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I've been a PC user since 1992, when I purchased my first PC (a 486 Dell) for Law School. And, when my 4 year old computer started to go, I toyed with the idea of an iMac, just for a change. It's been 2 weeks, and I love the speed and size (the screen is the 27"). Still getting used to it, and I've installed Parallels since I need IE for work, but I'm really liking it. I may be a convert. I do notice I don't spend as much time worrying about the computer, but I have installed anti-virus (free), because old habits die hard. My only complaint is the loss of the ability to sync my Outlook Calendar with Google, since Apple removed sync services. But, I'm adjusting.
I was a big Apple IIgs guy in the late 80s and so I resented John Sculley's constant attempts to prevent Apple II users from getting improved hardware/software lest it compete with the Mac. That said, I did get to do layout and copy editing for my high school paper on an original Mac II running Aldus PageMaker, and when I went to college I did assignments in Mathematica and papers in Word 5.1a (back when Office wasn't bloated) on the computer lab IIcis.
I went PC when Windows 95 came out and suffered through some of the early MP3 players (the original Diamond Rio with a whopping 32 megabytes of flash storage, nearly 4 songs worth!), and then a Creative Labs hard disk player the size of a Discman that must have weighed over a pound with batteries. iPod was immediately interesting when it came out, because it seemed like someone had done the same suffering I had and figured out how to fix it. I finally bought one when the click wheel version came out and immediately fell in love.
Several iPods later I switched from Android to iPhone (I had a Palm Pre before Android, which, Rene knows how I feel about that), and then after struggling with Windows 8 on my non-touchscreen ASUS laptop I bought a Haswell MacBook Air for my "daily driver". I've grown to love the combination of modern GUI convenience and raw UNIX power that OS X offers, and the added battery life from Mavericks felt like a free hardware upgrade.
My first Mac was a MacSE 30 that my public school district bought for every K-12 teacher. I was intrigued with the graphic capabilities and proceeded to make my 2 page lesson plan template with little icons for each subject. We could take the Mac home to print from home to school. My forward thinking district felt teachers would be motivated to use the computers at school by taking the time at home to learn how. I still remember 2 years later finding an unopened MacSE box under the kindergarten teachers desk! Not everyone embraced technology in those days! The Macs were a welcome replacement for our TRS 80 "Trash 80" RadioShack computers. To load a basic multiplication drill it took 20 minutes to load a program from a cassette player, and then it would crash if a student hit a button wrong! I have been a "Mac Addict" since 1987 and my students's parents knew that and donated to the purchases of my first gen iPhone and iPad. The iMacs I got from writing a grant in 1999 allowed my 4th grade students to make 5 page iWeb web sites. They scanned in their artwork for their art galleries, uploaded videos of themselves performing their poems for Grandparents' Day, uploaded PowerPoints of their state reports, wrote stories, and autobiographies. Their iWebs were their electronic portfolios and iWeb was much easier to use than EP software. Finally, when Steve Jobs was still alive I wrote him a 4 page letter detailing my love and use of Macs in my class over the years. I also told him I had 2 iMac Power Macs that had neon vertical lines ruining their displays. Within 4 days I got a call from an Apple Rep asking me how he could help me. Even though the iMacs were out of warranty Apple replaced both the displays for over $600 each, and later fixed a third one! That's why I love all things Apple! The only time I had a PC in my class was to connect up a microscope, but it got a porn virus and I gave it away to our custodian!
The Mac has changed my life in a way that is fun to think about. It introduced me to something new and unknown. My first Mac laptop made me never look back. I enjoy the excitement of watching keynotes online. It is because of my first iPhone that I ever learned about and started listening to podcasts. It was also the reason I joined the iMore then TiPb forums where I've met so many people I'm proud to call friends even without meeting them in person. I met one friend who invited me to podcast with him and that one day a week spent talking about tech is one I look forward to each week. Wherever I am when I see another Mac, iPhone or iPad it always makes me smile. It's like feeling a part of a big group brought together by one common thing.
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