The Macintosh was designed as part of a skunkworks operation originally headed by Jef Raskin. Raskin planned to create an easy to use and affordable appliance computer for use by ordinary people. The project was ongoing at the same time as Apple founder Steve Jobs was leading development of Lisa, Apple's intended flagship computer. Despite his heavy involvement in the inital stages of the Lisa project, Jobs eventually caught wind of the Macintosh project and gradually turned his full attention to it. In 1981, Raskin departed the team over a dispute with Jobs, making Steve the de facto leader.

It was under Jobs that the Mac became a GUI-oriented computer, influenced by a tour given to Apple staff of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center which included looks at PARC's Alto computer and the related Smalltalk software. The computer eventually released in 1984 as a vertically-oriented all-in-one and was gradually revised over the course of the decade. Eventually, Apple began to offer Macs in different formats, ranging from standard desktops to early laptops and other portable designs.

The Mac's popularity was at first fairly high, but after Steve Jobs was stripped of power within Apple (Eventually departing to form NeXT), executives who did not fully understand the platform began to devalue it (Notably, Apple was criticized in the nineties for offering an absurd amount of Macs which were too similar and had generic names) and the platform struggled. To compound these problems, Apple's Mac System software (Later Mac OS), the OS powering the Macs, was hopelessly outdated and needed replacing.

Unfortunately, Apple's internal software R&D had become bloated and ineffectual, stalling development on the next-generation Mac OS codenamed Copland. In 1996, Apple wrote it off as a sinking ship and decided to source the basis for their next-generation operating system from elsewhere. Several options were considered, such as licensing Microsoft's NT architecture and purchasing Be, Inc. for its BeOS. In the end though, it was Apple founder Steve Jobs and his NeXT outfit which Apple decided to buy, allowing them to base what would become OS X (Meaning Ten) on NeXT's powerful and robust NeXTSTEP OS.

This also brought Jobs back into the company. He quickly assumed control and began to turn the Mac platform around. Jobs trimmed the bloat from the product line and steadily began to focus on releasing stylish computers like the iMac and iBook for consumers and powerhouses for the Mac's creative professional base like the PowerBook and PowerMac lines.

    Since then, the Mac has become known as a stylish computer for the image conscious, as well as a great tool for artists, writers, film editors and so on. Since approximately halfway through the first decade of the 21st Century, Apple has begun to play up the Mac as a games platform, something for which it had developed a reputation for being poor at. This took several forms, most visibly the appearance of EA at an Apple event to promote the fact that they were bringing a number of games to the platform.

Despite the perception of the Mac as a second-rate games platform (By comparison to the dominant Windows PC), it has played host to a number of popular exclusives, most notably much of Bungie's earlier (Before the Microsoft buyout) catalog. In fact, Bungie's Halo, a huge hit for the Xbox, was originally a Mac exclusive. The game later found its way onto Mac as a port of the PC release.