Carmen Sandiego on the Macintosh
The Mac wasn't part of the 1985 launch — it joined the series three years later and stayed through to the last CD-ROM titles.
A late start
Unlike the Apple II, DOS and Commodore 64, the Macintosh wasn't part of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?'s 1985 launch lineup. Its first outing came via the Enhanced Edition, released for Mac in May 1988 — the earliest confirmed Mac build of any game in the series, and in fact the first platform the Enhanced line reached at all, ahead of its own DOS release two years later.
Through the sequels
Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? reached Macintosh in 1990, alongside its Amiga, Commodore and DOS ports. The Deluxe remake of the original game followed with its own Mac CD-ROM edition in 1992, carrying the same digitised National Geographic photography and Smithsonian Folkways music as the DOS release. Later entries kept Mac support as standard for their CD-ROM era: both Junior Detective Edition (1995) and Treasures of Knowledge (2001) shipped as Windows-and-Mac CD-ROM titles, bookending the classic line's run on the platform.
Why the gap mattered
The delay wasn't unusual for educational software of the era — the Mac was a comparatively expensive machine in 1985, and Brøderbund's early Carmen titles targeted the far more common Apple II and DOS installed base in schools. By the time the Enhanced and Deluxe lines arrived, though, the Mac had become common enough in both classrooms and homes that every subsequent release treated it as a first-class platform alongside Windows, rather than an afterthought.