The Macintosh, more generally called the Mac for short, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured and marketed by Apple Computer. Named after the ubiquitous fruit apple 'McIntosh', the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984 , supported by an expensive marketing campaign that included airing a 1984-themed television commercial during the Super Bowl. The Macintosh is regarded as being the first personal computer to popularize the use of the graphical user interface at a time when most computers used an operating system with a command line interface. Today, the Macintosh is the only family of computers available from Apple, and ranges from the "budget" desktop computer Mac mini to the midrange Xserve server . It also includes two series of notebooks: the iBook and the PowerBook. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted towards the home consumer, education, and creative professional markets; however, the Xserve G5, which is certified to serve clients on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell NetWare platforms, has enabled Apple to gain exposure to the enterprise market as well.

Macintosh computers originally used Mac OS as the operating system. However, from 1999 onward, Apple introduced the new Unix-based Mac OS X, finally stopping Mac OS development in 2002. Both operating systems were exclusively available for the Macintosh - however, alternative operating systems such as Linux can be installed as well. The current version of Mac OS X is Mac OS X v10.4 'Tiger', and all Macs besides the Xserve (which uses Mac OS X Server) are sold with it preinstalled. To complement the Macintosh, Apple also has developed a series of digital media applications (collectively the iLife suite) and a range of software aimed at the creative professional

more:-....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh

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