Welcome to Apple: A one-party state

That was a really fun time to be a Mac fan attending MacWorld Expos.

Also really frustrating. So a company called PowerComputing was killing it making Mac clones (with the full backing of Apple) and which had a very provocative ad campaign (http://www.streamstudio.com/powercomputing/campaigns.shtml), and here's what happened: The total Mac market was growing, but at the expense of Apple itself, and all the news reported on was Apple itself and its stumbling financials. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the time. Had they reported on the total Mac market instead, things would have looked stellar, but instead they reported on Apple alone, and this hurt both Apple AND the perception of the Mac market.

And that's when Steve Jobs took all the licenses back.

Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working away on creating an information appliance designed for “people first.”

Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse.

Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star.

However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the richness of the Star.

The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app for early PCs.

The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining, but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements, tradeoffs, and yes, politics.

Plenty more of that kind if thing at http://folklore.org/

There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an insanely focused vision:

https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...

Mac OS 8 and 9 were licensed to 3rd parties under Gil Amelio. That all ended, and the clones as well, when Jobs came back.

NeXTStep (or perhaps more correctly OpenStep) > Rhapsody > OS X. None of that was licensed to 3rd parties.

If this is true. It didn’t last long.

He cancelled all of the MacOS licenses by changing the next version of macOS to 8 instead of 7.7.

He also spent $100 million to buy out Power Computing’s Mac license shortly after the deal with MS.

Steve Jobs' keynotes were legendary.

MacWorld Expos were legendary (for a time). As a late teen geek demanding to attend some, the energy at those was absolutely palpable, I will never forget it. They also apparently had legendary afterparties, but I was on the cusp of 21 just when the MacWorlds were hitting their stride circa 1992: https://www.macworld.com/article/2833713/remembering-macworl...

I don't feel particularly at Apple's mercy because I still have a pretty valid alternative in Android. I only switched from Android to iPhone a couple months ago.

And when it comes to services, that's a big meh from me. Apple TV? Got the free trial, never watched anything on it. iCloud? Backups and settings sync, something which I won't be needing if I go back to Android. Music? Not using it, since I imagine it won't have much of the stuff that I want to listen to (and even if I wanted to get a streaming music service, Spotify still exists). iMessage has zero market penetration here, Apple Card doesn't exist here and I think Apple News also is not here. Apple Pay, something that I actually use and enjoy, still has an alternative in Google Pay.

Really the only product that I feel at mercy is the Mac.

That's how it strikes me as well, with the caveat that I worked for Apple pre-Cook, just before and during the Jobs years.

One could just as easily use the United States as a metaphor — obsessed with self-sufficiency, a "we're the good guys" attitude, suspicious of systems they didn't have a hand in creating, etc. The author's choice to use China seems especially petulant given that Apple is the only FAANG company whose business model isn't based on farming and selling personal data.

Isn’t that most medium-form content on the internet these days?

You have to understand the context under which this was said. Back when Jobs said it _all_ of the PDAs on the market required a stylus to operate them. And they all sucked mightily. The task of operating a PDA (let alone typing) with _fingers_ was considered impossible. So Jobs had to persuade the public that this is a better way to go. And being a Master Persuader, he did. It wasn't a "blind spot" in any shape or form, it was weapons-grade persuasion.

Nobody wants a stylus to operate their phone or ipod or what have you.

Styluses were a product of limited technology in those specific devices. And even modern stylus implementations are lackluster IMO. I had a surface book for a while I used for note taking and I ultimately just replaced that method with recording audio and typing out highlights. Styluses are good for very specific tasks such as literally drawing on a computer or precisely manipulating 3d objects since they can be much more pleasant than a mouse for that task, but for general interactions? No way, styluses are awful. And they can be lost/broken.

So I don't see how this was a blindspot for Jobs. He clearly wanted to create stuff that was the computer equivalent of high fashion with mass appeal, not niche hardware.