This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understoo

This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them. When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)