• San Jose Mercury News, Friday, January 23, 2009 11 AM

True that. Then again, maybe it won't. And that's the gist of Troy Wolverton's retrospective look at the first 25 years of Apple's trendsetting Macintosh computer.

"The biggest question Apple faces is how it operates in a world of ... cloud computing," says Charles Smulders, an analyst who covers the PC industry for Gartner. "We expect a lot of change in [that area] in the next two to five years."

The industry has become standardized, making it harder to introduce earthshaking changes, Wolverton points out, and many of Apple's recent changes to the Mac line have been the incremental improvements you would expect in a maturing market. "We're at the early stages of the birth of the PC in your pocket," says Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies. "That's where there is this huge amount of opportunity."

To that point, an informative accompanying charticle shows the evolution of the Mac product line over the years by necessity ignores the iPhone and iPod -- two trendsetting devices of their own that have lifted Apple from nichedom and onto the mass-market playing field.

Read the whole story at San Jose Mercury News »