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Comment by rahen | Hacker News Reader

What shortsightedness from Apple. By aiming to be the sole player in the market and charging exorbitant prices, they paved the way for the IBM PC where the market was wide open and the ecosystem thriving.

After the threats and harassing from Apple, all those manufacturers quickly started producing PC compatibles instead of Apple II compatibles, thereby reducing the Apple II market presence compared to the PC.

Classic case of greed at work.

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What really turned developers away from Apple after the Apple II was not only the price but that you couldn’t sit down at a Macintosh and start programming it like you could with an Apple II. You couldn’t really do that sitting in front of a PC either unless you were happy with GW BASiC, or you bought a Borland compiler, but at least there were less obstructions in your path if you wanted to develop a PC application versus an Apple application. The Macintosh felt like a locked down black box, like you bought a car with the hood welded shut. Overall, PCs were just much more accommodating to developers than the Apple products until Steve Jobs came back and switched everything over to UNIX-based operating system.

No need for a borland compiler, just type your assembly right into debug.exe!

HyperCard should have been that system. I really wonder what the Mac would have been like in the 90s if every machine had that in ROM, ready to go. The web would probably have been a bit different.

You might find the story of MacBasic interesting: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Apple intended to ship the Mac with a programming language, a really nice threaded and graphical Basic, but Bill Gates put the squeeze on them.

IBM losing control over the PC platform was more like a happy historical accident though, if the IBM beancounters would have taken the PC platform any serious, they wouldn't have allowed that to happen.

Did they really expect the industry to follow them into the EISA venture?

EISA was the open alternative to IBM's MCA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...

> By aiming to be the sole player in the market and charging exorbitant prices, they paved the way for the IBM PC where the market was wide open and the ecosystem thriving.

And they did it again, paving the way for the Raspberry Pi cyberdeck market that's wide open and the ecosystem thriving. Ken Thompson was the canary.

In the long term though it accidentally worked out since now they have complete integration and control and don't have to worry about the mess of dealing with other manufacturers. History is weird sometimes, and by sometimes I mean all the time.

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