What's next for Apple's Mac?

It's been 25 years since Apple changed computing with the debut of the Macintosh. The storied product may have been eclipsed by the iPhone in recent years, but will still evolve.

Twenty-five years after the debut of the Macintosh, the product that is the soul of Apple is not necessarily its vehicle to the future.

It was a quarter-century ago that Super Bowl XVIII viewers saw the now-famous introductory ad for Apple's Macintosh, formally released two days later. Apple had announced back in 1983 that the Macintosh was coming, but for many, that Sunday was their first look at the product that would drive Apple to new heights in the personal computer industry and usher in the graphical user interface as the standard way for regular people to interact with their computers.

These days, Apple is in a very different place. The company sold ten times as many iPods and iPhones in its first fiscal quarter as it did Macs; and it was a great year for the Mac. CEO Steve Jobs was so aware of this transformation in recent years that he announced in January 2007 that Apple Computer was no more; it's Apple Inc. these days.

More and more, it seems the iPhone is the future of Apple. Or, at least, the cutting-edge technology inside Apple, the project that everybody wants to work on, and that competitors strive to emulate. So what does that mean for the Mac over the next quarter century?

In all honesty, few of us know. Certainly it would have been difficult for most people in the late 1980s watching Michael Douglas in Wall Street talk into a "mobile" phone the size of Shaquille O'Neal's basketball shoe to envision using a sleek handheld phone with all the computing power of the PCs of the day, and then some.

But the Mac is still very much part of Apple's mission: it ends every press release with the stock paragraph declaring "Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications."

So let's consider the near-term future of the Mac; say 5 to 10 years from today.

Hardware
One look at our gallery of Macs through the years is enough to demonstrate just how far the personal computing industry has come from the days of bulky plastic and tiny screens to products like the MacBook Air.

Desktop computers seem likely to get smaller and larger; smaller in that people will consider even a Mac Mini too big for their home electronics cabinet, and larger in that they will get assimilated into various other household gadgets, such as televisions or home security systems. The other trend that will eventually come to roost is the home server, which is not for the faint of heart at the moment but seems eventually destined for every home. Apple will have some answer to that market as it develops, and they probably won't call it a server.