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I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version on

I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions. It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.

jjtheblunt 5mo ago
It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research. His cube was collecting dust on the office corner. This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.
  - jjtheblunt 5mo ago
    I wrote my thesis on a NeXT with latex2e , in my case about adding explicit parallelism constructs to SetL and dynamically load balancing shared memory multiprocessing to the associated runtime. There's evidently two of us!
flomo 5mo ago
> "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine. Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
- mrandish 5mo ago
  We probably don't disagree on much but nuanced details, which is why I said it was a "strange claim" instead of "incorrect". Being a retro-head who lived through those days obsessively watching every twist and turn... with "strange claim" I was trying to convey it's a "commercial success" is a nuanced judgement on which reasonable people can disagree and any such absolute claims require clear definition of terms, scopes and time frames.
  - flomo 5mo ago
    I think everyone knew the Macintosh was a technical success and "the future". But it was a commercial flop, and Steve Jobs got fired. So obviously he wan't happy about that. (The Mac press back then loved to portray Jobs as some insane cocaine addict, and local gossip backed that up. Probably not in his biographies, but that would get you fired.)
pjmlp 5mo ago
Until the second coming of Steve Jobs, there were hardly any Apple gear on sale in Portugal. There was a single importer, Interlog, that you had to physically travel to Lisbon, or order by phone from one magazine ad. The market was all about C64, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga and PC. The only place I saw Macs live was a single department on the campus as alternative to UNIX and Windows for Workgroups everywhere, and the secretary on the IT department.

jjtheblunt 5mo ago

It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.

pjmlp 5mo ago
My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research. His cube was collecting dust on the office corner. This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.
- jjtheblunt 5mo ago
  I wrote my thesis on a NeXT with latex2e , in my case about adding explicit parallelism constructs to SetL and dynamically load balancing shared memory multiprocessing to the associated runtime. There's evidently two of us!

flomo 5mo ago

> "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine. Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.

mrandish 5mo ago
We probably don't disagree on much but nuanced details, which is why I said it was a "strange claim" instead of "incorrect". Being a retro-head who lived through those days obsessively watching every twist and turn... with "strange claim" I was trying to convey it's a "commercial success" is a nuanced judgement on which reasonable people can disagree and any such absolute claims require clear definition of terms, scopes and time frames.
- flomo 5mo ago
  I think everyone knew the Macintosh was a technical success and "the future". But it was a commercial flop, and Steve Jobs got fired. So obviously he wan't happy about that. (The Mac press back then loved to portray Jobs as some insane cocaine addict, and local gossip backed that up. Probably not in his biographies, but that would get you fired.)

pjmlp 5mo ago

Until the second coming of Steve Jobs, there were hardly any Apple gear on sale in Portugal. There was a single importer, Interlog, that you had to physically travel to Lisbon, or order by phone from one magazine ad. The market was all about C64, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga and PC. The only place I saw Macs live was a single department on the campus as alternative to UNIX and Windows for Workgroups everywhere, and the secretary on the IT department.