By the mid-1990s, MacWrite was no longer a serious contender in the word processing market, development ended around 1995, and it was completely discontinued in 1998 due to dwindling sales.

Typical computers of the era booted into text-only disk operating system or BASIC environments, requiring the users to type in commands.

Allegedly, Steve Jobs was not convinced of his team's abilities, and secretly commissioned another project just to be sure[citation needed]; its development was eventually released as WriteNow.

[2] The first versions of MacWrite were rather limited, supporting only the most basic editing features and able to handle just a few pages of text before running into performance problems.

MacWrite established the conventions for a GUI-based word processor, with such features as a toolbar for selecting paragraph formatting options, font and style menus, and a ruler for tabs, margins, and indents.

However, the possibilities of the GUI/MacWrite/LaserWriter combination were obvious and this, in turn, spurred the development of desktop publishing, which became the "killer app" for the Mac and GUIs in general.

Strong sales continued, and Apple eventually let MacWrite and MacPaint languish with no development resources assigned to improving them.

[citation needed] Apple finally decided the only solution was to spin off the products as a separate company, Claris.

Several minor upgrades were released to allow MacWrite to run on newer versions of the classic Mac OS, but few other problems were addressed.

The main changes for this release were an updated user interface, a number of new "style" capabilities, and the inclusion of Claris' file translator technology, XTND.

's Apple Applications in 1987 wrote that "once a bold pioneer, MacWrite now seems frozen in time ... it lags behind other word processors in power and responsiveness, and it's clearly unsuited for outlining, layout, and other advanced tasks".