History of Apple Computer
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History of Apple Computer
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[edit] Introduction
Apple Computer took the world by storm in 1977 with the first successful personal computer, the Apple II. The II was not only the first successful personal computer, it was the first successful computer to have a keyboard and monitor, a form which has come to be synonymous with "computer" to many. The II sold millions of units, making Apple a billion dollar company. That alone would have been remarkable for a company founded by two men in their twenties on a shoestring budget, but in 1983 Apple had another hit with the Macintosh model. The "Mac" was the first successful personal computer with a graphical user interface complete with mouse, windows, menus. Along with the Apple LaserWriter, one of the earliest mass-market Laser Printers, the Mac redefined how a computer should be used, and all personal computers since have worked like the Mac. Unit sales were again, in the millions. At the turn of the decade Apple released a line of attractive, usable laptop computers and again made millions. Apple appeared to be a charmed company; Apple products were innovative in both design and engineering, high quality, and fun to use. Legions of Apple fans drooled over press releases and went to extremes such as tattooing the Apple logo on their bodies in their expression of Apple-philia.
But by the mid 90's Apple was a shadow of its former self. With few exceptions, Apple products had become overpriced and uninspired; the majority of the product line consisted of indistinct rehashes of the 1983 Macintosh, with relatively minor improvements. Competing products beat the Macintosh in performance in almost every dimension save style, typically at a significantly lower price.
Apple was no longer a technological leader and struggled to stay afloat as the company lost money in all of 1994, 95, 96, and 97. The first quarter of 1997 marked a nadir, as Apple stock hit a 12-year low of $4 and the company reported a $708 million loss. Later that year, Apple's primary competitor, facing antitrust charges, infused Apple with $150 million to prevent looming disaster[1]. Then, just as the end looked imminent, things turned around. Apple's stock price leveled off as the company began to earn meager profits again. New, competitive products began to hit store shelves, slowly at first, but by the early 2000s the company was out of trouble. As of 2006, the company has a $72 billion valuation and is the envy of the high-tech world.
So what had happened? How did this company go from greatness to pariah, then back again? As with all our stories, there are a lot of angles.
[edit] Early successes
[edit] The Apple II
[edit] And failures
[edit] The Apple III
[edit] The Apple Lisa
[edit] The Macintosh 128k debacle
[edit] Platform Wars
In 1983 Apple released the Macintosh. Twenty years later, all computers still resemble what the Mac brought to the market. Apple had a long head start on the competition, the first successful competing product was Microsoft Windows 3.1, released in 1992 (GEOS, released in 1986, failed). In technology-years this was an eternity, but Apple failed to capitalize.
See The "Apple Could Have Been Microsoft" Myth[2]
[edit] Winner-takes-all Platform Wars
[edit] Army of users familiar with one platform
[edit] Suites of integrated software
Discuss Microsoft's "Suite" strategy, how it erected a barrier to entry for Apple and any other competitor.
Someone could build a better Word processor or a better spreadsheet, or a better powerpoint, but they wouldn't be able to build all three at the same time.
Network effects?
Discuss the Apple rip-off myth. Or was it?
[edit] Apple should have had an advantage
Notable platform lesson: Platform ownership makes advancements easier to deliver to users.[3]
Microsoft had to worry about someone eating their MS-DOS cow while they tried to push a move to OS/2 or Windows. IBM couldn't push new hardware. Apple had no such worries -- it could change both.
[edit] The Backwards Compatibility Curse and a Solution
If it lacked backwards compatibility, Apple would have to convince developers to port all their applications before anyone would buy it. But if nobody had it, why build applications for it? Conversely, if it provided flawless backward compatibility with the Mac, then its new features might never be really put to use by developers.
These same problems were faced by Microsoft and IBM in trying to establish OS/2 as a new platform: how different from DOS could it afford to be? While OS/2 was beginning to offer a much stronger foundation than the aging MS-DOS, developers weren't quick to jump on OS/2 development because it wasn't yet widely deployed.
Notable platform lesson: The catch-22 of development support for new platforms is one of the most significant barriers for entry.[4]
Simulating a complete Mac in Copland was difficult. It took 8 years for the Mac to simulate Apple IIs, with the Apple IIe Card [[5]]. Simulating the Mac didn't happen till OSX.
Apple does an end-run around compatibility curse nowadays. Software works for two cycles, then must be rebuilt. Apple won't support anything older.
The "Universal binary" strategy where software developers build PowerPC and Intel binaries simultaneously and ship them on the same CD. Makes transition more comfortable for software producers and consumers.[6]
[edit] Disadvantages of closed hardware
Apple's closed system gave Apple a monopoly on hardware. This let Apple charge far more for its gear than it could have in a competitive market (some disagree -- see the apple overprcing myth). The closed model has other major advantages; Apple could make major changes to its designs, for instance.
But it also resulted in, possibly, smaller market share and correspondingly smaller incentives for suppliers to compete and improve their products. While Intel, AMD, and Cyrix competed to make cheaper and faster CPUs, Apple's sole CPU supplier, Motorola, produced mediocre products.
Notable platform lessons: supporting an integrated system is far easier than supporting a product of assembled parts from different vendors.[7]
[edit] Hamstrung by an Established User Base
A factor in the failure of any technology company that must be considered is technical incompetence. Apple displayed a measure of this, perhaps most of all in its 90's operating system development work.
See "hitting the wall": [8]
The initial incarnation of the Macintosh OS had been created for the minimal hardware platform that was available in 1983; tradeoffs had been made to meet time-to-market and cost constraints. By 1989, affordable hardware had become much more powerful, and Apple management was meeting to discuss redesign of the OS to adapt to the changing needs of the market. Some features, such as a user interface with color, were added fairly quickly, but the less superficial features necessary to make the Mac competitive beyond the early 90's proved more challenging. Indeed, by 1997, this next generation of Mac OS, codenamed "Copland", was incomplete with no foreseeable ship date. On the advice of engineering manager Ellen Hancock, Apple CEO Gil Amelio killed Copland. What had happened?
Copland seemed to incorporate all the right ideas. For instance, a marquee Copland feature was "memory protection". Memory protection prevents poorly written software from causing system crashes -- this hadn't been a significant issue in the earlier Macs, which only ran one program at a time, but beefed-up early 90's Macs ran many more programs concurrently and accordingly, crashed much more often. Memory protection technology had been present in UNIX for decades; cheaper and more powerful hardware in the early 1990s made it both technologically feasible and a competitive must-have for personal computers, and appeared in 1992 versions of Microsoft Windows. Copland also included a "microkernel" and operating system "services": both respected means of organizing a modern OS. Copland also included a virtual machine called the "blue box" which would run an older version of Mac OS for backwards compatibility and a simple upgrade path for existing customers. Apple's heart seems to have been in the right place.
But technically Copland proved difficult to execute. To illustrate one technical hurdle: Copland aimed to use no more than 4MB of memory, but the backward compatibility mode demanded a complete, memory-resident version of Mac OS 7, consuming 2.5MB of memory; two-thirds of the Copland memory budget was consumed before the first line of code was written. Interestingly, the 4MB limit may have seemed reasonable in 1992 when Copland was initially scoped out, but, as Copland fell behind it became quaint: 64MB of memory was standard by 1997.
Insiders report that technical difficulties like this were only part of the problem. Apple by the mid-90s had assumed the posture of a research organization. The regular releases, firm timelines and deliverables lists characteristic of successful software companies ceased to exist. Mac OS upgrades had become little more than bundles of shareware apps -- a widely touted but hardly notable feature of Mac OS 8 was an interface tweak known as "springing folders". "Why Apple Failed" talks of "Snowball Projects": projects which, like snowballs rolling down hills in cartoons, had grown larger and larger until they had only a snowball's chance in hell of completion. These projects became unkillable, because in their growth they had also grown to contain strategic technologies the company believed it couldn't do without. Copland was not the only failed project of the era -- X, Y, and Z also bombed.
The Copland goals eventually materialized, years later, in Mac OS X.
See "The Rise of Windows"[9] Rather than working to maintain its lead of the graphic desktop, in the early 90's Apple seemed content to doodle around with "advanced technology" and gained comfort in pointing out that it had already delivered what Microsoft was trying to build with Windows. That turned out to be a disastrous path for Apple, but the full consequences were hidden under a temporary illusion of apparent productivity.
Apple had delivered A/UX, a Unix distribution with impressive support for the Mac system software; played around with porting System 7 to the PC; experimented with a new RISC workstation platform; begun work on a media architecture called QuickTime; developed the Newton handheld computer and a line of cameras, scanners and other peripherals; described a new messaging platform called PowerTalk; and incubated various other enabling technologies, but was having trouble creating any significantly marketable products beyond the Mac.
Notable platform lesson: Real artists ship!
[edit] Mid 90s -- continued incompetence, or sowing what was reaped
[edit] Late 90s attempts at rebuilding
[edit] 2000s resurgence
[edit] Why?
[edit] Internals organization?
[edit] Engineering
[edit] Marketing
[edit] Arrogance
[edit] Disruptive technologies
[edit] Technical incompetence, the wasted years
[edit] Poor pricing?
Macs used quite expensive machines starting at nearly $1500 where one could pick up a Windows-based PC for about $500. However, Recent price drops with products such as the Mac mini and the white polycarbonate MacBook, Macs have become more accessible to the general public.
