Re: Apple ///?

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford) writes...

>In article <29MAR199700464722@vax2.concordia.ca>,
>Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>>     It was Apple's attempt at a business machine (along the lines of
>>the original IBM PC, which surfaced a year later) and intended to be
>>the replacement for the Apple II. The Apple III was also created to
>>keep the company profitable until the "future" of the company was to
>>be introduced -- the Apple Lisa.
>
>I don't really think the III was meant as a replacement for the II. IIIs
>were meant strictly for business and IIs for home and school. It's hard
>to say whether Apple planned the Lisa to amount to much considering that it
>cost ten grand when it came out and the Mac followed only a year later.

    The Apple III was not meant as an immediate replacement, but certainly
an eventual one. Development on the Apple II line was put on hold during
the years the III existed, notice the gap in years from the Apple II Plus
(1979) until the Apple IIe (1983)? Furthermore, if Apple truly planned to
support both lines, why did they purposely cripple the Apple II emulation
mode on the III? Why didn't they release an enhanced Apple II model then?
They were trying to discourage interest in the Apple II, that's why.

    As for the Lisa, it was supposed to be the future of the company. The
Mac was just a scaled down and cheaper version of it (kind of like a baby
Lisa). The Lisa turned out to be a failure, so they ended up pushing the
Mac instead, although I'm not sure they had it planned that way.

>Also, III production topped 100000 from what I've heard, reasonably 
>successful for that period. As the Softalk article from June '84 eulogizing 
>the III said, there were plenty of companies who would have loved to achieve 
>the III's success.

    That's a fair number (more than I originally thought) but peanuts 
compared to the number of Apple II machines sold (6-8 million was it?). 
I'm sure even pre-Mac Pluses sold topped that number. It's a significant 
amount, but still few enough where III's are not all that common.

>>     As things turned out, the Apple III was a miserable failure and
>>so was the Apple Lisa. Despite that, the Apple II not only kept the
>>company afloat, but highly profitable too (which came as a surprise
>>to management at the Apple Computer). Oddly enough, Apple once again
>>decided to try and replace the Apple II, this time with the Macintosh,
>>but yet again their new computer didn't do to well and _again_ it was
>>the Apple II that kept the company afloat and profitable. By the late
>>80's the Mac was strong enough to stand on it's own though, so this
>>3rd replacement had worked out. Ironically though, now that Apple has
>>finally killed off the Apple II, it doesn't look like the company will
>>have any future. :)
>
>I wouldn't write 'em off quite so fast. 50000 Powerbook 3400s sold in a two
>week stretch, double digit market share again, and other stuff says they're
>on the way back. They're what, the third best selling brand these days?

    I just read they laid off something like 4000-5000 workers a few weeks
back. Come to think of it, each time I see something about Apple mentioned
in the business section of the newspaper, it's more bad-news. I'm still
watching to see what happens, but I'm wouldn't buy stock in the company. ;)

    With all the PC can do (preemptive multitasking, real music synthesis,
complex games, more variety/expandability, etc.) which the Mac can't do or
offer at the moment, along with the fact PC clones are cheaper, custom
configurable and more available -- not to mention have a GUI more than
comparable to the Finder -- how does Apple expect to survive? The PowerMac
hasn't exactly made people stop dead in their tracks and jump back to
Apple, nor has System 7.5.6 made much of a splash in the computer world.
I may sound like I'm putting down the Mac, but there needs to be significant
_advantages_ to make people think twice before rushing out and buying a
generic PC clone. The argument about easy of use and plug'n'play doesn't
cut it anymore, PC's have or are quickly catching up in that area, so what's
left? I'm not much of a PC fan, but when it came time to choose between the
two, I found more pluses on the PC side.

    Apple has had a history of abandoning it's users in terms of support.
I've seen it done with the Apple III, the Lisa and first hand as an
Apple II owner (lately I've even seen repeating trends with the Mac).
It's rather like patting a dog and getting your hand bit, your not going
to try and pat the dog again so quickly. Still, this is only part of it,
just a bad taste in my mouth and probably others out there. If Apple were
selling technology I liked, I'd probably hold back my gripes and purchase
from them again. Unfortunately the Mac has failed to catch my interest,
and I'm turned off by the low-quality hardware they're now being made up
of (at one time if you bought Apple hardware, you _knew_ it was quality,
but today they're cutting back and throwing any junk at the users in hopes
that they'll be computer "newbies" and not know any better). There is
a whole list of reasons why I don't see a future for Apple, and there
most likely won't be, unless things drastically change...

>I'm still having trouble figuring how people think the II could still be
>a state of the art platform in the late '90s, held back by '70s architecture.
>Apple could do a PCI card like their Pentium DOS card, or offer Gus as a
>free product, but only running on an up to date platform.

    I'm talking about the Apple IIgs, it was different from the rest of
the Apple II line. You won't get any argument from me about pushing the
Apple IIe, IIc or IIc+ in the 90's, that would have been a mistake. They
could however, have updated the IIgs, just as they did with the original
Mac 128 (as someone else mentioned here a few months ago). Had they done
that, I'll bet they wouldn't have lost most of the home and education
market to PC clones. They had their foot in the door there, but yanked it
out and came back later with Macs as a solution -- bad move (yes, the Mac
is a fine computer, but an evolved IIgs would have been a better solution
for home users and schools. Or at the very least, Apple could have held
onto that market longer). What was even the point of the IIgs if they
were just planning to kill it all along?

>IIIs don't have a delete key, but III pluses have it plus a keyboard resem-
>bling the //e keyboard with italic lettering. Also a slick two speed setup
>on the arrow keys. Press them normally and they work like the rest of the
>keys, but press 'em hard and they repeat much faster.

    That was a pretty neat feature, which incidentally, made it over to
the Apple IIgs (you can mimic that Apple III feature with the arrow keys
by holding down 'Control' when pressing them).

>>    More important was what it can't do. Apple purposely added extra logic
>>to the motherboard to _prevent_ it's Apple II emulation mode from accessing
>>the advanced features of the machine. By purposely crippling the product,
>>this shows just what kind of company Apple Computer is (things didn't change
>>years later when the Apple IIgs was introduced, it too had things purposely
>>crippled or left out so to force you to buy them as extras). As for software,
>>little was really written, other than business applications and productivity
>>software.
>
>Well remember that it's only ][ plus emulation, which, if you supported more
>stuff than a ][ plus could do, wouldn't qualify as emulation any more. And
>would cause compatibility problems if people wrote apps to use III features
>under emulation. Considering that, I'd say the decision makes sense.

    Well, what about adding chips to the motherboard to _prevent_ programmers 
from writing their own emulation boot disk to take advantage of the advanced
features? I don't know, but a company that goes out of it's way to cripple
their product doesn't stand up well in my eyes. Not qualify as emulation
anymore? It was standard for Apple II Pluses to have 64K RAM, in fact lots
of old software required that amount to run. You couldn't use more than 48K
on the III. What about allowing users to use lowercase characters, would that
have been so terrible? If you want to follow that logic, then the Apple IIgs
should not have allowed it's Apple IIe emulation anymore than 64K (what was
supplied on the motherboard) or faster speed, since it wouldn't qualify as
emulation anymore. Maybe there should have been chips on the motherboard
on the GS to block access to SHR graphics and the Ensoniq?

>I can't think of any way Apple crippled the IIgs myself, aside from not
>upping the clock speed when ROM 3s came out, since faster 65816s were
>plentiful by then. Guess they didn't want to have to offer an upgrade.
>"Install system software 5.0" is what they told ROM 01 owners when ROM 3
>came out.

    How about that and not adding more memory to the motherboard, not
allowing anymore than 4 MB of DMA memory in the expansion slot, never
adding stereo output or a digitizer input. Not adding a measly extra
64K of RAM for the Ensoniq chip for that matter. How about leaving the
graphics limited to only 16 colors per scanline, 200 lines vertical
resolution, no internal hardrive/floppy drives (or motherboard support
for FDHD SuperDrives or SCSI). I could probably name a dozen more ways
it was left crippled. Even price for that matter, why did Apple keep
the price of the IIgs so high for years, while dropping the prices on
Macs? Like I once said before, if the engineers at Apple couldn't
figure out how to add more memory to the motherboard, or how to stick
a faster 65C816 on there or update the VGC to support more color
depth and resolution, maybe then it's no wonder they're now on the
verge of disappearing.

    Apple is not some kindhearted, caring company. In fact they don't
even seem capable of making levelheaded business decisions (putting
so much effort into killing a successful product is not a way to be
profitable). I disagree with people who blindly bash the Macintosh
because Apple choose it over the Apple II (I like to judge a machine
for the machine itself, not the company) but by the same token, I
no more like it when Apple blindly praise Apple and pretend what
they did in the past didn't happen (or try and find logic in it).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca