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Comment by spikej | Hacker News Reader

"The firm ultimately shared its fate with the every other PC maker that didn't jump on the IBM clone bandwagon. The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely."

What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?

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Apple advertised in Playboy?

Might sound odd or just plain weird, but Apple targeted the mainstream and education for name recognition. In fact, a lot of people still believe Apple invented the PC when their claim to fame was building something for the non-hobbyist / professional. This mindshare carried them through some horrific management in the 80's and 90's.

I do agree with minthd that having their own OS was a factor, but Commodore could have claimed that also along with having a much more advanced machine than Apple.

[edit]here is the ad https://www.pinterest.com/pin/406942516299771530/ [NSFW pictures greyed out around it] I do believe there was a really hokey Ben Franklin version also - to give some context that where Atari was advertising

Apple was #1 in personal computing before the IBM PC crushed the Apple II. Apple dropped below 10% market share during the PC era. It took a long time for the Macintosh to get any traction, partly because Apple was years late coming out with a good hard disk machine. (1983: IBM XT, 10MB internal hard drive standard. 1987: Macintosh SE, 20MB internal hard drive optional.) By the time Apple had caught up, the IBM PC was entrenched as the standard.

Apple was not #1 in personal computing. Commodore and Atari had higher market share numbers than Apple at the time of the PC launch. The PC destroyed the 8-bit market, and the Macintosh did not take it back when launched 3 years later.

Briefly, in 1981, Apple led on revenue.[1] (XLS file of sales data.) The Commodore 64 and the Atari 400 were much cheaper machines than the Apple II. Then they were all crushed by the IBM PC and clones.

[1] http://jeremyreimer.com/uploads/Computer_Smartphone_tablet_m...

The Commodore 64 wasn't released until August 1982 and the PC did take a while to beat it in marketshare. The VIC-20 was Commodore's monster seller before that (1st computer to hit 1 million unit sales). I did not see the VIC-20 listed on the chart, so I suspect it is in the other category. Given that is was released in 1980, I find it likely that it outsold Apple and the chart is hiding the actual Commodore number. Never mind the lack of Timex / Sinclair or TI computers in that spreadsheet. Calling Apple #1 when its market share never exceeded 16% is a bit off.

VisiCalc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visicalc

I think it boils down to: Apple established a platform and ecosystem for consumers, education, and business. The S100 companies largely sold CP/M boxes for business use. When PC clones turned "business" computers into a commodity, there was still a reason to buy Apples.

I think this is it.

Apple commodified fun computing - made it affordable, a bit lateral, a bit serious, but also creative and artistic.

No other computer company tried to own that space. The 8-bit S-100 companies were all serious bizness. Then IBM ate business computing, and it was all over for them.

Atari and Amiga tried to get into that space, and did okay for quite a long time. They died when they couldn't keep up with Apple or PC hardware.

Much later Apple did the same thing again with the iPhone and the iPad. (But not Watch, which is none of the above.)

IMO this is why MS completely failed with Win 8/10. They tried to make an OS that looks like it should be playing in that space, but MS isn't culturally predisposed to being lateral, fun, or artistic.

So instead of a camper van with a rocket engine they made a Jeep and glued Lego all over the windows. (Lego is fun, right?)

> Apple commodified fun computing

This never happened. Even today, where Apple enjoys revenue and popularity, the computers Apple sells still take less than 5% of market share and they are business computers, certainly not considered "fun" ones.

> made it affordable

Until just a few years ago, Apple was -- rightfully -- considered to be selling computers much more expensive than the competition. This image changed a bit these last few years but even today, a Mac Book Pro costs comparatively 30% more than the competition.

Apple was never about being affordable. Ever.

> They died when they couldn't keep up with Apple or PC hardware.

Atari and Amiga died for one reason and one reason alone: Windows.

When they died, Apple was close to being bankrupt as well and it only survived thanks to Bill Gates saving the company by injecting cash in it (mostly forced so it could sustain anti competitivity accusations).

> IMO this is why MS completely failed with Win 8/10.

Uh? Are you talking about Windows 8 and the upcoming Windows 10? Windows 8 was a pretty big success, even though it never got as popular as Windows 7 or XP.

Not much, really. I would even dispute the premise: the Commodore Amiga was still a viable platform up through the mid-'90s, for instance, and Atari's ST was still around and kicking then too.

If a few -- and only a few -- things had gone differently, Commodore could be Apple. The Amiga was ahead of its time and was in many ways far better than the Macintosh (at the time, or even a bit later).

Apple succeeded because it found two niches to sustain it -- education, design. Both Commodore and Apple had small but enthusiastic base of fans, but it's been shown time and again that fans alone are not enough to sustain a whole platform or company.

Amiga was well represented until the late 90s when the print magazines died off and that was the death knell. Both Amiga and Atari were in Computer Shopper too, albeit token pages.

Much or most of the Amiga and Atari ST installed base in the '90s was "low quality" though: users who didn't have hard disks and likely couldn't afford one, who were possibly using a TV and likely couldn't afford a decent monitor, who didn't have a printer and who were mostly buying games that came on booter floppies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter . Those guys would have had trouble using business/"productivity" software effectively even if they'd been interested in buying it. Obviously there were better-equipped Amiga and ST systems too, but by and large Apple and the PC had run away with the users who had the budget and the inclination to run application software.

(In general, the serious cost barrier of a hard disk and a decent monitor as more or less the price of entry to serious computing almost certainly had a major impact on the shape of the computing industry until pretty recently.)

Apple had a strong foothold in education with the Apple II, and the Macintosh had better graphics capabilities than stock PCs into the 90s giving Apple a strong presence in the design industry.

Momentum and brand, and a band of loyal enthusiasts to carry the flag through the dark years.

There was also an insistence on quality for a long time, and to be something else other than a business computer.

It's really a miracle they survived. It was very close. I can remember a time when we would laugh at people for persisting with an Apple. In those days there was hardly any software available, and career-wise, it looked like the deadest of dead ends.

The first time I remember this changing was circa 2003 when a friend confided he'd bought an Apple and was attempting to re-learn how to use it. It sounded odd at the time (he previously had been a linux installer) and I distinctly remember it because it was the earliest indicator of a change in the wind.

> What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?

Others have given decent answers, but, honestly, I don't think Apple was all that different. As you noted, "... even then, just barely."

We tend to think of Apple rather differently, today. But remember that Apple wasn't really such a big deal 20 years ago. The Apple that just barely made it through the 1980s and the Apple that reworked NeXTSTEP into OS X, brought out the iPhone, etc., are rather different beasts. They share a name and some corporate infrastructure, but not a lot else, really.

They were one of the largest going into the battle, and had entrenched positions in niche industries (mostly education).

They bundled their machine with their own OS. Vector didn't.

Many of the non-Apple, non-IBM-clone personal computer companies bundled machines with their own OS. Doing that may distinguish Apple from Vector, but it doesn't explain why Apple alone succeeded of the non-IBM personal computer firms of the time (being the best established when the IBM onslaught came, OTOH, might.)

They were entrenched in a few niche markets: Education, Music Production, Desktop Publishing. Photoshop, Pagemaker, ProTools were all Mac first, so that's where the users were and they were locked in due to files, plugins, fonts etc.

None of that stuff existed yet. We're talking about the CP/M era companies that failed to transition to the IBM PC era, essentially pre-Mac, though some of them did last into the late eighties, IIRC.

Oops. Misread "survive to the 90s" as "survive the 90s"

Technically, Atari and Commodore survived to the 90's but both were gone by the mid 90's. Along with Jay Miner, sadly.

[edit] I often wonder if there had been a in the same price range, better 16-bit or 32-bit successor to the 6502 would things have turned out differently?

Those things did come to exist in the '80s, and they were what helped the Mac to survive that decade. PageMaker and the Apple LaserWriter were announced on the same day in early 1985. And while by the late '90s it was mostly lock-in and loyalty that were keeping graphics and publishing professionals on the Mac, in the late '80s the Macintosh clearly was the best platform for GUI print and graphics applications (unless you considered workstation systems maybe, which most users weren't doing). Windows didn't take off until version 3.0 in 1990; Photoshop wasn't available for it until 1992. (Photoshop itself wasn't so dominant at that stage though.) The Mac was the flagship platform even for Microsoft's GUI office software: both Word and Excel were originally Mac software, Word for Windows didn't arrive until '89, and WinWord didn't become a hit until Windows 3.0 and WinWord 1.1 in 1990. In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that "core" Microsoft—the MS that dominated computing with Windows and Office, rather than the earlier company that produced good BASICs and got lucky with MS-DOS—was fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) that got ideas above its station.

That's how I remember it. The Mac came out only four years after the IBM PC and allowed Apple to sew up the GUI market for about five years. They were able to maintain a big quality edge for far longer.

Apple also introduced the first LAN (Apple Talk in 1985) you could set up pretty much by just connecting your Macs with a cable. I recall working at places where the only way you could transfer data between the PCs was by floppy, but people who had managed to convince management they needed a Mac were all wired together. Microsoft didn't introduce Windows for Workgroups for another seven years.

If Apple had tried to evolve the II series they probably wouldn't have survived.

A well kept secret was that Apple sold an AppleTalk card for the IBM PC, which was hands down the easiest way to network PCs. That's how I laser printed my dissertation. ;-)

The Apple II could not evolve. It was locked down by the expectation that new systems would run old software, and the old software made all kinds of nonstandard system calls, e.g., jumping into the middle of system routines to save one or two cycles. In other words, Apple didn't know their own software interface. Even upgrading to the IIe was a heroic undertaking. This experience is why, I believe, the Mac was always a closed system.

Well, there was Novell NetWare some time before Windows for Workgroups arrived. Of course the crushing of NetWare was a major campaign in Microsoft's war for dominance over personal computing.

Sure, but NetWare was the industrial strength solution. It was too expensive to set it up at home or at a company with fifty employees.

They pioneered cheap network hardware with NE2000.

Who would be crazy enough to network 50 endpoints over slow serial daisy chain? Arcnet was another story, but not significantly cheaper.

Alpha Micro, while perhaps not exactly a consumer PC company, is a microcomputer company from those days that's still alive.

Not much. For decades, Apple was holding on to a pretty small share of the market, enough to survive.

Microsoft bailed them out to avoid further antitrust inquiries.

That came much later: the Microsoft investment was announced in 1997, at Steve Jobs' first keynote after returning to Apple.

But regardless, I think Apple could have easily ended up just the same as the others without it.

The "bailout" was a payoff for IP infringement and was small potatoes, something like $150 million.

Assuming you mean the Mac IP and if so I believe Microsoft had a cross licensing deal in place which would cover it. It never got to litigation though.

To be fair Commodore and Atari were still making their own computers (Amiga/ST) in the early nineties. More accurate would be "consumer PC company that survived into the 1995s"

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