Same in Eastern Europe. You'd only see Macs in professional sound, video, graphic design and publishing houses, which was only a drop in the ocean compared to Windows PC market share. Their super high cost and inability to run most popular SW like games made it a no-go for consumer and businesses, especially in a low wage market given that Macs here were more expensive than in the US due to VAT and import duties but wages were 20x lower.
From what I remember in Hungary thirty-ish years ago: Professional AV was Commodore Amiga. DTP used Mac because of QuarkXPress. Professional design used SGI Indigo.
IBM PC was office and in this period it became the gaming machine. Even before Commodore went bankrupt, the Gravis Ultrasound and Wolfenstein 3D dethroned the Amiga. https://youtu.be/wsADJa-23Sg has an excellent explanation why Wolfenstein 3D couldn't be done on the Amiga. The GUS was key in moving the demoscene to the PC and while obviously that's extremely niche it literally demonstrated what the PC is capable of and had a huge effect on the game creators. The first Assembly was organized in 1992 by two Amiga groups and Future Crew but just one year the latter released Second Reality and the Amiga was no more.
And also important to note that the SGI machines were a factor more expensive again than the macs. If the macs were already nearly unfeasible in Eastern Europe the SGIs certainly would be.
Oh yeah I'm sure because they were pretty much the only game in town for that.
But what I mean is: they were purely professional workstations. A Mac was something that a wealthy private person could have, easily. You wouldn't buy an Indy, they were over 20k$ or something. I was really referring to private use.
We had some at university but even those were donated. Though we were mainly a HP-UX shop.
Same in the United States. Outside of schools who got the machines for a substantial discount, they were bought for specific professional use cases like electronic publishing.
Steve Jobs saw that it wasn't just the Mac but the entire PC industry that ignored the consumer market - Windows and the vast majority of software (excluding games) were built for the professional market, and the same beige boxes and components were rehashed for the consumer market with the idea that people would "want what they use at work". That was what restarted legitimate consumer market sales, and gave them a ton of ways to meaningfully differentiate their products (Microsoft didn't really start noticeably responding until the Zune and Vista)
In the early 2010s I stumbled upon a defunct Macintosh LC II or III in some office at my Russian technical university and was very surprised by that. I guess it was being used for CAD in the 90s, since the office belonged to someone from the mechanical engineering department.
It was that way in the US too until the iPod and then iPhone took off and MacOS X became viable. If it wasn't for Apple's legacy hold in education (a lot universities in the 90's sold Macs in their bookstores) Apple may have gone the way of Amiga before that happened. They were seen as the expensive, pretty computer used by creative types or by students.
Famously, Apple was the stock everyone expected to fail, for over a decade.
You couldn't short them because they kept not dying. You couldn't buy'm because they kept not making money.
IMO, Apple was only able to stay alive because Microsoft invested so heavily in them. Microsoft was worried about being seen as a monopoly, so investing in Apple ensured that Microsoft could both /not/ be a monopoly but also benefit no matter how well Apple did.
IIRC they sold their stake after the iPod was released and Apple was back on its feet.
Widespread adoption of Macs by students really went hand-in-hand with the transition to Intel, likely because of a boost to battery life that allowed students to take notes for at least two lectures before needing to plug in.
>> You'd only see Macs in professional sound, video, graphic design and publishing houses...
> It was that way in the US too until the iPod and then iPhone took off and MacOS X became viable.
No. As someone who had experience with existing in the 90s, I can say you're dead wrong. Like I don't even know where to start. Macs weren't as popular as PCs, but you'd see them all over in the consumer space:
You'd see Macs in department store computer displays (Best Buy, Sam's Club, Officemax, etc.).
The iMac was released in 1998 (and was so influential you had PC makers copying its style). That was the real beginning of Apple's turnaround. The iPod wasn't released in 2001, and was pretty niche for a long time.
Several families I know had Macs as their family computer during the 90s (including my own).
Growing up, I didn't know a single person personally who owned a Mac. I only knew Macs from schools and the handful of teachers I knew who'd bought the new PowerBooks ca 2002.
I also had experience existing in the 90s. They were extremely niche.
And going into the 2000s, I knew plenty of people with an iPod, but no Mac.
>And going into the 2000s, I knew plenty of people with an iPod, but no Mac.
Which took some doing as iPods were all Firewire up until ~2004 when Apple transitioned to USB.
Firewire was pretty unusual in the PC ecosystem - usually requiring purchasing a PCI card.
First gen version also didn't have Windows software. I'm thinking more once they were convenient for PC users to use, I guess 2005 onwards? I don't think I saw any iPods before then.
> I can say you're dead wrong. Like I don't even know where to start.
This kind of aggressive riposte is never called for.
It's true that the Bondi Blue iMac arrived three years before the iPod, and was influential. It bought Apple some breathing room, and took it off life support. A success by any measure.
It's also true that prior to this, and for a considerable time after, Macs were largely found in exactly the niches described by the post you're responding to. I would add education as well, as did, let's note, the directly parent post to your own. Sure, you'd find them in other places, like <checks notes> less than 5% of household computers, including your household it turns out. I can see why that would distort your impression of its ubiquity.
The iPod was an immediate sensation. It didn't start to sell in numbers for a few years, but everyone knew what it was (speaking from the US perspective) and craved it. There's no question in my mind that it was the touchstone product which gave life to the entire company, and the halo effect it produced gave a crucial leg up to the iPhone, which is what made Apple the multi-trillion-dollar company it is today.
Leaving off a few details and compressing a timeline doesn't make someone wrong, let alone 'dead wrong'.
I suppose it's possible to think that, if you jump straight from the title of the Fine Article to my post, without reading the thread which leads to it.
This. In Europe, Macs were for people around arts, printed press, audio/video and such. CMYK people.
For genZers, think about THE platform to run Adobe software fast and reliabily + audio tools.
These people must be either young or delusional. No one used Macs at home. Even under Mac OSX for Power PC, if you weren't a media producer, your interest in Macs was zero.
3Com made an Ethernet card for the Mac in the late 80's. 3+File/Print/Share existed for the Mac as well. I knew people who worked on it. Claris Software was initially an independent company selling software for the Mac.
PowerPoint was initially Mac-only (1987). It got bought by Microsoft so they could port it to Windows.
Claris was originally spun out from Apple so that MacWrite/MacDraw etc would not be seen as competing with third-party developers with an unfair first-party advantage.
> So yeah, Macs were around, but hardly ubiquitous.
And I'm not claiming they were ubiquitous, just that they weren't so niche you'd only see them in schools or on the desk of a graphic designer. They had something like a 5-10% market-share in the US. Anecdotally, that played out in my community as far as I can tell (e.g. 1 in 20 kids having a Mac at home sounds about right). You didn't have to go anywhere special to buy them, but the store might have 20-30 PC models on display with 2-3 Macs.
