DBWI: Could Apple Computer survive to the present day?

So, I was reading a bit about the old Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s, and it struck me how ahead of their time Apple was compared to Microsoft or even Commodore... what do you think it would take for Apple to survive to the present day and continue to sell Macintosh computers?

I'm thinking that killing off the Commodore Amiga might help here? Though one doesn't want Apple to just be OTL's Commodore...
 
Nearly impossible, when IBM went to Microsoft that pretty much did it for Apple. IBM had the name recognition that wiped all the small players out and since it is much cheaper to have all your staff knowing just one operating system one OS will dominate in the long run. Why learn an OS that has 1/5 or less of the programs than the other when you don't save money doing so? At best Apple remains a niche product. OOC: This is pretty much what happened OTL.
 
Nearly impossible, when IBM went to Microsoft that pretty much did it for Apple. IBM had the name recognition that wiped all the small players out and since it is much cheaper to have all your staff knowing just one operating system one OS will dominate in the long run. Why learn an OS that has 1/5 or less of the programs than the other when you don't save money doing so? At best Apple remains a niche product.

Why? At 38% market share Commodore sure isn't a niche company, though I will concede that it was the 1993 release of the CD32 what put them over the top as much as the A4000. Don't know if Apple would/could have come out with something comparable. ADOS' 3.x & 4.x rolling out with all the features and more of Win95 - years before the Microsoft offering - didn't hurt either. The "OS Cold War" the trades bleat about sometimes is overblown, especially since programs like Open Office make it easy to move/open files from one platform to another.

"Wiped all the small players out?" Huh? What about Osborne or the aforementioned Commodore? No, what really killed Apple was their ridiculous pricing - 3 times or more what you would pay for a comparable Winbox or an Amiga! No way is that sustainable in a market as cuthroat as computers. Only had they adopted a price structure more in tune with sanity would they have thrived. And don't give me that "more bang for your buck" nonsense; the C64, the Osborne 2 & III and especially the Amiga 1000 moonwalked all over the comparible Apple offerings of the time. Especially those first two - why Apple cancelled their MacIntosh project and kept pushing the friggin' Lisa will forever be a mystery to me. I bet it would have had a better chance against the O2. At least the Mac would probably have been cheaper, and reportedly had similar features.
 
Last edited:
Apple let the people down by stop supporting there Machines I had a laser computor that used Apples softwear and had twice the memory then an Apple to had .
 
Top