5 ms·

True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do

True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do so much more with the exception of perhaps DTP (but a LaserWriter was out of the price range of most people) Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) I did DTP on the Amiga, for example, by using LaTeX to do all of my work in college, produce postscript files with dvi2ps and then taking the files to my college lab and printing them on expensive printers. A $500 Amiga was producing reports with AMSTeX or LaTeX that looked like they were professionally typeset by a $5000 Mac setup (in 2018 dollars)

tambourine_man 8y ago
>Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) Sure they did. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable, like the Apple II, which was a hackers dream machine. I only take issue with the “creative” part of your comment.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". In terms of 2018 dollars, it cost about $6000 without a LaserWriter. Very few people could afford one, no matter how easy it was to use, which is why the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 far outsold it. 17 million Commodore 64's were sold. About 5 million Amigas. These were mostly sold to consumers, not schools. Sales for the original Mac128/Plus/SE/512 are hard to come buy, but looking at yearly estimates (about 70k Mac128k sold in 1984, and about 3x that every year after), the Mac never had any significant installed base of ordinary home users compared to the 8-bit or 16-bit competitors.
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    >The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". That it was.
- snvzz 8y ago
  >The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. Worse in every way, several times more expensive, and yet stupidly successful. I curse the retarded suits at commodore main offices at the US. It did better in Europe, because UK commodore had some decent marketing.
  - coldacid 8y ago
    It wasn't "the suits" in general like that. Pretty much all the blame for Commodore's failure post-Tramiel can be laid at the feet of two people: Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali.

tambourine_man 8y ago

>Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) Sure they did. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable, like the Apple II, which was a hackers dream machine. I only take issue with the “creative” part of your comment.

cromwellian 8y ago
The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". In terms of 2018 dollars, it cost about $6000 without a LaserWriter. Very few people could afford one, no matter how easy it was to use, which is why the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 far outsold it. 17 million Commodore 64's were sold. About 5 million Amigas. These were mostly sold to consumers, not schools. Sales for the original Mac128/Plus/SE/512 are hard to come buy, but looking at yearly estimates (about 70k Mac128k sold in 1984, and about 3x that every year after), the Mac never had any significant installed base of ordinary home users compared to the 8-bit or 16-bit competitors.
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  >The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". That it was.
snvzz 8y ago
>The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. Worse in every way, several times more expensive, and yet stupidly successful. I curse the retarded suits at commodore main offices at the US. It did better in Europe, because UK commodore had some decent marketing.
- coldacid 8y ago
  It wasn't "the suits" in general like that. Pretty much all the blame for Commodore's failure post-Tramiel can be laid at the feet of two people: Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali.