In your mind, when did the Mac become a mature product? (From any era)

[Scott Baret]

There's a great thread in the iPhone forum right now about when everyone felt the iPhone became a mature product, and it got me thinking-what does everyone think about the Mac's maturity?

IMO it does need broken into eras. We know the Mac is a mature product now, but it's been through a few iterations of architecture, operating system, and purpose (since the early models weren't web machines).

I feel the 68K architecture became a mature product in cycles: the SE was the big one for me, however. It took the best of the original Mac but made it useful, somewhat expandable, and finally delivered options like an internal hard drive. The other key models for me there were the Iici (speed, good expansion, integrated video) and the LC (repackaging older tech but making it marketable and remarkable for being able to run the Apple II emulation card, helping to make another mature product obsolete, especially in schools).

For PPC, I almost argue the beige machines never really became a mature product. They overlapped the 68Ks too much in the early days and quickly became obsolete once the G3 came along, plus the ports changed over entirely. I'd go with the later G3/early G4 era for when they started to mature. These are the computers that can reasonably run OS X, say, from the slot-loading iMac forward.

For Intel, it seemed to happen somewhat quickly, but I'd go with the later Core 2 Duos, mostly because Mac OS X had already matured by then (I personally don't feel like that happened until Panther at the earliest; I always felt Tiger was the first truly mature version). This also coincided with the Mac mini becoming a little more established and finding its niches. The designs have changed little as well, save for the Mac Pro that was out for a while. The laptops still look like thinner titanium PowerBooks and the iMac hasn't really changed a ton over the years either (not like the old days when new colors or shapes were the norm every other year).

I'm curious to see everyone else's thoughts. I've been through every era of Mac by this point and am at that point where it's like "uh oh, here we go again" with regard to the new processor architecture coming out...

 

[casperes1996]

I'm curious to see everyone else's thoughts. I've been through every era of Mac by this point and am at that point where it's like "uh oh, here we go again" with regard to the new processor architecture coming out...

I overall agree with your list in general, so instead of parroting you with respect to earlier Macs, I'll leave some thoughts on the ARM transition. Because I think it'll be a much smoother ride than you might have reason to fear. First of all you say yourself that the Intel era Macs reached maturity very rapidly. We've been down this road before and learned from the successes and the failures and computing as a whole is more mature.
Apple already has a lot of experience with Darwin/XNU and UIKit devices running on their own chips so the leap to the Mac and AppKit is not as big as when they've made architecture leaps in the past.
And the above point was made mostly with software in mind but holds equally for hardware. Apple has been making their own chips for all their iDevices, HomePods, AppleTV, AirPods for a long time now. In the transitions of yore the Mac was the centrepiece in all of Apple and the architecture transitions meant Apple went from established hardware in their products to new hardware in their products. This time they've already had many products out the door with this architecture. Products that in terms of market share and sales figures out shadow the Mac and thus are arguably more crucial to not screw up with. And they all run great on Apple's own chips.
The Mac isn't so much undergoing a huge transition as it is joining the party in a sense. Of course it's still a huge transition for the Mac itself, but for Apple and their hardware and software stack and teams, it's bringing the Mac into the fold

 

[Fishrrman]

Mac IIci. I still have mine up in the attic.
Later on, OS 10.3.

 

[brianmowrey]

For OS X I pick Lion over Panther, because life with Internet Recovery is so much better than optical.

For the current hardware, I think iMac has never matured. It has always just been a flagship brand statement with no real-world usage niche that it fits well. Macbooks, you could put the pin any point before Air and definitely NOT any form factor introduced after Air. A notebook should fit two drives, a bevy of ports, and be easy to repair. Mini, pretty much born perfect.