It took the return of ousted tech legend and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs - who incidentally didn’t come up with the Mac concept; that was computer scientist Jef Raskin’s early work - to turn the company around.
Nevertheless, under Jobs Apple started to “Think Different” again, and came out with stunningly designed machines like the colourful iMac G3 and the swivelling display iMac G4, nicknamed “Sunflower”.
This was in an era of beige and grey box PCs that sold just fine but looked utilitarian and dull.
Not that amazing designs guaranteed success. The Power Mac G4 Cube and later on, the Intel-based cylindrical Mac Pro flopped in the market. They were aimed at professional computer users who couldn’t not overlook the lack of practicality like internal expansion slots and other missing features.
Apple customers are sometimes described as cultishly loyal, but Mac users see their computers as tools and not objects of worship. On occasion, Apple has forgotten it has a tough crowd to please, one that expects excellent design and functionality for the sizable amount of money Macs (and other devices) cost, and has got things wrong.
Last year, after seven years, Apple finally gave up on the touch-sensitive OLED display strip on top of the keyboard that replaced the physical “function” keys on MacBook laptops. Known as the Touch Bar, it was programmable and had its own little processor.
While it was fun to start with, most people didn’t care for the Touch Bar when it came to day-to-day use. You had to take your eyes off the screen and look at the Touch Bar to check what it displayed to use it. For touch typists, that was particularly annoying.
You have to hand it to Apple, though - it has been able to engineer itself out of the technology holes it dug itself into in order to get back on track.
For example, Macs have had no fewer than four different processor architectures over the years. This is a difficult feat to pull off: expensive and time-consuming since it means starting from scratch each time with new technology, as software has to be rewritten or run via an adaptation layer.
Nevertheless, Apple moved from PowerPC processors that couldn’t keep up performance-wise to Intel, a partnership that lasted 15 years. When Intel eventually stumbled with delivering competitive chips, Apple dumped them and designed its own powerful and energy-efficient M-series processors instead.
However, Macs consist of more than just industry-leading design and fast hardware. The reason Apple is a trillion-dollar company now is due to Steve Jobs bringing in something the company desperately needed, but couldn’t develop itself in the 90s: a modern operating system.
Operating systems are the all-important software that runs computers and user applications. Jobs returned with a partly open-source solution that became MacOS X (that’s 10, by the way). It made Apple Macs competitive with PCs running Microsoft Windows again.
Well, eventually it became competitive: the first versions of MacOS X, named after big cats like Cheetah, Jaguar and Panther, worked but were slow on pre-Intel PowerPC hardware.
Having an operating system for Macs that didn’t take down the entire computer with data loss when an application crashed was great.
More importantly, Apple was able to adapt MacOS to run iPhones, which turned into a runaway success. The popular smartphones now shore up the company’s financials, despite the tech biz taking a breather in general.
It’s not just iPhones - Apple Watches, iPad tablets and TV set-top boxes also run versions of an operating system that began life on the Mac.
It’s a comprehensive ecosystem of innovative hardware, apps and services that’s hard to imagine would have been created without the Mac. Apple needs to keep that momentum going and take it to a whole new and different level of personal computing, which will be a formidable challenge over the next few years.
