The Evolution of Apple's Design Philosophy

Mac OS X finally shipped in 2001, marking a significant milestone in Apple's history. To create this new operating system, every app had to be rewritten largely from the ground up, but this was a long-term investment that paid off. By now, every Apple product still runs on the same software foundation, a testament to Apple's commitment to building a solid foundation for its products.

As Apple refined its design philosophy, it began to throw everything at the wall to see what would stick. The Power Mac G4 was shrunk down into an 8-inch cube, and OS X was installed on a rack mountable server. This couldn't go on forever, however, as Apple had made its statement, but now it was time for more practical designs to take over. The PowerBook made its second big leap, easing into the design that effectively holds to this day. An aluminum makeover, a widescreen 16:10 display, speaker grills to the left and right of the keyboard, a glass trackpad that would continue to grow over time, and starting in 2006, a MagSafe connector.

The Power Mac G5 adopted a serious and imposing aluminum case, with ample room for a big power supply and even liquid cooling. The iMac G5 from a year later was able to cram the same chip into a slim all-in-one case, but a crack was starting to show. The iMac G5 line never got as powerful a chip as the Power Mac G5, maxing out at 2.1 GHz – a big step down from 2.7. When it came to updating the Mac Mini, the PowerBook, and iBook, the G5 was simply a lost cause. Designing a low power machine is always a balancing act between speed, energy consumption, and heat.

The G5 chips ran too hot and drew too much power to offer any meaningful increase in speed over the G4. With no other options on the table, it was time for a wild card. Intel was on a roll in the mid-2000s, after the Pentium success from the '90s began to plateau. The Core 2 Duo chips were the latest and greatest, and one of the most dramatic moments in Apple keynote history was Steve Jobs revealing that Mac OS X was compiled to run on both Power PC chips and Intel all along.

And with the transition complete just a year later, every Mac started to get a radical makeover. Laptops in 2008 were generally about an inch thick and weighed about five pounds, even Apple's own MacBooks. Until the MacBook Air, laptops would never be the same. The MacBook Air was so thin it fit inside a manila envelope, and laptops would never be the same again.

The MacBook and MacBook Pro were themselves refreshed with a slimmer unibody design, changing the design from dozens of stamped metal pieces and frames into one machine shell with a lid and a bottom plate. This redesign also allowed Apple to introduce new features such as Thunderbolt and Touch ID. The iMac was redressed in aluminum and in 2012 got a similar radically thin redesign.

In just 10 years, Apple would go on to launch four transformative new products – none of which had anything to do with the Mac. The iPhone, the iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods changed the game for Apple, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Meanwhile, Apple forgot how to make decent laptop keyboards or pro desktop computers, and Intel forgot how to make faster processors.

Rumors had it that at one low point, the executive plan was to develop the iPad into the modular computer of the future and let the Mac fade away as a legacy platform. But thankfully, that didn't happen. Thanks to Apple silicon, the Mac learned how to coexist with the rest of the product lineup. The M-series chips on the Mac show an architecture with the A-series chips and the iPhone, bridging the gap between the two.

On the software side, even as the world trends towards lowest-common-denominator web apps, truly native Mac apps are making a comeback. Swift and SwiftUI are the latest technologies to rapidly build software interfaces faster and easier than ever before. And for the first time ever, the same code base can compile a native app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac alike.

So much technology is shared between these platforms that you might think Apple is only a few years away from merging them all into one. But I don't think that's true. If anything, Apple is building a common foundation to strengthen them all.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enThe Macintosh landed in 1984 to a maturing microcomputer market that was starting to become consolidated.IBM dominated on the high end with its mainframes and business machines,with clients on the scale of banks, Fortune 500 companies, and governments.With less than three years on the market with the IBM 5150, its first microcomputer,Big Blue was sucking the air out of the room.Household names like Commodore would never have a more successful financial year.The diverse world of different platforms and operating systems was crumblingin favor of IBM compatible machines or PC clones.These were easy to manufacture with off-the-shelf parts,but they were impossible to use without extensive technical training.The industry was begging for an easy-to-use, friendly computer that anybody could just pick up.A computer that nobody else was willing to invest in building, except for Apple.The Macintosh was a computer, but it wasn't an unapproachable machine like other computers.It was a desktop appliance, just like your telephone or your calculator.All the software on the Mac worked the same way. You pointed and clicked.The app windows had a title bar with a close button on the left.You could click the scroll bar to move around.If you ever didn't know what to do, you could read through the menu bar,always present on the top of the screen.It showed you the keyboard shortcuts, so you could learn those over time.Contrast this with any other PC, where launching a program took over the entire screen.There was no visual affordance for what features were available or what you could do,so you had to keep a manual open next to you at all times.The keyboard was the only form of input, but each program could have wildly differentkeyboard commands for every basic function.The fundamental difference is that on the Macintosh, the operating system was always there,running below the application, to help you with whatever you were trying to do.As a computer, the Macintosh was a bit weird.The keyboard and mouse are all really chunky, but you can see the family resemblance.They've all been designed as one cohesive collection.The mouse is actually more comfortable to hold than you'd think.You're supposed to wrap your hand around the bottom, with your pointer finger centered on the button.It's just as comfortable to use left-handed as it is right-handed.This is a motif that stuck over the years, even as taste in design changed.Steve Jobs insisted that the original Macintosh keyboard didn't have any arrow keys on it,so even for stuff like selecting text, users would learn to use the mouse instead.While arrow keys were added in with the Macintosh Plus,designers still made them as inconvenient to use as possible by arranging all four of themin a straight line, rather than the natural inverted-T arrow shape.Thankfully, later in the ’90s, they gave up on this dumb crusade.Revisions of the Macintosh were rushed out the door.The pinching point was obviously the small amount of memory it came with, only 128k.So later the same year, the Macintosh 512k quadrupled the amount of memory.And another year later, the Macintosh Plus doubled it again to one megabyte,and for the first time it was user-expandable to four megabytes.Hard drives were still very expensive, so none of these computers came with any built-in,permanent storage.Out of the box, you were expected to boot the computer by inserting a floppy diskthat would take you to the Finder.You then swapped it for a different floppy disk to launch an application,swap it back and forth a few times as it loads.Then as you do your work, you swap in a personal floppy disk where you save all your documents,swap back to the application floppy disk to finish and quit,then you swap back with your Finder floppy disk a few times to get back to the Finder.Needless to say, external floppy disk drives were a very popular addition.The Apple II line was still the company's breadwinner for much of the 1980s.IBM had taken over the business world and was encroaching on the home computer market,but the Apple IIe was untouchable in education.By the late ’80s, the Macintosh was starting to find its footing.Price of memory was falling, applications were being written for it,and a customer base was starting to grow.A company called Microsoft — whose biggest claim to fame was writing the crude operating systemthat ran on those IBM PCs — they started making applications for the Macintosh,Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.They also had a version that ran on their own crude graphical environment called Windows,but nobody used that yet.While the Apple II hit its stride in education,the Macintosh catalyzed a new field of desktop publishing.With its high resolution display, its powerful new software —Aldus Pagemaker and QuarkXPress — and its ease of use,made it the perfect fit for newsrooms big and small.Even an expensive Macintosh was a drop in the bucket,compared to the price of the $50,000 typesetting machines that preceded it.What would an even higher-end Macintosh be like?The Macintosh II.This monster of a Mac came with the internal space fortwo floppy disk drives, or one floppy disk drive and one 40 megabyte hard drive,and six NuBus expansion slots that could drive six big high-resolution color monitors simultaneously.It had a new 68020 processor that was twice as fast,and it had a new line of accessories that used ADB(Apple Desktop Bus) for plugging in printers, networking, mice, or keyboards.All of this came with a hefty price tag.The computer alone was double the cost of the Macintosh Plus at $5,498.Its innovations trickled back down over time.The Macintosh SE/30 also had the ADB connector,a built-in hard drive, a single expansion slot with an even faster 68030 processor,but in the familiar and cheaper all-in-one form factor with a 9-inch black and white display.The Macintosh Classic was a pared-down model that removed the expansion slotand retained the original 68k processor, but at the cheapest price yet, only $999.In the 1980s, a portable computer meant one of two things.An all-in-one computer, complete with a CRT display and floppy drives,weighing around 25 pounds without a battery, with a handle on the back for convenience.Or a tiny machine with a footprint no larger than its own keyboard,an LCD matrix display that could show around four lines of text,very little compute power, but some modicum of battery life.These machines don't have a built-in floppy disk drive,so moving files on and off them is not easy.Apple briefly attempted to make the best of both worlds,a full-size desktop-class flat-screen portable computer with the highly imaginative nameMacintosh Portable.It was swiftly removed from the market.Talk about a glow-up.Just two years later, Apple releases the PowerBook, and it gets the formula perfect.Hinge in the far back so it folds like a book,the pointing device below the keyboard so it's comfortable to use and you have a wristrest,with a backlit screen.Compared to modern laptops, the biggest anachronism is the fact that it has a track ball instead of a track pad.And this was a hit product.The PowerBook is what Apple needed to break into the business world.In the ’90s, the Macintosh lineup starts to get out of hand.Apple replaces the compact Mac all in one lineup with a horrible abomination of design,the Macintosh LC 500-series.For reasons no one remaining on this mortal plane of Earth understands,Apple also sells identical computers under a different name,the Macintosh Performa 500-series.At the high end, Macs with the new 68040 chip were called Macintosh Quadra,except for the Macintosh LC 575, which also had a 68040 series chip,but wasn't called Quadra.And it was also called the Macintosh Performa 575.To end this confusion, Apple introduced a new line of mid-range computers,fittingly named Macintosh Centris.Did I say end? No, it actually made it worse.These computers didn't replace anything else in the lineup, they only added to it.They also ran the same low-cost version of the 68040 that you could buy on the LC lineor the Performa line, but all of the Centris computers were also sold under the name Quadra.To help understand, just look at this simple graph.Apple then transitioned from the 68k processors to the new PowerPC chipsthat it developed in a joint venture with IBM and Motorola.They called these new computers Power Macintosh.Would this be a clean break from the confusing naming conventions before?No, the numbers got longer and the names got worse.The range now started at the Macintosh Performa 5200,which was identical to the Power Macintosh 5200 LC,which was identical to the Power Macintosh 6200 in a different case.This only got more confusing as you add in the 7000, 8000, and 9000-series Macintoshes.And that's before we even touch the Macintosh clones.That's a story for another time.Meanwhile, Apple was dipping its toes into personal electronics —PDAs, CD players, even digital cameras.All of these devices got the same design treatment:organic, smooth, flowing lines, black plastic that still looks surprisingly tasteful and modern to this day.The most notable of these scattered side projects was the Apple Newton.Flat screen, stylus touch input displays were becoming just high resolution and cheap enoughto make a sort of handheld computer.You could write notes with handwriting recognition, check your calendar,keep an address book, and more.It was all made possible by this experimental new processor called the ARM chip,which was incredibly power efficient.You could run the Newton unplugged for hours and hours at a time.Later models of the Newton, like the MessagePad 2000 and the eMate 300,were actually really good, but ultimately it was a product made six years too soon.Wi-Fi and modern touch screens would have taken it to the next level,but the technology just wasn't on the table in the ’90s.When Apple killed the Newton to focus on reinventing the Macintosh,it pulled out of the ARM partnership as well.ARM would continue making low power chips for things like cell phonesand other integrated devices, small applications —but surely you could never just scale up one of these chips to power a full desktop computer, right?That'd be ridiculous.So Apple's hardware lineup was crumbling under its own weight,but don't worry, its software was, too!Unable to put together a modern successor to macOS,its software was still being held back by the technical limitations of 1984.You could run multiple applications at once,but only the active application could do anything.Everything in the background was frozen.App memory was poorly managed and it wasn't properly siloed or sandboxed.Any app could read the memory of any other app or the operating system itself.It was shaky, it was unreliable, and it was a house of cards —when any one app crashed, the entire operating system crashed.When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was running on fumes.An entirely new Apple computer would have to be built from the ground up.New hardware, new software, new corporate culture,simultaneously with keeping their existing products on life support.The pressure was on for Apple's first big move after its change in management.And that came in the form of the iMac.There was a growing fervor that hit its peak in the late 90s.Over this new thing called the internet, there was internet shopping,internet sports, internet newspapers, internet cartoons, internet chat, internet radio.And the iMac was the internet Mac.Suddenly, a computer was more than just a complicated, expensive wayof playing games or typing letters or balancing your checkbook.A computer was what you used to get on the internet.And the iMac was the computer you wanted.Technically speaking, the iMac had a lot in common with the Power Macintosh G3that had arrived a year prior.The iMac wasn't an impressive computer.You could turn that into a cynical take about how all of Steve Jobs and Apple's successesare down to marketing and design veneer.You wouldn't be the first to make that argument.But I think it means something more.It proves that people aren't interested in buying technology.People want to buy a product.And designing a good breakthrough product that changes the course of designthat shakes an entire industry takes just as much genius.Then came the Power Mac G3 with just as clever a design.No screws to take out or metal panels to remove.Just flip down this door and you have in seconds access to the entire computer.Then came the iBook, an iMac to go.Using a new technology called AirPort based on some Wi-Fi engineering standard,you could use the internet from a laptop without any wires plugged in.No ethernet cable.Leveraging technology from next that Apple had acquired,the next generation operating system wouldn't be built on classic macOS anymore.OS X was a clean break.After years of developer previews, betas, and tests,Mac OS X finally shipped in 2001.And every app had to be rewritten largely from the ground up.But this was a long-term investment that paid off.Because to this day, every Apple product still runs on the same software foundation.And by now, Apple's design studio was going crazy,throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick.What if you made a computer shaped like a sunflower?What if everything was brushed metal?What if you shrunk down the Power Mac G4 into an 8-inch cube?What if you installed OS X on a rack mountable server?This couldn't go on forever.Apple had made its statement, but now it was time for more practical designs to take over.The PowerBook made its second big leap,easing into the design that effectively holds to this day.An aluminum makeover, a widescreen 16:10 display,speaker grills to the left and right of the keyboard,a glass trackpad that would continue to grow over time,and starting in 2006, a MagSafe connector.The Power Mac G5 adopted a serious and imposing aluminum case.In a taller and broader tower design,it had ample room for a big power supply and even liquid cooling.The iMac G5 from a year later was able to cram the same chip into a slim all-in-one case.But a crack was starting to show.The iMac G5 line never got as powerful a chip as the Power Mac G5,maxing out at 2.1 GHz — a big step down from 2.7.When it came to updating the Mac Mini, the PowerBook, and iBook,the G5 was simply a lost cause.Designing a low power machine is always a balancing act between speed,energy consumption, and heat.The G5 chips ran too hot and drew too much powerto offer any meaningful increase in speed over the G4.With no other options on the table, it was time for a wild card.Intel was on a roll in the mid-2000s.After the Pentium success from the ’90s was beginning to plateau,the Core 2 Duo chips were the latest and greatest.In one of the most dramatic moments in Apple keynote history,Steve Jobs revealed that Mac OS X was compiled to run on both Power PC chipsand Intel all along.And with the transition complete just a year later,every Mac started to get a radical makeover.Laptops in 2008 were generally about an inch thickand weighed about five pounds, even Apple's own MacBooks.Until the MacBook Air.So thin it fit inside a manila envelope, laptops would never be the same.And the MacBook Air would never have been possible on a Power PC processor.The MacBook and MacBook Pro were themselves refreshed with a slimmer unibody design.This changed the design from dozens of stamped metal pieces and framesinto one machine shell with a lid and a bottom plate.The iMac was redressed in aluminum and in 2012 got a similar radically thin redesign.In just 10 years, Apple would go on to launch four transformative new products.None of which had anything to do with the Mac.The iPhone, the iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods.Apple's stock would increase tenfold, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.Meanwhile, Apple forgot how to make decent laptop keyboards, or pro desktop computers,and Intel forgot how to make faster processors.Rumor has it that at one low point the executive plan was to develop the iPadinto the modular computer of the future and let the Mac fade away as a legacy platform.But thankfully, that didn't happen.Thanks to Apple silicon.What happens if you do spin up a silly little ARM chip into a desktop class computer?You get something incredible.Laptops with unimaginable battery life.Computers that just don't quit.iMacs so thin you have to put the headphone jack on the bottom.When Apple silicon came to the Mac,the Mac learned how to coexist with the rest of the product lineup.The M-series chips on the Mac,showing an architecture with the A-series chips and the iPhone,and the iPad bridging the gap between the two.On the software side, even as the world trends towards lowest-common-denominator web apps,truly native Mac apps are making a comeback.Swift and SwiftUI are the latest technologies to rapidly build software interfacesfaster and easier than ever before.And for the first time ever, the same code base can compile a native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac alike.So much technology is shared between these platformsthat you might think Apple is only a few years away from merging them all into one.But I don't think that's true.If anything, Apple is building a common foundation to strengthen them all.I'm D. Griffin Jones with Cult of Mac.\n"