Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the original Apple Macintosh. Yesterday we marked the occasion by looking at 25 milestones of the Mac over the last 25 years.
And while Apple may currently be cooler than a Slush Puppy cocktail in an ice hotel, it hasn't always been that way.
In fact, some of the decisions it has made have been downright disastrous. Here are just seven of them.
1. It used too much proprietary technology
Apple's determination to do things differently has often cost its customers, both in cash and cachet. Early Macs were stuffed full of proprietary connections, formats and programs. For example, it was virtually the only company to adopt NuBus expansion card slots (Steve Jobs' NeXT computer was another) when everyone else was plumping for PCI.
And it ensured file incompatibility with Windows PCs by using Group Code Recording (GCR) for floppy disk media instead of Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM). Other proprietary technologies adopted primarily by Apple include ADB and LocalTalk.
2. It took a big RISC with its processor tech
In the early days of computing, coming up with standards you hoped would become industry practice was commonplace.
When Apple adopted Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) chips supplied by IBM and Motorola for the Mac, a lot was made of their superiority to the Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) chips pioneered by Wintel.
RISC architecture has the ability to carry simple instructions in a single processor cycle (Hz), while CISC architecture carried out complex instructions across multiple cycles.
In other words, a CISC-based PC needed a lot more processing power to achieve the same result as a RISC-based Mac.
RISC CPUs had numerous other advantages over CISC: they consumed less power, ran less hot and so were better suited to laptop applications. The downside, of course, is that RISC chips weren't very widely adopted, partly because Intel was big and powerful enough to plough on with CISC regardless.
Intel also won the marketing battle between the two architectures, because by measuring processor prowess solely in Megahertz or Gigahertz, Intel chips were always going to sound more powerful than their rivals. Which would you buy: a Mac equipped with a 1GHz PowerPC G4 CPU or a PC with a 1.7GHz Intel Pentium 4? The PC, obviously, even though in practice they both benchmarked the same.
By 2005, it became obvious that Apple simply wasn't big or powerful enough to demand faster, better chips from IBM or Motorola and none of the three could match Intel's R&D. Result: Apple jumped on the Intel bandwagon and hasn't looked back since.
3. It lost the plot in the 1990s
For five long years between 1990 and 1995, Apple drifted rudderless while Microsoft and Intel carved up the PC market between them. What went wrong? Everything! Apple employees seemingly forgot they were working for a company that had to sell products and frittered away its cash pursuing ideas it hardly ever put into practice.
Apple's reached its nadir in 1995 when it had over $1 billion worth of orders for the new Power Macintosh and no way of supplying them, and a chronic oversupply of PowerBook laptops without customers to buy them. Apple's problems were so bad that you couldn't mention the company without attaching a 'beleagured' tag to it. Time summed up Apple's situation best in 1996: "One day Apple was a major technology company with assets to make any self-respecting techno-conglomerate salivate. The next day Apple was a chaotic mess without a strategic vision and certainly no future."
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tas50
January 24th
6. 7. Apple had a lot of really bad technologies, both hardware and software. It was painful to see a lot of them go, but it wasn't Jobs that cut the majority of them. It was our buddy Gil Amelio. He may have had no vision for the company, but he did a really great job of cutting failing projects which set things up for Jobs to come in as the hero who would reinvent the compay.
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sevenfeet
January 24th
5. This article has so many errors, I don't know where to begin, but let's take it from the top.
1. Too much proprietary technology? Back in the 80's you pretty much invented what you needed. Or adopted bleeding edge technology no one else was using at the time. Your examples are poor. NuBUS was an 32-bit MIT-developed technology that had bandwidth for days...a far cry from the 8 and 16 bit ISA slots that dated back to the early days of PC computing. Apple's first NuBUS machine was the Mac II in 1987. The PC world went through a few weird proprietary standards in the late 80's (including IBM doing MCA bus computers for a while) before PCI finally came on the scene in the 90's. Sophisticated Mac graphics cards in those days couldn't have been done with the constraints of ISA or later VESA buses.
SCSI was way ahead of anything that was in use for PCs at the time and it made hard drive expansion pretty easy. Remember what PC users were doing to get more storage in those days? And with any SCSI card, I can still hook up 20 year old drives to my Leopard machine now if I had to. Try that with an old DOS drive from the 80s. And SCSI buses gave us the first CD-ROM drives, which were externally connected.
2. RISC versus CISC. Back around 1990 of you remember any of the trade press, it was widely predicted that RISC would superceed CISC processors due to their natural advantages. From a short to medium perspective, this made sense for Apple since the 68000 platform had run its course. What no-one predicted back then was that Intel would co-opt many RISC technologies behind the scenes of their CISC chips. So it presented a CISC chip to programmers but used RISC tech behind the scenes.
3. Agreed. No argument there. Apple had no direction in the 1990s until Jobs returned.
4. I might agree with the overpriced/underperforming argument but you chose a poor example. The IIfx was easily the fastest PC of the day...at the same time, most people were buying 286 based machines. Your argument works better with some of the Quadra computers Apple was selling from 1993-1996.
5. "Apple had no answer for Windows 95". I'd say the problem was earlier than that. Apple really had no answer for Windows 3.1. Although still inferior to the Mac OS of the day, it was useful enough for PC clone vendors to license it as the primary OS for PCs and move away from DOS.
6. Licensing to third parties. If Apple had licensed before 1987, the entire personal computer landscape might be different. But they didn't and by the time they did in the 90s, it was too late and only ate away at Apple's bottom line for their Mac business.
7. "Core business". I'm sure you could argue this since Apple had a hard making the Mac OS better in the 90s through a series of failed projects. But I don't fault them for trying. After all, if Apple stuck to their "core business" now, we'd have no iPods or iPhones. The Newton sparked a race for similar technology from other companies that ended up giving is the Palm OS and Windows CE. And Apple's printer business was a key lynchpin with their desktop publishing strategy for a decade. The real problem with Laserwriters was that they were expensive (due to Adobe's Postscript interpreter) and that Apple didn't care about overall printer sales versus trying to shore up Mac sales. By the time they made printers work better with PCs, HP had already cornered the market.
4.
If it weren't for ADB, we wouldn't have USB. And if it weren't for Apple, we might not have wide USB adoption. The original iMac forced USB on Mac users but it took 3 years for the PC market to catchup and get off of PS/2 interfaces.
GCR recording versus MFM recording? Do you know anything about the history of floppy technology in personal computers? Steve Wozniak was using GCR recording on Apple ][ 5.25" floppies...in 1978. The better question is why IBM used chose MFM encoding when GCR recorded more data per track than MFM.
Localtalk (and the RS-422 serial standard) was designed to do away with the ugly parallel interface standard that dated back to the mid-70s. Localtalk made networking easy and dirt cheap. Anyone with cat-3 phone cable could (and did) make a functional office network in no time. Localtalk networks often ended up using spare phone wire in offices and schools that weren't being used for phone traffic anyway and had already been wired through the building. Compare that to Ethernet which was hilariously expensive per node until the 1990s. It also required coax cable to be wired everywhere and expensive bnc connectors. Finally, Mac networking software was baked into the OS and was dirt simple. Ask anyone over the age of 40 how "easy" it was to do a Novell network, or 3Com...or Banyan in those days. And don't get me started on IBM Token Ring.
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beatphys
January 24th
4. I was one of those people who bought a clone: it was a Power Computing. It was the ONLY PowerPC Mac type machine I could afford. It was a wonderful machine. I could not afford ANY other type machine directly from Apple.
When they killed the clone market, the killed my interest in Apple. I swore I would never go back, and so far 12 years later, I have not. I did what I should have done years ago: buy a PC. Now, my old PCs run Linux.
I do not regret my decision, because at the time, to me, Apple was "The computer for the rest of us that none of us could afford"
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stevedutch
January 24th
3. Apple basically tried to squeeze IBM out of personal computers and lost big time. It was like a kid with a cap pistol trying to take down Jesse James.
Going further back into the 80's, they made no attempt to maintain backward compatibility. When ProDOS appeared they did absolutely nothing to facilitate file conversion, and the Apple III had nothing in common with the Apple II, and the Mac had nothing in common with either. We had a student whose father "donated" an Apple III from his business. It sat around as a doorstop for several years before we junked it. I was once an Apple supporter but went over to the Dark Side (IBM at the time) because I could count on being able to move up without having to learn a totally new system. Finding out that the Mac didn't automatically handle older Apple file formats finally made me fed up enough to switch.
Plus, the Microsoft system of identifying drives by letter is hands down the most intelligible way of doing it.
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martinturner
January 24th
2. Well, ok, in that case they weren't disastrous.
There were several other minnows swimming around in the 1980s - Sinclair, Atari PCs, the BBC micro, Commodore, Amstrad, Apricot (then ACT), Brother, Olivetti, the Amiga. All of them were washed away (in time) by MS DOS and Windows, although some of them adopted the IBM architecture for a while. This was despite all of them avoiding the 'mistakes' described here. And, of course, there was IBM, which discovered that the main beneficiary of its PC architecture was not IBM, but Microsoft.
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watcherzero
January 24th
1. The point isnt that these bad decisions brought down the company, they didnt, the point is that the company would have been far more sucessful if it hadnt. In the mid 90's the company was practically bankrupt and would have been in the strong position it is today far earlier.
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