Macintosh Story: Sweet or Sour Apple?

Macintosh Story “Sweet or Sour Apple?” (マッキントッシュ物語 リンゴ甘いか酸っぱいか) is a comic strip drawn by Hitoshi Tanaka for the 1993-11-25 “MacBoy” issue of Japanese men’s lifestyle magazine POPEYE (widely known as the “Magazine for City Boys”).

The comic strip details the history of Apple and the Macintosh from 1970 through to 1993, and features a whole lot of history over its four pages:

• reality-distorting Steve Jobs
• angry Steve Wozniak
• a strangely ginger-bearded Doug Engelbart
• Xerox PARC
• Dynabook-dreaming Alan Kay
• Bill Gates in shorts
• a strangely blonde Bill Atkinson
• Pepsi-sipping John Sculley
• hand-drawn renditions of the 1984 ad, MacPaint and HyperCard
• the break-up
• NeXT
• Knowledge Navigator
• DynaMac (a Macintosh 512K marketed by Canon in Japan)
• successors to the Macintosh
• Apple prototypes
• Newton
• and more

I scanned these images today from my copy of the original magazine.

Thanks to my patrons for making this possible. More patrons means more cool stuff can be preserved/released.

High-resolution scans are available to my patrons.

Hope you enjoy it.