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Even in the US, the Mac was very marginal early on. It wasn't until it established a foothold in the DTP market in the late '80s that it was clear the Mac woul
by Gormo 2y ago
Even in the US, the Mac was very marginal early on. It wasn't until it established a foothold in the DTP market in the late '80s that it was clear the Mac would even survive as a platform. A ton of important business software never made it to the platform.
There's a lot of revisionism that stems from Apple having made a magnificent comeback over the past 25 years, but a lot of people are forgetting that Apple was not the dominant player it is today back then. They spent most of the '90s on the verge of bankruptcy, and were sustained only by a few niche markets -- the Mac was not regarded as a serious platform for business computing back then. If things had gone slightly differently, the Mac might have shared the same fate as the Amiga and the ST.
- some-guy 2y agoI was blinded by this growing up in the 90s in a college town in Northern California where it felt like the market share was 50% Apple.
- coliveira 2y agoApple also had a good market share in education. The first Mac I used was at the university, and many schools had Macs even when it was viewed as a very niche system.
- Arrath 2y agoI remember learning how to type and work the macintosh version of Paint on some Macs in 1st/2nd grade computer lab in 1995/96/97 somewhere. We even had crusty old Apple II's or the like hiding in corners.
- Gormo 2y agoThe Apple II was very dominant in education, but Apple never managed to retain that dominance through the migration to the Mac. Schools started moving to Wintel boxes in the mid-90s as the Apple II was becoming obsolete -- Macs were present in schools, but had stiff competition by that point. I recall my elementary school (1985-1991) exclusively having Apple IIs, my middle school (1991-1994) having a mix of Mac LCs and IBM PS/2s (along with lingering Apple IIs), and my high school (1994-1998) having all of the computer labs stocked entirely with Tandy 486es, with a handful of Macs in specific classrooms for particular use cases.
- firesteelrain 2y agoWe had a lot Mac’s (Apple IIe and iMac in school). Like everywhere I only knew one person who owned one at home. He was a diehard Mac person as that’s how people who owned Mac’s acted as I remember. They refused to own a Windows whatsoever.
- alsetmusic 2y agoThe products (both hardware and software) were also struggling. My first laptop, a PowerBook 5300c had terrible production / build problems. I can’t remember what they were, but even though I quite liked mine, it was a bad computer. And Copeland, the next-gen OS that would be on par with WinNT kept getting delayed and never shipped. Until Apple bought NeXT’s tech and talent, it was very bleak. I still loved my Mac, don’t get me wrong. It was clearly “better,” (I’ll never understand how our antialiased text didn’t make that obvious), but it was also dying. Getting rid of John Sculley and letting Steve Jobs micromanage everything and make unpopular cuts was a miracle save.