APPLE

The Mac is 35 years old today, know a little behind the scenes

 Surprised? You should not be. We've always covered the full range of personal computing, and Apple has been pushing personal computing forward for decades.
The Mac hit the stage on Jan. 24, 1984. Our first story on Apple computers came only weeks later, on Feb. 21, when we put "IBM vs. Apple" on our cover. With the long lead times of print magazines of the day, the cover story could not feature the Mac-in fact, it said "Apple is likely coming out with a scaled-down version of Lisa, called MacIntosh." We knew we needed to keep an eye on the Mac, but we did not know how big a deal it would be.
The feature compared to the PC and Mac platforms in word processing, drawing, programming and even "telecommunications." You really have to check out the charts in this feature, where we tried to benchmark application usability. "Our fantasy for the future is to have the PC and the Mac work side by side, each doing what it does best," we concluded.

The July 1985 issue opened with a big ad for MacCharlie-a gigantic, Frankenstein-like add-on that made your IBM-compatible Mac.
By 1992, we were giving Apple's Quadra 700 a full-time over a business machine, concluding that it was the best choice for desktop publishing and graphics-but maybe not for anything else. At the time, I had a Mac LC II at home, if I remember correctly. This was Apple's dark period, when it cranked product lineups and names constantly, and no one was sure what it was selling when. Will We Miss Apple When It's Gone?
Yes, over the years we have a lot of anti-Apple columns. Many of them, in retrospect, really look like trolling. When editor Jake Kirchner wrote "will we miss Apple when it's gone?" in 1996, Apple was several months away from acquiring NeXT, two years away from its renaissance with the new iMac under Steve Jobs, and 10 years away from rocking the world with the iPhone.
The Intriguing iMac
But the reviews have always been straight up. The "intriguing iMac," we wrote, did not have the power of the latest 1998-era Pentium, but our reviewer Tom Pope gave it a grudging thumbs-up.
iMac G5
By 2002, we were throwing Editors' Choice awards at the Mac lineup. We gave the desk lamp-style iMac an EC award, but I want to call it our 2004 review of the iMac G5 as Apple really started to impress the PCMag staff. That was the beginning of a five-star run for Apple's desktop line, and we do not give five stars all that often.
That's a good place to stop, because the 2004, five-star iMac really sets the stage for today's Mac desktop line, even 14 years later. That line introduced the all-in-one, all-in-the-design design that has been getting thinner and refined over the years. We've followed the Mac faithfully ever since. Sascha Segan