linguistic:translation, structural:reformatting, structural:summarization, linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:corruption
1979–1996: "Macintosh" era

In the late 1970s, the Apple II became one of the most popular computers, especially in education. After IBM introduced the IBM PC in 1981, its sales surpassed the Apple II. In response, Apple introduced the Lisa in 1983. The Lisa's graphical user interface was inspired by strategically licensed demonstrations of the Xerox Star. Lisa surpassed the Star with intuitive direct manipulation, like the ability to drag and drop files, double-click to launch applications, and move or resize windows by clicking and dragging instead of going through a menu. However, hampered by its high price of $9,995 (equivalent to $33,000 in 2023) and lack of available software, the Lisa was commercially unsuccessful.

Parallel to the Lisa's development, a skunkworks team at Apple was working on the Macintosh project. Conceived in 1979 by Jef Raskin, Macintosh was envisioned as an affordable, easy-to-use computer for the masses. Raskin named the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh. The initial team consisted of Raskin, hardware engineer Burrell Smith, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In 1981, Steve Jobs was removed from the Lisa team and joined Macintosh, and was able to gradually take control of the project due to Wozniak's temporary absence after an airplane crash. Under Jobs, the Mac grew to resemble the Lisa, with a mouse and a more intuitive graphical interface, at a quarter of the Lisa's price.

Upon its January 1984 launch, the first Macintosh was described as "revolutionary" by The New York Times. Sales initially met projections, but dropped due to the machine's low performance, single floppy disk drive requiring frequent disk swapping, and initial lack of applications. Author Douglas Adams said: "But what I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac." Most of the original Macintosh team left Apple, and some followed Jobs to found NeXT after he was forced out by CEO John Sculley. The first Macintosh nevertheless generated enthusiasm among buyers and some developers, who rushed to develop entirely new programs for the platform, including PageMaker, MORE, and Excel. Apple soon released the Macintosh 512K with improved performance and an external floppy drive. The Macintosh is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface, Jobs's fascination with typography gave it an unprecedented variety of fonts and type styles like italics, bold, shadow, and outline. It is the first WYSIWYG computer, and due in large part to PageMaker and Apple's LaserWriter printer, it ignited the desktop publishing market, turning the Macintosh from an early let-down into a notable success. Levy called desktop publishing the Mac's "Trojan horse" in the enterprise market, as colleagues and executives tried these Macs and were seduced into requesting one for themselves. PageMaker creator Paul Brainerd said: "You would see the pattern. A large corporation would buy PageMaker and a couple of Macs to do the company newsletter. The next year you'd come back and there would be thirty Macintoshes. The year after that, three hundred."

In late 1985, Bill Atkinson, one of the few remaining employees to have been on the original Macintosh team, proposed that Apple create a Dynabook, Alan Kay's concept for a tablet computer that stores and organizes knowledge. Sculley rebuffed him, so he adapted the idea into a Mac program, HyperCard, whose cards store any information—text, image, audio, video—with the memex -like ability to semantically link cards together. HyperCard was released in 1987 and bundled with every Macintosh.

In the late 1980s, Jean-Louis Gassée, a Sculley protégé who had succeeded Jobs as head of the Macintosh division, made the Mac more expandable and powerful to appeal to tech enthusiasts and enterprise customers. This strategy led to the successful 1989 release of the Macintosh II, which appealed to power users and gave the lineup momentum. However, Gassée's "no-compromise" approach foiled Apple's first laptop, the Macintosh Portable, which has many uncommon power user features, but is almost as heavy as the original Macintosh at twice its price. Soon after its launch, Gassée was fired.

Since the Mac's debut, Sculley had opposed lowering the company's profit margins, and Macintoshes were priced far above entry-level MS-DOS compatible computers. Steven Levy said that though Macintoshes were superior, the cheapest Mac cost almost twice as much as the cheapest IBM PC compatible. Sculley also resisted licensing the Mac OS to competing hardware vendors, who could have undercut Apple on pricing and jeopardized its hardware sales, as IBM PC compatibles had done to IBM. These early strategic steps caused the Macintosh to lose its chance at becoming the dominant personal computer platform. Though senior management demanded high-margin products, a few employees disobeyed and set out to create a computer that would live up to the original Macintosh's slogan, " computer for the rest of us", which the market clamored for. In a pattern typical of Apple's early era, of skunkworks projects like Macintosh and Macintosh II lacking adoption by upper management who were late to realize the projects' merit, this once-renegade project was actually endorsed by senior management following market pressures. In 1990 came the Macintosh LC and the more affordable Macintosh Classic, the first model under $1,000 (equivalent to $2,300 in 2023). Between 1984 and 1989, Apple had sold one million Macs, and another 10 million over the following five years.

In 1991, the Macintosh Portable was replaced with the smaller and lighter PowerBook 100, the first laptop with a palm rest and trackball in front of the keyboard. The PowerBook brought $1 billion of revenue within one year, and became a status symbol. By then, the Macintosh represented 10% to 15% of the personal computer market. Fearing a decline in market share, Sculley co-founded the AIM alliance with IBM and Motorola to create a new standardized computing platform, which led to the creation of the PowerPC processor architecture, and the Taligent operating system. In 1992, Apple introduced the Macintosh Performa line, which "grew like ivy" into a disorienting number of barely differentiated models in an attempt to gain market share. This backfired by confusing customers, but the same strategy soon afflicted the PowerBook line. Michael Spindler continued this approach when he succeeded Sculley as CEO in 1993. He oversaw the Mac's transition from Motorola 68000 series to PowerPC and the release of Apple's first PowerPC machine, the well-received Power Macintosh.

Many new Macintoshes suffered from inventory and quality control problems. The 1995 PowerBook 5300 was plagued with quality problems, with several recalls as some units even caught fire. Pessimistic about Apple's future, Spindler repeatedly attempted to sell Apple to other companies, including IBM, Kodak, AT&T, Sun, and Philips. In a last-ditch attempt to fend off Windows, Apple yielded and started a Macintosh clone program, which allowed other manufacturers to make System 7 computers. However, this only cannibalized the sales of Apple's higher-margin machines. Meanwhile, Windows 95 was an instant hit with customers. Apple was struggling financially as its attempts to produce a System 7 successor had all failed with Taligent, Star Trek, and Copland, and its hardware was stagnant. The Mac was no longer competitive, and its sales entered a tailspin. Corporations abandoned Macintosh in droves, replacing it with cheaper and more technically sophisticated Windows NT machines for which far more applications and peripherals existed. Even some Apple loyalists saw no future for the Macintosh. Once the world's second largest computer vendor after IBM, Apple's market share declined precipitously from 9.4% in 1993 to 3.1% in 1997. Bill Gates was ready to abandon Microsoft Office for Mac, which would have slashed any remaining business appeal the Mac had. Gil Amelio, Spindler's successor, failed to negotiate a deal with Gates.

In 1996, Spindler was succeeded by Amelio, who searched for an established operating system to acquire or license for the foundation of a new Macintosh operating system. He considered BeOS, Solaris, Windows NT, and NeXT's NeXTSTEP, eventually choosing the last. Apple acquired NeXT on December 20, 1996, returning its co-founder, Steve Jobs.