In January, the Mac will be exactly 24 years old. Named after the McIntosh Apple, the original Macintosh computer was released on January 24, 1984. As you may already know, the Mac was the first computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse instead of the standard command line interfaces of those times that also managed to become a commercial success, since the first graphical user interfaces were already developed in late 1970s by Xerox, but none made it to the masses. The user interface's history is a very interesting one, but let's get back to our Macs now...

The Mac sales went up and down for 14 years, and 1998 came with the introduction of the iMac and is considered to represent a new beginning for the company. The iMac was a market hit, with 800,000 units sold in 1998, and things really started to go up since then.

According to a Wall Street analyst, in 2007 we may see over 9 million new Macs around if this year's growth rate doesn't go down. Last week, Gene Munster from PiperJaffray said he expects that Apple will keep growing in 2007 due to improved availability of Macs, the expanding customers footprint and, of course, the new ability of Mac OS X to run Windows on Apple computers.

In 2006's third quarter, Apple had a market share of 2.8 percent, and the fourth quarter is expected to end with a 3 percent market share, that stands for 7.72 million units computers sold.

If Apple keeps growing this way and achieves an average of 3.5 percent for the next year, the sales will go up to 9.01 million units, and that's a long way up compared to previous estimates that had a target average market share of 2.7 percent and only 6.95 million Macs. These being said, there's only one thing to do: prepare for the Macs invasion!