(San Francisco) Forty years after launching the personal computer revolution, the Mac is gaining popularity beyond Apple fans and could experience new glory thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Or, failing that, be abandoned.
Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984 with a landmark television commercial, presenting the machine as a tool of rebellion against a dystopian political system.
The computer, nicknamed “Mac”, won its fans thanks to easy-to-use features, such as its graphical interface, clickable icons and a mouse.
“The influence of the Mac is massive,” Olivier Blanchard, research director at Futurum Group, told AFP. “Every laptop and every PC (personal computer) has tried to imitate the Mac and its success.”
Macs have become the computer of choice not only for Apple enthusiasts, but also for artists, filmmakers, and other creative professionals.
However, computers running Windows (Microsoft’s operating system) dominate corporate offices thanks to less expensive machines and widely adopted office automation and productivity tools.
Apple has made inroads in businesses, driven in particular by iPhone fans, who use their smartphones for work and prefer Macs to PCs, which are more compatible with the Apple brand’s ecosystem. .
“A lot of advertising and marketing is about making people feel special when they buy a Mac,” Dag Spicer of the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum, which is organizing a exhibition on the occasion of this anniversary.
“You know – be a rebel, be an outsider, fight the system, right from the first commercial in 1984.”
“Rare evolution”
Recently, Apple promoted the professional uses of the Vision Pro, its headset which allows you to integrate augmented and virtual realities into your real environment, thanks to cameras and sensors.
At $3,500, the headset marketed since Friday is aimed more at businesses rather than the general public, according to experts.
“Apple is looking to gain market share in businesses,” said Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies. “It’s clear that with Vision Pro, they want to get into companies, and they’re establishing a link between Vision Pro and the Mac.”
The global personal computer market has weakened with the rise of smartphones in daily life and the lack of major technological developments.
But it is a little reinvigorated according to analysts by teleworking and also the marked interest in machines capable of managing the new generation of AI.
“AI is the kind of development that rarely happens in the PC market,” notes Mr. Blanchard.
“PCs are about to become much more powerful and easier to use, bringing the generative AI capabilities we’ve seen in the cloud (on servers) directly to the user.”
For him, the generative AI features will give the impression of having a team of professional assistants on the computer.
The data used for AI will remain on the machines, locally, which will protect them and reduce cloud costs, he says.
“Can’t escape it”
Apple, always keen to preserve its image as a company that defines technological trends more than it follows them, mentions AI very little.
But according to the analyst, the Californian group has still started to design its own specialized computer chips.
“It is not because Apple is not talking about generative AI that we should believe that it is not investing in this space,” adds Carolina Milanesi.
Apple already uses AI in its lenses, computer photo processing, its digital assistant Siri and many other applications.
And even though the brand seems to be lagging behind in the race for the “intelligent” computer, when an AI-powered Mac arrives, it will certainly integrate seamlessly into Apple’s “ecosystem”, this galaxy of devices and services that allow it to keep its users in its universe, and to derive significant profits from it.
“If the Mac does not become an AI Mac within the next year, Apple will face questions,” said Mr. Blanchard. “AI is in everything, Apple can’t escape it.”
40 years later, the first Macintosh in figures
The first Macintosh, launched on January 24, 1984, celebrated its 40th birthday. A look back in figures at this technological antique from Apple which, ahead of its time, opened the way to modern computers.
A compact object integrating a screen and a floppy disk drive, the Macintosh democratized the computer, thanks to an interface allowing you to simply click on icons with a mouse, a device dating from the 1960s of which the Mac has widespread use. Before, only initiates had access to computers, which responded to complicated command lines.
1984
The launch of the first Macintosh took place with great fanfare.
On January 22, 1984, two days before its release, he attended one of the most followed events, the Super Bowl, the final of the American football championship, watched that year by 77.6 million viewers according to the Nielsen group, specialized in audience measurement.
The 60-second commercial, called “1984” and directed by Ridley Scott (“Alien”, “Blade Runner”), is inspired by the world of the novel “1984” by George Orwell, with a screen representing “Big Brother » – and competitor IBM – smashed by a sports car in Apple colors.
Pushed by its co-founder Steve Jobs, the Apple brand paid $800,000 ($2.5 million today) to secure a slot during the Super Bowl, in addition to the hundreds of thousands spent to produce the ad, according to the book. Apple Confidential 2.0” by Owen Linzmayer.
2495 dollars
The first Macintosh was a luxury product. It was marketed on January 24, 1984 in the United States at a price of 2,495 dollars, or nearly 7,400 dollars today (6,700 euros). Its price will drop quickly to $2,195.
The Mac is more affordable than its main competitor, the IBM PC, which cost $3,270 at the time (currently $10,000, €8,800), but it is twice as expensive as the Apple II, then the best seller. entry level of the brand.
Today, original Macs fetch up to 2,000 euros at auction. Even more popular with collectors, internal Macintosh presentation documents, dated October 1983, exceeded $12,000 in 2022 at RR Auction.
370,000 sales
Apple hoped to sell 250,000 Macintoshes in 1984, according to the New York Times in April 1984. If the official figures are secret, the brand ultimately sold 372,000 in the first year, plus a million Apple IIs, according to Jeremy Reimer, technology history blogger.
Honorable at a time when the computer was not yet democratized, these figures are 15 times more modest than Apple computer sales today.
The Cupertino (California) group sold nearly 22 million of them in 2023 (MacBook, iMac, etc.), according to Gartner and IDC. With 8% to 9% of global sales, Apple ranks 4e behind Lenovo, HP and Dell.
9 inches
Far from today’s giant screens, that of the first Mac is 9 inches, or approximately 23 cm diagonal.
In comparison, the latest iMacs offer a 23.5 inch (60 cm) screen, some portable MacBooks reach 16 inches (41 cm).
34.5 cm high, 24.4 cm wide and 27.7 cm deep, the first Mac can, despite its 7.5 kg, “be taken anywhere, even on a plane,” according to an AFP report. dating from January 1984.
128 kb
The first Mac has 128 KB of RAM, or approximately 131,000 bytes. 128 kb is for example the size of a low definition photo or a very small Excel file.
Today, there are few computers with less than 8 GB (8.6 billion bytes) of RAM and Apple’s most powerful computer, the Mac Pro, has up to 1.6 million times more RAM (192 GB) than its ancestor.
RAM allows the computer to temporarily store the data needed to complete a task. The higher it is, the more complex and simultaneous tasks the computer can perform.