The Mac is 40 years old today, and PCMag has been there for the whole journey. Surprised? You shouldn't be. We've always covered the full range of personal computing, and Apple has been pushing personal computing forward for decades.
IBM vs. Apple
The Mac hit the stage on Jan. 24, 1984. Our first story on Apple computers came only weeks later, on Feb. 21, when we put "IBM vs. Apple" on our cover. With the long lead times of print magazines of the day, the cover story couldn't feature the Mac—in fact, it said "Apple is likely coming out with a scaled-down version of Lisa, called MacIntosh." We knew we needed to keep an eye on the Mac, but we didn't know how big a deal it would be.
IBM vs. Apple: Is Mac Ready for Business?
That all changed when the PCMag team got its hands on the Mac, and in typical PCMag style, we did a comprehensive, 23-page blowout feature in the July 23, 1985 issue. The feature compared the PC and Mac platforms on word processing, drawing, programming and even "telecommunications." You really have to check out the charts in this feature, where we tried to benchmark application usability. "Our fantasy for the future is to have the PC and the Mac work side by side, each doing what it does best," we concluded.
MacCharlie
The July 1985 issue opened with a big ad for MacCharlie—a gigantic, Frankenstein-like add-on that made your Mac IBM-compatible.
How Does the PC Stack Up?
By 1992, we were giving Apple's Quadra 700 a full once-over as a business machine, concluding that it was the best choice for desktop publishing and graphics—but maybe not for anything else. At the time, I had a Mac LC II at home, if I remember correctly. This was Apple's dark period, when it cranked product lineups and names constantly, and no one was sure what it was selling when. But PCMag kept an eye on the situation nonetheless.
Will We Miss Apple When It's Gone?
Yes, over the years we ran a lot of anti-Apple columns. Many of them, in retrospect, really look like trolling. When editor Jake Kirchner wrote "will we miss Apple when it's gone?" in 1996, Apple was several months away from acquiring NeXT, two years away from its renaissance with the new iMac under Steve Jobs, and 10 years away from rocking the world with the iPhone.
The Intriguing iMac
But the reviews have always been straight up. The "intriguing iMac," we wrote, didn't have the power of the latest 1998-era Pentium, but our reviewer Tom Pope gave it a grudging thumbs-up.
iMac G5
By 2002, we were throwing Editors' Choice awards at the Mac lineup. We gave the desk lamp-style iMac an EC award, but I want to call out our 2004 review of the iMac G5 as when Apple really started to impress the PCMag staff. That was the beginning of a five-star run for Apple's desktop line, and we don't give five stars all that often.
Recommended by Our Editors
Apple Bets on Intel
In the August 9, 2005 issue, shortly after Apple had announced its intentions to transition from PowerPC to Intel processors (a move that apparently made attendees of Apple's developer conference "literally gasp in unison"), PCMag rightly noted that the move was "a risky one for Apple, which need[ed] to get software developers on board for the transition to succeed."
Little did we know, this was the beginning of a wildly successful engagement between Apple and Intel—one that would last 15 years and usher in some of the most commercially successful Mac computers of all time. Apple stuck with Intel processors until November 2020, when it announced the M1 processor and kicked off the era of Apple silicon that we're living in today.
For more fun Apple history, check out our Visual History of Mac Computers
![Apple's New M3 Macs: Hands-On With the Updated 24-Inch iMac and MacBook Pros](https://zmgvideos.mashable.com/cms/2023/11/04bp7FixWC17T4HtH39ErCB-1701113805/thumb/00001.png)
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