Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:

>Mitchell Spector wrote:
>>>     That is what pisses me off about Apple, and if they
>>> planned this all along, maybe they should have never come
>>> out with the Apple IIgs in the first place (the other II's
>>> never evolved, the GS was the first and only II to do new
>>> things). It's the fact that they lead us down a road to
>>> nowhere.
>
>    Whether Apple was big or small, there is no excuse for the way the
>Apple II (especially the GS) was handled throughout the years. However
>you look at it, the bottom line is Apple mistreated a 6-8 million base
>of customers and turned its nose up at a highly profitable product.
>Is that good business -- Yes or No? Do excuses even matter?

I agree.  The Apple IIGS was a computer with incredible potential
and one that took off with great sales.  There was no technical
reason why it could not have evolved further...

The reason the Apple IIGS was "done in" (and it was done in...
advertisement deliberately cut, development stunted, etc., until
Apple forced sales so low that it could justify pulling production
...basically neglect the IIGS to death by not doing any marketing
or updating...if the Mac was treated this way it too would have
long ago gone with the dinosaurs...) was the people at Apple...
the mindset was already a Macintosh future the day the IIGS
was introduced.  Steve Jobs saw to that...

By getting rid of Steve Jobs, Sculley managed to force launch
the Macintosh.  Before the IIGS, the Mac sales were very very
poor.  With Jobs gone, Sculley was able to keep the II series
alive long enough as a cash cow...

What Apple did was mortgage its future...the way it led A2
users down a dead-end road with an Apple IIGS they planned
as a dead-end computer whose sole existance was to feed
Macintosh ended up alienating a user base 10 million strong.

Steve Jobs said some time back (before he was hired back
to Apple) that if he were in charge, he would milk the Mac
for all it was worth and go on to the "next big thing"...the
man has not learned his lesson...

If Jobs was in charge of the PowerMac transition, PMacs
would never have been able to run 68k Mac software...even
many Macintosh supporters agree that this is the man's
attitude...

If Jobs had not cancelled the ARM A2 "Mac" transitional
computer years earlier, the Apple II and the Mac lines
would have been ONE instead of TWO.  It would have made
what eventually became the Apple IIGS and the Macintosh
into ONE computer.  We would not be having this talk
because we'd be one with Apple still...the loyal user base
would never have been abandoned...

The ARM was also a more powerful CPU than the 68000.

Think of an Apple IIGS with square pixels, same great sound
chip, slots, seen as a Macintosh by Apple and having Apple's
full support...AND having a more powerful CPU than the
68k Mac...plus it could run Apple II software...(I'm not saying
the ARM A2 prototype had an Ensoniq...it didn't...but if it had
been chosen over the 68k Mac prototype, by 1986 the GS
would have been an ARM GS with Apple's "Macintosh"
blessing and that GS unit could still have had the chip)...