@Karlos

Quote:

Let's face it. Every other personal computer died. The 80s was a Cambrian Explosion of different personal computers, the 90s was a mass extinction.

Apple survived, despite their best efforts to eff it up

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@WolfToTheMoon

@OlafS25

The main difference between Apple and Commodore/Amiga was pricing and market positioning. Apple had a much healthier margin for every computer sold. They also had much better marketing staff/campaign and had a few market niches that were really profitable where they had a majority market share, like desktop publishing.
Steve Jobs, really, was not instrumental in Apple's growth in the 80s - it was Apple II line that was making the most of profits and sales in the 80s.
Mscintosh, as Jobs envisioned it(very poor expendability, low specs, high price), was a poor seller and it did not achieve much success until Gasse made an expendable Macintosh II.

Commodore's strategy was mainly focused on race to the bottom - it worked in the 80s but left them devoid of capital and with nowhere to go once cheap PCs landed in the 90s. They also invested pretty much nothing in R&D. You really can't run a sustainable business like that.

In hindsight, I still think it was doable for Amiga to survive (but not under Commodore) - come mid 90s and mobile computing was taking off - that was a perfect niche for AmigaOS to spread its wings. It could have been a viable competitor to companies/products like Psion, Palm and such. A big advantage was there was already a pretty sizeable library of software and software developers. Another missed chance was a mobile gaming handeld with some of the Amiga hits from the A500 - that was certainly technically doable by the mid 90s. For whatever reason, none of the companies that came in possesion of the Amiga IP in the 90s explored these avenues - they were mostly going for the PC market.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Apple survived, the Mac didn't. OSX is just the evolution of NeXT that Jobbs brought back with him.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@WolfToTheMoon

Gil Amelio fought for Apple and even brought Steve Jobs (an adversary who eventually ousted him) to get NeXTStep and to stabilise the company. There was no equivalent at C=. Gould was out for himself. Tim Cooke has just taken a sizeable salary cut after an 8% drop in iPhone sales! The profits SHOULD affect the pay of the executives. That link was broken at Commodore and however badly they did the executives bled the bottom line dry!

In the end they couldn't even properly prepare the Amiga IP for sale to another serious big-league contender company! The CD1200 was too little to show that the A1200 could compete in the market and the CD32 couldn't compete against the PS1 in an unexpanded form! The A4000T was a beautiful machine but the video production niche was too small to sell the company on the back of that!

Where was the AAA/Hombre prototype? Where was the upgraded MOS/CSG fab and LCD production facitilities (yes, they let that go early on in the 80s) to add value to the sale? C= were a husk by the time Gould and Medhi had taken their salaries and benefits!

Last edited by BigD on 03-Feb-2023 at 12:47 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 03-Feb-2023 at 12:46 PM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@WolfToTheMoon

With Apple II Steve Job also was involved. At Commodore the C64 was the big cash cow for a long time. So i am not sure what you want to say. My view is at Apple people stood behind the products and certainly used them, at Commodore not. That is a fundamental difference to me. Regarding Amiga the mistakes were done in the 80s by not investing in the own technology, At Commodore they preferred to invest in overpaid management. A technical orientated company not investing in R&D but in managers... Pffff

@BigD

there were no prototypes, just ideas and papers. And in my view I doubt that the ideas would have made sense developing something completely new with PARISC as processor, incompatible chipset and Windows NT as OS.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 03-Feb-2023 at 01:54 PM.

@OlafS25

Quote:

there were no prototypes

Exactly, and hence no chance to sell the company as a going concern and only of value to the patent miners!

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Karlos

Quote:

Apple survived, the Mac didn't. OSX is just the evolution of NeXT that Jobbs brought back with him.

Maybe. My opinion is that Apple would have survived even if they used BeOS or a similar OS as a base. They had an active user base of several tens of millions in the mid to late 90s(i've seen estimates at 20-30 million). That's an large enough market that if you know what you're doing you can live off, especially if you charge Apple prices.

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@OlafS25

Quote:

With Apple II Steve Job also was involved. At Commodore the C64 was the big cash cow for a long time. So i am not sure what you want to say. My view is at Apple people stood behind the products and certainly used them, at Commodore not. That is a fundamental difference to me. Regarding Amiga the mistakes were done in the 80s by not investing in the own technology, At Commodore they preferred to invest in overpaid management. A technical orientated company not investing in R&D but in managers... Pffff

Steve Jobs hated the Apple II series. For several reasons, primarily because it wasn't his work, it was Wozniak's. That's precisely why it was a solid seller, it was expendable and a lot of companies supported it. Technically, it was a C64 competitor, but Apple charged much more for it. I'm sure they also made more money on it than Commodore ever did with C64(or Amiga)

Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 03-Feb-2023 at 07:54 PM.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Apple developed a cult basically. C= just thought that they could obliterate the opposition with ridiculously cheap tech with vertical integration of the supply chain. They failed to develop and support an ongoing computer platform and the Amiga developed into one only because the in-house Commodore 16bit machine; the C65 didn't come out soon enough and they were out of ideas for the next widget!

Apple too have now achieved vertical integration but refuse to discount their products like C= did. Apple instead foster a sense of value and tech jewelry so that their profit margins can remain an order of magnitude above what C= shot for. The result is not only a sustainable company but one that has shot far above any sane stock listing for a long time. Without Jobs and Ive I believe their peak is over but they are cemented after such a long period of dominance of computer, phone, tablet, tv and music markets! C= never secured any stability or war-chest forr R&D or a rainy day (i.e. 1993/94) and yet they bought a Pet Jet and their executives paid themselves like kings!

Chuck Peddle a true innovator should have been rewarded and kept at C= at all costs! Same with Jay Miner! Tramiel infuriated Peddle and saw him as a threat to be squashed like everyone else. Funny how Gould eventually squashed Tramiel personally by ousting him and the Amiga squashed the ST!

Last edited by BigD on 04-Feb-2023 at 01:24 AM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: … They call their machine Miner. In memory of Jay, the designer of the original Amiga, who questioning the need for ubiquitous computing, ultimately became the campaigner against the relentless push of corporate computing interests into every aspect of daily life. Until commodore had him silenced, framed as a sex offender and jailed until his death.

Love the world building.

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@OlafS25

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OlafS25 wrote: @agami What do you take? Please stop with it

I was just illustrating the stupidity of @ppcamiga1’s fantasy, regarding the importance of chunky pixels and Doom.

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@thread If you compare Apple and Commodore there is one big difference... at Apple there was Steve Jobs as CEO who lead the development and had visions...

I agree.
Commodore was rudderless. There was no clear corporate vision, and there was no strong leadership driving toward that vision.

Even their purchase of Amiga was more about not letting Atari have it, than a strategic decision. Everything else is just tons of proverbial spaghetti thrown against the wall.

It’s a shame that they didn’t use Amiga’s as a standard internally. You have to “eat your own dog food”.
Apple, under the Steve Jobs comeback tour, constantly crowed about using their hardware and software internally, even if it had fewer features than industry alternatives. They changed their workflows to suit their products.

Kind of what I’m doing this February. I am trying to use the iPad Pro 11 (M1) with external display, Stage Manager, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, as my daily driver.
I can’t expect the iPad to support the workflow I have become used to on Linux or macOS. I need to change my workflow to take advantage of the different computing paradigms.

Last edited by agami on 04-Feb-2023 at 02:54 AM.
Last edited by agami on 04-Feb-2023 at 02:54 AM.

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@ppcamiga1

You must be a hoot at parties.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: @Karlos Quote: Apple survived, the Mac didn't. OSX is just the evolution of NeXT that Jobbs brought back with him. Maybe. My opinion is that Apple would have survived even if they used BeOS or a similar OS as a base. They had an active user base of several tens of millions in the mid to late 90s(i've seen estimates at 20-30 million). That's an large enough market that if you know what you're doing you can live off, especially if you charge Apple prices.

I agree.
Apple survived because of Microsoft.
But Apple thrived in the 2000s because of Steve Jobs et al.

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@BigD
For 1993 time perid:

Above A1200's price range, A4000 wasn't price competitive when compared to Apple's Macintosh Quadra 605 (668LC040 CPU @ 25 Mhz based, entry price of $1000 USD)) and PC clones 486SX-25 and 486SX-33.

Meanwhile, SNES attacked the lower-priced gaming market segment that is near the A1200's price range. SNES has superior developer relations and 1st party game titles.

For the EU market, both SNES and A1200 were released in 1992. Commodore missed the 1992 Q4 Xmas sales period with relatively low A1200 production numbers.


Amiga World Magazine (November 1993), page 58 of 100,
A1200 price $379
A3000 5MB, 105HD, price $899
A3000T/030, 5MB, 200MB HDD, price $1199
A3000T/040, 5MB, 200MB HDD, price $1599
Cost for 040 card = $400

The cost estimate for 68040 card, $1599 - $1199, hence the cost for 040 card is about $400
A3000 has obsolete ECS graphics in 1993.

A1200's $379 + 040 card's $400 = $779.

Commodore could have pre-configured "out-of-the-box" A1200 with 68LC040 at 25Mhz SKU for slightly above $779 (i.e. add 4MB fast ram, HDD) which could compete against $1000 486 33Mhz based PC and Apple's Macintosh Quadra 605.

Unlike Commodore, Apple's cultish image has substance.

VideoToaster with A4000 is a tiny market niche. Social media video streaming didn't exist in 1993.

Last edited by Hammer on 04-Feb-2023 at 07:03 AM.

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Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@agami

Apple today earns the money with iPhone. Computer are only sold now for nostalgic reasons but economically they could drop it.

@agami

Quote:

agami wrote: @Karlos Quote: Karlos wrote: … They call their machine Miner. In memory of Jay, the designer of the original Amiga, who questioning the need for ubiquitous computing, ultimately became the campaigner against the relentless push of corporate computing interests into every aspect of daily life. Until commodore had him silenced, framed as a sex offender and jailed until his death. Love the world building.

Well, if you subscribe to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's all absolutely true. Just not in our reality.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@agami

Quote:

But Apple thrived in the 2000s because of Steve Jobs et al.

And what really made them successful was investing in new markets. They never really sold all that much computers(compared to the PC market), but what they did sell they charged good money for. And iPod and later iPhone is what really made them their fortunes, not Macs.

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@OlafS25

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OlafS25 wrote: @agami Apple today earns the money with iPhone. Computer are only sold now for nostalgic reasons but economically they could drop it.

They probably will drop computers eventually IMHO. They treat MacBooks more like ChromeBooks with every passing generation. They consider iOS games as 'good enough' for computer user! They have lost BootCamp for serious gamers who think Metal has been a failure in keeping Mac game developers/porting studios interested. Adobe Premiere trounced Final Cut Pro and you can use that on a PC! They killed the iDVD/iMovie killer combo. What are their killer apps now? Garageband? Logic Pro? That's it really isn't it?

...oh yeah and the tech jewelry/shrine of the mimalist aluminium sliver etc

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @agami Apple today earns the money with iPhone. Computer are only sold now for nostalgic reasons but economically they could drop it.

True.
But the Mac sales for the previous quarter were $7.7B

You can say that A-Eon sells computers for nostalgic reasons (not true but closer), but $7.7B for a quarter is the kind of sales for which many computer OEMs would give up their first born child.

Sure would like to catch that if/when they’re looking to drop it.

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All the way, with 68k

If Apple drops the Mac, what are they going to design and develop the new iPhones with?

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