Showdown: Original 1984 Macintosh vs. Today’s Apple iMac

Thanks to the giant technology festival that is CES, January is typically chock full of new PC announcements. Not so with Macs, which are announced whenever Apple feels like announcing them. It just so happens that the first time Apple felt like announcing one was in January—35 years ago.

“It changed the way we think about computers and went on to change the world,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote on Thursday of the first Macintosh, which starred in a TV commercial during Super Bowl XVII on Jan. 22, 1984 and went on sale a few days later. It was a diminutive computer with a 9-inch screen and 128 kilobytes of memory, but it did indeed usher in many PC characteristics we now take for granted—from a usable graphical user interface (GUI) to the all-in-one form factor.

Whether or not it changed the world is far less certain. The Macintosh itself ended up relegated to a tiny corner of the personal computing market, and Apple nearly went out of business nearly a decade after its introduction. It took the internet and a much smaller Apple product—the iPhone—to resurrect the company and truly change how the world uses computers.

Today, Apple is one of the world’s most valuable companies, and it’s still making all-in-one PCs with refined GUIs—the iMac and the iMac Pro ($4,249.99 at Best Buy)(Opens in a new window) . So what better way to celebrate the 35th anniversary than comparing the iMac to the original Macintosh?

A Renaissance Machine

Like the artwork of legendary Italians, the Macintosh was the product of a renaissance. For decades before, computers were cumbersome and expensive. From the room-filling mainframes of the 1960s to the command-line interfaces of 1970s’ experiments like the Altair 8800 and Apple I, little about computing leant itself to a large presence in the lives of average consumers.

The Apple Macintosh (later renamed the Macintosh 128K) was different. For $2,495 (the equivalent of about $6,000 today), you could get an entire computer in a single 13.5-by-9.7-by-10.9-inch package to put on your desk. Plugging in a keyboard and a small handheld device to control the on-screen cursor—called a mouse—took up a bit more room. But even the peripherals were cleverly designed. The keyboard had no number pad to save space, and attached to the Macintosh using the same coiled style of cable used on a telephone handset, to prevent tangles.

The mouse wasn’t the first PC pointing device, but it improved upon existing designs by jettisoning the second button for simplicity and covering the steel tracking ball in rubber to ease rolling.

The mouse, keyboard, and the Macintosh itself are all clad in beige, with a small colorful Apple logo located in the lower-right corner of the PC case. Above the logo, the 9-inch black-and-white CRT display has a resolution of 512-by-342 pixels, quite low compared with the 1,920-by-1,080 pixels that are common on HD displays today. But at least the Macintosh has a manual brightness control knob.

Below the display, there’s a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive built into the case. It’s a novelty compared with the 5.5-inch disk size that was commonplace in the early 1980s. You could also buy an external secondary disk drive (for $495), which added the ability to use multiple disks for storing documents and programs.

Around back, there are two serial ports for connecting printers, modems, and the like. Built-in ports were a big deal in 1984, when other PCs required special add-in cards to be able to connect to peripherals. Using a modem and AppleTalk, you could even connect to a local network of other Apple computers.

Inside, the Macintosh is packing some seriously impressive components, at leased compared with what else was available in 1984 (not much). The Motorola 68000 was the latest and greatest microprocessor, offering a peak speed of 8Mhz. Even better, it can run 32-bit software, a vast improvement over the 16-bit programs that preceded it. The 32-bit standard would live on for more than 20 years, until the current 64-bit architecture superseded it in the late 2000s.

The Motorola 68000 is joined with 64 kilobytes of ROM and 128 kilobytes of RAM. Notably, the Macintosh’s memory is not complemented with a storage device. Anything you were doing had to be saved to a floppy disk before shutting down the PC. For many programs, you’d actually have to remove the program disk and insert another disk every time you wanted to save your work, making that extra disk drive look like a no-brainer add-on. At least there is a separate chip and memory to keep the Macintosh’s clock and calendar accurate when it’s turned off.

Macs of today are known for their impressive suite of bundled software, something the original Macintosh has, too. The MacPaint program lets you use the cursor and a palette of colors and virtual tools to make art, and you could even use the undo command to reverse mistakes. For writers, there’s the MacWrite program, an early word processor that benefits greatly from the Macintosh’s GUI. Instead of using the keyboard to navigate through a document, you can simply point, highlight, and click on words.

35 Years Later

Fast forward 35 years, and the latest Apple iMac shows just how far personal computing has progressed. In nearly every respect, the 27-inch iMac is better than its Macintosh ancestor. Gone is the beige plastic case, with sleek aluminum and glass taking its place. Lots and lots of glass, in fact. There iMac’s screen measures 24 or 27 diagonal inches, compared with just nine for the Macintosh’s display. With a resolution of 5,120 by 2,880 and covering 100 percent of the RGB color spectrum, the iMac’s display is light years denser and more colorful, too.

Despite the 27-inch iMac’s immense size compared with the Macintosh, it weighs just a few pounds more—16.5 pounds versus 21 pounds.

Like the first Macintosh, the iMac also has rear input/output ports, but you won’t find any old-fashioned, bulky serial connectors. Instead, the left-bottom corner of the back panel holds four USB 3.0 ports, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3, an Ethernet jack, and a headphone jack. There’s an an SD card slot too, the iMac’s answer to the Macintosh’s floppy drive.

But the location of the iMac’s ports is slightly inconvenient for plugging in peripherals. You’ll often end up rotating the entire PC to the left to access them, especially cumbersome if you frequently need to plug in and unplug headphones. You can’t plug headphones into the original Macintosh, but at least it included a connector on the front of the case for connecting the keyboard and mouse.

On the other hand, you don’t really need to plug anything into the iMac to use it, thanks to Bluetooth. The iMac’s bundled keyboard and mouse are wireless and come with built-in rechargeable batteries, though the cumbersome charging process for the mouse leaves a lot to be desired.

Inside the 27-inch iMac, there’s an Intel Core i5-7500 running at 3.4GHz. That’s a mind-boggling speed compared with the Motorola 68000. On the other hand, the Intel silicon in the current Mac isn’t as cutting-edge as the Motorola was for its time. The Core i5 is two generations behind Intel’s latest CPUs, a reflection of the fact that the iMac hasn’t been refreshed since summer 2017.

Not only does the 27-inch iMac come with 8GB of memory as standard (a whopping 4 million percent increase over the Macintosh), but it also comes with 1TB of storage space in a Fusion Drive, which combines solid-state storage and a spinning hard disk. There’s also an AMD Radeon Pro 570 dedicated graphics processor with its own memory, a foreign concept to the original Macintosh.

Almost everything is improved with the iMac’s software offerings, as well. Word processing is covered thanks to Pages, and you also get a spreadsheet editor (Numbers), a photo organizer (Photo), and even a music editor (GarageBand). One glaring absence is anything resembling MacPaint; you’ll need third-party software to draw unless you open a pre-existing image in the Preview app.

A Pioneer in Pricing, Too

The one unequivocal advantage the original Macintosh has over the current Apple all-in-one lineup is price. You can pick up an inexpensive all-in-one Windows PC these days for much less than $1,000, compared with the iMac’s $1,099 starting price. Even though the Macintosh was expensive in absolute terms, it was still an amazing deal for what it was. No other company offered an all-in-one PC with a user-friendly graphical interface for around $2,000.

You could of course walk home with a Commodore 64 for much less ($300 in 1984, or $725 today), but the experience of using it was far more cumbersome since it didn’t have a GUI. There was also the Apple Lisa, which resembled the Macintosh’s all-in-one form factor, but was far more expensive.

Did the the Apple Macintosh change the world? Hard to say. But it did bring easy-to-use computing to consumers in a compact package for a price that, while high, was still a good deal. It’s hard not to look back on it fondly, even if the Mac desktops of today are millions of times more powerful.

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