I'm Dan Oliver and was on the IIGS team. I don't think Jobs had anything to do with cancelling the IIGS. As you said he wasn't at Apple at the time, but it's more than that. Upper management was maybe a little insecure about filling the role of Jobs. My guess is they would have loved to have cancelled the Mac just to kill Jobs's legacy. What I do know is I was at the meeting when management told the team the IIGS was going to be phased out. The reason was Apple didn't have enough resources for both and the profit margin was much higher on the Mac. And, it wasn't just an either or deal, they didn't really seem to want to extend the Mac line either. They figured to just sell the current Macs. Very short sighted and they later figured out the company did actually need to create new models. I think Jean-Louis Gassée would have been much more influential in the Mac winning than Jobs who's only influence was in creating the Mac team and a such a loved machine. If Jobs had stayed at Apple he would have killed the IIGS the moment he heard about it. I don't think he liked the idea very much that Woz had created the Apple II. Ego. I hated they killed the IIGS of course, but, looking back, I think it was the right choice. Everything about the IIGS was looking backward toward staying compatible and true to the Apple II legacy. Sure, the 65816 could have kept being extended like Intel but that's such an ugly path. It's a low margin path and Apple could never be Apple without high margins. It cost money to produce good products. The Mac was looking forward, many possibilities. The 68000 was like working in an open field instead of inside a closet. I do thank you for showing the power of IIGS. We were very proud of that machine. Side story on just how intense the battle was between the Mac and IIGS teams...When I was creating the Menu Manager I made a the Apple logo in full color, the old 6 horizontal stripes. The Mac team found out and went insane. I'm talking about screaming and crying. THE MAC UI IS BLACK AND WHITE!!! At that time Apple considered the Mac UI to be like the Coca-Cola recipe. Harvey Lehtman and others won that battle and we were allowed to make a color UI. I assume Gassée was probably key in allowing it too, he had a good business mind imo, I think it really pissed off the Mac team that we created the first color UI. Proportional scroll bars were also a battle, Mac team hated them. But today...still proportional...hehehehehe.
Great information. One thing I’m curious about-to keep the Apple II line going, eventually they would have needed to support resolutions above 240p. Any idea how that might have been accomplished? Also, since there was (briefly) an Apple III, what would the next step have been? Apple IV?
I'm a software guy. I know as much about hardware as I do about women. I had an Apple III before I joined Apple and it had been discontinued by the time I got to Apple. I liked it a lot, but business only. I don't remember anyone at Apple ever referencing the Apple III so don't know what their original plans were.
Good points! Except that I can't really see why 65816 being "extended like Intel" would be an "an ugly path". It was already an extended 6502. Intels extension of 8080 to 8086 to 386 was pretty elegant as well (while AMDs extension to x86-64, was damn right beautiful). (I'm not even a 6502 or Apple II fanboy of any kind, but programmed mostly the Z80 at the time. :)
Amen. My first computer was a Tandy 1000HX IBM clone. Today I am loading Linux on very old computers and they work great. Steve Jobs was all about "style". Wonderful...if you aren't on a budget.
Great video. When I was in HS in the early 90s we played so many games on the IIGs...they just looked and sounded amazing. The Mac classics were used but they were lousy for gaming. A few years later when I had my first tech job as an assistant Mac tech they had my take inventory of a huge room of Macs they had phased out (large college). There were stacks and stacks of IIGs systems as high as the ceiling and took me forever to get through them all. It was a sad thing to see that they were now just junk waiting to be recycled, while some Mac classics were still in use here and there.
I remember when my dad bought our first computer. It was the Apple IIGS and he paid a bit over $2000 for the whole setup plus ram/hdd upgrade. Then we found out about a year later that they were going to dump the IIGS for the Mac and my dad said he will never buy a computer from them again. We've been on the PC ever since XD
Extend and improve a dead platform almost always fails. Well, until Intel extended and improved the x86 and the only reason it survived is because Intel adopted AMD's innovative and backwards-compatible x86-64 architecture.
@Stephen Anthony What apple did with Intel was supporting all powerpc application and they did it for a very long time. Leopard 10.5 was not an ugly OS and still had upgrades even after Snow Leopard. You can't really blame them.
Kagusaki Wolf Apple alienated a lot of their fan base by abounding the Apple II line for the Mac. I agree with the 8 bit guy, it was a mistake to do so.
@@johnchainsman It wasn’t a dead platform, the Apple IIGS sold more than any Mac did the first year it was out, even though Apple barely advertised it. The only reason it died was because Apple refused to continue to make the Apple IIs.
The IIgs was an amazing system. When I was a kid, that computer provided me the ability to learn to program, play games, and work on school work. An added benefit was that it would run older IIe/IIc software as well. My parents purchased (and still have) the Woz Limited Edition IIgs. My wife's grandmother gave me her old IIgs (both still work). The game Hacker II provided many sleepness nights for me as I tried to figure it out.
I kept my IIe and IIgs for years. I SO regret selling them. I would loved to see a world where the Apple II series evolved instead of the Mac (writing this on a 2012 Mac Mini - sigh). I have entertained the idea of buying a nice IIe and doing so hobby computing. Right now I am using the Vintage II emulator to play Wizardry I.
Interesting video, but the M68K is really a 32-bit architecture. Even though its external data bus is 16 bits wide and its address bus is 24 bits wide, the registers and ALU inside is a full 32 bits wide. Thus it had a future. The 8 bit 6502 (IIe) and 16 bit 65C816 (IIGS) had much less of a future. Apple would have had to move to a 32-bit CPU (and a more advanced OS) sooner or later anyway. But considering it was several years before Intel released the 32-bit 80386, and many more years before Microsoft released even a partially 32-bit OS, it's probably fair to say they moved a little too soon, pushing expensive hardware that wasn't quite needed yet.
I love videos like this that discuss the history, and why certain products made it and others didn't. Those years were a confusing blur, but looking at it in hindsight. WOW. It makes us appreciate today's market. Great video!
That whole site sounds like paid advertising. It's just a matter of reading the hardware specs. I'm just comparing hardware vs price. I'm not talking about iOS or usability or Apple as a service.
+noidexe In 1989 I knew a guy whose job was to evaluate computers and software for a major corporation. If they were considering buying something, they would have him test it and write a report. As a result,he had both a Mac and a PC. He said the difference was this: To build a PC that can do everything the Mac can do would cost more than buying a Mac. But almost nobody wants a machine that can do everything the Mac can do. If you want to do just one thing, like desktop publishing or video production, you can build a PC that will do that better than a Mac for less money than a Mac.
The Macintosh, as a sleek all in one (for the eighties), wasn't necessarily a bad idea. On the outside, it's an attractive product. The big mistakes were not merging it with the Apple II line, it's limited audio visual capabilities and it's price. It's even possible to forgo the expansion capabilities and still have a desirable device but an upgrade card slot wouldn't go amiss. Having the OS installed internally, and upgradable, would've made the machine much easier to use too.
I could watch your videos all day! I absolutely love your attitude and the way you conduct yourself in videos. Keep up the amazing work love all the topics as well. 👋🖥️💾
the thing is, i've noticed that when people use Apple products, they are automatically an "Apple Fanboy" by non-Apple users. Which I think is crazy. If someone has an iPhone, they are labeled as "an iSheep". If they have an Android, then thats fine, they have an Android, regardless of what company it is. I have noticed though, people that do use Apple products, tend to be more "Brand loyal". They don't stop with iPhone, they'll get an iPad as well or a Mac computer as well. I love Apple as a company. I love their OS and the fact that they really did change the smartphone market and tablet market. They didn't make the FIRST smartphone or the FIRST tablet, but they changed the way people view them. Before iPhone, people that had smartphones were using Palm, Windows Mobile or Blackberry and typically, they were "Business" people. It wasn't teenagers with smartphones like it is now.
Yeah I hate it when people start bashing people just cause of that. I use a samsung s4 as my phone and I use a mac mini 2012 model for my mac computer I also use a alienware m11x laptop for my windows needs. I like apple products more cause I know they just work great like they are supposed to. I just can't stand fanboys in general. The one thing I also hate are the pc and console fanboys talking bad about each other. I rather play my games on a console cause I like using a controller rather than a keyboard.
***** Well go fuck yourself you little bitch :) You can't block someone for swear words, and if you don't wanna see them, then don't read the comment sections on any videos.
I just get annoyed when people worship Apple and think everything else is stupid. My friend's family literally has nothing but the newest Apple products, and they don't buy anything else. They look at Android as stupid and Windows as stupid. THAT is what pisses me off. Have an iPhone? Fine, good for you. Have a Mac? Awesome. Have it all and boast about it and talk trash about whatever you don't agree with? Get that shit outta here.
The Macintosh vs the 2GS sort of seems to feel like Jobs VS Wozniak. I was never that fond of any Macintosh I've ever used, but the 2GS impresses me in hindsight. (I was way too young to think too critically about such a thing if I had even known it existed when it was new). All these companies with weird decisions huh. Amiga could've been much bigger than they were, but Commodore just messed everything up. The 2GS was impressive, but apple had other ideas. Ideas which really forced them into a niche market for a really long time. You can consider it to their credit that they survived at all, given the number of those 80's computer companies that are just plain gone now... But still...
i think this was good. Not because I think it is fun to point out flaws, but because companies like Apple have so much going into their decisions, and it is always interesting to try to deconstruct those decisions. I am very interested in what additional issues you have on your mind. Thanks for the great content.
I too never realised how good the IIGS was. Perhaps it was not Jobs's ego as much as calculated marketing: at the time, combined home/business computer systems were seldom taken seriously, and I wonder if Apple wanted to delineate its big-ticket professional system from the home/education offering.
It's being somewhat overhyped here, but it was superior to the MAC. Don't forget about the $10k LISA! Having the huge software base of the Apple II would have been a huge boost had they focused on the IIGS line. The sound is absolutely outstanding.
Great video ! A good short story. I had a //GS back then and what you're telling reflects perfectly my feelings at that time. And in France, where I live, I fear the support for the // GS was even worst.
The Macintosh was a great marketing ploy with portability. Don't forget, when Steve Jobs introduced it he took it out of a travel bag. It was really the introduction to the laptop. It was successful in the sense that it proved that all the other CEO's and John Sculley were lost in business bs instead of inventing something new.
The iBookGuy , while I accept the merits of your view on the situation, I think that it was the best 'dumb luck' point in business history. Steve Jobs got thrown out of Apple, started Next, and then when Apple acquired Next they got a better OS environment and were able to re-invent themselves. (Under 'new' leadership.) This offered opportunities that an otherwise stagnant Apple would die from. Had Steve Jobs stuck around, I think the company would be out of business by now, rather than being one of the fastest growing companies in the desktop market. Innovation wasn't their strong point, style was. The iPod was just a polished Creative Labs MP3 player with more storage, and Microsoft had tablet convertibles way before the iPad came about. I think the form factors really took shape with the re-invention of the company, from ideas that started in the 1980's. Steve Jobs also adding people like Jony Ive & Phil Schiller to the team with his return. Steve Jobs wasn't the brightest businessman in his younger days, but he had ambition and drive. What he lacked in technical prowess, he made up for in having child-like imagination about the idealized future of technology. The Macintosh was supposed to be the idiot's (regular person's) computer. It was designed to be more of an appliance, than a serious business machine, so the backwards compatibility and expansion options were unnecessary. (I do agree that the pricing was backwards, but higher prices usually imply 'quality' and 'integrity' to customers.) Consider that prestige brands do the same job as economy brands, but at a much higher multiple of 'value', because people believe it's better. Like Mercedes vs. Chevy. It's like the original iMac vs the G3 Blue & White (I have the original beige G3, personally.). One was made to be a workstation that offered expandability and power, while the other was for new users that wanted to surf the internet and write e-mails or play that dinosaur and bug game they pre-installed on them. (Facebook wasn't even a thing yet, by that point, and neither was RUclips.) The iMac served its purpose and the business class machines served theirs. If you look at what we have now, with the Mac Mini (or iMac 5K) vs. the Mac Pro, one is good for RUclips level video production and content consumption, while the other can churn out Pro-quality 4K content, without choking on it. They're going to be pointed at two entirely different market segments, much like a commuter car vs. a semi-truck. It isn't that one is 'better' than the other, so much as they're like a sledgehammer vs. a scalpel. They just have different jobs, expectations, and strengths.
Interesting, but I think we disagree on the CPU though. The 68K processor had 16 registers (8 data, 8 address) for general use, each 32 bit. The 65816 had 2 8 bit accumulators and a few 16 bit registers. You can talk about it being more cycle efficient per instruction, but when you're missing basic things like multiplication and division, you realize that cycle/instruction benefit doesn't help you all that much. In addition, the 68K was made for compilation to it so working with a high level language is reasonable. Not so much for the 65816, although at least it has a 16 bit stack pointer, although the whole thing is hampered by the data bank register making it painful to work with anything more than 64K (yay! bank switching!). And while there were eventually C compilers for it, compiling to it was awkward since the compiler wouldn't know, for example, that you needed to convert a binary value to BCD for printing, which is why so much code for those machines were written in assembly. The 65816 was clearly a compromise of a CPU: a decent compromise given that it had to be able to switch into 6502 compatibility mode, but still a compromise.
I agree, the Motorola 68000 CPU was the better CPU and the way of the future. It had a simple, flat memory map, none of this complicated segmented memory that Intel CPUs had at the time.
agreed. the 65816 was a bitch to program. western design, the 6502 licensee that created the 65816, was a tiny little company and had very little resources for R&D of successor chips of the line. most definitely no where the strength of intel or motorola of its time. i think this is the point many are ignoring - the 65816 was a dead-end chip and most certainly could not compete against the powerhouses that would come in the 68k lineup.
Not to mention non-user upgradeable. At least the Apple IIgs was upgradeable, and certainly I've seen mods that could almost bring that 30-year-old computer to be rather competitive with even today's computers (well, maybe not, but certainly anything better than Macs at the time would let you do).
I was a massive Apple fan at that time. I mean really massive. I knew the memory map, the hooks, I programmed multitasking and networking professionally, built my own interface cards and had a schematic of the Apple II on my wall. And I was eyeing on to the 68000 as well! When I saw the Mac, monochrome, bolted down, with only 128 K of RAM, which was way too scarce for that architecture, that honeymoon was over. You had to PAY more to get a working system. It was like a birdie to all the independent developers. Game over for me. Period. It looked like fascism to me, the kind of thinking that was attacked by that first iconic Macintosh movie clip. Which was withdrawn after one show. They must have realized what it meant. The IBM PC copied the Apple II recipe, with listings and schematics and all openness and look what they achieved! F*** Apple.
Great video again. I've got some additional info for those interested: Steve Jobs was actually against turning the Mac into a color computer because most people had b/w printers, and then the display will not be WYSIWYG compared to the paper. He was also against internal expansion slots. The first Mac with color and expansion slots was the super expensive Macintosh II in 1987, the development had started two years earlier in "secret" because Steve was still in Apple. Once he left they could start the development all-in, so it took them a while. After the release of the Mac in 1984, the Apple II line was selling about 5 times more than the Mac the next couple of years. Mac is actually a cost reduced/cut down Lisa computer. Lisa was released a year before the Mac, but was just to expensive for personal use. So they took away color monitor and memory, and they stripped the OS to fit in the smaller amount of RAM, removing multitasking and color support, let it have 1 internal disk drive instead of 2 etc..
first real multitasking was on apple from 1996. First multitasking by years: Unix-1969, Sinclair QL-1984, Commodore's Amiga-1985, Windows NT-1990 and at the end Mac OS X 1996
@@Odee Mac OS X didn't exist until 2001. I think you're confusing Mac OS X with the earlier Mac OS which was strictly a 68000 product. Apple briefly made a version of OS X that worked with 68000 until they fully made the transition over to x86 architecture shortly after.
I can't stand it when people drop articles with things like lines of products such as computers. It's _THE_ Macintosh or _A_ Mac, not just "Mac did this" or "Mac was that". It's not a goddamned person.
About the part you mentioned on 3:09, the original Macintosh of course had no expansion slots, but the mac plus you were discussing about has the ability to be expanded.
+Avedis Ghazarian Not really.. It had no expansion sockets other than RAM modules. I think you're thinking of the Macintosh SE, which came out next and I think it had one socket.
Oh, thank you. I mean it was the first time with the Plus that you could add more ram, but if you were talking about adding things like advance new hardware, then I am wrong.
My last Apple computer was the Apple IIE . I didn't care for the Mac and I jumped ship for the PC clones, my first being the Tandy TX1000. I put in a VGA card and attached a Bernelle cartridge drive. Good times. Never went back to Apple.
me too. as an Apple IIe user, i felt abandoned when the Mac came out. I thought, ok if I have to switch over to a new platform and toss all my old software, I might as well go to a PC running DOS.
You have absolutely no clue about how important CPU choice is. The world was shifting away from programming everything in assembly language. Assembly language was the only practical way to program the 6502/6510 - the 65816 extended the address space to 16MB, but hold on. When Intel was designing the 8088/86 in the late 70s they already had the experience of the 8080 but actually thought ahead by adding registers to specifically support high level languages (e.g., C soon became the dominant high level language to program commercial software on personal computers). One was a stack frame register the other was a dedicated segment register that would allow a stack to be located into any segment (and thus load multiple programs into memory each with its own stack). Later there would be instructions added that made if more efficient to push and pop a stack frame context. So the Motorola with the 6809 was thinking along the same lines, they added features to that CPU that specifically assisted the use of high level programming languages. The Motorola 68000, for the mid 80s, then ended up being the ultimate high level language friendly CPU. Compared to the Intel 8088/86 and the 6502 CPUs it was pure Nirvana. Had all the registers necessary for doing a high level call stack properly and above all its registers were bit-wise large enough to where an address anywhere in its addressable memory space could be formed as a single binary value. The Intel 8088/86, of course, required much more complicated segmented addressing for code and data when going beyond 64K. Well, the 65816 of the Apple IIGS that you're praising much more resembled the 8088/86 CPUs than the MC68000 - but it was actually much worse than an Intel 8088/86 because it lacked two crucial registers that that CPU family had added in its design back in the late 70s - a register for the stack frame (not a stack pointer - stack frame - a context set up by high level languages when making a subroutine JSR) and a register to refer to the memory bank where a stack resides (meaning is possible to load multiple programs into memory and give each its own call stack). This made the 65816 just absolutely utterly pitiful for trying to support with a high level language. Sure, the Mac toolbox in ROM was coded in assembly language but the vast majority of software written for that computer was being written in high level languages which its CPU choice was the absolute best choice at that point in time in history for supporting high level languages. Computer software (and hence the economic factors of creating software) at the end of the day are what end up making or breaking a computer. To program for the Apple IIGS meant sticking with less economical assembly language programming or using crappy compilers that had to produce code that did atrocious hacks in their code generation in order to try and support what a high level language needs to do. The Commodore Amiga went with the MC68000 - not the 65816. Unless one needed to have specific legacy support for 6502 8-bit software, the MC68000 was the hands down obvious choice to base a new computer on in the mid 1980s - no contest whatsoever. It's clear the designer(s) of the 65816 didn't care whatsoever about supporting high level languages - didn't regard that as important at all. Otherwise they would have mimicked the Intel 8088/86 and added a dedicated stack frame register and a dedicated bank register for where the stack resides (on the 65816, the one and only stack is stuck in the zero bank of memory - the only thing they allow to do on the 65816 is to reposition the stack to any where within the zero bank, but this means when loading another program - think MS-DOS TSR programs -, there is no provision for giving the other loaded program its own call stack). The CPU designers at both Intel and Motorola fully conceived of their respective CPUs having explicit support for high level languages and in the mid 80s, Motorola 68000 with its flat addressing ability was the very best conception of all (Intel would not match that until they introduced the 80386 - on the 80386 the OS designs specific to that CPU would set all the segment registers to the same segment and then just ignore them from then on, effectively treating the 80386 as a 32-bit flat addressing CPU). The 65816 was nothing but a CPU designed to support late-70s/early-80s 6502-based 8-bit computers with backward compatibility mode. That is THE only forte it had on its resume. The designer(s) brought absolutely nothing else to the table and the 65816 was already outclassed by its rivals as it appeared in new systems in the mid-80s. The market place tells the rest.
C was introduced as a super assembler with a compiler to hidden code. At that time Basic was the language of choice, so including a software that translate Basic syntax into C and include a library of Basic functions equivalents, would be the graal.
@@Zeonoid It had a 24-bit address bus to memory, giving it a max 16MB addressable memory. But the registers internally were 32 bit, so as new models of the CPU came out, the addressability to memory was increased, but was possible for software to have been written on 68000 and then just run as is on later generations of the 68000
@@peberdah Commercial games of the late 70s, early 80s were written in assembly language - not interpreted BASIC. Non-game professional software developers were quick to move on to compiled languages that generated native code. We predominately chose C as that language in that mid-80s time frame. And because the MS-DOS PC was the business standard, and to some extent the Apple Mac (stuff like desktop publishing), this was a great choice because the CPU architecture supported high level languages. I wrote software for both Intel PCs and Apple Macs in the 80s (and 90s). In the 80s we all were using C for biz software. In the 90s, well in my circles it was C++. By 2000, it became practical to run managed programming languages for creating enterprise business software as computers were fast enough and had much more memory.
Steve Jobs was a arrogant dickhead that always put his own needs first. However he got better at collaborating when he came back. His bio is a very good read.
That's something people like to repeat, but there's no real evidence for it; if anything quite the opposite. Check out the rate that the 65816 accesses RAM versus the speeds of RAM available c. 1985 when the machine was being designed versus the costs. It's like saying that Apple deliberately crippled the Macintosh Plus because the 68020 had been available since 1984 but wasn't used. It just conveniently discards all the other engineering.
Personally I am skeptical of that claim. The faster CPU still needs to interact with the slow IIe core and peripherals. So about the best you could hope for is a "fast RAM/chip RAM" situation like on the Amiga, but with the "chip RAM" clocked at a lowly 1 MHz. So if they put more effort into giving it faster RAM and CPU the machine could have still wound up bottlenecked by the need to interact with its IIe parts. Though it could be they really did feel a need to be careful about how they positioned the machine relative to the Mac. Ultimately the Mac really was the platform that carried Apple through the 1990s and early 2000s. It floundered a lot in the 1990s - but it remained a viable platform long enough for the iMac and iPod to propel it into the next decade. I really don't believe a IIgs-derived platform could have done the same.
I remember my first year in High School, when the Mac came out there was this huge promotion at our school where every teacher was given a Mac for their classroom. It was suppose to revolutionize teaching, I think the Apple company was even involved, it got a ton of media attention, stories in the local paper, even made the nightly news. In the next two years, I only saw one teacher even turn the machine on and she just used it to play games while the class was taking a test or working on assignment. By my senior year, ever Mac was sitting on a shelf or filing cabinet gathering dust.
The first one I saw was at my job in a mobile phone company. I took one look at the tiny monochrome screen and wondered why on earth the company wasted thousands of dollars on it.
Still a good video, I learned a few new things. Thinking of getting a IIgs and this video came up. Thanks! I was in my late teens/early 20's when the Mac came out and they made me want one SO bad, and seeing one in person made me want one too. Oddly I didn't even know about the IIgs until years later, as the stores where I lived (SF Bay Area) simply didn't carry it. They were pushing the Mac hard. I had a //c and then a IIe with lots of expansion cards I bought used during this period (85-86) but had I known about the IIgs I certainly would have favored it, for obvious reasons. Seems so odd that I was completely in the dark about it.
The macitosh line is what happens when you have someone caught up in the emotions and marketing of a product as opposed to the engineering of something that could be awesome! I don't own ANY apple products and neither do my kids...never will...one distinct reason...I think your comparison is spot on here. Thank you for the vid!! Cheers.
Thats so sad you keep your kids off the best phones and tablets in the industry. Well really there is not much of a tablet industry there is iPad and oh I guess windows Surface but thats about it. There are really not much android ones. Oh you use windows? Thats Apple you know
@@igniteexport1463 Think outside the box... your kids are playing with the most overpriced POS that's on the market today. P.S. Windows came from the Xerox Alto, just like Apple OS...
@@nunyabusiness4651 Windows came from the Mac. Gates was not interested as much in the GUI he liked what they were doing and it wasn't till the Mac came along that they started looking seriously into a GUI. Overpriced? The surface is more expensive then the iPad is and is not nearly as good. There are really no android tabs to speak of.
Apple is far better then other stuff. And frankly most android phones are in price if not higher then the iPhone. Yes the Mac is higher but its allot better then windows machines
Yes. Damn mushroom munchers greed socialist capitalism abusers. Their business is not technology but reproducing fan boys and making them more and more stupid zombies.
Wait, you mean to tell us the company founded by a guy who stole most of his ideas from Xerox and then defrauded his business partner, and sold $6,000 monochrome underclocked computers is not, in fact, a greedy capitalist company?
As a authorized Apple service tech at the time Apple brought out the Macintosh we were blown away with some of the marketing strategies Apple came out with. Now with all back room details available to us I now think it was a miracle that Apple came out of this time period alive. Thanks for your insight on this subject.
+passion4paws91 so what? they were going bankrupt and they needed money. I think that's a great motivation. This strategy lasted them to this day and made them the most profitable company ever.
Here's the problem with your analysis. The IIGS operating system software GSOS would not have existed except for engineers from the Mac team. They brought code and experience from the System 1 project over to the IIGS. Now, I agree that it was completely unfair and short sighted to hobble the IIGS performance.
Apple's Human Interface is a standard. It is a not hardware specific. It could be applied to anything. GSOS is an operating system that manages devices. You are confusing the two.
I wouldn't necessarily blame Steve Jobs, although during his early years at Apple he did do his share of damage. The problem has to do partly with why he was ousted in 1985. When Macintosh sales were slipping, John Sculley wanted to re-focus Apple II development, whereas Jobs wanted to continue Mac development. When Jobs was out of the picture, I think Apple was in a situation where the Mac had gained enough of a following to where the product line could continue to exist, although they could not afford to kill the Apple II. I feel that's how the situation ended up the way it did. I think had Steve Jobs not been fired, the Macintosh probably would have advanced faster, making superior to the Apple II in every way (except for the expandable ports) and the price difference between the Apple II and Macintosh would have been justified.
I own a IIGS (now, not then) and it's a really cool computer! I think it was very competitive for its time. One thing I note is that the Mac adopted many of the innovations from the IIGS eventually including the ADB bus, color displays and color graphics in the GUI, and eventually high quality digital audio.
As I remember the time, the II GS was the successor of the Apple II, which was an enormously popular machine by hobbyists. At least here in Europe. But it always had the nimbus of beeing a hobby machine. Which was great for people developing their own add-on cards, but seriously this wasn't something, lets say a doctor or a lawyer wanted to have on his desktop. The other popular computres of that time, the Atari ST and the Amiga had that same image of beeing a toy machine, used for playing games but not for that much more. Well, the Atari had some reputation of beeing usefull for working with sounds (MIDI), the Amiga was known for the first steps in doing video editing, but that was pretty much it. The Mac on the other hand was a machine, which looked good, which simply worked and definitely was something to do serious work with. It became popular in the first generation of typesetting software for eg. doing a newspaper or just where you need a lot of writing to be done in a professional way. Clearly the lack of color didn't matter that much for these type of things. Much more important was, that even an untrained secretary or a medical or a law student could use that system out of the box without a lot of training or fiddeling around with cables or switches. The Mac was always targeted at the professional market, while the II GS was targeted at the hobby market to all who loved the plugboard design and could make use of it. The competitor for the II GS was Atari ST and Amiga, while the competitor for the Mac was the IBM PC.
Good points. I just missed this era, not getting a proper computer until the early 90's. I suppose the IBM PC started out with a business image - the name IBM alone accomplishes that - but interesting that IBM (the clones actually) came to own both home/gaming and business markets (with the niche exceptions that the Mac dominated) but I guess the IIGS could never have pulled that off even if it did have more or less the same architecture and limited upgrade path as the IBMs - it was just perceived as a joyboy family and gaming machine.
In the USA the IIGS was marjeted at the education market, which Apple dominated. However, they quickly replaced it in their education marketing materials with the Macintosh.
They are kinda going downhill because of Tim Cook; but if you don't know what made them great, you know nothing about them. People who hate Macs don't know much about computers in general.
MasterCheifn343 far as I'm concerned their only good more modern product is the iPod. when it was first introduced I don't think there was anything quite like it.
The 68000 cpu used in the Mac required twice as many clock cycles to perform the same operations as the 65816 cpu used in the Apple IIgs. Consequently, to compare clock speeds, you should divide the Mac's clock by two, for an effective Mac clock speed of 3.9Mhz vs the IIgs' 2.8 Mhz. But the major limitation of the IIgs was not speed, it was its peculiar memory segmentation. The 65816 was a 16-bit upgrade of the 8-bit 6502, which could only access 64KB of RAM. While the 65816 could use up to 8MB of RAM, it could only access one 64KB bank of RAM at a time, making it awkward to program. The Mac's 68000 was a native 16-bit cpu that could simultaneously access its entire 8MB memory space without arbitrary memory restrictions. By 1986, it was clear that the Apple II's 8-bit legacy hardware and software limitations were handicaps that could no longer compete with the increasingly dominant IBM PC.
I still prefer the 512X342 pixel display on the Plus to the 320/640 X 200 display. If you're doing word processing you can see what it's going to look like when printed. Same PPI as the dot matrix printer. Apple's Mac prices were sooo high, though. I love ADB. Woz is the man.
EricssonXL Upgrading your memory by a factor of 8 is still a huge thing. By calling it "slight" you minimize the stupidity of the original design. And the machine was intentionally designed to have no upgrade path other than buying a new machine.
Unless I was talking to an Apple fanboy, then yes that was my full intention from a normal user's perspective. I know factor of 8 is a huge thing, the thing is the normal person would not talk about 128kb to 1024kb being a factorial jump large but technology advancement large so we'd compare 128kb to 1024kb to something we'd use now like 4gb to 16 gb
I never could understand why the Mac was so hideously expensive. Which is one reason why I never had one growing up. I absolutely LOVE my IIGS! But to think that it is essentially the better Mac is interesting! Now imagine a IIGS with Macintosh ROMS... Hmmm :)
I think you got it wrong. What made the mac successful was that it did not boot up to a text prompt. Full stop. The mac was an attempt to re-imagine computers for people who had been hesitant to embrace computing and the personal computer revolution. A person already competent on a commodore 64 or an apple 2 or an atari 800 would have preferred the II GS. It was aimed at the existing market of experienced buyers. The mac was aimed squarely at people who had no idea how to work one of these things. The ENTIRE point of the mac was to remove things. Even the simple black and white tiny monitor actually was a brilliant move because it got people to say, “that’s not scary, it’s cute”. I owned a commodore 64 back in the day and my commodore had more advanced color graphics than the original mac, and even had a graphical operating system as an OPTION, but the first time I touched a Mac, I instantly understood that it would be a success. It’s not the original mac’s fault that Apple was a shit company from about 1988 to about 1999. The mac was genius.
3:53 You're still leaving out the floppy disk drive for the IIGS. I guess that would bring the IIGS up to about US$2000, just a little less than the Mac and a helluvalot more than the 16 bit wonders Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.
The Mac Plus also would have typically had an external SCSI drive and the same external 3.5" floppy drive purchased. If someone bought a IIGS new and did not have an Apple ][+ or //e then they would have had to buy a new 5.25" drive, but if they were upgrading they could use the Disk ][ drives with the IIGS instead of buying new drives. If you were just going to run 8 bit software then you didn't need to buy the IIGS RGB monitor, a composite monitor from a //e or even a TV set would work. Basically if you already had a ][+ and wanted a IIGS you could get by with just purchasing the IIGS itself - which came with CPU, keyboard, and mouse. You only needed to purchase better peripherals if you wanted to run IIGS specific software.
Well, the title is Apple and Steve Jobs's biggest mistakes. Since Jobs was fired from Apple not long after the Mac was introduced we'd have to look at Apple's mistakes, and that would probably be the Performa line.
A very interesting video, thank you for this. I am not an Apple user, I've always had PC's. Mostly because I always felt a PC was far more affordable, expandable and customizable. This may or may not be true, but it's the impression I've always maintained through the years, and being in graphic design and animation, I took a lot of heat for that perspective. I have a great deal of respect, however, for Apple and what they have achieved, and always wondered what product really helped them turn the corner into becoming a profitable and successful business again? Was it the debut of the iMac of the late 90's, or was it as most people believe the iPhone years later?
After getting out of the navy in '84, I was hired by GE up in Syracuse NY. Their engineering offices had three microcomputers: An Apple Macintosh, An IBM PC (two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drives), and a DEC Rainbow (CP/M, and proprietary pre-formatted 5.25" floppy disks because the machine couldn't re-format them). The DEC didn't get much use. The PC and the Mac were used by various engineers depending on which one they were comfortable with. Personally, I learned Microsoft DOS on the office's PC.
The design of the Macintosh is one of the reasons why I turned my back on Apple (after having owned an Apple II) forever. I hated the way you couldn't expand it, couldn't modify it. It was a manifestation of Steve Jobs' attitude about computers vs. that of Steve Wozniak, an attitude that continues to this day.
Sorry, claiming that both the 68000 and the 65816 processors are "16 bit" is quite questionable. Additionally, just considering clock efficiency in regard to accessing memory is also quite questionable. The 65816 was an 8/16 processor with some extensions over the 6502 and quite frankly, had a very clumsy instruction set. The 68000 was a 16/32 processor and had a clear and planned upgrade path. And frankly, the difference between 24 bit linear addressing (the 68000) vs 24 bit bank addressing (the 65816) is as different as night and day. On the 68000, you could actually use all of your memory for your programs in a seamless fashion. But using banks? That is just pure undiluted insanity. So the 65816 was the tail end of a dead end processor architecture, while the 68000 was the beginning of a new architecture with a clear future upgrade path.
Not necessarily a dead end. The 65816 could pretty easily have been extended to 32-bit linear adressning, just like Intel did when they designed the 386 from the 8086 and 286. (AMD did the same when extending the instruction set to 64 bits.)
@@herrfriberger5 Your examples seem to refute your point. The 80386 linear addressing offered *no* backward compatibility with segmented addressing as done on the 80286 and earlier processors. This is why the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows APIs was so long and drawn out. Whereas the 68000 was, as the OP pointed out, basically a cut-down 32-bit processor. So when the first 32-bit Mac, the Mac II, was released in 1987, most existing Mac software worked fine on it, and the transition to the “32-bit-clean” era was pretty much complete by about 1990, 5 years before Windows 95.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Linear adressing is by definition not segmented, so yes, of course. However, the 386 itself was 100% compatible with 286-style segmented adressing, being a pure extension of the 286. The linear adressing possible with the 386 was just a special case of segmentation, using a single 4 GB segment. It was perfectly possible to run older code on the 386, just as you can run 386 code on x86-64 today. The fact that the designers of 32-bit Windows did not chose to make much use of the segmentation is another matter. I would not blame the "slow" Windows developments on Intel. It has more to do with the original "Windows" being a simple DOS-program, basically a CP/M-style program, and "Windows NT" being (essentially) a port of WMS from the VAX to the the 386. Merging these two worlds took some time, yes, but the transistion from 16- to 32-bit addressing (or word size) was hardly the main problem there. Of course, it's also true that the 68000 had a linear 32-bit adressing architecture from the start and that it made it easy to extend old software. (Its atomic 32-bit integers were of less importance though. The addition of larger native integers when porting code is usually smooth.) The 65816 could run 6502 code using 24-bit adressing, and that simple mapping could have been easily expanded into 32-bits. Adding MMU functionality (like the 286/386 or 68010/20) would be a bit more complex, of course, but that was not strictly required in those days and in these kinds of computers. (There were even UNIX systems without any MMU hardware.)
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 PS The 68000 was not really a "cut down" 32-bit processor. It was essentially more of a 16-bit processor that emulated a 32-bit architecture via microcode. It's ALU and data paths were all just sixteen bits wide. The same could be said about processors like the Intel iAPX 432, the National 16032 CPU, many mini computers of the time, etc. A 16-bit implementation of a "32-bit architecture" was common. DS
@@herrfriberger5 There was simply no way to take advantage of the flat 32-bit addressing in the 80386 in any backward-compatible fashion. Contrast this with the 680x0 family, where you could still use 32-bit addresses on the 16-bit machines, albeit restricted to only 16MiB of available address space on a 68000 (note: only 8MiB of this could be used for RAM on the 16-bit Macs), and then run exactly the same code on a 32-bit machine and immediately have access to more memory than that.
Very nice, insightful video (as usual)! Sums it all up quite well. So sad all of Woz's work on the IIGS was so underappreciated, because it's still a magnificent little machine to this day! Jobs may have been an excellent businessman for selling the Macintosh at such high prices but in terms of really appreciating the engineering involved, truth be told: sometimes he kinda sucked. Too bad the business side and the technical side of computing seldomly go hand in hand as history has teached us many times.. Keep up the good work and uh, easy with the dynamite, David ;-)
As an owner of a Mac Plus at University back in the day, the Motorola 68000 was a 16/32 bit CPU, and used a 32 bit data word length but was restricted to a 16 bit data bus, with full 24 bit addressing. The 65816 was simply an enhancement of the 6502 (Commodore 64) from what I can find and was only 8/16 bit like the equivalent intel CPUs of that era and supported 24 bit addressing by adding an 8 bit page to a 16 bit address, so I don’t agree with you when you can say the Apple II had a superior CPU. The rest was very interesting though, thanks for the video.
Here is what happened in those two years -- Apple bled money on the Macintosh, Macintosh 128K, and Macintosh 512K. They were only making money on Apple II sales. By 1986 they had the IIGS which proved that the Apple GUI did not require a Macintosh.
Apple also made the Macintosh series almost impossible to restore due to failures on the machines. And the apple II series are easier to restore. so....
Great video. We had an Apple //c back in the latter half of the 1980's, but I was always quite jealous of my cousin's IIgs (we also used the IIgs in junior HS). By the time we got a new computer, (A Dell with a Pentium 75), the Apple II was pretty much gone and Macintosh was in the doldrums. Since then, I have stuck with the PC. However, I still have fond memories of my Apple II days and have always wished they would have kept it going. If they did, there is a good chance I'd still be an Apple user today.
One thing that this video neglects to mention is that the 68000 was a new(ish) chip and the first in a new family, the 68k family. Now that family did end with the 68060, but at the time where was no way of knowing that, and in 1986 there was every reason to believe that the 68000's ISA was one with a bright future (It was also seeing use in the Atari ST and Amiga, as well as various Japanese machines with rather extraordinary capabilities that we sadly never got to see in the west). By contrast, the 65C816 seems to be basically the end of the line for the 6502 family, I don't recall there being any successor to this processor and I don't think there was much expectation of seeing one back in the mid 80s. In a vacuum the 2GS is a better machine than the early Mac, but it looked like there the Mac had every opportunity to go onwards and upwards, whereas the 2GS was basically the last hurrah for 6502-based Apple hardware. I'm not saying that this wasn't a power-play by Steve Jobs, we all know what he was like and we all know the kind of internal politics that play out in tech-startups (which Apple definitely still was at the time), I'm just saying that there's valid engineering reasons why the 2GS might not have been Apple's favourite son, in spite of its specs compared to the Mac.
Thank you, really great and informative video. But think about this: if Apple had focused on the II line instead of the Mac line, and imagine as a result they would have indeed been better off during their 'dark ages' in the 90s, then as a result of that Steve Jobs would have never made it back to the company. The reason Steve was able to return to Apple was essentially because by 1996 many shareholders and Apple's board thought there really wasn't anything to lose at this point. And lucky for them, by that time Steve Jobs was a very different man with a lot more experience, wisdom, insight and probably a bit humbler too, but still aggressive and eager enough to build everything up from scratch again. So what I'm saying is, if Apple had stuck with the II line, Steve would have never returned and Apple would be doing much worse today.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that Apple would be doing worse with the absence of Steve Jobs ? They could have been doing better than they are right now.
When SJ left Apple in '85, he started Next computer company targeting educational market. That is where he designed the GUI much of which was used on Macs. When he returned Apple bought Next
... and the low margin PC clone with MS-DOS then Windows took over 98% of the market. As Stalin once observed, quantity has a quality of its own. Even today Apple values margin over market share, which is why Windows & Linux dominate. Apple is only significant because so many people use smartphones or tablets instead of desktops.
The Macintosh 128k was introduces in 1984. Anyhow the comparaison stays fair given it's 1986 the Macintosh Plus and the Apple IIGS… Except: 1) The Macintosh had a GUI and made the computer accessible to any company (as long as they would have understood that it's much more than an expensive typewriter). 2) Both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak left the company in 1985…
The IIGS had a GUI (initially a black & white one that was then replaced in 1986 with ProDOS 16 and then again in 1988 with System 6 & GSOS.) The Apple IIGS was marketed (while it was marketed) as a consumer home and education machine, not a business machine, and it was backwards compatible with thousands of education titles that the Mac was not.
There's a greater difference between the original Mac and the Mac Plus than memory! Newer ROM, HFS file system, double sided floppy, mini DIN-8 ports, SIM sockets.
No. The Plus still had DB-9 serial ports. It also added a SCSI port, that the 128/512 lacked. The Mac didn't get DIN-8 serial ports (and ADB) until the SE in '87.
My only gripe with this video is that you said that the Macintosh line was a mistake and shouldn’t have happened. And with the comparison you made in the video I can see where you’re coming from. But! You are comparing models on the Mac and Apple II that were released after their original releases. In 1984 (when the original Macintosh released) the Mac was indeed an Insanely Great product since it was the first affordable computer with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). And in ‘84, the Mac was the only computer to have this (aside from the expensive Apple Lisa). Since the IIGS wasn’t available in ‘84 I see it as the Mac was far more advanced than the Apple II and it was totally worth the price point for the GUI, point and click mouse, and the really good processor. It was way ahead of its time in that capacity. Having said that, I love your videos! Keep up the great work! 😁
One of the main purposes of this video was to demonstrate that the Mac was NOT the first affordable computer with a GUI. I think you need to go take another look at the price comparison between the two machines.
+Connor Fin Unless you're talking about aesthetics their hardware hasn't been special or really that good since the G5. A macbook is basically just a Dell in a nicer case-they're both made by Foxconn and the hardware is similar enough that you can install a third party BIOS and install OSX with Apple's installer.
The different is that Apple was doing it with two of their own products!! We don't see that anymore since all Macs run Mac OS. The closest we have is the Mac vs iPad Pro issue.
You are right sir! Steve Jobs caused incredible harm to Apple back in those days. Under his "leadership" Apple released the Apple III which was a poor product and overpriced.... The Apple II line should have been beefed up and supported much better! The actual real revolutionary product was the Apple Lisa which came out in 1983...but had been crazily overpriced: it cost $10 000 !!! The Mac originally came out with 128kb of memory only and no possibility of expansion ... in direct contradiction to the expansion philosophy of the Apple II. No wonder the PC took the market by storm, it offered what Apple now was refusing to offer: expandability and flexibility.
I'm Dan Oliver and was on the IIGS team. I don't think Jobs had anything to do with cancelling the IIGS. As you said he wasn't at Apple at the time, but it's more than that. Upper management was maybe a little insecure about filling the role of Jobs. My guess is they would have loved to have cancelled the Mac just to kill Jobs's legacy. What I do know is I was at the meeting when management told the team the IIGS was going to be phased out. The reason was Apple didn't have enough resources for both and the profit margin was much higher on the Mac. And, it wasn't just an either or deal, they didn't really seem to want to extend the Mac line either. They figured to just sell the current Macs. Very short sighted and they later figured out the company did actually need to create new models.
I think Jean-Louis Gassée would have been much more influential in the Mac winning than Jobs who's only influence was in creating the Mac team and a such a loved machine. If Jobs had stayed at Apple he would have killed the IIGS the moment he heard about it. I don't think he liked the idea very much that Woz had created the Apple II. Ego.
I hated they killed the IIGS of course, but, looking back, I think it was the right choice. Everything about the IIGS was looking backward toward staying compatible and true to the Apple II legacy. Sure, the 65816 could have kept being extended like Intel but that's such an ugly path. It's a low margin path and Apple could never be Apple without high margins. It cost money to produce good products. The Mac was looking forward, many possibilities. The 68000 was like working in an open field instead of inside a closet.
I do thank you for showing the power of IIGS. We were very proud of that machine.
Side story on just how intense the battle was between the Mac and IIGS teams...When I was creating the Menu Manager I made a the Apple logo in full color, the old 6 horizontal stripes. The Mac team found out and went insane. I'm talking about screaming and crying. THE MAC UI IS BLACK AND WHITE!!! At that time Apple considered the Mac UI to be like the Coca-Cola recipe. Harvey Lehtman and others won that battle and we were allowed to make a color UI. I assume Gassée was probably key in allowing it too, he had a good business mind imo, I think it really pissed off the Mac team that we created the first color UI. Proportional scroll bars were also a battle, Mac team hated them. But today...still proportional...hehehehehe.
Thanks for sharing! wow really cool insight from someone who was there! hopefully more people will see this.
Thanks so much for sharing your experience!
Great information. One thing I’m curious about-to keep the Apple II line going, eventually they would have needed to support resolutions above 240p. Any idea how that might have been accomplished? Also, since there was (briefly) an Apple III, what would the next step have been? Apple IV?
I'm a software guy. I know as much about hardware as I do about women.
I had an Apple III before I joined Apple and it had been discontinued by the time I got to Apple. I liked it a lot, but business only. I don't remember anyone at Apple ever referencing the Apple III so don't know what their original plans were.
Good points! Except that I can't really see why 65816 being "extended like Intel" would be an "an ugly path". It was already an extended 6502. Intels extension of 8080 to 8086 to 386 was pretty elegant as well (while AMDs extension to x86-64, was damn right beautiful).
(I'm not even a 6502 or Apple II fanboy of any kind, but programmed mostly the Z80 at the time. :)
Still waiting on that episode 2...
ikr
Andy Merrett Fanboy alert!
+Andy Merrett Well, since this video was released they never stopped making mistakes.
3 months later after this comment was posted still waiting...
Must have episode 2
I’ve been waiting almost 4 YEARS FOR EP 2
I've been waiting 4 minutes, and I'm grossly disappointed.
Meanwhile, he became the 8-Bit Guy... I'm not sure he's still entitled to talk about 16, 32 and 64 bit microcomputers!
@@OlpusBonzo he still has lots of videos on 16 bit computers
I have been a fan of the 8 bit guy for a long while. I have just seen the 2015 movie called Steve Jobs. David!!!! Where is the NEXT EPISODE MAN!!!!
Ok my original comment is over a year old. So we've all been waiting a OVER 5 WHOLE YEARS FOR EPISODE 2!
I’ve been waiting 8 years for episode 2
It is 2024 and I am still waiting.
When is Ep 2 coming? :)
Steve Jobs’ ghost is stopping it from coming
Not yet.
lolooolol
Because he's a fanboy
@@tardwrangler1019 He's certainly not a fanboy.
Almost two years later, no part 2
SplashyNoodles Its because all those "overpriced and underpowered" comments sums it up for all the other future parts
*4* years later!
That was 6 years ago 'future proofed comment'.
.
@@jersonrey - wasn't the author killed in a car crash after making this one?
Been waiting 8 years for part 2
I have never regretted going with an IBM clone running DOS for my 1st machine.
Me too , good old DOS and hardware you could upgrade / modificate .
It just worked and fun to use too .
Amen. My first computer was a Tandy 1000HX IBM clone. Today I am loading Linux on very old computers and they work great. Steve Jobs was all about "style". Wonderful...if you aren't on a budget.
Great video. When I was in HS in the early 90s we played so many games on the IIGs...they just looked and sounded amazing. The Mac classics were used but they were lousy for gaming. A few years later when I had my first tech job as an assistant Mac tech they had my take inventory of a huge room of Macs they had phased out (large college). There were stacks and stacks of IIGs systems as high as the ceiling and took me forever to get through them all. It was a sad thing to see that they were now just junk waiting to be recycled, while some Mac classics were still in use here and there.
I remember when my dad bought our first computer. It was the Apple IIGS and he paid a bit over $2000 for the whole setup plus ram/hdd upgrade. Then we found out about a year later that they were going to dump the IIGS for the Mac and my dad said he will never buy a computer from them again. We've been on the PC ever since XD
the IIGS was ahead of the Mac in a lot of things, like ADB and colour, by 3 years even
Extend and improve a dead platform almost always fails.
Well, until Intel extended and improved the x86 and the only reason it survived is because Intel adopted AMD's innovative and backwards-compatible x86-64 architecture.
@Stephen Anthony What apple did with Intel was supporting all powerpc application and they did it for a very long time. Leopard 10.5 was not an ugly OS and still had upgrades even after Snow Leopard.
You can't really blame them.
Kagusaki Wolf Apple alienated a lot of their fan base by abounding the Apple II line for the Mac. I agree with the 8 bit guy, it was a mistake to do so.
@@johnchainsman It wasn’t a dead platform, the Apple IIGS sold more than any Mac did the first year it was out, even though Apple barely advertised it. The only reason it died was because Apple refused to continue to make the Apple IIs.
The IIgs was an amazing system. When I was a kid, that computer provided me the ability to learn to program, play games, and work on school work. An added benefit was that it would run older IIe/IIc software as well. My parents purchased (and still have) the Woz Limited Edition IIgs. My wife's grandmother gave me her old IIgs (both still work). The game Hacker II provided many sleepness nights for me as I tried to figure it out.
I kept my IIe and IIgs for years. I SO regret selling them. I would loved to see a world where the Apple II series evolved instead of the Mac (writing this on a 2012 Mac Mini - sigh). I have entertained the idea of buying a nice IIe and doing so hobby computing. Right now I am using the Vintage II emulator to play Wizardry I.
Interesting video, but the M68K is really a 32-bit architecture. Even though its external data bus is 16 bits wide and its address bus is 24 bits wide, the registers and ALU inside is a full 32 bits wide. Thus it had a future. The 8 bit 6502 (IIe) and 16 bit 65C816 (IIGS) had much less of a future. Apple would have had to move to a 32-bit CPU (and a more advanced OS) sooner or later anyway. But considering it was several years before Intel released the 32-bit 80386, and many more years before Microsoft released even a partially 32-bit OS, it's probably fair to say they moved a little too soon, pushing expensive hardware that wasn't quite needed yet.
"Overpriced and Underpowered" same slogan they use today.
true...
apple sucks, always had, always will.....to bad there so many idiots that pay $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for products they don't know what they do
I love Apple... I just think their watch is overpriced. Everything else is finely priced.
that's the most ridiculous thing I've read in a while
Technology Spotlight 1000 euros for an iPhone( in Europe, not USA)? don't think so
"Macintosh was a mistake" ~ Hayao Miyazaki
Steve Jobs: A mistake?
Lol, the Studio Ghibli director would make a lot of Apple fans mad.
I love videos like this that discuss the history, and why certain products made it and others didn't. Those years were a confusing blur, but looking at it in hindsight. WOW. It makes us appreciate today's market. Great video!
Was that the start of "overpriced and underpowered but cool and simple" as a business strategy?
+noidexe Are you living under a rock? Check this out:
stevecheney.com/on-apples-incredible-platform-advantage/
That whole site sounds like paid advertising. It's just a matter of reading the hardware specs.
I'm just comparing hardware vs price. I'm not talking about iOS or usability or Apple as a service.
+Kiyoshi Kirishima
"Apple's Insurmountable Platform Advantage"
That's like saying "Taco Bell's Insurmountable Antidiarrhea Advantage"
+Kiyoshi Kirishima Are you living under a rock?
+noidexe In 1989 I knew a guy whose job was to evaluate computers and software for a major corporation. If they were considering buying something, they would have him test it and write a report. As a result,he had both a Mac and a PC.
He said the difference was this:
To build a PC that can do everything the Mac can do would cost more than buying a Mac. But almost nobody wants a machine that can do everything the Mac can do.
If you want to do just one thing, like desktop publishing or video production, you can build a PC that will do that better than a Mac for less money than a Mac.
The Macintosh, as a sleek all in one (for the eighties), wasn't necessarily a bad idea. On the outside, it's an attractive product. The big mistakes were not merging it with the Apple II line, it's limited audio visual capabilities and it's price. It's even possible to forgo the expansion capabilities and still have a desirable device but an upgrade card slot wouldn't go amiss. Having the OS installed internally, and upgradable, would've made the machine much easier to use too.
I could watch your videos all day! I absolutely love your attitude and the way you conduct yourself in videos. Keep up the amazing work love all the topics as well. 👋🖥️💾
"I'll create a mini series. "3 years later
Another Alt Acc of Haywire 2: Electric Boogaloo but yes only color
@@suprememasteroftheuniverse who hurt you
Another Alt Acc of Haywire 2: Electric Boogaloo He prob read the comments
Another Alt Acc of Haywire 2: Electric Boogaloo I’ll probably taken over his series with my own show called Computer Chronicles X
the thing is, i've noticed that when people use Apple products, they are automatically an "Apple Fanboy" by non-Apple users. Which I think is crazy. If someone has an iPhone, they are labeled as "an iSheep". If they have an Android, then thats fine, they have an Android, regardless of what company it is. I have noticed though, people that do use Apple products, tend to be more "Brand loyal". They don't stop with iPhone, they'll get an iPad as well or a Mac computer as well. I love Apple as a company. I love their OS and the fact that they really did change the smartphone market and tablet market. They didn't make the FIRST smartphone or the FIRST tablet, but they changed the way people view them. Before iPhone, people that had smartphones were using Palm, Windows Mobile or Blackberry and typically, they were "Business" people. It wasn't teenagers with smartphones like it is now.
Yeah I hate it when people start bashing people just cause of that. I use a samsung s4 as my phone and I use a mac mini 2012 model for my mac computer I also use a alienware m11x laptop for my windows needs. I like apple products more cause I know they just work great like they are supposed to. I just can't stand fanboys in general. The one thing I also hate are the pc and console fanboys talking bad about each other. I rather play my games on a console cause I like using a controller rather than a keyboard.
Oh my god. It's not called "an Android". It's called an Android device. An Android phone. An Android tablet. An Android TV. Get it?
***** You really have some anger issues.
***** Well go fuck yourself you little bitch :) You can't block someone for swear words, and if you don't wanna see them, then don't read the comment sections on any videos.
I just get annoyed when people worship Apple and think everything else is stupid. My friend's family literally has nothing but the newest Apple products, and they don't buy anything else. They look at Android as stupid and Windows as stupid. THAT is what pisses me off. Have an iPhone? Fine, good for you. Have a Mac? Awesome. Have it all and boast about it and talk trash about whatever you don't agree with? Get that shit outta here.
The Macintosh vs the 2GS sort of seems to feel like Jobs VS Wozniak.
I was never that fond of any Macintosh I've ever used, but the 2GS impresses me in hindsight. (I was way too young to think too critically about such a thing if I had even known it existed when it was new).
All these companies with weird decisions huh.
Amiga could've been much bigger than they were, but Commodore just messed everything up.
The 2GS was impressive, but apple had other ideas. Ideas which really forced them into a niche market for a really long time.
You can consider it to their credit that they survived at all, given the number of those 80's computer companies that are just plain gone now...
But still...
i think this was good. Not because I think it is fun to point out flaws, but because companies like Apple have so much going into their decisions, and it is always interesting to try to deconstruct those decisions. I am very interested in what additional issues you have on your mind. Thanks for the great content.
Apple deliberately throttling a product for a newer one to compete? OUTRAGEOUS!
I think that is still their motto
@@arnaldogonzalez1 *tHinK dIFferEnT*
I didn't realize the IIGS was as strong as it was. With your examples, it definitely seems like the Mac was a step backwards.
The IIgs was an incredible machine. I still have a few of them.
I too never realised how good the IIGS was. Perhaps it was not Jobs's ego as much as calculated marketing: at the time, combined home/business computer systems were seldom taken seriously, and I wonder if Apple wanted to delineate its big-ticket professional system from the home/education offering.
Wonderful to see an honest opinion nowadays.
It's being somewhat overhyped here, but it was superior to the MAC. Don't forget about the $10k LISA!
Having the huge software base of the Apple II would have been a huge boost had they focused on the IIGS line. The sound is absolutely outstanding.
The question is: Can it be overclocked?
I swear this channel changes names every time I watch a video.
Great video ! A good short story. I had a //GS back then and what you're telling reflects perfectly my feelings at that time. And in France, where I live, I fear the support for the // GS was even worst.
The Macintosh was a great marketing ploy with portability. Don't forget, when Steve Jobs introduced it he took it out of a travel bag. It was really the introduction to the laptop. It was successful in the sense that it proved that all the other CEO's and John Sculley were lost in business bs instead of inventing something new.
That's a good point
The iBookGuy , while I accept the merits of your view on the situation, I think that it was the best 'dumb luck' point in business history. Steve Jobs got thrown out of Apple, started Next, and then when Apple acquired Next they got a better OS environment and were able to re-invent themselves. (Under 'new' leadership.) This offered opportunities that an otherwise stagnant Apple would die from.
Had Steve Jobs stuck around, I think the company would be out of business by now, rather than being one of the fastest growing companies in the desktop market. Innovation wasn't their strong point, style was. The iPod was just a polished Creative Labs MP3 player with more storage, and Microsoft had tablet convertibles way before the iPad came about. I think the form factors really took shape with the re-invention of the company, from ideas that started in the 1980's. Steve Jobs also adding people like Jony Ive & Phil Schiller to the team with his return.
Steve Jobs wasn't the brightest businessman in his younger days, but he had ambition and drive. What he lacked in technical prowess, he made up for in having child-like imagination about the idealized future of technology. The Macintosh was supposed to be the idiot's (regular person's) computer. It was designed to be more of an appliance, than a serious business machine, so the backwards compatibility and expansion options were unnecessary. (I do agree that the pricing was backwards, but higher prices usually imply 'quality' and 'integrity' to customers.)
Consider that prestige brands do the same job as economy brands, but at a much higher multiple of 'value', because people believe it's better. Like Mercedes vs. Chevy.
It's like the original iMac vs the G3 Blue & White (I have the original beige G3, personally.). One was made to be a workstation that offered expandability and power, while the other was for new users that wanted to surf the internet and write e-mails or play that dinosaur and bug game they pre-installed on them. (Facebook wasn't even a thing yet, by that point, and neither was RUclips.) The iMac served its purpose and the business class machines served theirs.
If you look at what we have now, with the Mac Mini (or iMac 5K) vs. the Mac Pro, one is good for RUclips level video production and content consumption, while the other can churn out Pro-quality 4K content, without choking on it. They're going to be pointed at two entirely different market segments, much like a commuter car vs. a semi-truck.
It isn't that one is 'better' than the other, so much as they're like a sledgehammer vs. a scalpel. They just have different jobs, expectations, and strengths.
Where's episode 2?
+Josh Rice Was there ever one made? I just found this video, don't know how I missed it a while back.
Probably won't be one.
Josh Rice - He's still trying to upload it with a 200 baud modem!
It's funny to go back and watch these vids and see how empty your studio used to be.
Thanks for everything Xerox.
Th8aXs fer every1hing Xerex. :-)
@@sebastianmrozek8761 ??
Interesting, but I think we disagree on the CPU though. The 68K processor had 16 registers (8 data, 8 address) for general use, each 32 bit. The 65816 had 2 8 bit accumulators and a few 16 bit registers. You can talk about it being more cycle efficient per instruction, but when you're missing basic things like multiplication and division, you realize that cycle/instruction benefit doesn't help you all that much.
In addition, the 68K was made for compilation to it so working with a high level language is reasonable. Not so much for the 65816, although at least it has a 16 bit stack pointer, although the whole thing is hampered by the data bank register making it painful to work with anything more than 64K (yay! bank switching!). And while there were eventually C compilers for it, compiling to it was awkward since the compiler wouldn't know, for example, that you needed to convert a binary value to BCD for printing, which is why so much code for those machines were written in assembly.
The 65816 was clearly a compromise of a CPU: a decent compromise given that it had to be able to switch into 6502 compatibility mode, but still a compromise.
I agree, the Motorola 68000 CPU was the better CPU and the way of the future. It had a simple, flat memory map, none of this complicated segmented memory that Intel CPUs had at the time.
agreed. the 65816 was a bitch to program. western design, the 6502 licensee that created the 65816, was a tiny little company and had very little resources for R&D of successor chips of the line. most definitely no where the strength of intel or motorola of its time. i think this is the point many are ignoring - the 65816 was a dead-end chip and most certainly could not compete against the powerhouses that would come in the 68k lineup.
"Overpriced and underpowered" might as well be Apple's slogan
Not to mention non-user upgradeable. At least the Apple IIgs was upgradeable, and certainly I've seen mods that could almost bring that 30-year-old computer to be rather competitive with even today's computers (well, maybe not, but certainly anything better than Macs at the time would let you do).
wardrich yes!!
"We sue our customers" could be a runner up.
it still is
😂😂True
I was a massive Apple fan at that time. I mean really massive. I knew the memory map, the hooks, I programmed multitasking and networking professionally, built my own interface cards and had a schematic of the Apple II on my wall. And I was eyeing on to the 68000 as well!
When I saw the Mac, monochrome, bolted down, with only 128 K of RAM, which was way too scarce for that architecture, that honeymoon was over. You had to PAY more to get a working system. It was like a birdie to all the independent developers. Game over for me. Period.
It looked like fascism to me, the kind of thinking that was attacked by that first iconic Macintosh movie clip. Which was withdrawn after one show. They must have realized what it meant.
The IBM PC copied the Apple II recipe, with listings and schematics and all openness and look what they achieved!
F*** Apple.
A+
IBM PC copied Hewlett-Packard, not Apple.
Great video again.
I've got some additional info for those interested:
Steve Jobs was actually against turning the Mac into a color computer because most people had b/w printers, and then the display will not be WYSIWYG compared to the paper. He was also against internal expansion slots. The first Mac with color and expansion slots was the super expensive Macintosh II in 1987, the development had started two years earlier in "secret" because Steve was still in Apple. Once he left they could start the development all-in, so it took them a while.
After the release of the Mac in 1984, the Apple II line was selling about 5 times more than the Mac the next couple of years.
Mac is actually a cost reduced/cut down Lisa computer. Lisa was released a year before the Mac, but was just to expensive for personal use. So they took away color monitor and memory, and they stripped the OS to fit in the smaller amount of RAM, removing multitasking and color support, let it have 1 internal disk drive instead of 2 etc..
first real multitasking was on apple from 1996. First multitasking by years: Unix-1969, Sinclair QL-1984, Commodore's Amiga-1985, Windows NT-1990 and at the end Mac OS X 1996
@@Odee Mac OS X didn't exist until 2001. I think you're confusing Mac OS X with the earlier Mac OS which was strictly a 68000 product. Apple briefly made a version of OS X that worked with 68000 until they fully made the transition over to x86 architecture shortly after.
@@houseofno yes, sorry for mac os x, just change os x to computers :) I just trying to say that apple was last in multitasking
I can't stand it when people drop articles with things like lines of products such as computers. It's _THE_ Macintosh or _A_ Mac, not just "Mac did this" or "Mac was that". It's not a goddamned person.
About the part you mentioned on 3:09, the original Macintosh of course had no expansion slots, but the mac plus you were discussing about has the ability to be expanded.
+Avedis Ghazarian Not really.. It had no expansion sockets other than RAM modules. I think you're thinking of the Macintosh SE, which came out next and I think it had one socket.
Oh, thank you. I mean it was the first time with the Plus that you could add more ram, but if you were talking about adding things like advance new hardware, then I am wrong.
Where's episode 2? I was looking forward to the second episode, as a previous employee of Apple with my opinions too.
+Brandon MacEachern seriously, this was really objective, looking forward to number 2
I can't wait for episode 2
Me too!
Very interesting. Waiting for the second episode!!
My last Apple computer was the Apple IIE . I didn't care for the Mac and I jumped ship for the PC clones, my first being the Tandy TX1000. I put in a VGA card and attached a Bernelle cartridge drive. Good times. Never went back to Apple.
me too. as an Apple IIe user, i felt abandoned when the Mac came out. I thought, ok if I have to switch over to a new platform and toss all my old software, I might as well go to a PC running DOS.
You have absolutely no clue about how important CPU choice is. The world was shifting away from programming everything in assembly language. Assembly language was the only practical way to program the 6502/6510 - the 65816 extended the address space to 16MB, but hold on. When Intel was designing the 8088/86 in the late 70s they already had the experience of the 8080 but actually thought ahead by adding registers to specifically support high level languages (e.g., C soon became the dominant high level language to program commercial software on personal computers). One was a stack frame register the other was a dedicated segment register that would allow a stack to be located into any segment (and thus load multiple programs into memory each with its own stack). Later there would be instructions added that made if more efficient to push and pop a stack frame context. So the Motorola with the 6809 was thinking along the same lines, they added features to that CPU that specifically assisted the use of high level programming languages. The Motorola 68000, for the mid 80s, then ended up being the ultimate high level language friendly CPU. Compared to the Intel 8088/86 and the 6502 CPUs it was pure Nirvana. Had all the registers necessary for doing a high level call stack properly and above all its registers were bit-wise large enough to where an address anywhere in its addressable memory space could be formed as a single binary value. The Intel 8088/86, of course, required much more complicated segmented addressing for code and data when going beyond 64K. Well, the 65816 of the Apple IIGS that you're praising much more resembled the 8088/86 CPUs than the MC68000 - but it was actually much worse than an Intel 8088/86 because it lacked two crucial registers that that CPU family had added in its design back in the late 70s - a register for the stack frame (not a stack pointer - stack frame - a context set up by high level languages when making a subroutine JSR) and a register to refer to the memory bank where a stack resides (meaning is possible to load multiple programs into memory and give each its own call stack). This made the 65816 just absolutely utterly pitiful for trying to support with a high level language. Sure, the Mac toolbox in ROM was coded in assembly language but the vast majority of software written for that computer was being written in high level languages which its CPU choice was the absolute best choice at that point in time in history for supporting high level languages. Computer software (and hence the economic factors of creating software) at the end of the day are what end up making or breaking a computer. To program for the Apple IIGS meant sticking with less economical assembly language programming or using crappy compilers that had to produce code that did atrocious hacks in their code generation in order to try and support what a high level language needs to do. The Commodore Amiga went with the MC68000 - not the 65816. Unless one needed to have specific legacy support for 6502 8-bit software, the MC68000 was the hands down obvious choice to base a new computer on in the mid 1980s - no contest whatsoever.
It's clear the designer(s) of the 65816 didn't care whatsoever about supporting high level languages - didn't regard that as important at all. Otherwise they would have mimicked the Intel 8088/86 and added a dedicated stack frame register and a dedicated bank register for where the stack resides (on the 65816, the one and only stack is stuck in the zero bank of memory - the only thing they allow to do on the 65816 is to reposition the stack to any where within the zero bank, but this means when loading another program - think MS-DOS TSR programs -, there is no provision for giving the other loaded program its own call stack).
The CPU designers at both Intel and Motorola fully conceived of their respective CPUs having explicit support for high level languages and in the mid 80s, Motorola 68000 with its flat addressing ability was the very best conception of all (Intel would not match that until they introduced the 80386 - on the 80386 the OS designs specific to that CPU would set all the segment registers to the same segment and then just ignore them from then on, effectively treating the 80386 as a 32-bit flat addressing CPU).
The 65816 was nothing but a CPU designed to support late-70s/early-80s 6502-based 8-bit computers with backward compatibility mode. That is THE only forte it had on its resume. The designer(s) brought absolutely nothing else to the table and the 65816 was already outclassed by its rivals as it appeared in new systems in the mid-80s. The market place tells the rest.
Does it mean that 68000 has kind of 32 bit architecture ?
C was introduced as a super assembler with a compiler to hidden code. At that time Basic was the language of choice, so including a software that translate Basic syntax into C and include a library of Basic functions equivalents, would be the graal.
@@Zeonoid It had a 24-bit address bus to memory, giving it a max 16MB addressable memory. But the registers internally were 32 bit, so as new models of the CPU came out, the addressability to memory was increased, but was possible for software to have been written on 68000 and then just run as is on later generations of the 68000
@@peberdah Commercial games of the late 70s, early 80s were written in assembly language - not interpreted BASIC. Non-game professional software developers were quick to move on to compiled languages that generated native code. We predominately chose C as that language in that mid-80s time frame. And because the MS-DOS PC was the business standard, and to some extent the Apple Mac (stuff like desktop publishing), this was a great choice because the CPU architecture supported high level languages. I wrote software for both Intel PCs and Apple Macs in the 80s (and 90s). In the 80s we all were using C for biz software. In the 90s, well in my circles it was C++. By 2000, it became practical to run managed programming languages for creating enterprise business software as computers were fast enough and had much more memory.
Hope you get a chance to make more of these! I am an apple fanboy but also appreciate learning the low points
Very insightful and bold episode, thank you.
Hmmm, they slowed down the 2GS on purpose? Sounds like they haven’t changed one bit.
Steve Jobs was a arrogant dickhead that always put his own needs first. However he got better at collaborating when he came back. His bio is a very good read.
i'm pretty sure it was something to do with battery life
That's something people like to repeat, but there's no real evidence for it; if anything quite the opposite. Check out the rate that the 65816 accesses RAM versus the speeds of RAM available c. 1985 when the machine was being designed versus the costs.
It's like saying that Apple deliberately crippled the Macintosh Plus because the 68020 had been available since 1984 but wasn't used. It just conveniently discards all the other engineering.
Apple slowed down OLD iPhones to allow them to continue to be used. If they had not and the battery life sucked then people would complain about that.
Personally I am skeptical of that claim. The faster CPU still needs to interact with the slow IIe core and peripherals. So about the best you could hope for is a "fast RAM/chip RAM" situation like on the Amiga, but with the "chip RAM" clocked at a lowly 1 MHz. So if they put more effort into giving it faster RAM and CPU the machine could have still wound up bottlenecked by the need to interact with its IIe parts.
Though it could be they really did feel a need to be careful about how they positioned the machine relative to the Mac. Ultimately the Mac really was the platform that carried Apple through the 1990s and early 2000s. It floundered a lot in the 1990s - but it remained a viable platform long enough for the iMac and iPod to propel it into the next decade. I really don't believe a IIgs-derived platform could have done the same.
I remember my first year in High School, when the Mac came out there was this huge promotion at our school where every teacher was given a Mac for their classroom. It was suppose to revolutionize teaching, I think the Apple company was even involved, it got a ton of media attention, stories in the local paper, even made the nightly news. In the next two years, I only saw one teacher even turn the machine on and she just used it to play games while the class was taking a test or working on assignment. By my senior year, ever Mac was sitting on a shelf or filing cabinet gathering dust.
0
The first one I saw was at my job in a mobile phone company. I took one look at the tiny monochrome screen and wondered why on earth the company wasted thousands of dollars on it.
Yeah.
Still a good video, I learned a few new things. Thinking of getting a IIgs and this video came up. Thanks! I was in my late teens/early 20's when the Mac came out and they made me want one SO bad, and seeing one in person made me want one too. Oddly I didn't even know about the IIgs until years later, as the stores where I lived (SF Bay Area) simply didn't carry it. They were pushing the Mac hard. I had a //c and then a IIe with lots of expansion cards I bought used during this period (85-86) but had I known about the IIgs I certainly would have favored it, for obvious reasons. Seems so odd that I was completely in the dark about it.
The macitosh line is what happens when you have someone caught up in the emotions and marketing of a product as opposed to the engineering of something that could be awesome! I don't own ANY apple products and neither do my kids...never will...one distinct reason...I think your comparison is spot on here. Thank you for the vid!! Cheers.
Thats so sad you keep your kids off the best phones and tablets in the industry. Well really there is not much of a tablet industry there is iPad and oh I guess windows Surface but thats about it. There are really not much android ones. Oh you use windows? Thats Apple you know
@@igniteexport1463 Think outside the box... your kids are playing with the most overpriced POS that's on the market today. P.S. Windows came from the Xerox Alto, just like Apple OS...
@@nunyabusiness4651 Windows came from the Mac. Gates was not interested as much in the GUI he liked what they were doing and it wasn't till the Mac came along that they started looking seriously into a GUI. Overpriced? The surface is more expensive then the iPad is and is not nearly as good. There are really no android tabs to speak of.
"Overpriced Under powered" The only summary of apple you need.
Apple is far better then other stuff. And frankly most android phones are in price if not higher then the iPhone. Yes the Mac is higher but its allot better then windows machines
Quite funny to see that you're a fan of Futurame. Nice Slurm T-shirt.
I’m over here 5 years waiting for part 2.
Dave, you never followed up with more. Excellent info. Ignore any Apple apologists. Give us more of reality. Always great work you do.
So they've been selling overpriced, underpowered machines since the start?
Yes. Damn mushroom munchers greed socialist capitalism abusers. Their business is not technology but reproducing fan boys and making them more and more stupid zombies.
Master of the Universe hmmm you sure dont know nothing about apple...
Master of the Universe you make me laugh kid never see idiotic comment.”greed socialist capitalism abusers” haha
@@suprememasteroftheuniverse Chill bro damn. Nothing wrong with mushrooms either.
Wait, you mean to tell us the company founded by a guy who stole most of his ideas from Xerox and then defrauded his business partner, and sold $6,000 monochrome underclocked computers is not, in fact, a greedy capitalist company?
Gotta say I'm impressed with those black and white games :O they DO look pretty
OneMinuteFixed
Still impressed, what do you see, what do u use yourself? Games????
As a authorized Apple service tech at the time Apple brought out the Macintosh we were blown away with some of the marketing strategies Apple came out with. Now with all back room details available to us I now think it was a miracle that Apple came out of this time period alive. Thanks for your insight on this subject.
Can't wait for episode 2
Here's another possibility - the Mac might have had much better margin - e.g. more profit per unit.
+passion4paws91 so what? they were going bankrupt and they needed money. I think that's a great motivation. This strategy lasted them to this day and made them the most profitable company ever.
@@dvl973 So what? They use slave labor and produce/support idiots all around the planet.
Man i am a PC guy and i find this stuff fascinating. Its always interesting to see the history of a company and their successes and failures.
Loved this video, but still waiting on Ep 2. ;)
Really love your channel
Here's the problem with your analysis. The IIGS operating system software GSOS would not have existed except for engineers from the Mac team. They brought code and experience from the System 1 project over to the IIGS. Now, I agree that it was completely unfair and short sighted to hobble the IIGS performance.
GS/OS technically is a Mac-like GUI running over ProDOS. It based on Apple II technologies.
@@vadimrumyantsev8498 agreed. that asshole @stephen collins has no idea what the fuck he is talking about.
Apple's Human Interface is a standard. It is a not hardware specific. It could be applied to anything. GSOS is an operating system that manages devices. You are confusing the two.
I wouldn't necessarily blame Steve Jobs, although during his early years at Apple he did do his share of damage. The problem has to do partly with why he was ousted in 1985. When Macintosh sales were slipping, John Sculley wanted to re-focus Apple II development, whereas Jobs wanted to continue Mac development. When Jobs was out of the picture, I think Apple was in a situation where the Mac had gained enough of a following to where the product line could continue to exist, although they could not afford to kill the Apple II. I feel that's how the situation ended up the way it did. I think had Steve Jobs not been fired, the Macintosh probably would have advanced faster, making superior to the Apple II in every way (except for the expandable ports) and the price difference between the Apple II and Macintosh would have been justified.
This was very interesting, thank you.
I own a IIGS (now, not then) and it's a really cool computer! I think it was very competitive for its time. One thing I note is that the Mac adopted many
of the innovations from the IIGS eventually including the ADB bus, color displays and color graphics in the GUI, and eventually high quality digital audio.
As I remember the time, the II GS was the successor of the Apple II, which was an enormously popular machine by hobbyists. At least here in Europe. But it always had the nimbus of beeing a hobby machine. Which was great for people developing their own add-on cards, but seriously this wasn't something, lets say a doctor or a lawyer wanted to have on his desktop. The other popular computres of that time, the Atari ST and the Amiga had that same image of beeing a toy machine, used for playing games but not for that much more. Well, the Atari had some reputation of beeing usefull for working with sounds (MIDI), the Amiga was known for the first steps in doing video editing, but that was pretty much it. The Mac on the other hand was a machine, which looked good, which simply worked and definitely was something to do serious work with. It became popular in the first generation of typesetting software for eg. doing a newspaper or just where you need a lot of writing to be done in a professional way. Clearly the lack of color didn't matter that much for these type of things. Much more important was, that even an untrained secretary or a medical or a law student could use that system out of the box without a lot of training or fiddeling around with cables or switches. The Mac was always targeted at the professional market, while the II GS was targeted at the hobby market to all who loved the plugboard design and could make use of it. The competitor for the II GS was Atari ST and Amiga, while the competitor for the Mac was the IBM PC.
Good points. I just missed this era, not getting a proper computer until the early 90's. I suppose the IBM PC started out with a business image - the name IBM alone accomplishes that - but interesting that IBM (the clones actually) came to own both home/gaming and business markets (with the niche exceptions that the Mac dominated) but I guess the IIGS could never have pulled that off even if it did have more or less the same architecture and limited upgrade path as the IBMs - it was just perceived as a joyboy family and gaming machine.
In the USA the IIGS was marjeted at the education market, which Apple dominated. However, they quickly replaced it in their education marketing materials with the Macintosh.
"Overpriced and under powered." I'm pretty sure that's Apple's motto.
Well, if you knew something about them, you'd probably take that back. However, I do agree with some of the points that David made.
Goorpijp Wessel 12 of one, a dozen of the other.
maccollectorZ (Commenting Account) Yeah, i know the company fucking sucks and you defending it makes me cringe hard.
They are kinda going downhill because of Tim Cook; but if you don't know what made them great, you know nothing about them. People who hate Macs don't know much about computers in general.
MasterCheifn343
far as I'm concerned their only good more modern product is the iPod. when it was first introduced I don't think there was anything quite like it.
The 68000 cpu used in the Mac required twice as many clock cycles to perform the same operations as the 65816 cpu used in the Apple IIgs. Consequently, to compare clock speeds, you should divide the Mac's clock by two, for an effective Mac clock speed of 3.9Mhz vs the IIgs' 2.8 Mhz. But the major limitation of the IIgs was not speed, it was its peculiar memory segmentation. The 65816 was a 16-bit upgrade of the 8-bit 6502, which could only access 64KB of RAM. While the 65816 could use up to 8MB of RAM, it could only access one 64KB bank of RAM at a time, making it awkward to program. The Mac's 68000 was a native 16-bit cpu that could simultaneously access its entire 8MB memory space without arbitrary memory restrictions. By 1986, it was clear that the Apple II's 8-bit legacy hardware and software limitations were handicaps that could no longer compete with the increasingly dominant IBM PC.
I still prefer the 512X342 pixel display on the Plus to the 320/640 X 200 display. If you're doing word processing you can see what it's going to look like when printed. Same PPI as the dot matrix printer. Apple's Mac prices were sooo high, though. I love ADB. Woz is the man.
You can see what you get as long as you aren't trying to print in color to an ImageWriter II printer.
"Slight memory upgrade" from 128k to 1024k?
well it's not much today
EricssonXL Factor of 8? Not slight.
Jim Fortune still not much today
EricssonXL Upgrading your memory by a factor of 8 is still a huge thing. By calling it "slight" you minimize the stupidity of the original design. And the machine was intentionally designed to have no upgrade path other than buying a new machine.
Unless I was talking to an Apple fanboy, then yes that was my full intention from a normal user's perspective. I know factor of 8 is a huge thing, the thing is the normal person would not talk about 128kb to 1024kb being a factorial jump large but technology advancement large so we'd compare 128kb to 1024kb to something we'd use now like 4gb to 16 gb
You are the only one I don't need to watch on 1.5x
I never could understand why the Mac was so hideously expensive. Which is one reason why I never had one growing up. I absolutely LOVE my IIGS! But to think that it is essentially the better Mac is interesting! Now imagine a IIGS with Macintosh ROMS... Hmmm :)
I think you got it wrong. What made the mac successful was that it did not boot up to a text prompt. Full stop. The mac was an attempt to re-imagine computers for people who had been hesitant to embrace computing and the personal computer revolution. A person already competent on a commodore 64 or an apple 2 or an atari 800 would have preferred the II GS. It was aimed at the existing market of experienced buyers. The mac was aimed squarely at people who had no idea how to work one of these things. The ENTIRE point of the mac was to remove things. Even the simple black and white tiny monitor actually was a brilliant move because it got people to say, “that’s not scary, it’s cute”. I owned a commodore 64 back in the day and my commodore had more advanced color graphics than the original mac, and even had a graphical operating system as an OPTION, but the first time I touched a Mac, I instantly understood that it would be a success. It’s not the original mac’s fault that Apple was a shit company from about 1988 to about 1999. The mac was genius.
3:53 You're still leaving out the floppy disk drive for the IIGS. I guess that would bring the IIGS up to about US$2000, just a little less than the Mac and a helluvalot more than the 16 bit wonders Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.
Or more realistically - at least two floppy drives: a 5.25" drive to run all the Apple II software, and a 3.5" drive for the handful of GS software...
The Mac Plus also would have typically had an external SCSI drive and the same external 3.5" floppy drive purchased. If someone bought a IIGS new and did not have an Apple ][+ or //e then they would have had to buy a new 5.25" drive, but if they were upgrading they could use the Disk ][ drives with the IIGS instead of buying new drives. If you were just going to run 8 bit software then you didn't need to buy the IIGS RGB monitor, a composite monitor from a //e or even a TV set would work. Basically if you already had a ][+ and wanted a IIGS you could get by with just purchasing the IIGS itself - which came with CPU, keyboard, and mouse. You only needed to purchase better peripherals if you wanted to run IIGS specific software.
[The 8-Bit Guy] So.... Are you making an episode 2? I think the next mistake they made was the Macintosh Portable.
i agree
I agree, where is episode 2?!
Apple III anyone?
Well, the title is Apple and Steve Jobs's biggest mistakes. Since Jobs was fired from Apple not long after the Mac was introduced we'd have to look at Apple's mistakes, and that would probably be the Performa line.
Ya i agree the macintosh had a lead acid battery like a freaking car so once the battery died IT died
Former IIGS owner here (had one as a kid). Have many fond memories of the platform.
Yes! Hearing that Lemmings music brings me back to the good old days.
I feel so sad for folk who somehow got the idea that anything from Apple can do video games.
A very interesting video, thank you for this. I am not an Apple user, I've always had PC's. Mostly because I always felt a PC was far more affordable, expandable and customizable. This may or may not be true, but it's the impression I've always maintained through the years, and being in graphic design and animation, I took a lot of heat for that perspective. I have a great deal of respect, however, for Apple and what they have achieved, and always wondered what product really helped them turn the corner into becoming a profitable and successful business again? Was it the debut of the iMac of the late 90's, or was it as most people believe the iPhone years later?
I always felt it was the iPod that was their beginning of their true renaissance, which paved the way for the iPhone and iPad.
The iMac saved Apple.
And a loan from Microsoft.
We’ve been waiting almost 5 YEARS FOR EP 2....
After getting out of the navy in '84, I was hired by GE up in Syracuse NY. Their engineering offices had three microcomputers: An Apple Macintosh, An IBM PC (two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drives), and a DEC Rainbow (CP/M, and proprietary pre-formatted 5.25" floppy disks because the machine couldn't re-format them). The DEC didn't get much use. The PC and the Mac were used by various engineers depending on which one they were comfortable with. Personally, I learned Microsoft DOS on the office's PC.
The design of the Macintosh is one of the reasons why I turned my back on Apple (after having owned an Apple II) forever. I hated the way you couldn't expand it, couldn't modify it. It was a manifestation of Steve Jobs' attitude about computers vs. that of Steve Wozniak, an attitude that continues to this day.
Sorry, claiming that both the 68000 and the 65816 processors are "16 bit" is quite questionable. Additionally, just considering clock efficiency in regard to accessing memory is also quite questionable. The 65816 was an 8/16 processor with some extensions over the 6502 and quite frankly, had a very clumsy instruction set. The 68000 was a 16/32 processor and had a clear and planned upgrade path. And frankly, the difference between 24 bit linear addressing (the 68000) vs 24 bit bank addressing (the 65816) is as different as night and day. On the 68000, you could actually use all of your memory for your programs in a seamless fashion. But using banks? That is just pure undiluted insanity. So the 65816 was the tail end of a dead end processor architecture, while the 68000 was the beginning of a new architecture with a clear future upgrade path.
Not necessarily a dead end. The 65816 could pretty easily have been extended to 32-bit linear adressning, just like Intel did when they designed the 386 from the 8086 and 286. (AMD did the same when extending the instruction set to 64 bits.)
@@herrfriberger5 Your examples seem to refute your point. The 80386 linear addressing offered *no* backward compatibility with segmented addressing as done on the 80286 and earlier processors. This is why the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows APIs was so long and drawn out. Whereas the 68000 was, as the OP pointed out, basically a cut-down 32-bit processor. So when the first 32-bit Mac, the Mac II, was released in 1987, most existing Mac software worked fine on it, and the transition to the “32-bit-clean” era was pretty much complete by about 1990, 5 years before Windows 95.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Linear adressing is by definition not segmented, so yes, of course. However, the 386 itself was 100% compatible with 286-style segmented adressing, being a pure extension of the 286. The linear adressing possible with the 386 was just a special case of segmentation, using a single 4 GB segment. It was perfectly possible to run older code on the 386, just as you can run 386 code on x86-64 today. The fact that the designers of 32-bit Windows did not chose to make much use of the segmentation is another matter.
I would not blame the "slow" Windows developments on Intel. It has more to do with the original "Windows" being a simple DOS-program, basically a CP/M-style program, and "Windows NT" being (essentially) a port of WMS from the VAX to the the 386. Merging these two worlds took some time, yes, but the transistion from 16- to 32-bit addressing (or word size) was hardly the main problem there.
Of course, it's also true that the 68000 had a linear 32-bit adressing architecture from the start and that it made it easy to extend old software. (Its atomic 32-bit integers were of less importance though. The addition of larger native integers when porting code is usually smooth.)
The 65816 could run 6502 code using 24-bit adressing, and that simple mapping could have been easily expanded into 32-bits. Adding MMU functionality (like the 286/386 or 68010/20) would be a bit more complex, of course, but that was not strictly required in those days and in these kinds of computers. (There were even UNIX systems without any MMU hardware.)
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 PS The 68000 was not really a "cut down" 32-bit processor. It was essentially more of a 16-bit processor that emulated a 32-bit architecture via microcode. It's ALU and data paths were all just sixteen bits wide. The same could be said about processors like the Intel iAPX 432, the National 16032 CPU, many mini computers of the time, etc. A 16-bit implementation of a "32-bit architecture" was common.
DS
@@herrfriberger5 There was simply no way to take advantage of the flat 32-bit addressing in the 80386 in any backward-compatible fashion. Contrast this with the 680x0 family, where you could still use 32-bit addresses on the 16-bit machines, albeit restricted to only 16MiB of available address space on a 68000 (note: only 8MiB of this could be used for RAM on the 16-bit Macs), and then run exactly the same code on a 32-bit machine and immediately have access to more memory than that.
Very nice, insightful video (as usual)! Sums it all up quite well. So sad all of Woz's work on the IIGS was so underappreciated, because it's still a magnificent little machine to this day!
Jobs may have been an excellent businessman for selling the Macintosh at such high prices but in terms of really appreciating the engineering involved, truth be told: sometimes he kinda sucked. Too bad the business side and the technical side of computing seldomly go hand in hand as history has teached us many times..
Keep up the good work and uh, easy with the dynamite, David ;-)
As an owner of a Mac Plus at University back in the day, the Motorola 68000 was a 16/32 bit CPU, and used a 32 bit data word length but was restricted to a 16 bit data bus, with full 24 bit addressing. The 65816 was simply an enhancement of the 6502 (Commodore 64) from what I can find and was only 8/16 bit like the equivalent intel CPUs of that era and supported 24 bit addressing by adding an 8 bit page to a 16 bit address, so I don’t agree with you when you can say the Apple II had a superior CPU. The rest was very interesting though, thanks for the video.
The Macintosh was released early 1984, but the IIGS was released late 1986. Sure they were on sale at the same time, but alot can happen in 2 years.
Here is what happened in those two years -- Apple bled money on the Macintosh, Macintosh 128K, and Macintosh 512K. They were only making money on Apple II sales. By 1986 they had the IIGS which proved that the Apple GUI did not require a Macintosh.
Apple also made the Macintosh series almost impossible to restore due to failures on the machines.
And the apple II series are easier to restore.
so....
Great video. We had an Apple //c back in the latter half of the 1980's, but I was always quite jealous of my cousin's IIgs (we also used the IIgs in junior HS). By the time we got a new computer, (A Dell with a Pentium 75), the Apple II was pretty much gone and Macintosh was in the doldrums. Since then, I have stuck with the PC. However, I still have fond memories of my Apple II days and have always wished they would have kept it going. If they did, there is a good chance I'd still be an Apple user today.
One thing that this video neglects to mention is that the 68000 was a new(ish) chip and the first in a new family, the 68k family. Now that family did end with the 68060, but at the time where was no way of knowing that, and in 1986 there was every reason to believe that the 68000's ISA was one with a bright future (It was also seeing use in the Atari ST and Amiga, as well as various Japanese machines with rather extraordinary capabilities that we sadly never got to see in the west). By contrast, the 65C816 seems to be basically the end of the line for the 6502 family, I don't recall there being any successor to this processor and I don't think there was much expectation of seeing one back in the mid 80s.
In a vacuum the 2GS is a better machine than the early Mac, but it looked like there the Mac had every opportunity to go onwards and upwards, whereas the 2GS was basically the last hurrah for 6502-based Apple hardware.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a power-play by Steve Jobs, we all know what he was like and we all know the kind of internal politics that play out in tech-startups (which Apple definitely still was at the time), I'm just saying that there's valid engineering reasons why the 2GS might not have been Apple's favourite son, in spite of its specs compared to the Mac.
Thank you, really great and informative video. But think about this: if Apple had focused on the II line instead of the Mac line, and imagine as a result they would have indeed been better off during their 'dark ages' in the 90s, then as a result of that Steve Jobs would have never made it back to the company. The reason Steve was able to return to Apple was essentially because by 1996 many shareholders and Apple's board thought there really wasn't anything to lose at this point. And lucky for them, by that time Steve Jobs was a very different man with a lot more experience, wisdom, insight and probably a bit humbler too, but still aggressive and eager enough to build everything up from scratch again. So what I'm saying is, if Apple had stuck with the II line, Steve would have never returned and Apple would be doing much worse today.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that Apple would be doing worse with the absence of Steve Jobs ?
They could have been doing better than they are right now.
eastlondonhustler better than they are? How did you arrive at that conclusion?
I snorted when you said Steve Jobs was "a bit humbler".
When SJ left Apple in '85, he started Next computer company targeting educational market. That is where he designed the GUI much of which was used on Macs. When he returned Apple bought Next
... and the low margin PC clone with MS-DOS then Windows took over 98% of the market.
As Stalin once observed, quantity has a quality of its own.
Even today Apple values margin over market share, which is why Windows & Linux dominate. Apple is only significant because so many people use smartphones or tablets instead of desktops.
Nearly 4 years have passed and no episode 2
The Macintosh 128k was introduces in 1984.
Anyhow the comparaison stays fair given it's 1986 the Macintosh Plus and the Apple IIGS…
Except:
1) The Macintosh had a GUI and made the computer accessible to any company (as long as they would have understood that it's much more than an expensive typewriter).
2) Both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak left the company in 1985…
The IIGS had a GUI (initially a black & white one that was then replaced in 1986 with ProDOS 16 and then again in 1988 with System 6 & GSOS.) The Apple IIGS was marketed (while it was marketed) as a consumer home and education machine, not a business machine, and it was backwards compatible with thousands of education titles that the Mac was not.
These criticisms don’t make you unbiased. Bias is normal and nobody expects you to be unbiased. No need to pretend you are. Solid video I enjoyed it.
It's 2017 and I'm still waiting for the episode 2 tho...
Now its 2019... No ep2
@@gourakrushnasahoo-3971 2021 now :/
There's a greater difference between the original Mac and the Mac Plus than memory! Newer ROM, HFS file system, double sided floppy, mini DIN-8 ports, SIM sockets.
No. The Plus still had DB-9 serial ports. It also added a SCSI port, that the 128/512 lacked. The Mac didn't get DIN-8 serial ports (and ADB) until the SE in '87.
@@RCH_Aero Wrong, Google Mac plus rear, it still had the db9 mouse but 2 din port for modem and mouse.
My only gripe with this video is that you said that the Macintosh line was a mistake and shouldn’t have happened. And with the comparison you made in the video I can see where you’re coming from. But! You are comparing models on the Mac and Apple II that were released after their original releases. In 1984 (when the original Macintosh released) the Mac was indeed an Insanely Great product since it was the first affordable computer with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). And in ‘84, the Mac was the only computer to have this (aside from the expensive Apple Lisa). Since the IIGS wasn’t available in ‘84 I see it as the Mac was far more advanced than the Apple II and it was totally worth the price point for the GUI, point and click mouse, and the really good processor. It was way ahead of its time in that capacity. Having said that, I love your videos! Keep up the great work! 😁
One of the main purposes of this video was to demonstrate that the Mac was NOT the first affordable computer with a GUI. I think you need to go take another look at the price comparison between the two machines.
Great video. I loved the Apple IIGs I was a Commodore kid so I got the Amiga 1000. Later on as Mac got color I switched over.
5:50 "When obviously this product was overpriced and under powered compared to this one." Welcome to Apple Inc.
When you factor in things other than speed, Apple computers are worth the money.
Kai Tsurugi where designs are made up and the prices don't matter. The prices are just like Super Bowl tickets.
+Connor Fin Unless you're talking about aesthetics their hardware hasn't been special or really that good since the G5. A macbook is basically just a Dell in a nicer case-they're both made by Foxconn and the hardware is similar enough that you can install a third party BIOS and install OSX with Apple's installer.
The different is that Apple was doing it with two of their own products!! We don't see that anymore since all Macs run Mac OS. The closest we have is the Mac vs iPad Pro issue.
You are right sir! Steve Jobs caused incredible harm to Apple back in those days. Under his "leadership" Apple released the Apple III which was a poor product and overpriced.... The Apple II line should have been beefed up and supported much better! The actual real revolutionary product was the Apple Lisa which came out in 1983...but had been crazily overpriced: it cost $10 000 !!! The Mac originally came out with 128kb of memory only and no possibility of expansion ... in direct contradiction to the expansion philosophy of the Apple II. No wonder the PC took the market by storm, it offered what Apple now was refusing to offer: expandability and flexibility.
And it's partly the reason why Android dominates the mobile device market.
“Mr. GS, I knew the Macintosh. I worked with the Macintosh. Mr. GS, you are no Macintosh!”
Nice video ! I love the Slurm shirt !!!