Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? It is time for a classic episode. Now.
Speaker 1: Last week we had the Macintosh Story Part one, so
Speaker 1: today we're going to continue that with the McIntosh Story
Speaker 1: Part two. If you have not heard part one, well
Speaker 1: just check the publication from last Friday. You should be
Speaker 1: able to pull that and listen to it. But originally
Speaker 1: this episode published way back on June seventh, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1: We covered how the mac was born out of strife.
Speaker 1: It was not an easy berth. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of argument going on arguing, i
Speaker 1: should say, going on behind the scenes. It started off
Speaker 1: as a low priced comput that was the intent that
Speaker 1: was supposed to make personal computers more accessible to the
Speaker 1: average person. And then Steve Jobs effectively took over the
Speaker 1: project and changed it significantly. Rather than having a cheap machine,
Speaker 1: it became an expensive alternative to the IBM personal computer
Speaker 1: that had just debuted in the early nineteen eighties. So
Speaker 1: the IBM Personal computer came out and actually posed a
Speaker 1: serious threat to Apple. The Macintosh was supposed to be
Speaker 1: an answer to that. The Apple two and Apple three
Speaker 1: lines were distinct, and more about them in a little bit,
Speaker 1: But the Macintosh was really supposed to redefine computing and
Speaker 1: to put Apple back on track to being ahead of
Speaker 1: the game, as it were. But what actually happened next, Well,
Speaker 1: we ended right around nineteen eighty five. Last time, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, nineteen eighty five. The Macintosh computer debuted in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, and Apple was trying to rebound from
Speaker 1: a couple of bit blows. Now. That first one came
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty one. That's when IBM got involved in
Speaker 1: the personal computer market with its own PC. Before long,
Speaker 1: IBM PC sales were outpacing Apple to sales. And the
Speaker 1: second blow came in nineteen eighty three. That's when Apple
Speaker 1: launched Lisa. Lisa was a high end computer. It was
Speaker 1: a project that was being pushed primarily by Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: one of the co founders of Apple. Steve Jobs and
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak were the two Steves who founded the company.
Speaker 1: But Lisa was not a huge success. It had a
Speaker 1: graphic user interface or gouey gui uh, and it had
Speaker 1: a mouse, which was very innovative for the time. The
Speaker 1: only other company that really played with graphic user interfaces
Speaker 1: and a computer mouse was Xerox, and they had only
Speaker 1: done it internally. They didn't make this a product that
Speaker 1: other companies and consumers could go out and purchase. Apple
Speaker 1: decided to change that. However, r Lisa had a really
Speaker 1: hefty price tag. It was ten thousand dollars when it
Speaker 1: went on sale, and it was meant for business applications,
Speaker 1: but at that price, very few businesses were willing to
Speaker 1: take the plunge. Remember those are nineteen eighty three dollars.
Speaker 1: That's significant, even more so than ten thousand dollars is today.
Speaker 1: Ten thousand dollars is already a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1: If you adjust for inflation, you're talking around almost twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: That's a lot.
Speaker 1: So the GUI also ate up a lot of the
Speaker 1: computer's processing power. So not only did it cost a lot,
Speaker 1: but the operating system alone took up so much of
Speaker 1: the computer's processing power that you couldn't run very many
Speaker 1: applications on top of it. And that's not a great
Speaker 1: selling point. Like this is expensive, but at least you
Speaker 1: can't run much software on it. That doesn't make a
Speaker 1: really good tagline if you're trying to sell a computer,
Speaker 1: just an fyi in case you ever want to to
Speaker 1: make and sell computers in the future. Then you also
Speaker 1: had very few developers who were willing to put forth
Speaker 1: the effort to create programs for a computer that was
Speaker 1: so elite, so expensive that it had a very small market.
Speaker 1: If you are in the business of making software and
Speaker 1: you have a limited amount of time and money on
Speaker 1: your hands, you want to dedicate that time and money
Speaker 1: toward projects that are likely to give you the biggest profit.
Speaker 1: And if you're talking about the types of organizations that
Speaker 1: are willing to lay down ten grand per computer, that's
Speaker 1: a very small market. So software developers were not eager.
Speaker 2: To jump on the bandwagon there.
Speaker 1: So Lisa was effectively a flop. It was kind of
Speaker 1: doomed from the start. Now, as I mentioned right at
Speaker 1: the beginning of this episode, Steve Jobs effectively took over
Speaker 1: the Macintosh project.
Speaker 2: Now, this was after.
Speaker 1: The then CEO of Apple demanded that Steve Jobs stop
Speaker 1: interfering with Lisa. Macintosh was a totally different project than
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs once he was pulled off the Lisa project
Speaker 1: and said, you can't bother them anymore, looked around, saw
Speaker 1: the Macintosh project, which was completely independent, and said, I'm
Speaker 1: going to make that my pet project. And so he
Speaker 1: began to involve himself with, or, in the words of
Speaker 1: some of his contemporaries at the time, interfere with the
Speaker 1: Macintosh project. And as a result, McIntosh transformed from a
Speaker 1: humble machine to an expensive consumer level device with a
Speaker 1: guy and a mouse. It didn't have a graphic user
Speaker 1: interface before Steve Jobs got involved. It was initially priced
Speaker 1: at twenty four hundred and ninety five dollars, which is
Speaker 1: expensive just for a basic computer today before you adjust
Speaker 1: for inflation. If you do adjust for inflation, that's more
Speaker 1: like five thousand, seven hundred bucks. That's a huge amount
Speaker 1: of money.
Speaker 2: To ask to pay for a PC.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted a Macintosh in nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: when they first launched, you'd be plopping down the equivalent
Speaker 1: of fifty seven hundred dollars in today's money.
Speaker 2: And keep in mind that the.
Speaker 1: Original plan was that this computer was supposed to cost
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars, which would be closer to twelve hundred
Speaker 1: bucks today, which is still expensive. Obviously, if you wanted
Speaker 1: to pay for a brand new computer, twelve hundred dollars
Speaker 1: is closer to the top end of your basic machines.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, you can trick out a machine to
Speaker 1: be much more expensive than that if you want top
Speaker 1: of the line processors, graphics cards, cooling systems, all that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. But if you're just buying off the shelf,
Speaker 1: twelve hundred dollars is already pretty expensive. It's not the
Speaker 1: top end, but it's healthy.
Speaker 2: Right Anyway.
Speaker 1: That was the initial goal was a five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: price point in nineteen eighty four dollars, which would be
Speaker 1: about twelve hundred dollars today, and it.
Speaker 2: Blew that out of the water.
Speaker 1: I should point out, however, that this higher price tag
Speaker 1: is not entirely the fault of Steve Jobs. I don't
Speaker 1: want to give you that impression. It's true that Jobs
Speaker 1: added a lot of features that necessitated a price hike.
Speaker 1: No matter what, it was going to cost more than
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars because of the changes Steve Jobs made.
Speaker 1: But as for that price tag of twenty four hundred
Speaker 1: ninety five dollars that credit really needs to go to
Speaker 1: the then Apple CEO John Scully. Scully reportedly decided that
Speaker 1: the initial price tag for the mac which was originally
Speaker 1: going to be fifteen hundred dollars back in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: was too low. He actually said, fifteen hundred bucks, that's
Speaker 1: that's not high enough for us to really see a
Speaker 1: huge profit off that. So he knocked it up to
Speaker 1: twenty four ninety five, and that way the Macintosh would
Speaker 1: see a profit margin of fifty five percent, meaning you'd
Speaker 1: make fifty five percent over what you paid to create
Speaker 1: the computer. He didn't want to have a slim profit margin. However,
Speaker 1: of course, if you increased the price of a machine dramatically,
Speaker 1: then you're going to decrease the number of sales you make.
Speaker 1: So it's a very delicate balance figuring out how much
Speaker 1: to price a product so that you get the maximum
Speaker 1: amount of profit from your investment. And Scully decided to
Speaker 1: go pretty hard for that investment with that fifty five
Speaker 1: percent profit margin. And this also began Apple's long history
Speaker 1: of being a company associated with the idea that its
Speaker 1: hardware is overpriced. You've probably heard that if you've ever
Speaker 1: taken any look into Apple products, that you're paying a
Speaker 1: premium just for the Apple brand name because the products
Speaker 1: are priced more than what they would be priced by
Speaker 1: a competitor for an equivalent machine. That's not always the case,
Speaker 1: by the way, but it happened frequently enough in Apple's
Speaker 1: past that it became associated with the company's identity. People
Speaker 1: thought of Apple as being an elite company, that you
Speaker 1: were paying that extra price, and that you could be
Speaker 1: saving money if you just went with a different computer manufacturer,
Speaker 1: which in some eras was absolutely true, just not in
Speaker 1: all eras. Back in those earliest days of Macintosh, it
Speaker 1: certainly was the case that is undeniable now. Initial reviews
Speaker 1: of the Macintosh actually heaped a lot of praise on
Speaker 1: the computer. Consumer Reports wrote an absolutely glowing review of
Speaker 1: the original Macintosh, saying that the interface really transformed computing.
Speaker 1: The reviews stated that the interface, including the windows that
Speaker 1: it would use the mouse that you would use to
Speaker 1: navigate the guy, were more than just gimmicks, which you know,
Speaker 1: you could have easily seen them as just being gimmicks.
Speaker 1: Everyone else was used to using text based interfaces and keyboards,
Speaker 1: so this wasn't a guaranteed success right all of the gate.
Speaker 1: But Consumer Reports said, no, they got it right. This
Speaker 1: actually makes sense. They said that it actually transformed computing
Speaker 1: from a system of Labrinthian rules to something that the
Speaker 1: average per could easily grasp. A Macintosh wasn't a cryptic
Speaker 1: machine that required the user to learn dozens of command
Speaker 1: line terms, like you know, various file trees and ways
Speaker 1: to navigate between different directories. You didn't have to do
Speaker 1: that because it was all graphically presented for you and
Speaker 1: you just click on whatever it was you needed. It
Speaker 1: was a device that a novice could learn to navigate
Speaker 1: within like half an hour of using it.
Speaker 2: There were some drawbacks, however.
Speaker 1: That same Consumer Reports review pointed out that the operating
Speaker 1: system on the Macintosh took up an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: the computer's processing power. The computer had enough memory to
Speaker 1: store about eight and a half pages of text after
Speaker 1: you factored in the operating system. That's text, not images
Speaker 1: or video or audio. All of that stuff would come later.
Speaker 1: Just eight and a half pages of text. That's all
Speaker 1: the memory it could have after you ended up booting
Speaker 1: up the operating system.
Speaker 2: This was one of the reasons that I was.
Speaker 1: A real snob about Guy interfaces or GUY based computers.
Speaker 1: I hated the day that my dad decided to install
Speaker 1: Windows on our IBM compatible machine, which was similar in
Speaker 1: many ways to the Mac operating system. And the reason
Speaker 1: I was upset about it was because the Windows operating
Speaker 1: system required so much of our computer's ability to process
Speaker 1: information that it limited the kind of software we could
Speaker 1: run on it. If your software required more than what
Speaker 1: the computer could supply, you ran into problems, and I
Speaker 1: attributed a lot of that to the operating system. I
Speaker 1: much preferred DOSS, which was so slimmed down by comparison
Speaker 1: that you could run lots of different software on it. Well,
Speaker 1: the same thing was true with the early Mac operating system.
Speaker 1: It just hogged up a lot of the initial Macintosh's abilities.
Speaker 1: And to be fair, the original Macintosh only had one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty eight kilobytes of memory, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly packing an enormous amount of memory into that package.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break talking about the
Speaker 1: Macintosh in order to thank our sponsors.
Speaker 2: More and more software.
Speaker 1: Developers began to create programs that could only run in
Speaker 1: GUI environments, which kind of forced the issue to switch
Speaker 1: from the DOSS and other operating systems that involved command
Speaker 1: lines to shift over to graphic user interfaces because a
Speaker 1: lot of software ended up only being compatible with graphic
Speaker 1: user interface systems, and that helped force the issue. I
Speaker 1: still am bitter about that, even though today I probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to.
Speaker 2: If you put me in.
Speaker 1: From an Apple two E or an early IBM PC
Speaker 1: that was just running DOSS, I wouldn't remember any of
Speaker 1: the commands besides DR, which is directory DOS, I would
Speaker 1: be lost. But I still am kind of bitter about
Speaker 1: all this. Now, I also be fair. I'm an elitist
Speaker 1: computer nerd type. I'm just an elitist computer nerd type
Speaker 1: who lacks the information to be able to effectively be
Speaker 1: an elitist, which is the saddest kind of nerd. Apple
Speaker 1: obviously had really high hopes for that original Macintosh, but
Speaker 1: they had also had really high hopes for Lisa, and
Speaker 1: that didn't pan out back in nineteen eighty one, which
Speaker 1: was back when the Macintosh was still in development. It
Speaker 1: didn't debut till nineteen eighty four. Keep in mind, in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, Apple had a plan, and their plan
Speaker 1: was that they would sell two point two million Macintosh
Speaker 1: computers by nineteen eighty five by the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, but that plan was based upon a launch
Speaker 1: date that would happen sometime in nineteen eighty two, because remember,
Speaker 1: back then, they were still looking at creating a cheap
Speaker 1: alternative to the other computers like the Apple two and
Speaker 1: other competing computers on the market, so they had high
Speaker 1: hopes that they would be able to sell two point
Speaker 1: two million units by nineteen eighty five. The computer wasn't
Speaker 1: even available for purchase until nineteen eighty four, so that
Speaker 1: set them back, and even if they had launched in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, they would have had to sell around
Speaker 1: fifty thousand computers every month to hit that two point
Speaker 1: two million mark within the end of nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: They did have an enormous start. The Macintosh marketing department
Speaker 1: was great for the launch of the computer, and they
Speaker 1: sold quite a bit when they first went on the
Speaker 1: market because people were really excited about it. But after
Speaker 1: that initial excitement, they weren't able to capitalize on creating
Speaker 1: a momentum and it died off pretty quickly. The marketing
Speaker 1: kind of failed after that initial launch. The Apple blew
Speaker 1: too much money early on and didn't have enough to
Speaker 1: support it throughout its an launch, So after a successful
Speaker 1: couple of first months, sales dropped precipitously down to like
Speaker 1: five thousand units a month, way below the number they
Speaker 1: would need. So by the end of nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: they had not sold two point two million units as
Speaker 1: they had originally planned. It was more like two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand units, a huge shortfall. The Macintosh was
Speaker 1: not quite a flop like Lisa, but it wasn't performing
Speaker 1: as well in the market as Apple had hoped. Now
Speaker 1: it was impressive, but it was suffering from a similar
Speaker 1: issue as Lisa. It didn't have a lot of applications
Speaker 1: available for it, not as many as the competing ibmpcs had.
Speaker 1: Apple's then CEO admitted as much later on John Scully.
Speaker 1: He said, Yeah, we didn't do enough to develop software
Speaker 1: to run this computer. So while the computer was nice
Speaker 1: to look at, the graphic user interface was interesting, there
Speaker 1: just wasn't a whole lot to do with it. You
Speaker 1: didn't have things like spreadsheet programs. There was a severe
Speaker 1: lack of utility with their computer. Really, they only had
Speaker 1: two applications They had mac Wright which was a word
Speaker 1: processing program, and they had mac Paint, which was a
Speaker 1: simple graphics program, but that was about it.
Speaker 2: They didn't have the other stuff you would associate with
Speaker 2: other computers.
Speaker 1: So while it was user friendly, it didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of usability to it, like there just wasn't enough
Speaker 1: to do, so that also hurt Macintosh sales. Now you
Speaker 1: might also remember from our last episode, Like I said,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Apple at this time was John Scully,
Speaker 1: whom Steve Jobs had lured away from Pepsi. The story
Speaker 1: is that Scully was kind of in line to become
Speaker 1: the chairman of the board over at Pepsi, but it
Speaker 1: was on a much longer timeline than Scully wanted, and
Speaker 1: that Steve Jobs was able to convince Scully to come
Speaker 1: over by saying to him, do you want to spend
Speaker 1: the rest of your life selling sugar water or do
Speaker 1: you want a chance to change the world once again?
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs master salesman.
Speaker 1: He could really have a turn of phrase and get
Speaker 1: you to believe in him even when the odds were
Speaker 1: stacked against him. Scully himself would say that that phrase
Speaker 1: really convinced him to come over to Apple, and he
Speaker 1: said so in a documentary, so you can actually check
Speaker 1: this out. It's a documentary titled Bloomberg Game Changers Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: so it's part of a series. It was a really
Speaker 1: effective sales pitch, as it turns out, so Scully and
Speaker 1: Jobs initially worked really well together leading up to the
Speaker 1: Macintosh launch. Scully's predecessor was Mike Markula, which in the
Speaker 1: last episode you might remember was the guy who stepped
Speaker 1: in to remove Steve Jobs from the Lisa project. Markula
Speaker 1: was an early investor in Apple and had transitioned from
Speaker 1: CEO to board members, so he retired as CEO. He resigned,
Speaker 1: transitioning over to the board. He had told his wife
Speaker 1: that he wasn't going to stay on with Apple for
Speaker 1: very long, although he stayed on much longer than he
Speaker 1: initially meant to. He just stayed on in the capacity
Speaker 1: of member of the board as opposed to the CEO,
Speaker 1: and then John Scully took over the job as CEO. Now,
Speaker 1: John Scully would serve as the CEO from about nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five to about nineteen ninety three ish. Ninety three
Speaker 1: ninety four is really when we're looking at that transition. Effectively,
Speaker 1: ninety three Scully initially got along well with Jobs, but
Speaker 1: when the Macintosh sales began to drop off, new tensions
Speaker 1: developed between the CEO and Apple's co founder, and that's
Speaker 1: not great when you have kind of clashing personalities at
Speaker 1: the top level of your company.
Speaker 2: Now, John Scully also has the dubious.
Speaker 1: Distinction of being on the Worst American CEO's List curated
Speaker 1: by Conde Nas. He's actually number fourteen on that list
Speaker 1: back when they published it a few years ago. Now
Speaker 1: more on why John Scully made that list as this
Speaker 1: episode progresses. Apple at the time had not completely switched
Speaker 1: over to the Macintosh line as its primary product, so
Speaker 1: you might think, oh, it went Apple two to Apple
Speaker 1: three to Macintosh and they discontinued the other computers, but
Speaker 1: that's not true. They were actually producing different lines of
Speaker 1: computers simultaneously, and Apple's structure was designed around this, where
Speaker 1: each product had its own division, so it wasn't like
Speaker 1: you had one big division of all these different products
Speaker 1: grouped together. You had an Apple two division, an Apple
Speaker 1: three division, and a Macintosh division. You also had a
Speaker 1: Lisa division until they discontinued that product. So the Apple
Speaker 1: two and Apple three computers continued to be manufactured and
Speaker 1: sold by Apple side by side with Macintosh computers. The
Speaker 1: Apple three ended up being a failure. It was a flop,
Speaker 1: very much like Lisa. It just didn't do so well.
Speaker 1: It was meant to be, again, a business level machine,
Speaker 1: not a personal computer, and it was priced as such,
Speaker 1: and there just wasn't enough there for businesses to jump
Speaker 1: on board with it. There were cheaper IBM computers coming out,
Speaker 1: so that was more attractive from an expense side of things.
Speaker 1: And like Lisa, there weren't a lot of developers creating
Speaker 1: software for the Apple three, so it didn't make a
Speaker 1: whole lot of sense to invest in the Apple three
Speaker 1: platform if the IBM computer platform cost less and had
Speaker 1: more development. So companies weren't adopting the Apple three. But
Speaker 1: the Apple two continued to hold its own, so it
Speaker 1: was still a big product even as the Macintosh came online.
Speaker 2: The Apple two.
Speaker 1: C computer debuted in nineteen eighty four. That was the
Speaker 1: same year that the Macintosh came out, so Apple two
Speaker 1: C stood for well, a more advanced Apple two computer. Actually,
Speaker 1: the letter system for Apple two computers is really confusing,
Speaker 1: because the Apple two E came out in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: and then the Apple to C came out in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, so they weren't going in alphabetical order, and
Speaker 1: that is a bit more than a bit confusing. But
Speaker 1: the Apple two C was Apple's first compact model, so
Speaker 1: the C kind of stood for compact. The computer's hardware
Speaker 1: consisted of a case that had an incorporated keyboard and
Speaker 1: a five and a quarter inch disk drive, and the
Speaker 1: computer itself, which was separate from a monitor. It was
Speaker 1: just the computer. You could slide that into a base
Speaker 1: a stand essentially, and on top of the stand you
Speaker 1: could put your monitor, so the computer would kind of
Speaker 1: slot in underneath where the monitor was. The monitor would
Speaker 1: not sit directly on top of the computer case itself.
Speaker 1: Apple would continue to make computers in the two C
Speaker 1: line until nineteen ninety, so the Apple two continued to
Speaker 1: go on sale to hit store shelves while the Macintosh
Speaker 1: continued to evolve, so these separate products remained side by
Speaker 1: side for quite some time. Apple launched an enhanced version
Speaker 1: of the Apple Too E in nineteen eighty five, so
Speaker 1: the two E continued as well.
Speaker 2: It just got a bit of a beefier.
Speaker 1: Version than the one that had launched a couple of
Speaker 1: years earlier. It did not have a graphic user interface
Speaker 1: like the Macintosh, and Apple would continue to make these
Speaker 1: Apple Too computers available for quite some time. In fact,
Speaker 1: that Advanced two E would continue to be on sale
Speaker 1: until nineteen ninety three, so extending pretty far. Like you
Speaker 1: would think that by ninety three you would have just
Speaker 1: graphic user interface based computers, but you still had the
Speaker 1: Apple two E Enhanced. And maybe one day I'll do
Speaker 1: an episode dedicated just to those Apple line computers to
Speaker 1: talk about the process of their evolution compared to Macintosh.
Speaker 1: But that's not really what this episode's about. I just
Speaker 1: went into touch base and explained that was going on
Speaker 1: at the same time as the development for the mac Now,
Speaker 1: in January nineteen eighty five, Apple tried to make the
Speaker 1: best of a bad situation by launching the Macintosh Excel.
Speaker 1: Only here's the thing. This was not the next Macintosh computer.
Speaker 1: It was actually a rebranding of a different computer, namely
Speaker 1: the Lisa Too. So remember the Lisa was a flop.
Speaker 1: Then Apple decided to make a stripped down version of
Speaker 1: the Lisa computer and sell it for a lower price
Speaker 1: than that ten thousand dollars beast of a computer called Lisa.
Speaker 1: Lisa too did not do well in sales either, so
Speaker 1: then they rebranded it. They called it Macintosh. Xcel was
Speaker 1: a Macintosh doing all right initially, but they weren't able
Speaker 1: to move the Lisa two computers, so they rebranded it.
Speaker 1: They called it the Excel, but it still didn't do
Speaker 1: so well, and by April nineteen eighty five they discontinued it.
Speaker 1: They stopped making the Macintosh Excel.
Speaker 2: They still had a ton of inventory, but they weren't
Speaker 2: making more of them.
Speaker 1: They were able to offload some of the Macintosh Excel
Speaker 1: devices with some big sales deals, so for example, they
Speaker 1: sold five thousand of the Excel macintoshes to a company
Speaker 1: called Sun Remarketing back in nineteen eighty seven. But ultimately
Speaker 1: a lot of those units never left Apple warehouses.
Speaker 2: They just sat there.
Speaker 1: And so in nineteen eighty nine, they decided to take
Speaker 1: a note from the video game crash of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: You might remember, Atari decided to get rid of a
Speaker 1: lot of excess inventory by dumping them in landfills out
Speaker 1: in the desert. Apple ended up doing the same thing,
Speaker 1: only they dumped theirs in a landfill in Utah instead
Speaker 1: of in a different state. So they all of those
Speaker 1: Macintosh XL computers ended up in a landfill in Utah.
Speaker 1: So somewhere in a Utah landfill, if you dig down,
Speaker 1: you would be able to find old Macintosh XL Lisa
Speaker 1: to computers. But don't do that. We'd be a colossally
Speaker 1: bad idea and you could very easily injure yourself if
Speaker 1: you dug in the wrong landfill. Phil, Plus you'd probably
Speaker 1: be trespassing. So I'm officially telling you do not go
Speaker 1: searching for the McIntosh XL because even if you.
Speaker 2: Found one, it wouldn't work. At this point.
Speaker 1: It's been exposed to elements since nineteen eighty nine, so
Speaker 1: you don't want one.
Speaker 2: Don't do it.
Speaker 1: If I hear about you doing it will be very
Speaker 1: put out. I've got a lot more to say about
Speaker 1: the history of the Macintosh from nineteen eighty four to
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, but before I get into the next segment,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So,
Speaker 1: a few months after the initial Macintosh hit store shelves,
Speaker 1: Apple released an update called the Mac five twelve, also
Speaker 1: known as the Fat Mac. This Macintosh had five hundred
Speaker 1: and twelve kilobytes of memory, that's why it was called that,
Speaker 1: so significantly more memory than the initial Macintosh, which remember,
Speaker 1: only had one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes. That additional
Speaker 1: memory made it easier to develop programs for the Macintosh
Speaker 1: because the operating system no longer hogged nearly all of
Speaker 1: the system's memory. But that extra memory came at a cost.
Speaker 1: The fat max price tag was three thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: dollars in nineteen eighty five. That's equivalent to nearly eight
Speaker 1: thousand dollars today. Incredibly expensive. Still, the fat mac had
Speaker 1: a big advantage. It could actually do stuff pretty big
Speaker 1: when you compare it to the original Mac and some
Speaker 1: software and one additional piece of hardware really helped increase
Speaker 1: the value of the Macintosh line. So on the software
Speaker 1: side you had stuff like Aldice page Maker. It eventually
Speaker 1: became Adobe page Maker, and it helped usher in a
Speaker 1: new era of computing. This was the era of desktop publishing.
Speaker 1: That was not a thing really before the Macintosh and
Speaker 1: Aldie PageMaker made it a thing. So page Maker, if
Speaker 1: you've never used it, it's sort of a layout program.
Speaker 1: It allows you to lay out an attractive esthetic design
Speaker 1: to stuff like newsletters, flyers.
Speaker 2: That kind of thing. A program. If you wanted to
Speaker 2: make a program.
Speaker 1: For a play or some other event, you could use
Speaker 1: page Maker to size everything and position properly so that
Speaker 1: you had an attractive layout. And that meant that you
Speaker 1: could suddenly do this at home, where if you had
Speaker 1: the right equipment, or with a small business, you could
Speaker 1: do it there. You didn't have to go to a
Speaker 1: larger publishing house and contract with them to make your stuff.
Speaker 1: This was revolutionary. It was one of the reasons why computers,
Speaker 1: personal computers and small computers that businesses used were so popular.
Speaker 1: It meant that they gave these entities, whether they were
Speaker 1: individuals or small businesses, greater opportunities.
Speaker 2: So that was very popular.
Speaker 1: But there was also some other software that was helping out.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, Microsoft began to publish software for
Speaker 1: the Macintosh. So Microsoft and Apple haven't always had a
Speaker 1: contentious relationship. In fact, Microsoft has often in Apple's past
Speaker 1: helped the other company out with loans or with investments.
Speaker 1: It hasn't always been a I hate you, no, I
Speaker 1: hate you more kind of relationship. One of the earliest
Speaker 1: programs Microsoft made available for the Macintosh was Word one
Speaker 1: point oh, which was the first real competitor to Apple's
Speaker 1: own Macwright software and eventually overtook Macwright. People began to
Speaker 1: prefer Word one point oh and its later versions to
Speaker 1: the Macwright word processing program. Another program that came over
Speaker 1: to mac was the Excel one point oh software, the
Speaker 1: spreadsheet program. In fact, it came to the Macintosh first.
Speaker 1: It was a Macintosh exclusive for a while in the
Speaker 1: early days. That was just the case because it wouldn't
Speaker 1: even come to Windows until late nineteen eighty seven. So
Speaker 1: Apple had a head start on Windows when it came
Speaker 1: to Excel. But there's a whole story that I've talked
Speaker 1: about in a previous episode about why that is, so
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go into it here. On the
Speaker 1: hardware side was a device called the Laser Writer. This
Speaker 1: was a printer, a monstrously heavy printer. It weighed seventy
Speaker 1: seven pounds that's about thirty five kilograms, and it had
Speaker 1: a three hundred dots per inch resolution, pretty standard for
Speaker 1: printers of the day, and it cost a hefty amount
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars. And let's adjust for inflation because I
Speaker 1: like to do that. That's about sixteen grand in today's dollars,
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand dollars for a printer. But you could network
Speaker 1: multiple Macintosh computers to this one printer, so that increased
Speaker 1: its value. You didn't have to buy a printer for
Speaker 1: every computer. If you had several computer workstations at your office,
Speaker 1: you could network them together to this printer and they
Speaker 1: could all print from the same printer. That was a
Speaker 1: pretty big deal, very novel concept when it came to
Speaker 1: this level of computer enterprise. Normally, you'd be paying a
Speaker 1: lot more money for a networked system that was created
Speaker 1: pretty much by contract for your company. So it meant
Speaker 1: that Apple could actually compete in that space, and they
Speaker 1: could also print in different fonts. The earliest laser writer
Speaker 1: only a few different fonts, but that was still a
Speaker 1: huge advantage over older printers, remember like daisy wheel printers.
Speaker 1: Actually you may not remember daisy will printers. I do
Speaker 1: because I grew up with them. Those had a physical
Speaker 1: font on the device itself, so you couldn't really change it,
Speaker 1: but the laser writer could reproduce a few different fonts,
Speaker 1: giving you some options. And later versions of the laser
Speaker 1: writer and later versions of the operating system and the
Speaker 1: accompanying software would allow even more fonts, so that made
Speaker 1: desktop publishing even more attractive. So this combination of software
Speaker 1: and hardware suddenly made the Macintosh a more attractive device
Speaker 1: if you wanted to go into publishing. And this really
Speaker 1: begins the relationship Apple has with creators, people who are
Speaker 1: into graphics, eventually into film and audio. Apple kind of
Speaker 1: established that relationship with people at this stage, this early stage,
Speaker 1: with the fat Mac.
Speaker 2: It meant that you were catering.
Speaker 1: To people who didn't really feel comfortable with the IBM
Speaker 1: compatible approach to computing. They found it more intuitive to
Speaker 1: go to the Mac system and that would remain true
Speaker 1: for decades. In fact, for a long long time, Apple
Speaker 1: dominated when it came to production, particularly video and audio production.
Speaker 2: Here at how Stuff Works, our video.
Speaker 1: Department works almost exclusively on Macintosh computers. So even though
Speaker 1: I would argue PCs have caught up in a large
Speaker 1: part and software for the PCs have cut up in
Speaker 1: large part to Apple's dominant place in that market, there's
Speaker 1: still people who prefer the Apple approach, and to be honest,
Speaker 1: depending upon what format you're working in, Apple still.
Speaker 2: Does it better than PCs do.
Speaker 1: All of that began way back in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: with the Fat Mac and the launch of the Laser Writer,
Speaker 1: and the launch of these software programs I've been talking about.
Speaker 2: On the corporate side.
Speaker 1: Nineteen eighty five was when Apple said goodbye to the
Speaker 1: co founders, but under very different circumstances. Steve Wozniak, who
Speaker 1: had mostly been away from Apple ever since he had
Speaker 1: suffered injuries in an airplane crash and had been working
Speaker 1: hard to recover from them. He left on his own
Speaker 1: accord in February nineteen eighty five, and he went back
Speaker 1: to college. Eventually he went into teaching and then began
Speaker 1: to do other stuff as well. Steve Jobs, however, didn't
Speaker 1: really have a choice in the matter, not really when
Speaker 1: you get down to it. After numerous teams reported being
Speaker 1: incredibly frustrated with Steve Jobs' managerial style, the executives of
Speaker 1: the company, primarily CEO John Scully, decided to effectively strip
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs of all of his power. They removed him
Speaker 1: from all the projects. They put him in an office
Speaker 1: in a building that was mostly deserted. Steve Jobs himself
Speaker 1: referred to it as Siberia and of course Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: is not one known for making melodramatic statements like that,
Speaker 1: so you know it had to be awful. But the
Speaker 1: point being the Steve Jobs had really very little to
Speaker 1: do with the company that he had helped create. He
Speaker 1: had been pulled away from it and removed more or
Speaker 1: less from power. Not everyone was upset about that, because
Speaker 1: so many people had had issues with his management style,
Speaker 1: but it still was a difficult story, right to say,
Speaker 1: we've decided this founder of our company shouldn't be involved
Speaker 1: in any of the company's projects, but was still effectively
Speaker 1: an employee of the company. He was still drawing a
Speaker 1: salary at that point. But Jobs decided he didn't want
Speaker 1: to just sit at a desk in an empty building
Speaker 1: and pull a salary from a company. He wanted to
Speaker 1: see if he could perhaps regain control of Apple, and
Speaker 1: so he went to some of the executives of Apple
Speaker 1: to see if any of them would support him and
Speaker 1: what would effectively be a coup to go to the
Speaker 1: board of directors demand that John Scully be removed as
Speaker 1: CEO and perhaps Steve Jobs would take his place. But
Speaker 1: one of the executives he went to felt very strongly
Speaker 1: that this was the bad decision. That person was Jean
Speaker 1: Louis Gaess. Now, Jean Louis Gassy was someone who had
Speaker 1: risen up in the Apple ranks. He was a manager
Speaker 1: in their various product division lines, and he did not
Speaker 1: like Jobs. Jobs and guess did not get along. So
Speaker 1: Guessay ended up going over to John Scully and tattletaled
Speaker 1: on Steve Jobs. He essentially told John Scully, who was
Speaker 1: off on a business trip, Hey, you should know this.
Speaker 1: Steve is going around stirring up trouble and he wants
Speaker 1: to try and go to the Board of directors and
Speaker 1: go over your head and replace you. John Scully rushed
Speaker 1: back to Apple. He called a meeting of the Board
Speaker 1: of directors. He was furious with Steve Jobs for what
Speaker 1: he saw as an act of disloyalty and dishonesty, and
Speaker 1: so they had it out in front of the Board
Speaker 1: of Directors. It was, by all accounts, an ugly confrontation,
Speaker 1: and ultimately John Scully was asking the Board of directors
Speaker 1: for essentially a vote of confidence and to say, you
Speaker 1: know who would they go. Would they side with Jobs
Speaker 1: or would they side with Scully? And then the board
Speaker 1: sided unanimously with John Scully. Every member of the board,
Speaker 1: including the people I've already mentioned in this episode, were
Speaker 1: on John Scully's side, and they effectively pushed Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: out of his company. Obviously, the story with Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: and Apple doesn't end here in nineteen eighty five. Will
Speaker 1: actually revisit Steve Jobs later on in this episode, but
Speaker 1: we've also covered this story in other episodes of Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: So if you want to hear a really deep discussion
Speaker 1: about what Steve Jobs did in his years away from Apple,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of different places you can check out,
Speaker 1: or a couple different episodes you can check out. There's
Speaker 1: a two parter called How Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Work.
Speaker 1: They published in two thousand and eight, so they were
Speaker 1: very early episodes of Tech Stuff Tech Stuff in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, so Chris Pollette and I talked about
Speaker 1: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who had a lot of
Speaker 1: not just similarities, but a lot of they worked a
Speaker 1: lot together in those early days of Apple and Microsoft.
Speaker 2: So you can check out that two parter.
Speaker 1: And there's also a very sad episode titled One More
Speaker 1: Thing and that published in twenty eleven. Shortly after Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs passed away, and in those episodes, I really talk
Speaker 1: about what Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2: Did in his years away from Apple.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to cover it here, but we
Speaker 1: will revisit Steve Jobs because he does factor back into
Speaker 1: Apple's history a bit later on. If you want to
Speaker 1: know more, check out those episodes I just mentioned. Now,
Speaker 1: Jobs would end up publishing letters of resignation. He sent
Speaker 1: letters of resignation to the press after he had effectively
Speaker 1: been forced out of his own company, so it's more
Speaker 1: like you can't fire me, I quit sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Presumably he did this in order to get the media
Speaker 1: on his side, but it did not have the effect
Speaker 1: that he was hoping for. In fact, Apple stocks rallied
Speaker 1: as a result of Steve Jobs being pushed aside and
Speaker 1: sending out these resignation letters. Effectively, the market was saying, whew,
Speaker 1: we sure are glad you got rid of that guy.
Speaker 1: Not a great message to receive, not this big blow
Speaker 1: to the ego, I'm sure, but it gave Scully more
Speaker 1: confidence in his decisions, which would emerge in physical form
Speaker 1: with the evolution of the Macintosh line. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the CEO's first acts once he had been confirmed as
Speaker 1: being the head of Apple, was to lead a massive
Speaker 1: reorganization at the company, and a lot of people say
Speaker 1: it was long overdue. So again, up to that point,
Speaker 1: Apple's org charts were based on products. If you worked
Speaker 1: in the Apple two line, you were in one division.
Speaker 1: If you worked on the Apple three line, you were
Speaker 1: in another division. If you worked on the Macintosh you
Speaker 1: were in yet another division, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: Each department was separate from all the others.
Speaker 2: And John Scully said, this doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: What we should do is have a big product development
Speaker 1: department and everyone who works on various products will be
Speaker 1: inside this structured department with a manager overseeing that product
Speaker 1: or product development overall.
Speaker 2: So everyone would have a single boss.
Speaker 1: They would report to, who in turn would report to
Speaker 1: John Scully as CEO. Then you would also have a
Speaker 1: department just for sales. You would have a department just
Speaker 1: for marketing, and these departments would work together, but they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be dependent upon individual products. It would largely be
Speaker 1: these big divisions within Apple. So essentially he was saying,
Speaker 1: let's go to your traditional corporate structure. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: he was inventing a new type of leadership. This is
Speaker 1: something that's common across corporations all over the world.
Speaker 2: So he was just saying, let's.
Speaker 1: Go to that because it makes more sense. It streamlines things,
Speaker 1: people know who they report to. There's not this compartmentalized
Speaker 1: structure between different products. People can actually communicate with each other.
Speaker 1: We can make sure that people working on one product
Speaker 1: are not stepping on the toes of people who were
Speaker 1: working on another product. Everyone can talk to each other,
Speaker 1: and then ended up being viewed as a positive move
Speaker 1: in the market. Again, people thought this guy knows what
Speaker 1: he's doing, and they felt confident in Apple's performance because
Speaker 1: of this restructuring, Apple stocks would end up performing really
Speaker 1: well over the next few years. Meanwhile, Jean Luis Gesay
Speaker 1: that manager I was talking about who tattletaled on, Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: became the manager for the product's division.
Speaker 2: Effectively, he took.
Speaker 1: Over the position that Steve Jobs was inhabiting before he
Speaker 1: was stripped of all of his responsibilities. So Guess became
Speaker 1: the manager for product division and decided to make a
Speaker 1: major change to the Macintosh line.
Speaker 2: So remember that last.
Speaker 1: Mac was the Fat Mac or the Mac five twelve.
Speaker 1: The next computer in that line was the Mac Plus. Now,
Speaker 1: Apple introduced this in nineteen eighty six, and it looked
Speaker 1: identical to the Fat Mac. If you were to put
Speaker 1: two side by side, you probably wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: immediately tell them apart unless you could actually read the
Speaker 1: designation on the case. But inside it was actually quite
Speaker 1: different from the fat Fat Mac. So, for one thing,
Speaker 1: the Fat Mac was not meant to be expandable. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs hated the idea of users being able to alter
Speaker 1: the computers that Apple designed. He wanted to have closed systems,
Speaker 1: meaning that you bought a computer, that's the computer you
Speaker 1: got to use.
Speaker 2: You didn't get to expand it in.
Speaker 1: Any way unless you were to go to a third party,
Speaker 1: and that would violate your warranty. The Macplus was different,
Speaker 1: and it was actually expandable. You could upgrade your machine
Speaker 1: if you wanted to. It was the first Macintosh to
Speaker 1: feature a small computer system interface, also known as a
Speaker 1: scuzzy drive SCSI. But people call it scuzzy, not that
Speaker 1: it was scuzzy, it's just how we pronounce it. It's
Speaker 1: actually a set of parallel interface standards that allow you
Speaker 1: to connect other devices to a computer. So a scanner
Speaker 1: an external hard drive printer's that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: It's just meant to be kind of a.
Speaker 1: Universal plug for certain types of computer peripherals. I talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about it in a recent episode about
Speaker 1: USB's when I was comparing USBs to serial and parallel ports. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the scuzzy would remain a feature in every Mac that
Speaker 1: would follow from that point until nineteen ninety eight. You
Speaker 1: could also upgrade the memory of the Macplus. The Macplus
Speaker 1: would come with a whole megabyte of memory. Remember, the
Speaker 1: previous fat Mac had five or twelve kilobytes. Megabyte was
Speaker 1: another big jump up, but you could expand that to
Speaker 1: up to four megabytes using a thirty pen memory module
Speaker 1: that was easily pluggable into the Macintosh system. You didn't
Speaker 1: have to do any crazy soldering or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It had an expansion slot you could plug these chips into.
Speaker 1: Previous Apple devices didn't allow you to upgrade your memory,
Speaker 1: so what you bought was what you got, unless you
Speaker 1: again went to a third party and had it professionally altered.
Speaker 1: So this was a huge departure from Steve Jobs's philosophy.
Speaker 1: Guessay's approach was almost one hundred eighty degrees different from jobs,
Speaker 1: and would continue to be different from jobs over the
Speaker 1: next few years. The Macplus also included a keyboard with
Speaker 1: some features that we now consider to be pretty much
Speaker 1: standard for keyboards, like arrow keys and a number pad. Obviously,
Speaker 1: not all keyboards have those, especially for things like laptops.
Speaker 1: You might not have a number pad on all laptops,
Speaker 1: but for your standard PC keyboards, the kinds for desktops,
Speaker 1: you pretty much find arrow keys and number pads on
Speaker 1: most of those these days. But this was novel thinking
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty six, so it was something that
Speaker 1: differentiated the Mac Plus from other computers on the market.
Speaker 1: And it also ran the third generation of Max operating system,
Speaker 1: which was then called System three. This was before Apple
Speaker 1: started calling the operating system mac os, they just called
Speaker 1: it System and you could use double sided floppy discs
Speaker 1: with this device, which allowed you to store a wopping
Speaker 1: eight hundred kilobytes of data per disc. I remember those days,
Speaker 1: but anyway, that was a big thing back then. Having
Speaker 1: a double sided disc effectively doubling the amount of information
Speaker 1: you could save on a disc.
Speaker 2: That was a huge space saver.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you had to have twice as many of those
Speaker 1: stupid discs, and that was a pain in the butt. Later,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty six, Apple discontinued the Fat Mac and
Speaker 1: replaced it with the five twelve K, which was similar
Speaker 1: to the Mac Plus. So you had the Macplus, which
Speaker 1: was sort of the high end machine, and then they said, well,
Speaker 1: the Fat Mac doesn't really measure up to the Macplus.
Speaker 1: We'll make a new version of the Fat Mac called
Speaker 1: Mac five twelve K. It did not have some of
Speaker 1: the elements that the Macplus had. It didn't have the
Speaker 1: scuzy port, and it didn't have the expandable memory capability.
Speaker 1: It had those older traditional Apple style memory chips, and
Speaker 1: as you might imagine, that didn't measure up well with
Speaker 1: the Macplus in the market. So you had consumers or
Speaker 1: small businesses mainly and larger looking at the Macplus versus
Speaker 1: the Mac five twelve k E and they said, why
Speaker 1: would I go with the five twelve K E which
Speaker 1: has fewer features than the Macplus. So ultimately the five
Speaker 1: twelve KE did not sell very well. The Macplus, however,
Speaker 1: was a very popular product within the Apple line, in fact,
Speaker 1: so much so that it would become the longest lived
Speaker 1: computer in the Macintosh line, meaning it was the one
Speaker 1: that Apple produced the longest amount of time, from nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six to nineteen ninety, so four years of producing
Speaker 1: the same computer. That's a long time in computer terms,
Speaker 1: because parts become obsolete so quickly, right processors get faster,
Speaker 1: we can put more memory into these machines, but the
Speaker 1: Macplus would stay on store shelves largely unchanged from nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six to nineteen ninety. Now at this stage, I
Speaker 1: should mention that I'm not going to cover every single
Speaker 1: variation of the Macintosh in this episode.
Speaker 2: I know it sounds like it because.
Speaker 1: I've started with the big one so early on, but
Speaker 1: that would just be ridiculous.
Speaker 2: If I were to do that, it would eventually just.
Speaker 1: Lead to me reading off specs for different computers, and
Speaker 1: that would get incredibly boring incredibly fast. I do want
Speaker 1: to cover some of the big changes that happened throughout
Speaker 1: Apple's history and the history of the Macintosh, but I'm
Speaker 1: not going to cover every variation of every entry into
Speaker 1: the Macintosh line. There are lots of them, so many
Speaker 1: that it actually became a problem for Apple.
Speaker 2: But I'll go into that in a little bit.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to try and get a deeper understanding
Speaker 1: of not just the growth of the personal computer market,
Speaker 1: but the evolution of Apple as a company. So that
Speaker 1: being said, nineteen eighty seven saw some milestones in Apple history.
Speaker 1: For one thing, Apple built the one millionth Macintosh in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven. Now that was a bit behind schedule,
Speaker 1: because you remember, way back in nineteen eighty one, they
Speaker 1: were hoping to sell two point two million Macintosh computers
Speaker 1: by the end of nineteen eighty five. It is nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven, and they've just built the one millionth Macintosh,
Speaker 1: so they're well behind what they were hoping for back
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty one. However, that being said, this was
Speaker 1: a totally different world nineteen eighty seven. You saw massive
Speaker 1: competition in the market. Not only did IBM have its
Speaker 1: own personal computers out there, but you had all the
Speaker 1: clones of IBM computers, the IBM compatible computers, because IBM
Speaker 1: licensed that technology to other companies. So there was a
Speaker 1: lot of competition in the space. So hitting that one
Speaker 1: million mark was still impressive, even though it was much
Speaker 1: later than what they had hoped for, and it was significant.
Speaker 1: So that year Apple introduced new computers in the Macintosh line.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty seven, they launched the Mac se and
Speaker 1: the Mac two. As in the Part two son of Mac,
Speaker 1: it was the Roman numeral two as well, kind of
Speaker 1: similar to how they did Apple one, Apple two, Apple three.
Speaker 1: We start seeing the Macintosh regularly shortened to just Mac.
Speaker 1: At this point, very few people started referring to them
Speaker 1: as Macintosh computers.
Speaker 2: They just called a max really.
Speaker 1: After the first Macintosh, that became pretty standard, and the
Speaker 1: Mac two marked another big departure from the original Macintosh
Speaker 1: design jobs and wanted the mac to be that closed system.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, the Mac two had six expansion slots
Speaker 1: that could support all sorts of stuff, including different types
Speaker 1: of video cards, which was a huge departure for Apple,
Speaker 1: plus different types of network cards, scuzzy drives, that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. It could also display color the video cards.
Speaker 1: If you had the right video card in the right monitor,
Speaker 1: you could have a color display, which was a first
Speaker 1: for Macintosh computers, and it pushed the Macintosh from the
Speaker 1: monochromatic world to the world of glorious color, with up
Speaker 1: to sixteen million different colors that could be displayed, which
Speaker 1: was actually pretty impressive back in the mid eighties. Later on,
Speaker 1: that would be dwarfed by what you could achieve with
Speaker 1: high end video cards and monitors. In nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Apple's Macintosh line continued to evolve, but there weren't really
Speaker 1: any major developments like the ones I just mentioned. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was mostly revisions and evolutions of the line, but
Speaker 1: not revolutions on the software side. The operating system grew,
Speaker 1: with System six coming out toward the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, but apart from the first Apple CD ROM
Speaker 1: drive launching, nothing huge really happened in the macline in
Speaker 1: eighty eight, and the same is true for eighty nine,
Speaker 1: with one major exception. That was the year that Apple
Speaker 1: introduced the mac Portable. So this wasn't really a laptop computer.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could call it a laptop computer, but
Speaker 1: really it was more of a portable Macintosh computer. In
Speaker 1: theory you could call it laptop, but only in theory
Speaker 1: because the thing weighed nearly sixteen pounds or about seven
Speaker 1: point two six kilograms, which is a pretty weighty machine
Speaker 1: to call a laptop. It was also bulky and was
Speaker 1: about the size of a standard briefcase. In other words,
Speaker 1: it was a giant compared to the Mac Air that
Speaker 1: you could find today. The Mac Portable had a lead
Speaker 1: acid battery, which is the same sort of battery you
Speaker 1: can find in your standard gas powered automobile, like a
Speaker 1: car battery that's also lead acid. That's the type of
Speaker 1: battery the first Mac Portable had. Now, it did allow
Speaker 1: you to have about ten hours of battery life, so
Speaker 1: that's nice. But it added to that significant weight where
Speaker 1: it was a rather i should say it made up
Speaker 1: a significant portion of that weight.
Speaker 2: There were two main keyboard layouts you could get.
Speaker 1: One had a numeric keypad and the other one had
Speaker 1: a track ball which would replace the need for a mouse.
Speaker 1: So track ball sort of like the old centipede arcade machines,
Speaker 1: And if you don't know what that is, ask your parents.
Speaker 1: There were This was another one of the ideas of
Speaker 1: Jean Louis Gassay, so he decided that the portable computer
Speaker 1: was an interesting approach. He had already made a decision
Speaker 1: to stick with Apple. He had received an order an
Speaker 1: offer rather from Commodore. Commodore was making the Amiga line
Speaker 1: of computers and they wanted Guess to come over as
Speaker 1: the new head of Commodore. But he actually turned the
Speaker 1: company down initially and said that he wanted to stick
Speaker 1: with Apple, and so he really pushed for the portable Mac.
Speaker 1: It had pretty impressive specs for the time. Apple said
Speaker 1: they spared no expense, they made no accommodation for the
Speaker 1: fact that was portable. They didn't want to compromise on quality,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the specs were pretty impressive even for
Speaker 1: just a regular desktop machine. However, it meant that the
Speaker 1: device was incredibly expensive. Again not as surprise with Apple, right.
Speaker 1: So its price tag was six thousand, five one hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for this portable machine in nineteen eighty nine, So
Speaker 1: if we look at inflation, that's about thirteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: He would have to pay thirteen grand to get this
Speaker 2: portable Mac.
Speaker 1: Now, there was a call for portable machines because more
Speaker 1: and more companies wanted people to be able to take
Speaker 1: a machine into the field. You might work for a
Speaker 1: company like a utility company, and having a computer that
Speaker 1: your employee could take with him or her on a
Speaker 1: service call was incredibly valuable. So there was a need
Speaker 1: for portable machines. People had a desire for them. There
Speaker 1: was a market there, But thirteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: For a portable mac.
Speaker 1: Was a super steep price, and you might not be
Speaker 1: surprised to hear that not very many of them were
Speaker 1: sold as a result. In fact, Apple sales in general
Speaker 1: were not doing well that year. It marked the first
Speaker 1: time Apple had an actual drop in sales figures. We
Speaker 1: were selling fewer computers than they had in the previous year.
Speaker 1: The following year, Gasse announced his retirement from Apple and
Speaker 1: vacated the head of product development, So he only lasted
Speaker 1: a little bit longer than Steve Jobs himself did. Now,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety also saw a big shift due to outside competition.
Speaker 1: That's because in nineteen ninety Microsoft launched Windows three point zero. Now,
Speaker 1: the previous incarnation of Windows had really not made a
Speaker 1: huge impact on Macintosh sales. Consumers had not really adapted
Speaker 1: and adopted the Windows platform. But Windows three was a
Speaker 1: different story. Windows three and IBM compatible machines were starting
Speaker 1: to become more popular, and from this point forward, I'm
Speaker 1: just going to call those PCs. We'll talk about max
Speaker 1: versus PCs. I don't like that because I think personal
Speaker 1: computer is too broad a term to just refer to
Speaker 1: Windows based machines. But just for simplicity's sake, We're going
Speaker 1: to do that for the rest of this episode. So
Speaker 1: PCs were really selling well, and Windows three point zero
Speaker 1: was a dominant operating system, again a graphic user interface
Speaker 1: similar to what you would find on the Macintosh. There
Speaker 1: were even people arguing that Microsoft was copying no Macintosh,
Speaker 1: but the development of Windows was happening at around the
Speaker 1: same time as the development of the Macintosh guy, And
Speaker 1: to be honest, both companies really owed a huge debt
Speaker 1: to Xerox because it was Xerox's Park, the R and
Speaker 1: D arm of Xerox that developed the graphic user interface. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the ibmpcs had a huge advantage over Macintosh in that
Speaker 1: they were less expensive. You could buy an IBMPC for
Speaker 1: a fraction of what it cost to buy a Macintosh.
Speaker 1: Then you can get your graphic user interface with Windows
Speaker 1: three point zero.
Speaker 2: In fact, within a.
Speaker 1: Couple of years, you would have about five copies of
Speaker 1: Windows three point zero for every Macintosh that was being sold.
Speaker 1: That's not great if you're Apple. I should also point
Speaker 1: out that even at this point, as late as nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: I still hated Windows because I still hated the idea
Speaker 1: of having to surrender so much of my computer's operating
Speaker 1: system or so much of my computer's processing power to
Speaker 1: the operating system. So I was still being an elitist
Speaker 1: computer snob in those days, although I had to give
Speaker 1: in because more and more games were only Windows compatible,
Speaker 1: and if I'm going to be honest, that was my
Speaker 1: main concern with PCs back in the day. Wasn't so
Speaker 1: much concerned about the productivity software. But if I couldn't
Speaker 1: play my Ultima series of games, I got grouchy anyway.
Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety remember it was also the year that the
Speaker 1: Macplus finally got discontinued from Apple. They decided to stop
Speaker 1: selling it, to stop making it, but it had a
Speaker 1: four year run, so that was really strong. Now I've
Speaker 1: got or to say about this period in Apple and
Speaker 1: Macintosh history, but before I get to that, let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 2: Within two years, so.
Speaker 1: Essentially, by the time it gets to nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: Windows machines were outnumbering McIntosh machines by that factor of
Speaker 1: five to one, and that was super bad news for Apple.
Speaker 1: Apple stock price suffered dropping twenty percent, so the value
Speaker 1: of the company decreased by one fifth. Because of this
Speaker 1: issue and other issues going on in Apple, so the
Speaker 1: company was.
Speaker 2: In a dangerous time in its history.
Speaker 1: It really led to an overall operational loss and it
Speaker 1: was pretty ugly. Stockholders were demanding that something change. So
Speaker 1: John Scully was on the way out at this point
Speaker 1: because the performance of the company was suffering. He was
Speaker 1: being blamed for a lot of that, and so he
Speaker 1: left in nineteen ninety three. But just before he left,
Speaker 1: Apple was still trying to right the ship.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The ship was starting to list. They were trying to
Speaker 1: get it back on track. I'm mixing metaphors, sue me.
Speaker 1: Apple introduced System seven, so this was the next generation
Speaker 1: of its operating system, and it introduced AutoMac support from
Speaker 1: multiple simultaneous applications, so you could run numerous programs at
Speaker 1: the same time. It also introduced its QuickTime software in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, and Apple Max began to run on
Speaker 1: the Motorola six eight zero three zero processors. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's an easier way of saying that, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure the computer geeks out there in the audience who
Speaker 1: are familiar with these processors, these are the ones that
Speaker 1: Max ran on the sixty eight thousand processors that Motorola
Speaker 1: made since the beginning. I'm sure there's an easier way
Speaker 1: of saying them, and I apologize for not knowing that,
Speaker 1: but I'm just going to stay them the long way anyway.
Speaker 1: The Apple introduced the Macintosh Quadra seven hundred and the
Speaker 1: Quadra nine hundred computers in ninety one, which were meant
Speaker 1: to be new product lines within Macintosh, although they didn't
Speaker 1: last very long. They ran on Motorola six to eight
Speaker 1: zero four zero processors, which are comparable to the four
Speaker 1: eighty six processors that Intel was producing at the time.
Speaker 1: So you had Microsoft and Windows that were paired up
Speaker 1: with Intel, and you had Apple pairing up with Motorola,
Speaker 1: trying to make sure that its computers were of a
Speaker 1: comparable comparable level of quality to the top of the
Speaker 1: line IBM compatible machines. Apple introduced a new type of
Speaker 1: computer called the PowerBook, which was a line of truly
Speaker 1: portable computers. These were more These were closer to being
Speaker 1: laptop than that portable Mac was. Remember the portable Mac
Speaker 1: was really just a portable Mac, but the power Book
Speaker 1: was meant to be more.
Speaker 2: Of a laptop.
Speaker 1: The first of the power Books, or rather the lowest
Speaker 1: in the whole line. The cheapest was not actually made
Speaker 1: by Apple. Apple contracted with Sony, and Sony made the
Speaker 1: power Book one hundred. This is unusual because most Apple
Speaker 1: products are manufactured by Apple itself, but that wasn't true
Speaker 1: for the power Book one hundred. The battery on the
Speaker 1: power Book one hundred would last a whole two hours
Speaker 1: without being plugged in. It didn't sell as well as
Speaker 1: some of the higher end models because it just didn't
Speaker 1: have the features. The power Book one forty and the
Speaker 1: one seventy were launched at around the same time, and
Speaker 1: they sold better than the power Book one hundred did.
Speaker 1: The form factor of these ended up kind of defining
Speaker 1: the look of laptops in the future. So if you
Speaker 1: unfolded the screen, the keyboard sat back toward the screen,
Speaker 1: so typically the way you would open up laptop, and
Speaker 1: you know how the keyboard is back in the back section.
Speaker 1: In the front section there was space for a first
Speaker 1: of track ball, so again kind of like centipede ask
Speaker 1: your parents, and then later on a trackpad, which is
Speaker 1: what you find standard on most laptops today.
Speaker 2: Well, it was the power.
Speaker 1: Book that kind of defined that form factor and most
Speaker 1: laptops following followed along behind it.
Speaker 2: They didn't really change that up because it just made sense,
Speaker 2: but it was the power book that really introduced that.
Speaker 1: Now beyond this, you also had in nineteen ninety one
Speaker 1: an alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. They called it
Speaker 1: the AIM Alliance, AIM standing for Apple, IBM, Motorola cute right.
Speaker 2: The aim of aim yakidishmacaee doo.
Speaker 1: Was building new hardware and software to act as a
Speaker 1: platform for the next generation of computers and to and
Speaker 1: as a direct competitor with Windows and Intel. So they
Speaker 1: wanted to make their own version of the partnership that
Speaker 1: Microsoft had with Intel and make it a competing standard.
Speaker 2: They called it PREP, which added.
Speaker 1: In uppercase P and uppercase are a lowercase E and
Speaker 1: an uppercase P. It stood for power PC Reference Platform.
Speaker 1: It was intended to serve as that competitor, and the
Speaker 1: goal was to create a new operating system that Apple
Speaker 1: would be in charge of. So Apple would provide the
Speaker 1: operating system and it would run on Risk based processors
Speaker 1: that's RISC, and those would come from IBM and Motorola.
Speaker 1: Apple's code named operating system was called PINK and why Well,
Speaker 1: that goes back a little bit earlier in Apple's history.
Speaker 1: So when Apple was planning out future projects several years
Speaker 1: before this happened, they would write down ideas on one
Speaker 1: of two different colors of note cards. If the ideal
Speaker 1: was considered to be easy to implement, If engineer said, yeah,
Speaker 1: we can knock that out and it won't cost too
Speaker 1: much and it won't take up too much time, those
Speaker 1: ideas went on blue note cards, meaning these are going
Speaker 1: to be easy for us to do. If it was
Speaker 1: considered a challenging idea that was going to require more time,
Speaker 1: more effort, and therefore it was going to cost more internally,
Speaker 1: they would write it down on a pink note card, saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is going to be harder to do. It might
Speaker 1: still be worth it, but it's going to be hard.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: The operating system was code named Pink because it was
Speaker 1: written down on a pink note card. Creating the next
Speaker 1: generation operating system, one that wasn't rooted in the system
Speaker 1: versions that had been on Macintosh up to that point
Speaker 1: was going to take a lot of development time and effort,
Speaker 1: so it was code named Pink. Now, sadly, prep never
Speaker 1: really meshed you never got a point where you had
Speaker 1: the hardware and software married to together to make this
Speaker 1: rival to Windows Intel.
Speaker 2: So ultimately the project was a failure.
Speaker 1: But one thing that did come out of it was
Speaker 1: a new type of processor called the power PC processor,
Speaker 1: and those would eventually find their way into mac computers.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety two, Apple introduced a line of Macintosh
Speaker 1: computers called the Performa line, and this was McIntosh's effort
Speaker 1: to actually say, hey, let's make something for the average consumer.
Speaker 1: Most Macintosh computers were so expensive and so specialized that
Speaker 1: they were just going to a narrow niche market. We're
Speaker 1: talking about those creators I mentioned earlier and small businesses,
Speaker 1: but that meant they were passing up the opportunity to
Speaker 1: really target personal computer owners. They had mostly targeted those
Speaker 1: through the Apple two line. But now the Apple two
Speaker 1: line was dead. It had discontinued, and really it ended
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three when Apple two E Enhanced stopped
Speaker 1: being made, although there were a couple of other variations
Speaker 1: in the Apple two that lasted a bit longer. But
Speaker 1: they wanted to tackle that same market with the Macintosh line,
Speaker 1: so they launched the Performa series.
Speaker 2: So what was it.
Speaker 1: The Performance Series was really just rebranded older models of
Speaker 1: Macintosh computers.
Speaker 2: So the Macintosh.
Speaker 1: Computers that debuted a couple of years earlier but now
Speaker 1: had slower processors compared to the most up to date models,
Speaker 1: they got rebranded as Performa models of Macintosh and put
Speaker 1: on the market. However, Apple dumped a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: different models at the same time, and that really confused
Speaker 1: consumers in the marketplace. Imagine going to a store and
Speaker 1: seeing eight different variations of the same basic computer and
Speaker 1: not really understanding what differentiated one from another. That's kind
Speaker 1: of what happened with the Performa series. It just added
Speaker 1: more confusion in the marketplace, and ultimately consumers just weren't
Speaker 1: sure about which computer they should pie, and not a
Speaker 1: lot of them got sold. So Apple decided, hey, let's
Speaker 1: clear up the confusion, and they produced a half hour
Speaker 1: infomercial explaining the different Performa models, and you can find
Speaker 1: it online. So if you've got half an hour to
Speaker 1: kill and you want to see how Apple tried to
Speaker 1: explain this Performa series to consumers, search for it online.
Speaker 2: You can find it.
Speaker 1: It's usually divided up into multiple parts, but you can
Speaker 1: find the performa series of videos that made up a
Speaker 1: half hour infomercial. Now, the next person to step in
Speaker 1: as leader of the company, remember Scully had left in
Speaker 1: ninety three, was Michael Spindler. He came from Apple's European
Speaker 1: operations division and he worked his way up the chain there.
Speaker 1: His term was one of real controversy. It wasn't as
Speaker 1: a smooth transition, and it wasn't without issues.
Speaker 2: In fact, there were rumors that he was discussing.
Speaker 1: The possibilities of a takeover with other companies like Sun
Speaker 1: Microsystems or IBM, and he also oversaw projects at Apple
Speaker 1: that ultimately failed, like Apple's Newton project. I know I've
Speaker 1: mentioned Newton in previous episodes of Tech Stuff. I think
Speaker 1: we might have even done a full episode about the Newton,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a sad and comical story simultaneously.
Speaker 1: But that was the little handheld device that was meant
Speaker 1: to be able to recognize handwriting and other and have
Speaker 1: other features as well, that ultimately had its ambitions were
Speaker 1: beyond its own grasp. Let's be kind and call it that.
Speaker 1: But that's another story. So the nickname for Michael Spindler
Speaker 1: was the Diesel. I don't know what that says about
Speaker 1: his character, but I have a feeling that I probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't be compatible with someone whose nickname is the Diesel,
Speaker 1: unless it was Kevin Nash, because we have a mutual
Speaker 1: love of professional wrestling. Now, Spindler would end up being
Speaker 1: replaced by the Board of directors a few years later
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, and the board of directors chose
Speaker 1: Gil Emilio to step in as CEO. Gill Emilio had
Speaker 1: come from National Semiconductor before joining Apple, and Emilio himself
Speaker 1: would also get replaced by the Board of directors in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven. But more on that in a little bit.
Speaker 1: Let's get back to the timeline of Macintosh. So we
Speaker 1: left off in nineteen ninety four, just took a break
Speaker 1: to talk about the shuffle at the CEO level over
Speaker 1: the next couple of years, which really tells you that
Speaker 1: Apple was in trouble.
Speaker 2: When you see a company changing CEO.
Speaker 1: So rapidly because the board keeps replacing it, that's not
Speaker 1: a great sign. Doesn't show a lot of confidence at
Speaker 1: the Board of directors level, and it probably reflects a
Speaker 1: lack of confidence at the shareholder level. But the show
Speaker 1: had to go on. So what was happening Macintosh. Well,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four, Apple made a big move that
Speaker 1: was a defining moment in the Macintosh line. They decided
Speaker 1: to move away from those Motorola processors I talked about
Speaker 1: a minute ago, and switched to the power PC processors,
Speaker 1: which remember were still developed partially by Motorola in partnership
Speaker 1: with IBM. So it's not like they were turning their
Speaker 1: back on Motorola. Rather they said, from this point forward,
Speaker 1: our architecture is going to depend upon this type of
Speaker 1: computer processor instead of this other type of computer processor.
Speaker 1: But that meant big changes all down the line of
Speaker 1: the Macintosh. Now, they were hoping that the power PC
Speaker 1: processors would be able to rival Intel's x eighty six chips.
Speaker 1: Those are the for eighty six's, the pendums and so on,
Speaker 1: So that was the hope, and they actually stuck with
Speaker 1: power PC processors all the way from nineteen ninety four
Speaker 1: to two thousand and six, and then they changed again.
Speaker 2: That's a story for later now.
Speaker 1: The first mac to feature a power PC processor was
Speaker 1: the Macintosh sixty one hundred, which also ran macOS nine.
Speaker 1: It was the latest version of Apple's operating system. Although
Speaker 1: it wasn't called macOS nine, it was really System nine.
Speaker 1: It was the first computer to actually run System nine.
Speaker 1: Oddly enough, Apple also released a second version of this
Speaker 1: specific computer with a completely different chip architecture.
Speaker 2: So you had the power Pc version.
Speaker 1: Of the sixty one hundred, but you also had an
Speaker 1: Intel for eighty six version of the sixty one hundred.
Speaker 1: For the first time, Apple decided to try and go
Speaker 1: with an IBM compatible route, So this version of the
Speaker 1: Mac sixty one hundred had an Intel forty forty six microprocessor.
Speaker 1: It was DOS compatible. It could run both mac OS
Speaker 1: and Windows simultaneously. Later on on Macintosh users would have
Speaker 1: to do this by setting up a virtual machine that
Speaker 1: would run an instance of Windows over on top of
Speaker 1: the Mac hardware. This was also a time when Apple
Speaker 1: began to stray further away from the concept of making
Speaker 1: as much in house as it could, and it was
Speaker 1: a big departure from the way Steve Jobs had run
Speaker 1: things back when he was still part of the company. Now,
Speaker 1: the power Pc hardware was incompatible with software that was
Speaker 1: written for Macintosh computers running the older Motorola chips. You
Speaker 1: often find this if you change processor types. That change
Speaker 1: in architecture requires software to behave a different way in
Speaker 1: order for stuff to get done. So if you were
Speaker 1: trying to run an older Macintosh program on a power
Speaker 1: PC Macintosh, you had to have an emulator. This is
Speaker 1: a piece of software that simulates the way other hardware runs.
Speaker 1: You might remember I did an episode all about video
Speaker 1: game emulators. The same thing is true for operating system
Speaker 1: emulators or chip emulators. So you had this software that
Speaker 1: was replicating the way old Motorola chips ran, but it
Speaker 1: would allow the software to run on a power PC
Speaker 1: processor computer. In other words, you just had to have
Speaker 1: this other piece of software to kind of act as
Speaker 1: an interpreter so that you could get stuff done on
Speaker 1: your new machine. Now, the good news was the power
Speaker 1: PCs were so powerful, these power macs as they came
Speaker 1: to be called, were so powerful that it didn't slow
Speaker 1: down the processing of these older mac programs. So the
Speaker 1: emulator wasn't so processor heavy that it was impacting the
Speaker 1: way the program ran. It would actually run more smoothly
Speaker 1: on these power PC programs or power pc machines than
Speaker 1: they would on the older Motorola machines. So that was
Speaker 1: a good story, right. You don't want your emulator to
Speaker 1: slow stuff down, because then people get the implication that
Speaker 1: the brand new computer they just bought is slower than
Speaker 1: their old computer. That's a bad thing. So luckily the
Speaker 1: emulator ran really efficiently and it didn't slow things down.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, that's when things kind of went
Speaker 1: bonkers over at Apple. For the first time ever, Apple
Speaker 1: licensed other companies to allow them to bring Macintosh compatible
Speaker 1: machines to market, So this was the era of the Macclone.
Speaker 1: They allowed other companies to license the hardware and software
Speaker 1: and make their own versions of the Macintosh computer, although
Speaker 1: they would be called different things. This, by the way,
Speaker 1: ignores the fact that PowerBook one hundred was built by Sony,
Speaker 1: but that was built by Sony for Apple. In this case,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about companies that were building machines for Apple.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about companies that would license the technology to
Speaker 1: build their own version of the Macintosh and sell it
Speaker 1: to consumers. The first was the Radius System one hundred
Speaker 1: from a company called Radius, and it was similar to
Speaker 1: Apple's own PowerMac eighty one hundred. The specs were very close,
Speaker 1: but the computer itself was housed in a tower style case,
Speaker 1: so very different from Apple's approach where they would try
Speaker 1: and put the monitor and the computer case all in
Speaker 1: one unit. That was typical for most of Apple's computers.
Speaker 1: Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Speaker 2: This was totally different.
Speaker 1: It was more like your standard IBM compatible where you
Speaker 1: had a tower desktop. So it was a big departure
Speaker 1: from Apple's esthetic. There were other computers that also launched
Speaker 1: at this time that were clones the Macintosh, because there
Speaker 1: were other companies that licensed the technology from Apple, and
Speaker 1: perhaps Apple was hoping to dominate the market again and
Speaker 1: make enough money off the licenses to justify their use. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Apple ended up cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Speaker 1: In this case, they licensed the technology manufacturers, but that
Speaker 1: gave companies the opportunity to produce cheaper machines running Apple
Speaker 1: hardware and software. So you could run Macintosh programs on
Speaker 1: these computers because they were clones of the mac not physically,
Speaker 1: but from a hardware and software standpoint, they were, and
Speaker 1: they were able to sell them for less expensive prices
Speaker 1: than what Apple was demanding. So Apple ended up undercutting
Speaker 1: its own sales because it authorized these other users. These
Speaker 1: other manufacturers to make Macintosh compatible computers. So why would
Speaker 1: you go and buy what appears to be an overpriced
Speaker 1: machine from Apple if you can go to one of
Speaker 1: its competitors and buy a comparable machine for much less money.
Speaker 1: If you are a consumer or a business, it makes
Speaker 1: more sense to go the other route, to go the
Speaker 1: cheaper route. As long as you're reasonably sure that the
Speaker 1: machine is a good one, that's what you're gonna do.
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's what Apple saw. They saw a
Speaker 1: lot of consumers going to these competitors rather than going
Speaker 1: to Apple. Now, one benefit was that they had a
Speaker 1: lot more people buying into the Apple ecosystem, But because
Speaker 1: Apple wasn't controlling that hardware, they weren't seeing any money
Speaker 1: off of it, besides that initial licensing fee that they
Speaker 1: charged companies in order to produce these clones. So in
Speaker 1: the long run it ended up hurting Apple. It was
Speaker 1: hurting their sales, although it did mean that more people
Speaker 1: were getting familiar with the Macintosh program and the Macintosh
Speaker 1: platform because suddenly they could afford a Macintosh, even though
Speaker 1: it wasn't an official Apple Macintosh.
Speaker 2: This is one of those decisions.
Speaker 1: That Apple executives today probably look back on and shake
Speaker 1: their heads and mumble about it, because it really affected
Speaker 1: profits over at Apple. By nineteen ninety six, Apple was
Speaker 1: looking for the next generation of operating systems because in
Speaker 1: didn't work out. So they said, we need a next
Speaker 1: generation operating system. Our system series is starting to show
Speaker 1: its age. We need a new operating system. But to
Speaker 1: spend the money in time to develop an in house
Speaker 1: is not really practical. So they started looking outside the
Speaker 1: company and saying, well, what else is out there that
Speaker 1: maybe we could acquire and then use in future Macintosh computers.
Speaker 1: They looked at two different companies, and here's the funny thing.
Speaker 1: Each of those companies was founded by a former Apple executive.
Speaker 1: The first company was B Incorporated. That's b Inc. And
Speaker 1: they created the BOS or BOS if you prefer. This
Speaker 1: company was founded by Jean Louis Gassa, so remember the
Speaker 1: head of product development from a few years ago who
Speaker 1: stepped down. The other big contender was next Step, the
Speaker 1: next Step operating system, which was from a company called
Speaker 1: next and that company was founded by drum roll please
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs. So once again you had guess a versus Jobs.
Speaker 1: With the two operating systems that could potentially power the
Speaker 1: next generation of Macintosh computers. Now ultimately, spoiler alert, Apple
Speaker 1: decided that they would go with Next. They decided against
Speaker 1: bios and decided the next step was the operating system
Speaker 1: they wanted. So instead of setting up a licensing deal,
Speaker 1: they did something a little different. They didn't just license
Speaker 1: the technology from Next. They acquired Next. They spent a
Speaker 1: lot of money doing it too. They spent nearly four
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty million dollars on the purchase, and they
Speaker 1: threw in one and a half million shares of Apple
Speaker 1: stock as well. Now keep in mind Apple stock at
Speaker 1: this point was suffering, but it was one and a
Speaker 1: half million shares. If they could turn things around, and then,
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, they totally did that, million and a half
Speaker 1: shares of Apple would be worth way more money. So
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs came along as part of this part of
Speaker 1: the deal, They essentially bought Steve Jobs back to Apple
Speaker 1: because he was the founder of Next and he was
Speaker 1: part of that company, so they acquired the company. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs comes on, so he would return to Apple in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven after a very long hiatus or as
Speaker 1: he might refer to it as banishment, and he returned
Speaker 1: initially as a consultant, but Apple was reeling. The stock
Speaker 1: price had hit.
Speaker 2: A twelve year low, and the board of.
Speaker 1: Directors had decided eventually that they needed to replace gil Emilio.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there was one person who was really
Speaker 1: arguing for this, and that person was a Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: So Steve Jobs goes to the board directors and says, hey,
Speaker 1: you are in real trouble. The decisions that have been
Speaker 1: made over the past few years have been disastrous for
Speaker 1: this company and they are leading it to the brink
Speaker 1: of bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: You got to get rid of gill Emilio. And the
Speaker 2: board of.
Speaker 1: Directors agreed and they put Steve Jobs in charge as
Speaker 1: interim CEO. But that's that's what and last Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: would eventually become the actual CEO, not just an interim CEO,
Speaker 1: and would end up taking control of the company he
Speaker 1: had co founded a.
Speaker 2: Couple of decades earlier.
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, it was a total different story for
Speaker 1: Apple from that point forward. But that's the tale for
Speaker 1: another episode. All right. That concludes this text of classic
Speaker 1: episode The Macintosh Story Part two. Next Friday we will
Speaker 1: continue with part three.
Speaker 2: Then we'll be all up.
Speaker 1: To date as of twenty seventeen, and nothing's happened since then, Right,
Speaker 1: so we're good. I'm kidding, of course, but I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this classic episode, and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.