[JeremyReimer]

I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist.

But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional.

A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.

[desiarnezjr]

The Laserwriter was one of the first accessible laser printers. And also the first with Postscript. It was super expensive (easily more than the Macintosh needed to print to it) but it was revolutionary.

The only other common option was the early HP laser printers, but no Postscript.

[Taniwha]

"Professional" is relative - compared with PC state of the art the Imagewriter was OK - laserprinters weren't really a thing yet for anyone

[scarface74]

LaserWriters came out in 1985

[scarface74]

The first Apple LaserWriter came out in 1985 - one year after the Mac came out. It was a Postscript printer that supported vector graphics.

[User23]

On the software side MacDraw was already there though.