DBWI Apple Computer doesn't go bankrupt in 1997?

Nothing short of ASB intervention could have saved them. Their overpriced gadgets with small niche could never succeed competing general purpose PC and versatility of Windows. Sometimes you just must concede to the better man.
 
What logical ideas could Apple computer have done to survive


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Written In NeXT OS 12

OOC: Nice idea but it's not a DBWI, but rather, just a plain old WI.

IC: Remember the M-Pod? It was made by that Silicon Valley startup that had been founded largely by former Apple employees in 1999, and went on to make that company very famous indeed. Perhaps this device could have saved Apple from its permanent disbanding in December, 2001?
 
OOC: Nice idea but it's not a DBWI, but rather, just a plain old WI.

IC: Remember the M-Pod? It was made by that Silicon Valley startup that had been founded largely by former Apple employees in 1999, and went on to make that company very famous indeed. Perhaps this device could have saved Apple from its permanent disbanding in December, 2001?

OOC: It is a DBWI, because it's from another TL that the WI is being posed from.
Anyway...

IC: Apple was a dumb idea to start with. They were just hipster Window's computers that did about 1/4 as much.

Good thing Steve Wozniak went and helped work on Linux. Linux Computers is better then Apple ever would of been.
 
Nothing short of ASB intervention could have saved them. Their overpriced gadgets with small niche could never succeed competing general purpose PC and versatility of Windows. Sometimes you just must concede to the better man.

OOC: Nice idea, but Apple weren't like that in 1996/7. If anything, they were declining because they were copying the Windows 'beige box' approach and making 'general purpose PCs'. The gadgetry and high prices kicked off in the early 2000s.

IC: Apparently Steve Jobs entered talks to return to Apple in 1996 - they broke down because of his infamous ego and how far up shit creek they were by then. If he'd come back, could he have worked that magic of his?
 
Apparently Steve Jobs entered talks to return to Apple in 1996 - they broke down because of his infamous ego and how far up shit creek they were by then. If he'd come back, could he have worked that magic of his?

No.

Apple was doomed the minute they lost their lawsuit with Microsoft. Gates and co. were always better businessmen than Apple execs were, and that wouldn't change. Combine that with their growing abilities and talented staff of software designers and you have a combination that leads to their current position.

Their little computers were obviously shameless ripoffs of Microsoft products by this point, and people had lost what faith they had in the company.
 

Perkeo

Banned
Make the Macintosh a franchise rather than a proprietary product. The IBM/Windows/Intel Platform never ever had any advantage whatsoever but beeing the indisputed standard for all low-cost manufacturers.

With the Macintosh operating system on Amiga, Atari ST and one or two more licensees from the far east, they could make a difference.
 
Not likely when you consider the competition is Microsoft, the company that has dominated the PC, laptop, tablet, software and gadget market since it's incception. The only thing close to competition they have is Linux - and the word competition is used lightly.
 
If apple stayed in business, I imagine Amiga would not have had a revival in the late 90s under gateway. I know the Amiga is a niche product but I love NeXT OS. Ok Im a Amiga fanboy.
 
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Written In NeXT OS 12

Judging my your sig, I imagine that you are going to argue Apple should have bought Next.

Let's be realistic. Next had already tried and failed to break through to the mainstream. It was then, and remains today, technically impressive, but a tiny niche operating system supported by a small number of devotees.

It was also UNIX based - Apple need a brand new modern operating system, so buying BeOS was the only correct choice. They followed the right strategy, but they just executed too late, too slowly, and too poorly.
 
Well, what they should have done included:

1. Scrapping PowerPC with IBM and Motorola. Instead, they should have either partnered with Western Design and Acorn to develop ARM at the desktop level much faster (and provided a much more graceful upgrade path to Apple II users), or else teamed up with Sun and Fujitsu and brought the MacOS over to SPARC.

2. Scrapped "Pink" as unworkable.

3. Signed Doug Hynie for chipset development.

4. Bought the Erlang specification as soon as Ericsson put it on the open market, in order to start development on a new OS and GUI.
 
OOC: Nice idea, but Apple weren't like that in 1996/7. If anything, they were declining because they were copying the Windows 'beige box' approach and making 'general purpose PCs'. The gadgetry and high prices kicked off in the early 2000s.

OOC: Remember the Newton?

Apparently Steve Jobs entered talks to return to Apple in 1996 - they broke down because of his infamous ego and how far up shit creek they were by then. If he'd come back, could he have worked that magic of his?
Do you think Jobs would have been able to keep Apple out of the PDA Market? Or... maybe he could have helped them make it sell. That was a huge gamble they took, trying to compete with Palm with the Newton II. Adding color was a nice idea, but it raised the prices way too high.

But, considering what happened to the Palm when the second wave PDA's came out from Microsoft, Research in Motion and Handspring, I doubt that Apple could have done much better.

Unless they jumped into the music player business like CaliBoy suggested, just in time for Napster and iMusic [1] and the M-Pods. Or better yet... maybe they could have jumpstarted the tablet field back when it first started slumping in the mid '00's.

I guess it doesn't matter though, as most of that stuff didn't start until several years after they were gone, they'd have to survive longer in the first place. Not to mention, it would taken real vision to come out with competitive products in those crowded fields. Sure, Apple did it in the '80's. But, even if Jobs could have been able to repeat that success, it's unlikely that anything they'd do could convince him to come back. He didn't seem interested in the corporate world anymore -- his focus in the last decade of his life was pretty much on his third world philanthropy.

[1] Just realized that with Apple going down in '97, there's no IMac, which means "I-" is now available to other companies.
 
If apple stayed in business, I imagine Amiga would not have had a revival in the late 90s under gateway. I know the Amiga is a niche product but I love NeXT OS. Ok Im a Amiga fanboy.

Well, maybe it could have helped OS/2 become even more popular as a Windows alternative as it was in OTL. After all, the Amiga and a significant portion of Linux's products use OS/2 as a GUI, with great results.
 
Well, maybe it could have helped OS/2 become even more popular as a Windows alternative as it was in OTL. After all, the Amiga and a significant portion of Linux's products use OS/2 as a GUI, with great results.

Just to be clear, OS/2 has little to do with Amiga and Linux. Amiga runs the NeXT OS (as voss already said), and Linux is, well, Linux. Sure, IBM donated a lot of their OS/2 code to the open source community back around 2000, and it was eaten up by the GNU community -- at least what they were able to prove was capable of being re-licensed. And obviously from there it got ported over to OPENSTEP by NeXT.

Like almost all Unix-like OSes, both of them still use variants of X as a GUI (Linux is mostly on X.Org now, and NeXT uses their semi-proprietary version whose name I forget right now). Although, I do believe that some of the GUI programs, like the file explorer, commonly used in one or two of the popular desktop environments on Linux are descended from OS/2 code. And a lot of OS/2's user interface concepts were re-used in NeXT's GUI, and certainly could have been taken from the same code for all I know.
 
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Apple has its place in history. Its the company that popularized the PC by producing an affordable, stylish, user friendly product. It was a market leader untill HP and IBM could compete, and it squandered its comparative advantages by pursuing impractical electronics and attempting to carve out a separate niche for nearly every aspect of computing and programing.

Jobs and Wozniak are still sucessful and industry leaders. The former has made billions off of Pixar, and Wozniak is the technical guru of Linux. Apple itself still exists as a brand, Gates acquired it name (and much of its patents) after Apple's bankruptcy and its the channel Microsoft uses to release its riskier forarys into consumer electronics.
 
Just to be clear, OS/2 has little to do with Amiga and Linux. Amiga runs the NeXT OS (as voss already said), and Linux is, well, Linux. Sure, IBM donated a lot of their OS/2 code to the open source community back around 2000, and it was eaten up by the GNU community -- at least what they were able to prove was capable of being re-licensed. And obviously from there it got ported over to OPENSTEP by NeXT.

Like almost all Unix-like OSes, both of them still use variants of X as a GUI (Linux is mostly on X.Org now, and NeXT uses their semi-proprietary version whose name I forget right now). Although, I do believe that some of the GUI programs, like the file explorer, commonly used in one or two of the popular desktop environments on Linux are descended from OS/2 code. And a lot of OS/2's user interface concepts were re-used in NeXT's GUI, and certainly could have been taken from the same code for all I know.

True. However, some of us OS/2 fanboys have managed to get OS/2 onto Amigas, or even Atari PCs (such as me). I tried OpenStep and it just didn't feel quite right, so hence why I still prefer OS/2 (I'm running the current version on my Atari).
 
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