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The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer.
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The Macintosh was introduced by the now famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, "1984".[19] The commercial most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984 and is now considered a "watershed event"[20] and a "masterpiece.
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the combination of the Mac, Apple's LaserWriter printer, and Mac-specific software like Boston Software's MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker enabled users to design, preview, and print page layouts complete with text and graphics—an activity to become known as desktop publishing. Initially, desktop publishing was unique to the Macintosh, but eventually became available for other platforms as well.
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Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross compiling from a Lisa
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. Apple's response was to introduce a range of relatively inexpensive Macs in October 1990. The Macintosh Classic, essentially a less expensive version of the Macintosh Plus, was the least expensive Mac until early 2001
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The Macintosh Classic II and Macintosh LC II, which used a 16 MHz 68030 CPU, were joined in 1991 by the Macintosh Quadra 700 and 900, the first Macs to employ the faster Motorola 68040 processor.
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In 1994, Apple abandoned Motorola CPUs for the RISC PowerPC architecture developed by the AIM alliance of Apple Computer, IBM, and Motorola.The Power Macintosh line, the first to use the new chips, proved to be highly successful, with over a million PowerPC units sold in nine months.
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When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he ordered that the OS that had been previewed as version 7.7 be branded Mac OS 8 (in place of the never-to-appear Copland OS).
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In 1998, a year after Steve Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced an all-in-one Macintosh called the iMac.
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Introduced in July 1999, the iBook was Apple's first consumer-level laptop computer, filling the missing quadrant of Apple's "four-square product matrix"
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In early 2001, Apple began shipping computers with CDRW drives for the first time.
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Apple announced the release of the Mac Mini priced at US$499 the least expensive Mac to date.
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March 2006, a group of hackers announced that they were able to run Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. The group released their software as open source and has posted it for download on their website.
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April 5, 2006, Apple announced the public beta availability of their own Boot Camp software that allows owners of Intel-based Macs to install Windows XP on their machines; later versions added support for Windows Vista. Boot Camp became a standard feature in Mac OS X 10.5, while support for Classic was dropped from PowerPC Macs
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Glass was added in 2008 with the introduction of the unibody MacBook Pro. These materials are billed as environmentally friendly.[90] The iMac, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines use aluminum enclosures, and are now made of a single unibody.
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On February 24, 2011, Apple was the first company to bring to market a computer that utilized Intel's new Thunderbolt (codename Light Peak) I/O interface. Using the same physical interface as a minidisplay port, and backwards compatible with that standard, Thunderbolt boasts two-way transfer speeds of 10 Gbit/s.[
