Steven Levy, writing for Wired, interviewed Apple executives about the secret to the Mac’s 40-year run:

“With the transition to Apple silicon that we started in 2020, the experience of using a Mac was unlike anything before that,” says John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.

Ternus’ comment opens up an unexpected theme to our conversation: how the connections between the Mac and Apple’s other breakout products have continually revitalized the company’s PC workhorse. As a result, the Mac has stayed relevant and influential way past the normal lifespan of a computer product.

In the past few years, Mac innovations sprang from the transition to custom Apple silicon chips first pioneered to power iPhones. “I joke that we had to create the iPhone to create the scale to build the Mac we wanted to build,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Ternus also notes that the iPhone’s contribution to Apple’s bottom line has been very good to the Mac. “As the business has been successful, it’s enabled us to invest and do the things we always wanted to do,” he says.

One example of that, I mention, must have been the recent boost to battery life in Mac notebooks. “When we broke physics?” jokes Joswiak. Indeed, the almost daylong span, 22 hours of battery life in some Macbook Pros, can feel life-changing. Again, this was a collateral effect of efforts to extend battery life in the iPhone.

“When we first started working with Apple silicon, it honestly did feel for us like the laws of physics had changed,” says Ternus. “All of a sudden, we could build a MacBook Air with no fan with 18 hours of battery life,” he says. “The best arrow in our quiver is efficiency. Because if you can improve efficiency, everything gets better.”

Levy has been covering the Mac from the beginning. His article is a fascinating look back at important moments in the computer’s history and at where it stands today.

Apple silicon is just the latest inflection point for a computer that has seen more than its fair share of changes over four decades. For a while, it looked like the Mac would be relegated to history’s dustbin – left behind by the iPhone. But, it’s the very success of the iPhone formed the foundation of some of the greatest strengths of today’s Mac. It’s an age-old story of reclaimed success built on reinvention necessitated to avert irrelevance.

This morning, the Steve Jobs Archive remembered the 40th anniversary of the Mac with a message to its email subscribers that tells the story of when Rolling Stone photographer Norman Seeff and reporter Steven Levy visited Apple. It’s a great anecdote that captures the spirit of the team that created the Mac in the time leading up to its public unveiling.

The post also explains Jobs’ approach to building the Mac:

Steve knew that the very best work conveys the ideas and intentions of the people who created it. And he believed deeply that this team of engineers, designers, and programmers, who were also sculptors, photographers, and musicians—a team that integrated technology and the liberal arts—could create a machine for everyday people, “a computer for the rest of us.” 

At a time when computers were complex and difficult to use, it was a radical objective. To get there, Steve encouraged the team and protected them; he pushed them hard and shared his critiques. He asked them to sign their work like artists, even while reminding them that they were building a tool for others to use. “We’re going to walk into a classroom or an office or a home five years from now,” he promised, “and somebody’s going to be using a Macintosh for something we never dreamed possible.”

The Steve Jobs Archive has published a handful of stories to its email list since its inception, and today’s is one of my favorites. I do wish, though, that the Archive maintained a blog on its site for this sort of material. Locking these stories up in a third-party service like Mailchimp is a shame for a bunch of reasons.

Jonathan Zufi, the creator behind the coffee table book ICONIC - A Photographic Tribute To Apple Innovation has dug into his archive of Mac photography to mark the 40th anniversary of the Mac with over 1,000 photos and videos that he’s taken and collected over the years, all of which are on display on mac40th.com. Here’s Zufi on the Mac’s milestone:

Over the past 40 years Apple developed and launched hundreds of products in and supporting the Macintosh line - culminating in 2024 with the latest range of M3 powered desktops and laptops which are technological marvels of speed, power management and design.

To celebrate this milestone, mac40th.com showcases every Macintosh desktop and portable Apple has ever made with hundreds of the photos taken as part of the work creating the coffee table book ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation (3rd edition now available up to date as of the end of 2023). The site also includes photos taken by Kevin Taylor, Forest McMullin and others (including video) that I’ve collected over the past 14 years.

Zufi’s website is wonderful. There’s so much to browse here. You can easily spend hours discovering old favorites alongside obscure curiosities. It’s the perfect way to spend some downtime and mark today’s anniversary.