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> Apple III and Lisa failed. Macintosh was underpowered and overpriced on launch. But Apple continued to invest in Apple II, which financed investing in Macinto
by retrac 4y ago
> Apple III and Lisa failed. Macintosh was underpowered and overpriced on launch. But Apple continued to invest in Apple II, which financed investing in Macintosh
Apple barely scraped through the Apple III + Lisa debacle. The Apple III was itself supposed to be the conservative product line that would fund the Lisa and other advanced development. They even added hardware to prevent accessing its extended memory and etc. from Apple II emulation mode; they didn't want developers targeting both platforms. The Apple II was put on the back burner. It wasn't going to get the new OS for the Apple III, for example, even though it could support it. (It did eventually get it, as ProDOS.)
Development of the Apple III started in '78 around the time the Apple II+ came out. The Apple III came out in 1980 as a massive flop. The Apple III+ came out late the next year as another flop. Around then, the Apple //e was started in late 1981 as a rather rushed effort to expand the Apple II line, which by then had been completely stagnant since the release of the Disk II drive more than 3 years before, during a rapidly evolving time in the microcomputer market (the IBM PC had just been released). If they had just released a straightforward upgrade to the Apple II+ around ~1980, instead of the overengineered Apple III, they might have been the IBM of the industry.
- cestith 4y agoThe IIgs was also a different platform from either the II, the III, or the Macintosh. It wasn't released until two years after the Mac. It outsold the Mac for a while, but the high price put it well above the price of an Amiga before it was retired.
- icedchai 4y agoI wanted a IIgs for a while, but a BBSer convinced me the Amiga was a much better machine (also wayyyy cheaper.) The difference in price between an Amiga 500 and an Apple IIgs was insane. And the Amiga 500 could emulate a Mac!
- cestith 4y agoI think the price difference led a lot of people toward the Amiga and probably some toward the ST or PC. I might pick one up for my collection one of these days, but there's no way I'd have had one new.
- a4isms 4y agoAuthor here. I remember the Apple III well, we nearly bought one for my mother's Real Estate brokerage. Ended up with a fairly vanilla Intel-based PC. Whew! But thank you for the correction on "Apple continued to invest..."
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI love Apple history and Apple, mostly because buying serial number 79 Apple II and then years later buying a Mac when they first became available were career changers for me, but for a weird reason: both had, given the hardware limitations, good Lisp programming environments and it was a game changer to hack Lisp at home until I got more professional Common Lisp work.