Slashdot Mirror
Apple's First Flops
Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."
Where can i get one of those babes? I want to replace my 95 cause it's beginning to be insecure and unstable... ...deja vu ...
"The press declared the machine and its software revolutionary. In a matter of months, the Macintosh had revolutionized Apple and the computer business" - they revolutionized and other company rules the market ?
Siropel
I'd say two major flops are a pretty good hit/miss ratio compared to the number of products they've had out, 2:50 or so.
What about the Apple Pippin? Few people know about Apples ill-fated console release.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
major flops under its belt
It's ok Steve... it happens to every guy! Maybe you were just nervous!
Look at you now - with your impressive... eh... Mac Mini...
I don't know if there are some Mac addicts here who can remember it, but the "AV" machines back then (660 AV and 840AV iirc) with their AT&T 3210 DSP, GeoPort, etc... were nicknamed Mac III
:)
...
:)
And of course were an horrible flop
It's funny because back then, the nickname "Mac III" made a lot of people associate it with Apple III, and there was, in the Mac hackers community, a bad feeling about it
Apple: Never again use "III" in a product name
Ben.
"... Apple began the eighties with..."
If this isn't old news.. I don't know what IS.
Why on earth would he object to putting a fan in it? Did he think it'd make too much noise?
Absolutely. In this day of multi-ghz processors and video cards requiring their own cooling, people forget what it's like to have a dead silent computer. Remember back then that many/most computers didn't even have hard disks, so unless you were accessing the floppy, there was no noise at all. Notice that he made the same edict when it came to the original Mac's.
What a concept! Usually when you drop things, they break. But when you drop an Apple, well, it just works (TM).
Actually this was a common problem with all computers of that era. Wasn't uncommon at all to have chips work their way loose, esp new computers. I'd get new units and the first thing I'd do is re-seat all the socketed chips, esp the memory dips as trouble shooting your computer locking up or randomly rebooting (ahhh, some things never change do they?) because one of your 36 64k dips was loose was not fun.
FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fan, owner, and former employee (certainly not a high-level one, though).
That said, Apple screws up a lot, particularly in first versions of a new product. As the article says, the Lisa was a flop, but it led to the original Mac, which led to the real hit, the Mac II.
The Mac Portable was a terrible product--but it led to the Powerbook, which defined the laptop computer. The Cube was overpriced and didn't have a market, but it led to the Mini, which is kicking ass.
The iPod was a hit from the jump, but the Newton was dead from its announcement date (we knew it was in trouble when they started handing them out as employee awards).
From article:
By April 1984, Apple had managed to sell only 65,000 units, loosing money on the model.
Geez, Slashdot's power to make people misspell words is so powerful that it's leaking into linked articles!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
You just cant beat 1980s technical support. A friend of mine use to work for Cray back in the 80s. When the systems timing wasn't just quite right a technician will go to the system and cut the wire a little shorter so the electrons will get there a little quicker. Technology back then if you ever compare the electronics were a lot bigger and more durable. large solder blobs to keep the chip in place with the board. An extra wire soldered on to fix a bug in the design. just filled with ICs. It is great stuff. With this type of stuff you can actually figure out how it works. Figuring that you has the specs of every IC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The Lisa wasn't a commercial success but it certainly was a technological success, paving the way for the Mac. (If you haven't seen a picture of one, google around... they looked a bit like an original Mac (aka 'Mac Classic') rotated through 90 degrees. It had a revolutionary WIMP interface. I remember as an awestruck almost-teenager reading a breathless review in the UK's then only PC mag, "Personal Computer World" which said "the only bad thing we could find to say about it is that some of the icons look a little whimsical. How long could you look at a whimsical icon before it becomes irritating?" It was also over eight grand sterling, four times the price of the ugly, clunky CGA IBM PCs that were the competition...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Oh no that wasn't.
//s and did very well. It introduced a number of additions that eventually made their way into the Mac world, such as ADB input bus. It had 16-bit graphics when Macs were still black and white, 16-chanel sound chip (the Mac had a 4-way back then I believe).
That machine was the last of the Apple
That machine would have made Apple big, had they had not spent all their marketing efforts onto the Mac (whose hardware was inferior in many areas to the GS, but whose OS was superior).
Dan Bricklin's spreadsheet ran on the Apple first and was the sole reason folks went out and bought an Apple. For a period (think early 80's), Apple owned the desktop computer market, with many more business-oriented applications than creative/educational titles.
Only after they got crushed by IBM machines did they focus on thier current market. I don't think IBM did them in as much as the IBM clone market, which reduced the cost of the hardware to far below Apple's. With a lower price, more people purchased IBM-compatible machines and the demand for software followed.
It turns out according to the Apple sales database they sold exactly 65,535. :)
The Economics of Website Security
If the X86 hardware is faster, then why doesn't it outperform the Xserve clusters using Mac OS X and standard Apple hardware? Don't mistake bad benchmarking for good data. Don't believe me, go to the Super Computer web site (http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=1 1) where 5 of the top nine are PowerPC hardware. Number 7 on the list is built by using stock Xserves ordered directly from the on-line Apple Store and running Macintosh OS X. And, there are even faster Apple clusters in the wild that didn't even bother to try to compete for a ranking.
These are not marketing ploys. These are very expensive machines that are optimized to go as fast as they can to get the job done. No political bias...just go fast. The only X86 cluster in the list above a ranking of 9 has nearly twice the number of processors as the Virginia Tech cluster. Maybe you should spend a little less time pounding out Visual Basic programs and do some actual research before making statements like that.