Re: Apple III question (couldn't find a 3 group to ask)

[karen@uab.edu (bathswife)]

Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<o9s2g09o5o8emng0jps5mdao24ablhggua@4ax.com>...
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 08:41:08 -0500, exegete@nunya.biz wrote:
> 
> >My point is, that many have telescoped those years, and ignored that 
> >there was development for the II. Did Apple focus on other machines? 
> >Yes. Did Apple largely (but not totally) ignore extending and enhancing 
> >the II? Yes. Did the /// kill the II? No. The Mac did. And it took the 
> >Mac 2-3 years to do so! The Mac only began to be successful with the 
> >Plus model, and that was 1.5 - 2 years after January 1984!
> 
> My personal take on this is that the Mac didn't kill the Apple II,
> Apple's management did.  They ignored the fact that the Apple II was
> selling better than their newer product and ignored their installed
> customer base.  Even so, they still didn't managed to kill the Apple
> II for a very long time.

I think a combination of things 'killed the Apple II'  First of all,
here is a brief timeline that I took from "Compute's Apple" Vol.1, No.
2 January 1986.:

In Summer of 1980 Apple announced the Apple III
In September of 1980 130,000 Apple II computers had been sold so far

By the end of 1982 Apple was selling 33,000 computers a month.

January 1983 Lisa and Apple IIe introduced.
May 1983 John Sculley becomes Pres. of Apple 

January 1984 Macintosh introduced.
April 1984 Apple IIc Introduced.

April 1985 Apple discontinues Lisa.
June 1985 the so called "Palace Revolt"
(Compute's Apple 1986)

Don't forget that by the time Mac & Apple IIe were introduced, Apple
wasn't the only game in the market anymore.  Radio Shack/Tandy, IBM,
Amiga, Commodore and lots of others were producing similar machines so
there was a lot more competition.

Steve Wozniak has said a lot of things and at the time that he made
the statement that he thought the /// had killed the Apple II, I'm
sure he thought that was true.

In an interview conducted with Woz in January, 1984 by "SOFT TALK"
magazine, Woz says, "Obviously anyone that sees or uses the
Lisa/Macintosh user interface style realizes that it will be the only
choice for computers by the end of the decade. And this is a good
direction for the Apple II to be in-it's happening already with the
use of a lot of hi-res screens, even for text in different fonts,
treating the screen as bits rather than characters, and with
windowing.  It's more efficient.

One problem we've got is that there are about twenty video modes in
the Apple IIe.  In the Lisa or Macintosh there's one video mode and it
does everything.  That's a level of simplification that becomes very
affordable when RAM costs come down.  You really will want the one
video mode and just have graphics and text all on the same screen. 
Performancewise the eight-bit machine would just be running those
high-speed versions of the processor as a way to get higher
performance.

For nearly ten years, the cost of the typical system that the end user
wants has remained about constant, but the functions have gone up. 
It's pretty obvious that the prices of microcomputer systems aren't
going to go up in the next year to two years, but by two years from
now 256K will be the standard in every single micro.

Taking a look at the major peripherals on the IIe that are doing well
gives a good idea of the directions it could go in.  First there's
higher speed....In the Apple II line we ought to head toward things
like speech, music generation, all the arcade boards-but I don't think
sprites are needed just yet.
In ten years we'll be able to have the equivalent of the Apple II for
maybe a couple of hundred bucks.  In other words, we won't be spending
more than a couple of hundred bucks per student.  There is no way to
imagine a thousand-dollar computer per student, because today there is
nothing available that's near a thousand dollars for students.

We could actually get by okay without too many computers in school.  I
hate to say it, but the computer is not the only key or the only way
to live your life.  Only a small segment of people will have to talk
very well to computers, and they'll be largely computer programmers
and developers.  Other than that, we should be able to get the basics
in school.  Will computers make IQs go up?  I have doubts, it's not
clear to me."
(SOFTALK January 1984)

What Woz says in that interview is significant in two different ways.
First of all he mentioned the Lisa/Macintosh interface and
simplification.  Secondly, in that last paragraph, he said, to
paraphrase,  'that only a few people would have to talk very well with
computers'.

Those two statements taken together with the growing competition in
the personal computer market is important.  First of all, the vast
majority of personal computer owners today know nothing whatsoever
about programming but can operate their computers rather well.  They
don't know enough to understand the limits of the simplification (ie.,
lisa/mac/windows type interface) and probably don't care (most
anyway).  And there are millions of them, make that billions.  Woz
goes on to say that only a small number of people will have to be able
to talk to their computers...obviously he means the people who have
the ability and want to modify through programming the features of
their personal computers....and these are the people who grew up on
Apple II's and learned how to 'talk' to their computers.
And so to my thinking, the bottom line is about numbers.  There are
billions of people who are perfectly willing to settle for computers
they don't have to learn to talk to in order to use in their homes and
businesses.  If Apple hadn't continued to push the Mac line and
concentrated on Apple II line, they would have been competing with
those other companies like Radio Shack and Commodore and the easy to
use interface (simplified for the masses) would have continued in much
the same way they have today except without the Macintosh.  It was
about business, numbers and money.

Is there still a market for computers that can be 'talked to'?  Those
of us still using Apple II's that pine away for the 'good old days'
are probably using some form of Linux or something comparable but  are
limited by what can be done with the hardware aren't they? I don't
know...I'm actually new to the Apple II having just bought one used
but prefer using it to write on for some inexplicable reason.
  Why can't there be a personal computer using faster processors and
newer technology that can be 'talked to'....modified and with the
options that 'simplification' for the masses took away?  Is that
impossible?  I don't know.  How many people would be interested in a
machine like that and willing to pay for it (I 'm sure it would cost
more than the average pc made today)?