Apple Reflects On The Mac At 30 With New Video And Website Retrospective

Apple is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Mac with a new video and microsite released today featuring some fond remembrances of the machines over the years from creative professionals including Moby, artist April Greiman, photographer Jon Stanmeyer and more. The site features use cases exemplified by some of the best creative, educational and scientific professionals of the past 30 years, attaching a renowned face to each generation of new hardware from the original Macintosh all the way up to the brand new Mac Pro.

There’s also an interactive element to the site, with a section called “Your First Mac” where Apple asks visitors to tell them about their own first experience with a Cupertino computer, featuring a brief quiz where you select your inaugural introduction to Macintosh and then choose from a list of general activities you used said machine for. For me, the first Mac I actually owned all to myself was 2005’s eMac, which I bought used and which had been modified by the local authorized Mac shop to have the power button up front instead of hidden all the way round back of that deep CRT.

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Apple seems to be tabulating that input in real-time on the site, and is displaying a running breakdown of the most popular first Mac models and what percentage of visitors were using said machines. There’s also a slider that lets you see, depending on which year you’re looking at, what first-time Mac users were mostly doing on their hardware: Early on, there’s a lot of educational use and desktop publishing, but ‘Internet & Email’ starts taking over in the mid-90s as you might expect and remains dominant right through to today.

If you are or have been a Mac user at any time during the past three decades, the site’s bound to trigger some nostalgia, and even if you aren’t, you’ll get a glimpse into why this computing pioneer has managed to invoke so much devotion from its fans, and why Apple executives told MacWorld that the “Mac keeps going forever.”