The context I was thinking of was the iPad. At the time it was really thought it was completely going to kneecap the portable Mac line (even Apple believed it and invested more in iPad development than Mac development). It was only after Jobs left our mortal coil that the iPad really stagnated in comparison to what the hardware itself was capable of.
It is also notable that the Mac was stagnating just like the Amiga around that time. The successor to OS 9 was delayed for years and years before being cancelled. The hardware was getting more expensive but with only small incremental improvements in speed or capacity. The Centris and early Performa lines were just so mediocre. The 68k architecture was stalling out just as Intel was blowing everyone's doors off with x86. Jobs made a bad bet with PPC, but it was still way better than 68k and gave them enough breathing room to keep up with PCs for a bit.
The Mac. Nobody is disputing that every product relies on previous products.
But the Mac is a good example of a technological break thru that had imperfect packaging, pricing AND timing.
The packaging was too restrictive for the time. Jobs' vision was right, but the industry hadn't developed far enough that you could ship a machine without internal slots and be successful.
The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market, and the rest of the market didn't recognize sufficient increase in value due to the GUI to make the pricing make sense.
And of course, both of those issues were issues of timing. The Mac took several years to be successful, and depending on how you measure things, some would say it has never become successful (still only being %23 of the market or something like that.)
But the Mac was a technology break thru. In fact, it contained many such breakthrus, both in hardware and software.
Jobs famously pared the Macs down to laptop/desktop and pro/consumer to create a grid of four platforms (of course this predates phones, watches, ipads...).
I suspect Jobs was over-correcting because he had to, because Apple was floundering. But the model matrix for the Macs are not a lot bigger than Job's 2 x 2 minimalist stable.
You should really watch a bunch of the old Jobs videos.
A prime example is price. Jobs’ was asked why they didn’t make a competing MacBook at the $600 Windows laptop price point (I think this was the mid 2000s?). He said that it might have sold really well but that they would have to severely degrade the user experience to hit that price point, and he refused to do that because he wanted to make great devices.
Back in those days you could plug any non-exotic device into a Mac, and it would mostly just work instantly, which was paradise compared to XP and 7’s driver and .dll hell. These days, I’d expect Apple to do stuff like patch the AirPods Max firmware to break the Android apps that enable all the cool non-basic features.
There was certainly much lamentation at the time that Apple didn’t purchase BeOS.
I’m also reminded of Sun’s near-acquisition of Apple (apparently multiple times), which McNealy(?) later acknowledged would never have worked out so well.
Jobs gets a lot of grief here and elsewhere for his personal failings and management style, but this was an epochal moment in the computer business. I remember roughly at the same time dreading what seemed like the inevitable Windows victory over all of personal computing.
Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases.
To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.
My recollection was that Apple was in dire straits at the time anyhow, but that the clone makers were substantially increasing MacOS shipments at a time when Apple was threatened with irrelevancy.
I thought Jobs killed the clones because he wanted absolute control, which he saw as necessary to pursue his goals for a high-end, seamless experience.
None of the Cocoa / NS API stuff you're talking about here had much impact on Apple's tech stack as actually deployed in the field until at least 2005 or so. The iMac was successful with a modernized legacy Mac OS on it, and the first iPods shipped with their own embedded OS, not iOS as we know it.
Apple survived by becoming leaner and more lifestyle focused. Maybe your last point applies, and maybe Jobs learned this management lesson and others through his startup time at NeXT, I dunno.
But more than anything I think Apple's revival came through dramatically shrinking product lines, cutting fat, and focusing on just in time production. Unfortunately in the process a lot of interesting tech was also thrown away (Newton!)
"Apple played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where it got them:" It got them in the position of being the ONLY company making consumer computers that still has any margins to speak of. HP, Compaq, Dell, et al are all racing each other to the bottom, trying to eke out a minimal survival on razor-thin margins.
Apple's stumbles in the 80s and 90s weren't because they failed to license MacOS, it was because Jobs was immature and shot himself in the foot, taking his company down with him. These days they couldn't possibly be doing any better, and you can bet your ass Jobs still thinks licensing MacOSX is a terrible idea.
That's not really a fair characterization. 1990s Apple did indeed only iterate its Macs until Jobs returned, but they absolutely didn't stop trying to innovate – they just didn't do it with focus. I mean, Apple invented the PDA without its co-founder at the helm, and repeatedly tried to put a revolutionary operating system on the Mac, but failed due to institutional bloat and uncertain leadership.
I have also heard that the Mac people (though possibly not Jobs specifically, as he left in 1985) didn't want the //gs to compete with it, and were unhappy with having a Mac-like GUI in color on the //gs when the original Mac was black and white. It also beat the Mac to the punch with better sound capabilities and ADB.
Jobs certainly had no interest in making the Mac compatible with the Lisa, and intentionally positioned it as a competitor - effectively killing the Lisa line. Sadly, preemptive multitasking didn't become standard in mainline Mac OS until OS X in 2001 - some 18 years after it appeared on the Lisa.
Apple also didn't want the Mac and Newton lines to compete with each other, much as they are currently trying to differentiate MacBooks and iPads. Kind of a shame since the eMate seems like it was an interesting system, and pen-based and palmtop Macs could have been interesting as well. Today iPadOS still has many limitations compared to macOS, in spite of running on the same silicon.
Except the Mac would have died if it wasn't for Jobs return.
I remember those failed attempts to rejuvenate the Mac OS and not having any significant Macs sales on my country besides a single importer company on the capital.
When I saw the PowerPC to Intel move, it felt like a company with ambition and vision who knew what they were doing with technology.
It was a confident CEO that used his own words to passionately live-demo the products his company was developing and selling. He almost apologetically told us that Apple had to make the change to deliver the notebooks he had promised two years before -- But couldn't with PowerPC. It made sense. And then, he showed us that all along Apple had the foresight to plan for this many years ahead.
It was inspiring, and I was really excited about it. As a user and computer scientist, it made me curious about OSX. As a developer I wanted to support their platform, and went on to work on iOS apps a couple of years later. Apple felt like the future.
This time, I feel unenthusiastic, and wondering where to go next... Despite the fact, that I objectively think this has the potential to be far more significant.
Delivery with confidence and passion for the product always matter. A lot.
That’s 22 years ago. Whole other era. Steve Jobs had just returned, so macs weren’t yet intel and they weren’t running OS X yet, using the NEXT architecture.
In other words, you and OP may both be right. Three absolutely massive transitions at apple between your era and theirs: hardware, software and management quality.
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