Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

shack@onyx.southwind.net (Randy Shackelford) wrote:

>Obsolescence/replacement wasn't nearly so rapid earlier on as it is now.
>For instance, consider how long ProDOS 1.1.1 and Mac system 7.1 were current.
>And that is even more so with Apple hardware; my Quadra 840av, introduced
>in summer of '93, is just now reaching the point where software support
>is tailing off, and I consider that premature. And throw in the fact that
>Apple equipment holds its value far better than PC hardware too. The going
>price for a basic 840av is $400-500. Could you get that for a five year old
>PC?

Not really true because your black and white Mac box was updated to
a Color Classic while the GS was not updated at all from the late '80s
to early '90s time period, yet the GS was still sold at the same price
as the Color Classic and without advertisement at that.  Sounds pretty
deliberate to me.  They MADE it look obsolete to justify killing it.  If
the black and white Mac was the one not updated and the GS was
and both were sold at the same price in the early '90s, what would
have happened to the overpriced black and white Mac?

Look, I don't want Apple or the Mac dead, but if you keep trying to
defend what was done deliberately to the A2, people are going to
respond. Why not defend Apple TODAY, not the evil it did in the past.
Every company makes mistakes sometimes, even Apple. Apple
computing is not a religion, you know....

>Up until recently, Apple's marketing has been asleep at the wheel. Up until
>the Think Different campaign and the Pentium II snail and burning dancing
>Intel idiot commericals, when was the last time you recall seeing an Apple 
>ad for anything?

I've seen MANY Mac advertisements and NO Apple II advertisements
in the early '90s when Apple slam-dunked the "kill the A2" campaign
in that famous Apple Storm meeting.  I remember the "Dad, what's
a DIP" commercials pushing Macs on the grounds that Windows/
DOS PCs were hard to configure.

By the way, I liked the snail commercial, but why Apple?  I'd think
that Motorolla should be doing the advertisement....

Randy Shackelford wrote:

>Mitchell Spector wrote:
>
>:Try doing the same for the PowerMacintosh: cut all advertising,
>:drop support, keep costs high and do absolutely nothing to upgrade
>:the machine (sell the same model, unchanged year after year) and
>:see how long it lasts. You can even pretend the PC compatible is
>:on equal footing in terms of market size and popularity for this.
>:the end result will still be the same. The Apple II did not die
>:because of lack of interest, it died because of Apple Computer.
>
>I contend that it "died" because it reached the end of its life cycle. You
>could consider 68K Macs "dead" for the same reason. I suppose that the
>difference is that the Apple II crowd doesn't like the replacement for Apple
>IIs as much as the 68K crowd like theirs.

For the last time, they didn't kill the Mac, did they? You had an upgrade
path to new Macs.  They did kill the Apple II.  At the very least, a 20Mhz
GS with at least 5MB built in could have been Apple's "low end" model
in the early '90s, and it would have sold.  The so-called Mac low end
was MUCH more expensive than the average Windows/DOS PC....

The GS may have been at the end of its life cycle (the IIe was, for sure),
but there could have been A NEW APPLE II (20Mhz and 5MB WAS
DOABLE).

You can't equate the A2 with the 68k Mac.  The 68k Mac to PPC
transition was reasonable.  There was a long transition period. The
A2 just had a neglect period.

To bring this talk back to the subject in the header, the killing of the
Apple II started WAY before the Mac.  The Apple III could not have
special features accessed in II+ emulation mode, a deliberate attempt
to stunt any growth in the II line in preference for the III.  The Lisa
was lavished with marketing while Jobs publically condemned the
IIe.  When that failed, Macintosh was born. Macintosh did not do well,
but Jobs still wanted to kill the II.

By the time Jobs left, he had already done the damaged.  Apple's
policy was already set in stone: the Mac was the future and the II
was to be killed off slowly with neglect....