3 ms·

Sorry to tame down those rosy memories, but nothing like that was happening in Europe, or rest of the world for that matter. Apple was seen as vastly overpriced

Sorry to tame down those rosy memories, but nothing like that was happening in Europe, or rest of the world for that matter. Apple was seen as vastly overpriced to PC (something students and their parents react very much to), without any added value if you ignore massive marketing (not going into other Apple products since they really stood above the crowd, but ecosystem wasn't existing much back then). Basically a very expensive PC built together with custom OS, without any possibility to extend or modify it, very un-hacker if I may say so. If you used it as Windows machine it was much smarter to go to similarly-priced enterprise laptops, which offered things like NBD on-site warranty repairs (I had whole keyboard block replaced once on Dell, from manifestation to fix it took maybe 1 hour and I just took a long coffee break), with which Apple simply couldn't compete in business segments.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Not sure why this was down voted. I for one appreciate a perspective outside the US bubble. Perhaps someone else from Europe can weigh in?
amatecha 3y ago
Yeah, literally not one of the people I'm thinking of that bought a MacBook in those days cared about extending/modifying or hacking it. Not even adding RAM. They were legitimately good machines with a good operating system, that worked really well for these people. I was "the designated tech guy" for basically everyone I knew in those days, and I got almost zero queries about these Macs in those days. BTW, this was in Vancouver, Canada, not in US. Either way in NA the Apple platform had a serious resurgence then. The MacBooks were actually seriously solid in comparison to equivalently-spec'ed Dell or HP laptops, and those manufacturers didn't even come close in terms of hardware quality (especially the trackpad). Combined with the skyrocketing popularity of the iPod, there's really no doubt it was a good time for Apple and its users.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Not sure why this was down voted. I for one appreciate a perspective outside the US bubble. Perhaps someone else from Europe can weigh in?

amatecha 3y ago

Yeah, literally not one of the people I'm thinking of that bought a MacBook in those days cared about extending/modifying or hacking it. Not even adding RAM. They were legitimately good machines with a good operating system, that worked really well for these people. I was "the designated tech guy" for basically everyone I knew in those days, and I got almost zero queries about these Macs in those days. BTW, this was in Vancouver, Canada, not in US. Either way in NA the Apple platform had a serious resurgence then. The MacBooks were actually seriously solid in comparison to equivalently-spec'ed Dell or HP laptops, and those manufacturers didn't even come close in terms of hardware quality (especially the trackpad). Combined with the skyrocketing popularity of the iPod, there's really no doubt it was a good time for Apple and its users.