Hardware
 
The internals of the original 20-inch iMac G5. Many hardware components can be seen.Main article: Macintosh hardware
Apple directly sub-contracts hardware production to Asian manufacturers, maintaining a high degree of control over the end product. By contrast, most other companies (including Microsoft) create software that can be run on a variety of third-party hardware. The current Mac product family uses Intel x86 processors. All Mac models ship with at least 1 GB RAM as standard. Current Mac computers use an ATI Radeon, nVidia GeForce or Intel GMA graphics cards and include either a Combo Drive, a DVD player and CD burner all-in-one; or the SuperDrive, a dual-function DVD and CD burner. Macs include two standard data transfer ports: USB and FireWire. USB was introduced in the 1998 iMac G3 and is ubiquitous today; FireWire is mainly reserved for high-performance devices such as hard drives or video cameras. Starting with a new iMac G5 released in October 2005, Apple started to include built-in iSight cameras to appropriate models, and a media center interface called Front Row that can be operated by remote control for accessing media stored on the computer.[50]

Until 2005, Mac computers have shipped with a single-button mouse, largely because surveys showed users did not know which button to use.[citation needed] Although Microsoft's IntelliMouse, featuring two buttons and a scroll wheel, was introduced in 1995 to great success, The Mac operating system did not support more than one mouse button until Mac OS X arrived in 2001. Apple released the four-button Mighty Mouse in August 2005,[51] and a wireless version in July 2006,[52] and began to ship it with new desktop Macs.