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Comment by fulladder | Hacker News Reader

I like Howard's blog. However, in this post and many others, he seems to regard the Mac as a continuous story line from 1984 to the present.

I actually think the Apple of today is completely different company than the Apple of the late 70s / early 80s, and the two companies have basically nothing in common at this point. The way I see it, before the iPhone, Apple had never had any truly mass market, "it's for everybody" product line. They had a long series of niche products. The iPhone really changed them, in ways good and bad.

Nevertheless, I appreciate Howard's perspective, even if I'm not totally bought into it.

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* before the iPod

Maybe its success didn’t reach global scale, but I think it’s the iPod that turned Apple Computers Inc into Apple Inc.

Yeah, the iPod was a major step along the way to the iPhone. I guess the difference to me is that MP3 players were never something that literally everyone was going to feel a need to own. Not everyone listens to music or podcasts, but everyone needs to communicate. It's a size-of-market thing, the difference between "our market is anybody who listens to music" vs "our market is all human beings." A successful product in that second category feels much different to me than a successful product in the former category.

At the time though it really felt everyone would one day own an mp3. The entire world had a walkman. The mp3 player was like a 10x better version of that.

The Walkman was a hugely successful product, but I don't think that everyone owned one. It was popular with teenagers, exercise/fitness enthusiasts, and a few other categories. It wasn't something that a businessman would have owned, or an elderly person, or a poor person. Today, however, all of those people own smartphones.

I really think it was the iPhone that changed Apple.

Everyone had a little radio/tapedeck/cd player. I had like a half dozen of these devices laying around my home. You go on a walk and everyone has one of these things strapped to their hip. I assume business people still want to listen to the baseball game taking the commuter rail home.

> The entire world had a walkman

Absolutely not the case.

Wikipedia cites an article in Japanese saying that about 220 million Sony Walkman devices were produced before discontinuation in 2010. Even if you quadruple that for other brands, you're not even close to 1/4 of the world at the time they first came out.

I don’t think you will ever get full numbers. People in Kazakstan or kenya in the 1980s definitely had this sort of thing but I doubt it would be a first party sony walkman product. A portable tape deck/radio is cheaper than a larger stereo.

the Mac as a continuous story line from 1984 to the present

It's a reasonably continuous storyline for the end user, which is what matters given the topic. Personal computers themselves weren't a mass market, neither were smartphone so you could just as well look at it as, say, "Apple's long-term vision of mass market computing succeeded". But it's not clear how either of these interpretations would change this blog post much.

Well, everyone is going to have their own perceptions, and maybe some end users do see it as a continuous evolution. For me personally, I saw a discontinuity in the 2010s where suddenly the platform was becoming very locked down: features like SIP prevented you from modifying anything that was part of the OS (though you could turn it off) and code signing appeared to be the first step toward preventing end users from executing any program not blessed by Apple. There was a while in the late 2010s where many of us were pretty sure that Apple was on the verge of prohibiting users from running any code they wrote themselves. There would be some kind of byzantine approval process like for iOS that would reject random, personal utilities not useful to anyone besides the author.

Apple kept denying this was their plan, but kept moving closer and closer to doing this. However, they then appeared to stop around 2020 and haven't renewed those efforts, so I guess we are safe?

There was a while in the late 2010s where many of us were pretty sure that Apple was on the verge of prohibiting users from running any code they wrote themselves.

Other than arguments made on messageboards, I don't think there was really any concrete evidence of this, the technical/product reasons they were/are doing this for were clear. So yeah, I think that's a discontinuity of perception.

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