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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

My dad bought an Apple II back in the day, and I remember a lot of fun times playing games such as Choplifter and Conan. Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning; but the Apple II wasn't anything like the Macintosh, it was a geek computer built by an engineering genius (Wozniak) which was successful due to its vast and diverse software library rather than its looks.

I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.

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> Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning

I don’t think so. They wanted to be better, but not more expensive. Certainly, a lot of Woz’s hardware was dirt cheap for what it did and sacrificed programmability.

For example, the Apple 2 graphics modes “were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_...), and Personal Computer World wrote “no-one has colour graphics like this at this sort of price” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception)

Similarly, WOZ’s disk controller cut corners to be cheap relative to the competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview: “The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations.”)

What corners did he cut, exactly? The only engineering screwup I can think of with regard to the Disk ][ system was that the original DOS could have been several times faster if the tracks had been laid out in the opposite order. That was a software problem, fixed later with ProDOS and with numerous third-party utilities. Hardware-wise, it was basically unassailable.

I wouldn't characterize the Disk II controller as "cutting corners" (a term which connotes shoddy design/construction or reduced quality) but instead as using clever tricks to do more with less. By most accounts it did the job at least as well as the contemporary standard. For one thing, Wozniak's design was able to pack the sectors tighter than the standard radial configuration[0], resulting in a slight increase in disk capacity compared to the standard formatting.

The lasting legacy of the Apple II has been much more "No-one has colour graphics like this" than "peculiar"... though the machine was designed around multiples of TV signal clocks which made future upgrades challenging. They were able to push the platform surprisingly far with the IIGS.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II#Disk_II

They were more expensive for the consumers. Apple's engineering acumen allowed them to keep a higher profit margin.

> They were more expensive for the consumers

The claim I replied to isn’t that Apple always was more expensive, but that it always wanted to be more expensive, even back in the beginning. Who doesn’t want to sell their product for more money? I also think that, certainly in the beginning, they wanted to build better products and accepted higher costs.

Also, what computer with comparable features could people buy “even back in the beginning” for less? One could argue there were none when the Apple II debuted.

The PET and TRS-80 were a lot cheaper ($1298 vs $795 respectively $599,95) and shipped with displays but didn’t do colour. The PET and, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard, also the TRS-80 had an inferior keyboard.

Steve Jobs at the start of Apple was inspired by Sony and wanted to market Apple's consumer electronics as high-quality consumer electronics. Jobs was always very keenly interested in marketing and for Apple a central part of marketing and ads is building a story around people rather than technology which is something Apple's held to from the start, though their approach did evolve. The "premium" marketing was a seed planted from the beginning, but later it became a response to becoming a minority player in personal computing, Apple had to differentiate to survive and that was the way to do it, though it was always nascent, since Jobs wanted Apple to be like Sony from the beginning, a premium consumer electronics company.

I think jobs said on stage back in 97' when he returned something like: "I don't care if we're different, we want want to be much better".

Folklore.org is a blast to read learning about the people who put the Macintosh together.

Meanwhile Samsung has learned to play the premium game and is beating Apple in innovation, with their $1800 flip phone, Z Fold 5.

I think flip phones are a pretty mature product category actually. Although a flip smartphone is more like a Nintendo DS.

I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II.

They very much did, just like lots of buyers of different competing consumer products. As to the image, Apple cultivated it almost from the start.

If anything, old Apple required more suspension of disbelief than current Apple - you bought something that was sold to you as a luxury item but wasn't built like one.

> I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.

There was quite a bit of pre-Jobs snobbery. RISC-vs-CISC was one, "pro designers and artists [aka people with taste] use these!" was another common one, "have fun with DOS and viruses" was one...

It was born out of badly losing on marketshare for years. It was also somewhat invisible if you weren't an avid Mac user or Mac hater since at 3% marketshare or whatever, most people didn't know many people to hear it from in the first place!

From what I saw, the iMac/Aqua ("Fisher Price" if you weren't a fan) era didn't even turn around the cool factor for the general public nearly as much as the Intel Macs - "now I can just boot Windows if I have to, at least" to get a lot more curious people to give Macs a shot. Then they were cool for a while. Now they're common enough that I don't think "cool" is the right word vs just "pricey/status-y".

The pre-iMac snobbery was when Mac were considered to be the BMW of computers - “it just works”. When the iMac came out the snobbery change when color iMacs showed up on TV shows. The snobbery become more younger, urban and hipster with the iPod.

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