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The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual could afford so they could cover the mar

by ndiddy 4y ago

The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual could afford so they could cover the marketing budget. Combined with the lack of software and the small amount of (non-upgradable) RAM, this meant that Mac sales slumped after the initial rush of early adopters. More information: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

lostlogin 4y ago
Their early pricing was very high, even when you don’t factor in inflation. It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Almost didn't. Apple ][ revenue kept the doors open until I think it was 1986 when they were finally break-even on Macintosh. And it cost Jobs the company. Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months and if he hadn't had those 11 years at Next Inc which also went bankrupt, OS X probably wouldn't have happened. The stars aligned for Apple a few times: I think it's Apple ][, iTunes, iPhone in that order. These days we reflect on the Macintosh as a success, but texts from the mid-to-late 80s did not and frankly, I trust those texts more. A fairly good specimen can be found in this 1987 text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple (available at https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john) Here's an example from my personal library from a 1984 text, "The coming computer industry shakeout" which sadly hasn't been digitized: http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg 1984-86 were pretty dark times for Apple if you're to go off of what people were saying between 1984-1986.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months This is another HN myth like “cable was once ad free”. Before Amelio was kicked out, he had secured $4 billion in financing. If you look at the series of events, it is completely illogical thst $150 million could have “saved” Apple. The deal happened in 1997. Apple wasn’t profitable and just barely until 2000-2001. $150 million couldn’t have saved it. Besides that, a month later, Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. The second myth is that part of the deal was that Microsoft agreed to port Office to the Mac. Office was already available for the Mac and actually started on the Mac. Part of the deal was that Microsoft would continue supporting the Mac with Office and port IE. Also Apple and Microsoft were involved in two major legal disputes - the “look and feel” lawsuit where Apple accused MS of copying the Macs interface and that MS illegally used QuickTime code. They agreed to drop the lawsuit and cross license patents.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      I'd like to contest that and hopefully I'll remember to do it tomorrow when I'm awake. Their quarterly 10-Ks are online from the era. I've gone through them before. Sorry for not being more engaging, it's late and I'm getting kinda dizzy so I should go to bed.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Start here: Apple bought PowerComputing for $100 million in cash right after the MS deal. That would mean that a net $50 million “saved” Apple. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-computing/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-comput... My timeline for Apple profitability was off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc. But Apple lost over $1 billion that year. A net $50 million was a drop in the bucket. I also misstated that Amelio had obtained working capital. It was actually Fred Anderson from the same article. > On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors. Fred D. Anderson was the head of the directors in short term and obtained short-term working capital from the banks in July 1997.
  - prox 4y ago
    Guy Kawasaki also talks about his time at Apple. There were definitely problems, I mean Guy was one of the software evangelists to get more software getting produced which was a BIG problem. After C64 you got the Amiga (graphics) and Atari ST (music) who took a lot of the marketshare for easy to use GUI os’es. Also games were big on both. PC was still predominantly business until games like Doom and the first audioboards/videocards and the CD-ROM.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I have been programming Apple software since 1986. That means that I have been through a lot of changes, and watched Apple expand and contract; numerous times. I used to regularly get sneers from "PC people," about how I was holding onto a "dead baby," and should just let go, and learn Windows. It got fairly infuriating. Geeks can be pretty insulting (just spend some time, wandering around the comments of this very venue, and we're quite well-behaved, hereabouts). Kinda glad I stuck it through, though.
  - Someone 4y ago
    > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months That was the outcome of a process that started years earlier, when Jobs wasn’t at Apple. I wouldn’t describ3 it as “got”, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company: The lawsuit "Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co.", filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows. On March 3, 1995, a Federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that prohibited Microsoft from distributing its current version of Video for Windows […] In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock
Maursault 4y ago
> The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual could afford so they could cover the marketing budget. Andy Hertzfeld is indisputably a genius that was at the right place at the right time. He's a decent writer, and his easy personality shows through his writing style. That said, he was a software developer, not a marketing specialist. Advertising is only important to sales and image, and little else. I don't claim to understand how, because I can barely believe it myself, but advertising has a direct correlation to increased sales and revenue such that the more that is spent on advertising, the more sales and revenue there will be, and this is unrelated to product price. Maybe the sales slumped, or maybe whatever market there was for the 128K Macintosh in 1984 was quickly saturated. Maybe even the price, as high as it was, wasn't high enough. It is also possible that with less advertising and an amazing affordable price that Mac would have failed and Apple would have gone under. It's hard to say, but what did happen is that Mac succeeded and Apple survived, no worse for the wear for spending a lot on advertising and selling Mac at much higher prices, at least during the mid-1980s.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  It should have been cheaper. The thing you’re overlooking is that the 1984 Mac was not actually a market success. Success required more memory and the LaserWriter. The Apple II carried Apple until sometime in the late 80’s when people finally started buying Macs for desktop publishing.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > The thing you’re overlooking is that the 1984 Mac was not actually a market success. You are mistaken. "The Macintosh was the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse."[1] 70K were shipped within the first 100 days of the announcement,[2] which is a sale every two minutes every hour of the day for more than three months, generating $174.6M in revenue and representing fully 1% of the existing home computer market in just over 3 months. That is actually market success by any measure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#1984:_Debut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#1984:_Debut [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090821105822/http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/applehis/appl1984.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090821105822/http://www.island...
fulafel 4y ago
The following year in 1985 the Amiga 1000 with all that extra graphics hardware apparently cost 1295 USD and Macintosh MSRP was 2495 or 1995 depending who you believe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Amiga folks always overlook Apple’s emphasis on user experience. The Amiga workbench UI at the time looked like an Apple IIe high-res mode if someone had forgotten black and white monitors existed. Everything was ugly blue / orange combination and the graphics seemed chosen to emphasize pixel bulkiness. Put that and the 1985 Finder head to head and the user walks out the door with the Mac. Something like DeluxePaint vs MacPaint would be a much different story, easy Amiga win. However, pretty much every user considering a computer would need word processing, where again the Mac had a rock solid look and feel advantage.
  - whartung 4y ago
    Yea, I did not like the Amiga. It just felt cheap. The low resolution "high res color graphics" were just Not Good compared to the crisp B&W Macintosh graphics. GEM for the Atari and PC suffered the same problem, it just looked terrible. Even Window 1 and 2 looked better than either of these. The singular interesting thing from the Amiga was that you could drag down the current screen and reveal a screen beneath. I never spent any time with the Amiga, to be fair, but I was off put enough by initial perception to not really even want to try.
mikotodomo 4y ago
True, but it pushed the computer industry forward.

by ndiddy 4y ago

lostlogin 4y ago

Their early pricing was very high, even when you don’t factor in inflation. It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.

kristopolous 4y ago
Almost didn't. Apple ][ revenue kept the doors open until I think it was 1986 when they were finally break-even on Macintosh. And it cost Jobs the company. Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months and if he hadn't had those 11 years at Next Inc which also went bankrupt, OS X probably wouldn't have happened. The stars aligned for Apple a few times: I think it's Apple ][, iTunes, iPhone in that order. These days we reflect on the Macintosh as a success, but texts from the mid-to-late 80s did not and frankly, I trust those texts more. A fairly good specimen can be found in this 1987 text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple (available at https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john) Here's an example from my personal library from a 1984 text, "The coming computer industry shakeout" which sadly hasn't been digitized: http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg 1984-86 were pretty dark times for Apple if you're to go off of what people were saying between 1984-1986.
- scarface74 4y ago
  > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months This is another HN myth like “cable was once ad free”. Before Amelio was kicked out, he had secured $4 billion in financing. If you look at the series of events, it is completely illogical thst $150 million could have “saved” Apple. The deal happened in 1997. Apple wasn’t profitable and just barely until 2000-2001. $150 million couldn’t have saved it. Besides that, a month later, Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. The second myth is that part of the deal was that Microsoft agreed to port Office to the Mac. Office was already available for the Mac and actually started on the Mac. Part of the deal was that Microsoft would continue supporting the Mac with Office and port IE. Also Apple and Microsoft were involved in two major legal disputes - the “look and feel” lawsuit where Apple accused MS of copying the Macs interface and that MS illegally used QuickTime code. They agreed to drop the lawsuit and cross license patents.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    I'd like to contest that and hopefully I'll remember to do it tomorrow when I'm awake. Their quarterly 10-Ks are online from the era. I've gone through them before. Sorry for not being more engaging, it's late and I'm getting kinda dizzy so I should go to bed.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Start here: Apple bought PowerComputing for $100 million in cash right after the MS deal. That would mean that a net $50 million “saved” Apple. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-computing/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-comput... My timeline for Apple profitability was off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc. But Apple lost over $1 billion that year. A net $50 million was a drop in the bucket. I also misstated that Amelio had obtained working capital. It was actually Fred Anderson from the same article. > On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors. Fred D. Anderson was the head of the directors in short term and obtained short-term working capital from the banks in July 1997.
- prox 4y ago
  Guy Kawasaki also talks about his time at Apple. There were definitely problems, I mean Guy was one of the software evangelists to get more software getting produced which was a BIG problem. After C64 you got the Amiga (graphics) and Atari ST (music) who took a lot of the marketshare for easy to use GUI os’es. Also games were big on both. PC was still predominantly business until games like Doom and the first audioboards/videocards and the CD-ROM.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I have been programming Apple software since 1986. That means that I have been through a lot of changes, and watched Apple expand and contract; numerous times. I used to regularly get sneers from "PC people," about how I was holding onto a "dead baby," and should just let go, and learn Windows. It got fairly infuriating. Geeks can be pretty insulting (just spend some time, wandering around the comments of this very venue, and we're quite well-behaved, hereabouts). Kinda glad I stuck it through, though.
- Someone 4y ago
  > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months That was the outcome of a process that started years earlier, when Jobs wasn’t at Apple. I wouldn’t describ3 it as “got”, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company: The lawsuit "Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co.", filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows. On March 3, 1995, a Federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that prohibited Microsoft from distributing its current version of Video for Windows […] In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock

Maursault 4y ago

> The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual could afford so they could cover the marketing budget. Andy Hertzfeld is indisputably a genius that was at the right place at the right time. He's a decent writer, and his easy personality shows through his writing style. That said, he was a software developer, not a marketing specialist. Advertising is only important to sales and image, and little else. I don't claim to understand how, because I can barely believe it myself, but advertising has a direct correlation to increased sales and revenue such that the more that is spent on advertising, the more sales and revenue there will be, and this is unrelated to product price. Maybe the sales slumped, or maybe whatever market there was for the 128K Macintosh in 1984 was quickly saturated. Maybe even the price, as high as it was, wasn't high enough. It is also possible that with less advertising and an amazing affordable price that Mac would have failed and Apple would have gone under. It's hard to say, but what did happen is that Mac succeeded and Apple survived, no worse for the wear for spending a lot on advertising and selling Mac at much higher prices, at least during the mid-1980s.

KerrAvon 4y ago
It should have been cheaper. The thing you’re overlooking is that the 1984 Mac was not actually a market success. Success required more memory and the LaserWriter. The Apple II carried Apple until sometime in the late 80’s when people finally started buying Macs for desktop publishing.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > The thing you’re overlooking is that the 1984 Mac was not actually a market success. You are mistaken. "The Macintosh was the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse."[1] 70K were shipped within the first 100 days of the announcement,[2] which is a sale every two minutes every hour of the day for more than three months, generating $174.6M in revenue and representing fully 1% of the existing home computer market in just over 3 months. That is actually market success by any measure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#1984:_Debut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#1984:_Debut [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090821105822/http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/applehis/appl1984.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090821105822/http://www.island...

fulafel 4y ago

The following year in 1985 the Amiga 1000 with all that extra graphics hardware apparently cost 1295 USD and Macintosh MSRP was 2495 or 1995 depending who you believe.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
KerrAvon 4y ago
Amiga folks always overlook Apple’s emphasis on user experience. The Amiga workbench UI at the time looked like an Apple IIe high-res mode if someone had forgotten black and white monitors existed. Everything was ugly blue / orange combination and the graphics seemed chosen to emphasize pixel bulkiness. Put that and the 1985 Finder head to head and the user walks out the door with the Mac. Something like DeluxePaint vs MacPaint would be a much different story, easy Amiga win. However, pretty much every user considering a computer would need word processing, where again the Mac had a rock solid look and feel advantage.
- whartung 4y ago
  Yea, I did not like the Amiga. It just felt cheap. The low resolution "high res color graphics" were just Not Good compared to the crisp B&W Macintosh graphics. GEM for the Atari and PC suffered the same problem, it just looked terrible. Even Window 1 and 2 looked better than either of these. The singular interesting thing from the Amiga was that you could drag down the current screen and reveal a screen beneath. I never spent any time with the Amiga, to be fair, but I was off put enough by initial perception to not really even want to try.

mikotodomo 4y ago

True, but it pushed the computer industry forward.