Macintosh Classic

An early 128 KB Macintosh.

The Macintosh, later branded as Mac, is a family of computers created by Apple, first sold in January of 1984, and continues to be sold to this day. There have been many different computers bearing the Macintosh name, and they span many different hardware technologies and operating systems. Like the earlier Apple computer line, Macintosh computers have always had a high price tag which has prevented it from achieving widespread popularity, and uses a tightly regulated architecture which has prevented a lot of software from being released on it. Users often claim an intuitive design, but I've never noticed that to be the case. The earliest Macintosh models used a Motorola 68000 CPU.

I have never owned a Macintosh computer or even used one very much. I have always thought of them as inferior computers.

Software

The following is Macintosh software that is important to me.

Games

See all Macintosh Games.

Review

Good

• Macintosh attracted some rather impressive software companies early on, like Adobe and Bungie, though the majority of them ended up jumping ship to Microsoft.
• The platform had a lot of nice graphic and media software, if you could afford it.

Bad

• In order to keep a high resolution display and decent update speed, the OS stuck with monochrome graphics long after all of their competitors had switched to color.
• A lot of their early ideas seemed completely backwards. For example, the disk drive didn't have an eject button, so, to eject a disk, you had to move it into the trash can, which is the same thing you do to delete files!
• The Mac continued using a one-button mouse for years after the rest of the world had switched over to two or more buttons. Secondary click required a more obnoxious keyboard-mouse combination.
• By making an all-in-one unit, it was difficult to upgrade any of the hardware or even fit in many expansion cards.

Ugly

• The closed architecture prevented a lot of developers from even bothering with the platform. This meant there was far less hardware and software available for the platform than its competitors.

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