History Of The Macintosh PC

Apple is a small niche competitor to Microsoft in the operating system market. Apple has setup a business model where they position themselves as the hip alternative to PC’s. This keeps a small, but loyal group of customers buying them, even today when Apples are simply PC hardware with a higher price tag, the cost of that hipness. The history of Macintosh has been a rocky one at best.

The Boom

Thanks to the unfortunate marketing and other supply issues that surround Commodore in the US, Apple was able to market the Mac as a better machine than the PC’s of the day. The Commodore offerings made both Apple and PC pale in comparison. Apple also used the brilliant tactic of selling Macs to schools at a small margin of the street price. This helped win the hearts and minds of the children who would then influence the purchases made by their parents. Apple also teamed up Adobe, maker of the famous Photoshop software. They were able to get a version of the software optimized for the CPU in the Mac, giving an apparent advantage of Mac hardware of that of a PC. More information about the history of the Macintosh can be found here http://www.apple-history.com/

Steve Jobs’ ruthless campaign to make Apple profitable at any cost was working, but it didn’t end there. After licensing the ability to make Mac clones to many large companies, Jobs decided to renege and make OS 8 a Mac only version. This basically left those who had invested in Mac hardware out in the cold. Their clones had increase the Mac market share, but hurt Apples profits as people were buying the much less expensive clones that contained the same quality of hardware. Jobs essentially decided that the Apple name was itself an added value that people should pay more money for. But lashing out at the competition and releasing dubious benchmark results could only keep Macs moving forward for so long.

The Decline

The end really came with Windows 95, while Microsoft’s OS had more appeal by its second iteration called windows 98. This OS took back most of the market share Apple had gained during its blitz campaign with the Macs. Over time, more and more of the Apple claims of superiority in different software were found to be false, and even Adobe started making Photoshop optimized for Intel processors. Jobs and Apple lashed out in bizarre fashions trying to stem the tide of market share loss. They even went so far as to sue PC manufacturers who were making computer cases other than white, stating that they had the patent on other colors. This being so even though PC’s had come in other colors for years.

Macs Today

Macintosh now lives on running PC hardware and its own operating system. With apple now facing a tremendous backlash from apparently pretending that malware did not exist on the Macs of today. More information about this can be found here http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20064394-245.html