Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)
I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
That was absolutely revolutionary.
S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics.
The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based.
Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.
What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?
Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars).
"It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985."
Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.
I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.
But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more so today (especially for the vast amount of legacy C code.)
Until governments and companies decided fixing CVEs was getting too expensive.
Then programming with straightjacket languages suddenly is the new future.
Until AI came to be, now it is a mess again.
I wish Ada had more high-quality open source compilers and libraries, since it seems easier to write than Rust.
According to Wikipedia, the first commercial C++ implementation came out in October of 1985, MPW was released in September of 1986, and MPW C was released in July of 1987.
C++ seems to have been added sometime in ~1988 (??)
Think C 4.0 (later Symantec C/C++) with (C++ like) object extensions seems to have been released for the Mac in 1989.
And the later collaboration with Metrowerks and the PowerPlant framework.
I mentioned the podcast, because Wikipedia is not the source of universal truth.
I looked at the intro to some of the MPW C++ documentation (before posting above, thank you internet) and I think it said that MacApp could be used via the C++ to Object Pascal bridge and that a native C++ framework would be forthcoming.
https://www.folklore.org/Puzzle.html
To this day, one of my favourite word processors is WriteNow, which was ~100,000 lines of assembly.
Naturally there had to be a balance, until mid-90s what we consider AAA games, were mostly Assembly.
The observation was that linking in the Pascal library was problematic when one was storing everything on a single 400KB Micro Floppy.
Sorry if misunderstood.
This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.
The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change things much.
Let's be clear, Raskintosh isn't the Macintosh that history eventually proved successful. What Raskin wanted was a significantly simpler and cheaper machine, more squarely pitted against offerings from Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore. Not to mention Apple's own array of ecosystem failures, such as Apple III, Lisa, IIGS, or indeed Newton.
Based on the raw odds, plus hindsight, I contend it would have been an ecosystem failure even if it saw some sales success. By not reaching for the stars, it would have been yet another in a long line of quirky mid-eighties, commercially successful, but short-lived platforms.