THE 24TH OF JANUARY 1984. Our
story begins with the launch of the Apple
Macintosh 128K. In the intervening nearly
40 years, the Apple Mac has never been
able to match the sales success of the
PC but, when it comes to mindshare, the
two platforms are on much more equal
footing.
As it happens, the Mac had its best year
ever in 2021, shifting just under 29 million
units. If that sounds impressive, most
estimates of overall worldwide personal
computer sales last year, not including
Apple Mac shipments, suggest a figure
of around 325 million desktops, laptops
and workstations. In other words, at its
best, the Apple Mac isn’t even one tenth as
successful as the PC.
PC
If comparing one company to an entire
industry seems unfair, several of the
bigger beasts in PC sales shift far more
units than Apple. Lenovo alone sold 82
million PCs in 2021, HP’s sales were 74
million units and Dell’s 59 million. You
get the idea. Whatever the Mac’s merits,
market domination isn’t one of them.
Maybe not in sales but, in terms of
technical and cultural influence, the
contest has been much more competitive.
Without getting bogged down in the debate
over the origins of various graphical user
interfaces, the 1984 Macintosh’s virtual
desktop metaphor predated the launch
of the first version of Windows by nearly
two years. Ever since, there’s been a
symbiotic relationship between the twomainstream computing platforms that
has seen countless elements of software
and hardware either mimicked or adopted
wholesale by both sides.
Here in 2022, the Mac is currently going
through one of its periodic overhauls,
primarily thanks to the shift from Intel
CPUs to chips designed in-house by Apple,
a process that is due to be complete by the
end of the year. By some accounts, the
new Apple M1 chip family is revolutionary.
Certainly, sales of Macs are on the up.
All of which means it’s time to revisit that
time-honoured contest: PC versus Mac.
Of course, we have a dog in this fight. But
that doesn’t stop us from appreciating the
things that Apple gets right. In the end,
there can be only one winner. Bring it on!APR 2022 MAXIMU MPC 49