I still have some of that promotional gum in the tiny box with the logo on the side of it. I once had two of the tiny boxes (the gum sucked, btw).
[slight hijack]Would you believe I actually had one of these? And was using it in 1995?
Small correction, though: It was the Ace 1000, not Ace 1200.
[/slight hijack]
Simple.
PCs are cheaper… and everything I ever wanted to run can be bought for a PC.
When I first began, there were plenty of software packages that weren’t suited to Macs.
I don’t know how much it’s influenced the total market, but a lot of the technical software for geophysics, engineering, architecture, etc., was more widely developed first for Unix machines and migrated to NT, and has never made it to the Mac.
As I think about it, the only places I recall ever seeing Macs in an office were reprographics companies I’ve used, who also had PCs around.
IIRC, IBM didn’t do too well with their PC division. It was the clone makers that took off. Of course, that didn’t happen until the first compatible BIOS (IIRC Phoenix) arrived.
What? The original IBM PC was designed around a 8088 because it was cheaper than a 8086, while the Mac was designed around the 68000.
All told, 68000 was a much better processor than the 8088.
The only reason why Intel outstripped Motorola that badly is because of the IBM Effect. Having enormous demands for your processors helps just a tad bit. If IBM had picked the 68000, the situation would be reversed.
Did I not say “simplified”? Apple started with the 68000 chip and switched to PowerPC sometime around 1993 when the 68xxx series was getting long in the tooth. (Emulating 68xxx instruction set for legacy code didn’t help the performance any.) If relationships between Apple and Motorola hadn’t gone to hell AND if Apple had maintained enough market share to make it worth Motorola’s time to invest in the PowerPC architecture AND if Motorola wasn’t managed by dolts (as an example, they mandated the use of IBM PCs and * forbid * the corporate use of Macs despite the fact that they made the chips for Macs) then the PowerPC architecture probably would have advanced enough to have left Intel chips in the dust.
The story is not over, btw. IBM is designing a 64 bit processor with AltiVec that should display some impressive performance (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0210/16.ibm.php). Clock speed won't approach current Intel architecture speeds, but for vector processing type applications (e.g. Photoshop-type image processing) it should fly.The PowerPC is actually a join effort by IBM and Motorola. Recently IBM has completed a new PowerPC design which they would hand to Motorola to create a version for desktops.
That Apple could not maintain a large enough market share was only partly their fault. They thought ther entrenched position in the microcomputer market would help - it didn’t. Not when IBM meant - still means - business. By extension, anything sanctioned (i.e. clones) also meant business.
Of course, several key decisions made in Project Chess helped the clone makers a lot.
I thought the Macs on TV shows were product placements. (Paid for by Apple)
You would have a hard time getting a PC product placement. Although Dell and other manufactuers are trying to make their products look distinctive from one another now their products do not look distinctive enough to pay the networks to put a PC on the set of a show like Drew Carrey.
Sorry - I should have made my intended-humourous-sarcasm more obvious given your newbie status.
In the time I have been here there have been endless, endless threads on Mac vs PC and nearly always they seem to end up in the Pit.
I also realise that it might be hard to search for these, because of the four-letter-minimum search thing. “macs” may work though.
That’s not surprising. This is the company that, in an early version of IE for Mac asked the user “Does Netscape have an uninstall feature?” Begging the question:
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Why does my Mac need an uninstall?
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If your product is so damn good, why do I want to uninstall it?
Microsoft advertising has been shooting the company in the foot for years. Fortunately for them, they have an elephant’s foot and advertsing has a BB gun.
On the other hand, Apple did the “Lemmings” ad, which single handedly managed to shun the entire cadre of mid-late 80’s ITs. At least when Apple screws up an ad, it looks nice.
Actually, quite the reverse is true. Apple sensed early on that one possible way to increase market share would be to get their computers in schools, so that children would become familiar with them and encourage their parents to buy one for the home.
Apples were significantly less expensive than PCs for schools because Apple practically gave them away, and most schools were, and still are Apple/Mac based.
Every school I ever attended was overrun by Apples and then Macs. My wife is a teacher and she has to beg borrow and steal to get to use anything other than the useless iMacs they have.
Another reason that PCs took off was that the Mac peripheral interface was proprietary and they refused to license it for a long while. So you were forced to buy an apple printer, keyboard, etc that were all more expensive than their open architecture PC equivelents.
IMO, the biggest reason most people I know have PCs rather than Macs is not for any reason that’s been gone into in detail, though those reasons are interesting.
The reason macs aren’t as popular, at least in my opinon? Gaming. Many games, if they’re even offered on a Mac, come out months after they’ve come out for a PC. This is true of the Sims in particular. Most websites offering things for download are designed to be used for a PC: there is a program to convert the file names into mac ones, and a handful of sites for Mac Users, but most user-made things are designed with a PC player in mind.
While it’s different in the work place, many many home computer buyers buy computers with gaming in mind. Hell, a lot of them buy them primarily for gaming. So which is more appealing: a computer system with hundreds of thousands of titles for it, or one with a much more limited catalogue that will require months of extra waiting before you can buy your must-have game? I’d never buy a Mac for this reason, and I’m not even a hardcore gamer.
what elfkin477 said…
This thing is about 3 megs in size… in case you are on dial-up…
http://www.wiredvideo.com/public/video/apple_gamer.wmv
In the school district I serviced the majority of computers in labs were macs. It is now slowly moving over to dells for staff but mac is still dominant in the classrooms.
Why aren’t Macs as popular? John Sculley. The CEO of Apple in 1983 until 1992 or so, Sculley was repeatedly presented with two options to saturate the market with Macs and increase the Mac OS’s (if not Apple’s) market share to a sustainable level: allow clones or drastically lower prices. He chose… neither.
Terrified of losing control over the Mac the way IBM had lost the PC, Sculley couldn’t handle the idea of cloning. But not understanding the market economics of technology (lower the price to get people into your market, and you’ll make more from them over the long run), he wouldn’t cut down Apple’s profit margins on intro level Macs.
It was around 1990 before Apple had low-cost intro Macs, and even later before they had low-cost intro color Macs.
Sculley also handed Bill Gates the company’s crown jewels with an agreement that allowed Microsoft to take Apple’s key interface innovations (menubars, toggle buttons, etc) and use them in Windows 1.0. The agreement actually let Microsoft use them in Windows 1.0 and all successor products, allowing for Windows to become more and more Mac-like. By Windows 95, the differences between Mac OS 7 and Windows were pretty slim. Apple’s opened this lead back up with Mac OS X, which merges the classic Mac interface with the reams of innovation found in Steve Jobs’ NeXT OS.
Apple also discouraged the games market from emerging early on the Mac, afraid that businesses might not take the Mac seriously, which created a situation where one of the markets where the Mac could really shine – graphical games – was unofficially or officially discouraged for years. The Mac game market is much better now than it has been in the past, but it has never truly rebounded from this idiotic decision by Jobs and Sculley.
Apple still dominates a number of industries – not always was a majority, but as an unmovable force – including many “creative” industries such as graphical design, publication production, and is fairly powerful in most non-back office business segments of the film and television industry. Mac OS X also opens up potential markets in science, engineering and back room servers that weren’t accessible by the old Mac OS.
IMHO, the #1 reason that Apple lost the market was due to its use of proprietary hardware and operating systems. We’ve seen repeatedly in the computer market that companies that farm out stages of product development to outsiders consistently do better than those that try to do everything in house, often to the point of success or failure in the market. Apple is at its core an operating system company, but in order to prevent competition with anyone else selling operating systems, it tries to lock users into proprietary hardware. If Macs had used standard PC hardware from the get-go, and if Mac OS had run on non-Apple branded PCs, Apple might be a viable competitor to this day. There would be a lot more fluidity in the marketplace, and certainly more competition.
Apple, it seems, is finally realizing its mistake. Future Macs will be built on AMD’s X86-64 technology, and it looks like OSX will be available as a standalone product for anyone using one of these processors. This is a necessity, as Apple certainly can’t keep pace with evolving PC hardware. If Apple stays on its current course, PCs will keep eroding even its entrenched markets until it just dies quietly, possibly swallowed up by MS. If Apple can switch to open hardware to leverage its quite nifty OSX, it might actually have a fighting chance.
The components inside a modern Macintosh are pretty much industry standard, aside from the processor. Standard RAM, PCI slots, USB and FireWire interfaces. Apple plays the standards game very, very well.
And of course, the core of its new operating system is open source.
Not true. Apple just switched its entire production over to OS X, and still has developers straggling. To throw ANOTHER hardware platform change on top of that would bea disaster, not to mention it would break compatibility with all pre-AMD Mac software. Not going to happen.
Apple’s future systems will be based on IBM’s new PowerPC 970, which Apple will doubtlessly dub the G5.
Again, no evidence of this. Marklar, Apple’s OS X for x86, is kept at parity, but you seem to misunderstand where Apple’s money comes from: the hardware. Apple doesn’t make money on its operating systems, it makes money on its hardware sales. To let anyone have a Mac interface on any crummy old PC hardware would gut Apple’s profit margins, and in short order Apple would collapse to become another Be or NeXT, both of which had far better operating systems than Windows, which were available for x86 hardware, but couldn’t succeed.
Apple is losing the megahertz race, but megahertz are pretty meaningless nowadays. There’s nothing to stop Apple from using the latest technological doodads that you find in a Dell, aside from the Pentium 4 processor.
People have been predicting the death of Apple for 25 years. Apple is in far better shape today than it was five years ago. Once all of its key software packages are out for OS X and its running on the G5 chips, say, this time next year, the situation will be even better. Apple is structurally profitable, unlike virtually every other computer maker out there but Dell and maybe HP-Compaq, and is the only one out there with a real ability to differentiate their offerings from the rest of the market. Software products once abandoned on the Mac, like QuickBooks and Avid, are coming back. The company is healthy, and not going anywhere.
And another reason why Macs aren’t as popular as PCs. In the years running up to the iMac’s debut and Apple’s subsequent turnaround, this talk alone presumably turned off a sizeable portion of potential buyers.
I realize that my point was a YMMV deal, but I know that it couldn’t have been my experience alone.
Carry on.