MAC VS PC FOREVER FRENEMIES

The PC and Mac have been rivals for nearly 40 years, yet the Mac has never had the measure of the PC. Could the arrival of Apple silicon finally give the Mac the edge? Jeremy Laird investigates…

- Jeremy Laird

THE 24TH OF JANUARY 1984. Our story begins with the launch of the Apple Macintosh 128K. In the intervening nearly 40 years, the Apple Mac has never been able to match the sales success of the PC but, when it comes to mindshare, the two platforms are on much more equal footing.

As it happens, the Mac had its best year ever in 2021, shifting just under 29 million units. If that sounds impressive, most estimates of overall worldwide personal computer sales last year, not including Apple Mac shipments, suggest a figure of around 325 million desktops, laptops and workstations. In other words, at its best, the Apple Mac isn’t even one tenth as successful as the PC.

If comparing one company to an entire industry seems unfair, several of the bigger beasts in PC sales shift far more units than Apple. Lenovo alone sold 82 million PCs in 2021, HP’s sales were 74 million units and Dell’s 59 million. You get the idea. Whatever the Mac’s merits, market domination isn’t one of them.

Maybe not in sales but, in terms of technical and cultural influence, the contest has been much more competitive. Without getting bogged down in the debate over the origins of various graphical user interfaces, the 1984 Macintosh’s virtual desktop metaphor predated the launch of the first version of Windows by nearly two years. Ever since, there’s been a symbiotic relationship between the two mainstream computing platforms that has seen countless elements of software and hardware either mimicked or adopted wholesale by both sides.