I've always loved that serif font they used on marketing material, e.g. from the "Insanely Great" book thumbnail on this page. It seems like an 80s/90s font, but yet still classy and aesthetically pleasing to me today.
Apple was largely overshadowed by Commodore until the mid-80s. The Apple 2 kept Apple afloat until they were pretty much bankrupt in the 90s. Then Steve returned. That's the real history of Apple that they don't want you to remember. Only those who survive longest get to rewrite their version of history.
Not sure who the "they" you reference are, but the fact that Apple hung onto the II (and its many variants) for too many years while they tried to swing for the fences is not some secret. That Steve Jobs returned and saved the company on the cusp is known by just about everyone. I mean, there have been multiple major motion pictures on this...
Definitely. They supported office on the Mac to prove that Windows wasn't a monopoly and paid Apple $150 million dollars in a cross-licensing deal give each company complete access to current IP. The thought was that Apple would use the windows IP to provide Redbox access to the new MacOS.
The C64 won the 8-bit PC race from 1983-1986 (earlier in Europe) but x86 PCs and Macs won the 16/32/64-bit PC marathon from 1987 onward.
It is well known that 1990s Apple struggled to differentiate Macs vs. cheap beige PCs running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 that could run the same user programs (Office, etc.) And that Mac clones cannibalized Apple's dwindling market share.
Jobs killed off clones, and solved the differentiation problem with the iMac in 1998 and Mac OS X in 2001; subsequently the iPod and iPhone focused on device categories where Windows was not dominant, and the iPad beat Microsoft at its own tablet PC game.
This is a nice collection with terrific documentation of Apple's "vintage" history from the 1970s to the 1990s. For example you can compare Macworld/MacUser vs. PC World magazines at the same time to see both sides of the Mac vs. PC war/friendship, and history of the computing industry in BYTE.
My dad bought an Apple II back in the day, and I remember a lot of fun times playing games such as Choplifter and Conan. Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning; but the Apple II wasn't anything like the Macintosh, it was a geek computer built by an engineering genius (Wozniak) which was successful due to its vast and diverse software library rather than its looks.
I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.
> Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning
I don’t think so. They wanted to be better, but not more expensive. Certainly, a lot of Woz’s hardware was dirt cheap for what it did and sacrificed programmability.
Similarly, WOZ’s disk controller cut corners to be cheap relative to the competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview: “The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations.”)
What corners did he cut, exactly? The only engineering screwup I can think of with regard to the Disk ][ system was that the original DOS could have been several times faster if the tracks had been laid out in the opposite order. That was a software problem, fixed later with ProDOS and with numerous third-party utilities. Hardware-wise, it was basically unassailable.
I wouldn't characterize the Disk II controller as "cutting corners" (a term which connotes shoddy design/construction or reduced quality) but instead as using clever tricks to do more with less. By most accounts it did the job at least as well as the contemporary standard. For one thing, Wozniak's design was able to pack the sectors tighter than the standard radial configuration[0], resulting in a slight increase in disk capacity compared to the standard formatting.
The lasting legacy of the Apple II has been much more "No-one has colour graphics like this" than "peculiar"... though the machine was designed around multiples of TV signal clocks which made future upgrades challenging. They were able to push the platform surprisingly far with the IIGS.
The claim I replied to isn’t that Apple always was more expensive, but that it always wanted to be more expensive, even back in the beginning. Who doesn’t want to sell their product for more money? I also think that, certainly in the beginning, they wanted to build better products and accepted higher costs.
Also, what computer with comparable features could people buy “even back in the beginning” for less? One could argue there were none when the Apple II debuted.
The PET and TRS-80 were a lot cheaper ($1298 vs $795 respectively $599,95) and shipped with displays but didn’t do colour. The PET and, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard, also the TRS-80 had an inferior keyboard.
Steve Jobs at the start of Apple was inspired by Sony and wanted to market Apple's consumer electronics as high-quality consumer electronics. Jobs was always very keenly interested in marketing and for Apple a central part of marketing and ads is building a story around people rather than technology which is something Apple's held to from the start, though their approach did evolve. The "premium" marketing was a seed planted from the beginning, but later it became a response to becoming a minority player in personal computing, Apple had to differentiate to survive and that was the way to do it, though it was always nascent, since Jobs wanted Apple to be like Sony from the beginning, a premium consumer electronics company.
I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II.
They very much did, just like lots of buyers of different competing consumer products. As to the image, Apple cultivated it almost from the start.
If anything, old Apple required more suspension of disbelief than current Apple - you bought something that was sold to you as a luxury item but wasn't built like one.
> I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.
There was quite a bit of pre-Jobs snobbery. RISC-vs-CISC was one, "pro designers and artists [aka people with taste] use these!" was another common one, "have fun with DOS and viruses" was one...
It was born out of badly losing on marketshare for years. It was also somewhat invisible if you weren't an avid Mac user or Mac hater since at 3% marketshare or whatever, most people didn't know many people to hear it from in the first place!
From what I saw, the iMac/Aqua ("Fisher Price" if you weren't a fan) era didn't even turn around the cool factor for the general public nearly as much as the Intel Macs - "now I can just boot Windows if I have to, at least" to get a lot more curious people to give Macs a shot. Then they were cool for a while. Now they're common enough that I don't think "cool" is the right word vs just "pricey/status-y".
The pre-iMac snobbery was when Mac were considered to be the BMW of computers - “it just works”. When the iMac came out the snobbery change when color iMacs showed up on TV shows. The snobbery become more younger, urban and hipster with the iPod.
Just browsing the Mac Programming book's took me back in time. So many books I recognized by the cover, books I had forgotten that I had once owned and learned from. This was pre-Internet (well, pre-Web) and my copies of the books became well worn.
One of my favorite parts is The Mathematical Foundation of QuickDraw, where it explains that X/Y coordinates are not pixel coordinates. They represent a grid of infinitely thin lines between the pixels.
If that seems like a subtle distinction, it helped me understand a few things, like "why would it matter if we call a single pixel at the top left (0,0)-(0,0) or (0,0)-(1,1)?"
This starts at page I-138 (PDF page 150) in the original edition:
I continue to find joy in seeing that others are passionate about the old Mac era. It's a lot of fun to see people cataloging Apple history on their own and restoring old machines.
