Mac circa 1993

[mauidan]

Pulled the boxes for my Budge Khorus speakers out of the attic to get them
ready for shipping to Oahu. Found this Apple ad among the newspaper stuffing:

 

[amirm]

Those were the good days for Apple. After not having a laptop ever, they introduced the three models, one of which is listed above. That raised their sales figure given the pent up demand amongst the Mac owners for a portable (there was HUGE portable that was super expensive and hence hardly anyone bought it).

 

[Bruce B]

Does anyone actually know where I could get one that works?

 

[amirm]

One what Bruce? One of the desktops? If so, ebay has some for sale now: http://cgi.ebay.com/Mac-Classic-Mod...aultDomain_0&hash=item483c440490#ht_500wt_925

I also have my old Mac from the mid-1990s. I forget the model but it is a desktop separate from the monitor.

 

[JackD201]

What I'd love to have as a conversation piece is a Newton

 

[amirm]

Closest I come to that is a hardware engineer who worked for me but while at Apple, worked on the Newton!

OK, I have another connection. I was working for Sony. My boss told me that Apple came to them, trying to get them to build the Newton. My (Japanese) boss took the device from them, wrote SONY on it and its handwriting recognition could not decipher it! So they told them they were not interested.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Those were the good days for Apple.

Well, that depends on what you call the "good days." It is the year that Scully finally left, after forcing Jobs out, taking over the direction of product development, and trying to re-invent Apple in IBM's image. It was good, I suppose, if you saw Scully's demise coming, guessed that Jobs would return, that the company would rediscover it's purpose and begin a long, dramatic rise to become one of the world's leading consumer electronics companies, the world's biggest earning technology company, and the world's leading music seller and top-performing (margins, not gross) retail chain.

It was also a really good year to buy Apple stock. If memory serves, it was that year that it bottomed out at around $17 a share. God knows that was good if you bought and held. But as a customer and a stock holder, I consider these the good days for Apple.

The Newton was a dramatic failure. An inevitable result, I think, of repeatedly reaching for the reinvention of entire categories instead of resting in the comfort of sound business strategies that reach for the giddy heights of the next quarter.

Tim

 

[amirm]

I didn't say those were the best days for Apple. But it was a period of growth. I was working at Sony and we built them one of their laptops. I was an Apple guy then so I was so relieved to have a laptop I could take with me to Japan and work on my presentations on the plane and once in the hotel room. That was an incredible advance for an Apple user. We (Sony) provided floppy drives for all of their laptops so had the inside data on how well they are doing. It was a bit like a car company all of a sudden having an SUV to also sell.

At that time, there was little respect to go around for Jobs. He had built a company called NeXT around an image when technology mattered for workstations. It failed catastrophically. Jobs was more interested in decor of his offices than figuring out how to build a workstation people wanted to buy. It was in that atmosphere which Apple pulled ahead of the expectation with those laptops. For that time, when computing was for people with thick glasses and little social skills, Jobs was the wrong man for the job. Now decades later, everyone has computing devices so fashion has value. Not so then.

BTW, just looked up Apple stock price and it was around $30 in 1990 and rose up to $50+ by 1993.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I didn't say those were the best days for Apple. But it was a period of growth. I was working at Sony and we built them one of their laptops. I was an Apple guy then so I was so relieved to have a laptop I could take with me to Japan and work on my presentations on the plane and once in the hotel room. That was an incredible advance for an Apple user. We (Sony) provided floppy drives for all of their laptops so had the inside data on how well they are doing. It was a bit like a car company all of a sudden having an SUV to also sell.

At that time, there was little respect to go around for Jobs. He had built a company called NeXT around an image when technology mattered for workstations. It failed catastrophically. Jobs was more interested in decor of his offices than figuring out how to build a workstation people wanted to buy. It was in that atmosphere which Apple pulled ahead of the expectation with those laptops. For that time, when computing was for people with thick glasses and little social skills, Jobs was the wrong man for the job. Now decades later, everyone has computing devices so fashion has value. Not so then.

BTW, just looked up Apple stock price and it was around $30 in 1990 and rose up to $50+ by 1993.

I'm sure my memory is imperfect, but I remember, sometime in the 90s when I was a B of A, one of the young guys who worked for me walked into my office and said, "Tim, Apple is trading at $17 a share. Surely it's worth more than that?"

But maybe it was $37, not $17, and I'm just remembering a better story. I have a photogenic memory - I remember things as much more attractive than they actually were.

It's an old argument, Amir, but I can tell you with certainty that for those of us who use Apple products, it's not about style. The very thing that Apple opponents hate most - the closed system - is the company's greatest strength. It makes for a large body of hardware and software that works together seamlessly to just do what it is supposed to do with no muss and no fuss. But even that is not primary. It's that the ethos of "ease of use" is carried from product design all the way to the telephone and the retail floor, resulting in world-class customer service. It's one of the few companies in the last 50 years that has defined itself and its relationship to its customers clearly, and stuck with its vision (the Scully years being the exception), through good and bad times, until it came into focus. They've taken a very rare long view, accepted their failures and their niche markets and finally achieved unprecedented mass market success as a result. Give me 100 more companies like Apple, give me more of that "style" and I would give you a stronger America. If only the banking industry had thought as much of the customer...

Tim

 

[amirm]

It's an old argument, Amir, but I can tell you with certainty that for those of us who use Apple products, it's not about style. The very thing that Apple opponents hate most - the closed system - is the company's greatest strength. It makes for a large body of hardware and software that works together seamlessly to just do what it is supposed to do with no muss and no fuss.

That has been the case forever for Apple (sans a short period that they allowed others to clone the hardware before Jobs killed it). The point I was making was not regarding Apple vs. Others but what has occurred to other companies like them. Remember the rise of Nokia? That coincided with cell phones being something the masses carried so style was important and they nailed it at the time, allowing them to kill everyone else. Ironically, Apple beat them on style and software and they can't compete.

It's one of the few companies in the last 50 years that has defined itself and its relationship to its customers clearly, and stuck with its vision (the Scully years being the exception), through good and bad times, until it came into focus. They've taken a very rare long view, accepted their failures and their niche markets and finally achieved unprecedented mass market success as a result. Give me 100 more companies like Apple, give me more of that "style" and I would give you a stronger America. If only the banking industry had thought as much of the customer...

Tim

We have a lot of those strong companies:

1. Amazon. Revolutionizing merchandazing.

2. Microsoft. While the future is less certain for than the past, they have been an incredible cornerstone of America's strength in technology. It was Bill Gates who recognized one day, software would be far more important than hardware. Indeed, the message was so powerful that it became part of Apple's formula for success: apps and their stickiness to the platform.

3. Intel. Singlehandedly kept us in silicon market after everyone else gave up (think DRAM and ASICs) and let that production and innovation go Asia.

4. Google. People think of Google as a search engine but what they have built is a "cache of the Internet." They take snippets of everything on the Internet and maintain it cheaply and reliably on the Internet. No one has built such infrastructure to scale as they have. They are finally, finally on the path to build the next big thing: Android. Too slow to get there and they need more of these but again, they are a powerhouse of innovation for US. They are the biggest threat to Apple's dominance.

The everyday customer zooms on Apple as the success story by a large factor due to style and sexiness. But the above companies hold their own and then some...

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

That has been the case forever for Apple (sans a short period that they allowed others to clone the hardware before Jobs killed it). The point I was making was not regarding Apple vs. Others but what has occurred to other companies like them. Remember the rise of Nokia? That coincided with cell phones being something the masses carried so style was important and they nailed it at the time, allowing them to kill everyone else. Ironically, Apple beat them on style and software and they can't compete.


We have a lot of those strong companies:

1. Amazon. Revolutionizing merchandazing.

2. Microsoft. While the future is less certain for than the past, they have been an incredible cornerstone of America's strength in technology. It was Bill Gates who recognized one day, software would be far more important than hardware. Indeed, the message was so powerful that it became part of Apple's formula for success: apps and their stickiness to the platform.

3. Intel. Singlehandedly kept us in silicon market after everyone else gave up (think DRAM and ASICs) and let that production and innovation go Asia.

4. Google. People think of Google as a search engine but what they have built is a "cache of the Internet." They take snippets of everything on the Internet and maintain it cheaply and reliably on the Internet. No one has built such infrastructure to scale as they have. They are finally, finally on the path to build the next big thing: Android. Too slow to get there and they need more of these but again, they are a powerhouse of innovation for US. They are the biggest threat to Apple's dominance.

The everyday customer zooms on Apple as the success story by a large factor due to style and sexiness. But the above companies hold their own and then some...

Good examples, all. We need more, we need them in paradigm-shifting, market-creating technologies and we need them manufacture domestically. It's not enough to innovate here, to design here, if we give the production away. It may be ok for individual companies, but it's not a sustainable model for the country. But that's a very long, and potentially political discussion. Another board, another time.

Tim