The first Macintosh was introduced in 1984 as the low-cost successor to the Apple Lisa, a computer that already had a visual and mouse-driven user interface like the Macintosh and was ahead of its time, but was largely unsuccessful because of its high price. The name was coined by Jef Raskin, who named it after his favorite apple variety, the McIntosh. To avoid problems with the American audio brand McIntosh, the name was spelled Macintosh.

Development of the Macintosh began in 1979 under the leadership of Jef Raskin. Steve Jobs later visited the Xerox PARC lab by invitation, along with Bill Atkinson, among others. After this visit, several ideas from PARC and its mouse-driven Xerox Alto workstation were adopted. However, the Apple team developed their own overlapping windows in the interface, the ability to move or delete icons, the "cut and paste" metaphor, and a menu bar that looked the same in every program.

The Macintosh was heralded on January 22, 1984 with a one-minute commercial during the American Superbowl. About half the population of the United States watched this. Two days later, the computer was officially introduced by Apple founder Steve Jobs. The price of the first Mac was between 1995 and 2495 dollars.

It is now known that the Macintosh used in this presentation was not the original Macintosh, but a prototype of what would later become the Macintosh 512. This is because many applications did not work with the limited memory of 128 KB.

The first Macintosh used conventional cooling because Steve Jobs didn't want a fan in the machine. The machine suffered from overheating in the beginning. Limited memory was also a problem. The Macintosh 512 and Macintosh 128K came on the market relatively shortly after their introduction. It was better built internally and less prone to malfunctions. The 128 is actually a 512 with less memory on the mainboard and has long been sold as a budget model.

The original Macintosh can be recognized from the back showing real Macintosh with no amount of memory.