Macintosh

The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple. Named after the McIntosh variety of apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was one of the first commercially successful personal computers to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface. The current range of Macintoshes varies from Apple's entry level Mac mini desktop, to a mid-range server, the Xserve. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. Production of the Macintosh is based upon 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 Macintoshes. This is in contrast to PCs pre-installed with Microsoft Windows, where one vendor provides the operating system and multiple vendors create the hardware. (In both cases, the hardware can run other operating systems; modern Macintoshes, like PC's, are capable of running operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.)

Original Macintosh computers used the Motorola 68k family of microprocessors, but later models switched to Motorola and IBM's PowerPC range of CPUs in 1994. Apple began a transition from the PowerPC line to Intel's x86 architecture in 2006, which for the first time allowed Macs to run native operating system binaries for the x86 architecture. Current Macintoshes use the Intel Core, Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon 5100 series microprocessors. All current models of Macintosh come pre-installed with a native version of the latest Mac OS X, which is currently at version 10.4.9 and is commonly referred to by its code name of "Tiger". Apple will be releasing Mac OS X v10.5, codenamed "Leopard", in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 2007.