- Personal computers are often called PCs - originally classified as microcomputers
- A desktop PC usually comes with a tower that holds the main circuit boards and disk drives of the computer, and a collection of peripherals, such as a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
- In the current market there are two main kinds of PCs: the Apple Macintosh (Mac) line, and "all of the others".
- The term "PC" or "IBM" refers to "all of the others", which is a historical artifact back to the days when IBM and Apple were the two main competitors in the market and IBM called its machine a "personal computer".
- Consequently, even though a Mac is a personal computer, the term "PC" often means a machine other than a Macintosh.
- Until recently, Macs and PCs, in general, could not run software that was made for the other, without some special technology added to them because they ran on different microprocessors.
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- A PC is based on a microprocessor originally made by the Intel company (such as Intel's Pentium, although other companies such as AMD now make "Pentium clones" that can run PC software.).
- Macintoshes used a PowerPC processor, or on older Macintoshes a processor made by Motorola.
- Also, the operating system software that runs the two kinds of computers was different.
- PCs usually use an Operating System made by Microsoft, like Windows; Macintoshes use a different operating system, called MacOS or iOS, proprietary to Apple.
- The efforts to make the two kinds of computers compatible resulted in the current Apple Mac line that make use of Intel processor thus allowing the Mac to run Windows and iOS seamlessly.