From icons to iconoclasm
How Apple changed the way computers look, feel and work
Apple didn’t invent the graphical user interface (GUI); that was the work of Doug Engelbart in the 1960s. Researchers at Xerox PARC built on his work and made the 1973 Alto, the first personal computer with a GUI. It had many of the things we take for granted today: a mouse and pointer; windows for different things; icons; and menus with drop-down menus. That operating system spawned another, Gypsy, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. And it lead to the 1981 Xerox Star, a computer that incorporated many of these ideas. A certain Steve Jobs was particularly impressed by the PARC’s work as Apple made its own GUI, helped by many former PARC members.
The first GUI product Apple shipped was the Apple Lisa in 1983. Early versions of its operating system didn’t even have icons, but as Apple visited Xerox and occasionally poached its people the design evolved. Apple took Xerox’s ideas and added their own, such as drag and drop.
When Apple introduced the Apple Macintosh with its GUI in 1984, there was a mixed reception. Some tech pundits scoffed: who needs eye candy when word processing works just fine in plain text? But the GUI made computers so much more friendly, and it did for desktop publishing, digital art and personal computing what the iPhone would later do for smartphones. When you used an app such as MacPaint, you saw the future of everything.
Evolution and revolution
Apple’s System Software evolved through multiple versions. Multitasking, the ability to do more than one thing at a time, arrived in 1987’s System Software 5’s MultiFinder, and the interface received a huge overhaul with the release of System 7 in 1991. That introduced aliases, drag and drop into applications, balloon help and TrueType fonts. And on compatible Macs, it even ran in full colour. But the biggest change in Mac interfaces happened in 2001 with the arrival of Mac OS X. That wasn’t evolution. It was revolution.
The water-inspired Aqua interface of Mac OS X actually appeared first in 2000’s iMovie, but it was the liquidlooking OS that, according to Steve Jobs, you’d want to lick. The 2000 public beta was a beautiful thing, an operating system quite unlike anything you’d ever seen before with a new place for your apps: the Dock.
Aqua used blue, white and grey with little pops of colour such as the glassy buttons on windows. You couldn’t really customise it beyond choosing the darker Graphite option, but you didn’t really need to. Mac OS X was gorgeous.
The next big change was in Mac OS X Panther, which somewhat divisively applied Brushed Metal to the Finder, and Mac OS X Leopard, which applied it system-wide. But the biggest earthquake in Mac interface design wasn’t until 2020. That’s when Big Sur made macOS look more like iOS than ever before with its unified design, something that’s undoubtedly prettier but disappointed some long-term Mac users.