Apple Computers

Keep Bill Gates and Microsoft around, but make Apple Computers the major computer company.

Let the guys at Macintosh allow their stuff to be "knocked off" by a bunch of other companies. Seemed to work well for IBM and its ilk.

Alasdair Czyrnyj said:

Let the guys at Macintosh allow their stuff to be "knocked off" by a bunch of other companies. Seemed to work well for IBM and its ilk.

Click to expand...

Exactly, its generally admitted that Apple's keeping its OS proprietary so that only Apple or Apple approved software would work on Apple computers was the single worst business decision of the 20thc. It isn't like they weren't told this or in fact did not have an example ready at hand.Texas Instruments, makers of the first generally available home computer, beat other companies by over a year and could have easily had the market all to themselves, instead they went the proprietary software route and out of the home based business entirely a very short time later.
To this day many people argue that the Mac is a better computer than Windows is an OS, yet Macs still exist, as I understand it, largely due to the kindness of Bill Gates.

Steve Jobs dies in a plane crash just before the release of the original Macintosh 20 years ago. The remaining board members (most of whom Jobs drove off before he himself was ousted by Sculley) eventually open the company up and drop Job's obsession with control of hardware manufacturing (Jobs to this day doesn't really understand software terribly well), cutting a licensing deal with Microsoft in 1987-88, just in time for the second generation of Macintoshes. If they had the brains to make it a non-exclusive license (probably not, given the way that Gates negotiated...) they could have licensed it to IBM as well, to provide the basis for OS/2

By the time that Windows 3.0 was released in OTL, most of the MS graphical interface work would be done using some variation of the MacOS, probably with some changes to the internals to accomodate non-Motorola chipsets. Without the release of a Windows 3.0/3.1 and Windows NT cluster of OSs, it is likely that the MacOS would be overwhelmingly dominant by this time.

Now, to be fair, I rather doubt that this would have been a good thing, but one never knows...

or instead of DOS, IBM goes with CP/M. Microsoft comes up with an alternaive to CP/M but it dosen't come out until 1982/83. and the IBM-PC takes off slower in this TL as a result.

or IBM somehow stops the first clones coming on the market (lawsuits).

cwf1701 said:

or instead of DOS, IBM goes with CP/M. Microsoft comes up with an alternaive to CP/M but it dosen't come out until 1982/83. and the IBM-PC takes off slower in this TL as a result.

Click to expand...

I'd rather not screw over IBM, as they're doing good things with Apple right now (like the G5, which I'm typing this on right now).

Bonus points for anyone who gets a merger in the 90s between Apple and IBM (or even if one buys out the other).

Once again, no Steve Jobs, merger (buyout, actually) by/with IBM is likely as Apple bottoms out in the mid-late 90s.

This was the tortoise and the hare. The Apple design was beautiful. The IBM was a clunker that is only just getting over the legacy of the terrible original design choices eg 8086 chip was more a device controller than a proper computer processor.

Compaq was the first cloner so IBM could tie them up in legal problems that mean the compatible market does not take off and others do not clone. The pattern is set for Compaq to pay a license to IBM and the practice is copied by Apple who at the time objected to giving its technology away for free.

So you have two licensed designs that are franchised. The market will grow more slowly and probably today we would have less fast machines but the majority will be Apple and the quality of the software will make up for the slower processors.

As a consequence we have small Microsoft, Compaq, Novell and Intel whose position will be taken by Motorola.

Actually, they did try licensing. But it was given up after Apple saw their market share dwindle even more, as happened to IBM.

Imo, they'd have needed a cheap model with standard connectors - so that people can choose cheap PC-Displays, cheap PC mice, and so on. Something like a modular discount-Macintosh.

Many people would have chosen original Apple peripherials for the design or the quality - some even with PC's, if that had been possible before.

Apple appears to be pretty successful with this strategy atm.

When the Mac comes out they:
1. Put it out with 512K instead of 128K.
2. Give it a bigger screen.
3. With higher resolution.
4. And a bigger floppy.
As a general rule, you mark the computer up by a set price, and then sell the hardware at cost of parts. IE, if increasing the ram from 128K to 512K costs 100 dollars, then you mark up the larger memory computer model at only 100 dollars more, and not 1,000 dollars more.

Back compatibility & upgrade potential...

I had an Apple ][ Europlus in 1979: it was a nice machine, with floating-point BASIC in ROM, 48 kb RAM, fair graphics and a decent keyboard. I used it for word-processing, Astronomy calculations and 6502 Assembler programming.

A year later, the mostly incompatible Apple2e came out, followed by ProDOS and a bunch of other stuff which was neither upgradeable nor back-compatible, followed by another incompatible Apple, followed by YET ANOTHER incompatible Apple...

Remember, we're talking $/Eur 100 for 16 kb RAM, ~ $/Eur 300 for a floppy drive, so each year's 'upgrade' was the price of a second car.

Or, it would have been, if I'd been fool enough to spend the money.

Us Apple ][ users who'd created the market were 'hung out to dry'. The next wave got the same treatment, as did the next... As with most of those other early-buyers --some of us were caught *twice*-- I promised it would be a *very* long time before I bought another Apple.

I switched to the excellent, 'open' BBC_B Micro, traded up to their 'B+128', and used an nice, orthogonal Acorn Archimedes until PCs caught up...

And my firewall's about the only part I'll upgrade each year.