Re: why did apple go mac?

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

wbdesnoy@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron Desnoyers Winmill) wrote:

>Because Apple needed the next best thing, and they could not do that on the
>6502?  Because, at that time, very few people knew what GUIs were so a radical
>departure would not hurt their potential market?
>
>The 68000 based Macintosh served Apple very well, thank you.  The fact that
>the Apple IIgs could do it better, for a time, was only an afterthough.

It is more than just a matter of hardware limitations.  So called hardware
limitations can be overcome and in fact have been overcome in the PC
world where they DIDN'T abandon their user base.  They have been
overcome again and again.

No, the real reason is the "vision" of Steve Jobs.  The closed system
that the user didn't have to think about versus the open system full
of slots for the USER to configure the way he or she saw fit.  When
the IBM PC first came out, they copied the Apple II.  It is true.  From
several books I've read, IBM employees were actually using Apple IIs
while designing the computer that would outlive it.  The PC had slots
because the Apple II made them popular and showed what an asset
they could be.  Now before anyone says "Altair" let me point out that
the Apple II was the first device that even resembled the personal
computer of today.  Look at an Apple II, an Altair, and a PC and tell
me with a straight face that the PC was modeled more after the
Altair than the Apple II.  No, the IBM PC was built with a set of
design requirements in mind and slots was one of them and they
got that idea from the Apple II.

Jobs has always felt that expandability and flexibility in a computer
was "confusing."  Thus the Macintosh, originally conceived as a
closed, self contained system with limited expandability.

Now Jobs is back and there is an iMac and a G4 cube.

Simply put, the main reason Apple dropped the II was because it
was incompatible with Jobs' vision of what a computer should be.
Computers like the Apple II and IBM PC were "confusing."  The
user needed to be shielded from the inner workings of the machine.

He has a point but to the majority of Apple II users, the Mac was
never and will never be accepted because WE don't do things
that way.  WE like to expand our systems and configure them
the way WE like it.  Sadly, Jobs seems to have ingrained even
in Apple II users the idea that the PC is bad.  Having made the
jump to the PC, I can say that a modern PC is 1000 times more
similar to the Apple II experience than any Mac can be.

>In exchange, Apple did not have to carry the baggage of legacy application
>support.  They were, after all, out to capture the market.  Companies such as
>IBM are out to keep an existing client base.  As such, they give their
>existing customers what they want.  Usually that something includes support
>for their existing software.  This is a habit which you see Apple adopting
>as time goes on: the switch from 680x0 to PowerPC did not break software
>compatability (or even hardware compatability, in many cases); the transition
>from MacOS to MacOS X will be much the same (it is the transition from a
>single user, co-operatively multitasking system to a full fledged Unix
system).

Now this is something that Jobs sorely miscalculated and I
think his infatuation with the Mac/closed system concept
combined with his desire to eclipse the brainchild of Woz
made him blind to this.

680x0 to PowerPC transition was smooth because Jobs was
not there.  But I think Jobs realizes now that he can get his
closed system and still have his users.  At least he has
figured out that the user is important.