Macs

The Macintosh ( literary it means a light waterproof fabric), or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface.The Mac was designed to provide users with a natural, intuitively understandable, and, in general, "user-friendly" computer interface. Many of the user interface ideas in the Macintosh derived from experiments at the Xerox Parc laboratory in the early 1970s, including the mouse, the use of icons to represent objects or actions, the point-and-click and click-and-drag actions, and a number of window operation ideas. Microsoft successfully adapted these user interface concepts for its first Windows operating system.

Current Mac systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. They are: the aforementioned (though upgraded) iMac and the entry-level Mac mini desktop models, the workstation-level Mac Pro tower, the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, and the Xserve server.Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Mac computers. This is in contrast to most IBM PC compatibles, where multiple sellers create hardware intended to run another company's operating software. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems, designs, and prices.

Apple also develops the operating system for the Mac, currently Mac OS X version 10.6 "Snow Leopard". The modern Mac, like other personal computers, is capable of running alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and, in the case of Intel-based Macs, Microsoft Windows. However, Apple does not license Mac OS X for use on non-Apple computers.