Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And we're going to continue our discussion about how Apple survived the PC Wars. So if you haven't heard part one, that was last week's or the last episode rather, you should go and listen to that. The episode before that was all about obscure or semi obscure computers that time has forgotten, So computers that came out in the seventies and eighties that did not stand the test of time. So these are all sort of part of kind of a series about computers and why the computer landscape is the way it is today. Why don't we have a Commodore sixty four, a really you know, would be like a Commodore like two thousand forty eight or something at this point. Why don't we have that? Instead? We've got these various Windows based machines and Macintosh machines or mac machines. Why is that? So we're looking at the Apple side of that story and continuing that story today. Uh. In the last episode, I talked about the early history of Apple computers and how the company hit a home run with the Apple two platform, but then found itself on shaky ground. When Apple launched the Macintosh in night four, the company was still depending upon revenue generated by Apple two sales, mostly in the form of the Apple to E computer. The platform had the benefit of a large library of programs. A lot of developers had made software for the Apple too, and the computers were dependent upon processors that have been manufactured in the late nineteen seventies, which raised some eyebrows because now you had this increasingly old platform, had a good library of software, but couldn't remain relevant. At the time, the software rarely required more resources than the Apple two could provide, so they hadn't quite hit a a true stopping point yet. There there were some concessions being made by software developers to make sure that their programs could run on Apple two properly, but it was good enough. It didn't push the the the capabilities of the Apple two platforms so hard that it was unable to meet the requirements of the software. It didn't hurt that Apple two had a text based operating system rather than the graphic user interface that the Macintosh introduced to the home computer market. Because, if you remember from our last episode, one of the big challenges the Macintosh faced was that the gooey this graphic user interface took up most of the computer's memory, which left very little for it to do other applications. The Apple two didn't have that problem. It was all text based, so it could reserve its memory for all the programs. Meanwhile, the Macintosh continue to struggle in those early days due to an expensive price tag and a limited number of application is available for the platform. When the McIntosh came out in nineteen eighty four, it was not alone. Apple launched another computer a couple of months later, while it also launched the Lisa two, which was an attempt to salvage the Lisa project. It would ultimately rebrand the Lisa Too as the Macintosh XL. But that's not the computer I was referring to. Instead, I'm talking about the Apple to See. So even as Apple was trying to forge a new path with the Macintosh line of computers, it was still leaning heavily on the Apple Too platform. So what set the Apple to See Apart from the Apple to E, which had launched in three Well, for one thing, it was a lot smaller the C and Apple to see stood for compact. It was, at least by some definitions, portable. The basic computer had a handle that could fold down to become a stand that would tilt the computer keyboard into the proper position for typing. It did not, however, have an degraded display, so you would have to carry a separate display around with you and connect it to your portable computer. Also, it didn't have a battery power supply. You would have to plug the computer in somewhere. Now, eventually you could get battery packs that the computer could use as a power source, but it didn't ship with them. Still, the industrial redesign of the Apple form factor and its versatile size UH and its features meant it got support in the market. Even though it was built on an aging foundation of the Apple two platform. It actually received the highest number of day one orders in Apple's history, and it initially cost hundred dollars. After a year on the market, it sold more than four hundred thousand units, so it proved that the Apple two platform still had legs seven years after it had been introduced. In April, Apple officially retired the Apple three platform. Between the Apple three and the Apple three Plus, which was a slightly upgraded version, the company had managed to sell only sixty five thousand computers. It had manufactured ninety thousand. The Apple three was just about, by any measurement, a total failure. In Apple announced it had shipped seventy thousand Macintosh computers within the first one hundred days of it being available, though I should point out that shipped and sold are two different metrics. Still, this was not a bad number, but it was still shy of projections Apple had made when the Macintosh was still in development. They had said that they needed to sell forty seven thousand units per month. Instead, they had moved seventy thousand units in a hundred days, so they were still falling short. In September, Apple introduced the five hundred twelve kilobyte version of the Macintosh. This version was more expensive than the base model. It cost three thousand, two hundred dollars when it launched. The following month, Apple announced they had sold the two millionth Apple two computer. That means in just a little more than a year, the company went from producing it's one millionth Apple two machine to selling its two millionth unit. Now, this was spread across the family of Apple two computers at that time, so the Apple to the Apple two E and the Apple to C the Apple two line continued to keep the company afloat. By the end of nineteen eighty four, Apple had sold a quarter of a million Macintosh systems. It was a modest success, but far short of those two point two million units the company had hoped for back in nineteen eighty one. Still, the Macintosh was a nice change of pace. It was not a commercial flop like the Lisa or the technical flop like the Apple three. In Night five. While struggles at the management level would ultimately prompt Steve Jobs and Apple to part ways, the company was still struggling with what to do with the Lisa Too. At first, the company rebranded the Lisa Too and called it the Macintosh XL, but the rebranding wasn't enough to save the project, and ultimately Apple would abandon it in April five, just a few months after rebranding it. Also that year, Apple made some major cuts. The number of employees had topped five thousand, seven hundred at Apple, but in June the company eliminated about twenty percent of all of its positions. In nineteen six, Apple was a very different company. Both of the co founders were gone. The Apple three and the Lisa projects were both a thing of the past. The Macintosh line was continuing, as did the now ancient by computer standards Apple two line. On the tenth anniversary of Apple's founding April first, nineteen eighty six, the company announced the Apple two GS. This was the last major update to the Apple two platform. Apple would later introduce upgrades to the Apple to E and the two C lines, but the two GS represented the last big development on that platform. It was the ind of the life cycle for the Apple two platform, or at least the beginning of the end. The G S and two g s, by the way, stood for graphics and sound. This is one of those things that confused me back when I was a kid, because we had an Apple to E. The Apple to C came out after the Apple to E, but in the alphabet, C comes before E, and I didn't know that the letters actually stood for stuff. And then the Apple two GS came out, and I really was wondering what was going on. That's because these letters actually were standing for different terms in this case, Like I said, g S stood for graphics and sound. The Apple two GS at a graphic user interface that was similar to the Macintosh Gooey. It also had a mouse. It did not have an integrated floppy drive in the computer case, but rather it would have an external floppy disk drive, so you would have to connect it via a cable to the CPU. These were three and a half inch discs at this time, not the old five and a quarter inch discs. Some people mistakenly at the time would call these discs hard disks because three and a half inch discs were in hard plastic as opposed to that thinner, more flexible stuff that the five and a quarter inch discs used. But they were still technically floppy disks, not hard disks. That's a tangent. The two GS had a different processor than it's Apple two computer predecessors. It used the Western Digital sixteen bit sixty five C eight sixteen microprocessor. However, that microprocessor was compatible with the older six five O two processors that other Apple two computers used, so the two GS retained backwards compatibility with existing Apple to software. The clock speed on the new processor could reach two point eight mega hurts, though, if you were running old Apple to software, you would have to limit the clock speed to one mega hurts in order to make it compatible with that old programming. If you bought third party hardware, you could actually over clock it to a then blistering eight teen mega hurts. The company all so boasted two hundred fifty six kilobytes of RAM, which could be expanded up to eight megabytes. The company had a display that or the computer rather had a display that could support a resolution of six hundred forty by two hundred pixels in four color mode or three d twenty by two hundred pixels in sixteen color mode. So still well, it was high definition at the time. It's pretty low resolution these days. The two gs also introduced a new hardware element that found its way into the Macintosh line after a little bit. This was called the Apple Dusktop bus. Now, a bus is a communication system within a computer or between computers. Its job is to transfer data between components or between computers. For example, a computer's CPU and its memory are tightly coupled, and a bus provides the communication link between those two components. The Apple Desktop bus was a peripheral and external peripheral that allowed users to connect different devices to a proprietary standard for Apple systems. You can use it to connect stuff like a keyboard or a mouse to a computer. This was Apple's proprietary approach to a universal connector universal within the world of Apple, but not outside of it now. Eventually, the company would discontinue this BUS system in favor of following the industry standard of USB later on. Much later on, as Macintosh computers will continue to use a dB until the late nineteen nineties. The a dB was one of many projects Steve Wozniak had worked on before he left the company in Ve. Also in nineteen eighty six, Apple swapped out the five twelve kilobyte Macintosh for a new enhanced version that cost less. The new machine sold for two thousand dollars, and the Macintosh Plus also debuted in nineteen eight six. It had a whopping hole megabyte of RAM and a ES of read only memory or ROM. This machine was capable of running more demanding applications and put it beyond the limits of what the failed Lisa and Lisa two platforms were supposed to do. So finally, Apple had moved beyond those and it cost dollars, which was expensive, but not nearly at the levels of the earlier Macintosh and Lisa computers. By this time, Apple was really swinging focus to the Macintosh line. The Apple two products were finally running out of steam. There are only so many updates Apple could make to the legacy platform to keep them relevant in the face of competing machines. Those machines were largely IBM compatible PCs at this point. Now I'll talk more about them in the next episode, but the Macintosh line looked like it was truly going to be the future of the company. Now. That did not mean that Apple would abandon the Apple two platform right away. Sales were still okay, so they were still bringing in money for the for the company, and the Macintosh sales figures had not quite reached a level that was sustainable in the long term. The former president of Apple France, a man named Jean Louis Gassa, came over to Apple's US operations to take the role that Steve Jobs had held for years. Gassa made decisions that were very different from its predecessor. He wanted Apple to stop concentrating on making machines for home users and focus on the more profitable business and high end consumer market. He wanted Apple to focus more on technical superiority than aesthetic design. He had a mantra that many at Apple began to repeat, and that mantra was fifty five or die. That was a reference to Gassay's goal of hitting a fifty five percent profit margin on Apple computers, meaning that you're selling the computers at more than what it cost you to make them and market them. It was at this time that Apple really cemented its reputation as offering computers that were more expensive than the comparable IBM clones on the market. At first, Magotosh computers also suffered from a lack of software, and to be fair, the Macintosh platform consistently lagged behind IBM compatible computers in terms of a software library. That said, the emphasis on power and technical specs meant that developers could create sophisticated software for the Macintosh that IBM compatible machines could not easily replicate. This was a trend that would last for years, with certain types of processor heavy applications like video, photo and audio editing software becoming the bread and butter for the Macintosh line. That remains true to this day. If you look at the production machines here at how stuff works, you'll notice an awful lot of Macintosh computers because the people who are using it to edit audio and video work need that power, and McIntosh is still known for that to this day. I've got a lot more to say about Apple and how it survived the PC wars of the early eighties all the way through the nineties. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In Apple sold its one million Macintosh computer. That was good, but again, their original goal was to hit that two point two million units sales from nineteen eight to nineteen eighty five. So eighties seven hitting one million, they're a little behind schedule. The Macintosh and debut in nineteen eighty four, it took three years to hit that one million units sold. Still, the Macintosh Apple was offering was a very different machine than the one the design team had had in mind way back in the early nineteen eighties. Remember, they had wanted to create a user friendly home computer that could be sold for around a thousand dollars. The actual machines had so many more features than the design team had originally intended that it cost more than twice as much as the goal price the team had anticipated when they were first talking about it. That spring, Apple introduced the Macintosh to This was the first of the computers of the gas Say era. It cost a whopping six thousand, five hundred dollars when it was released that you could actual we find it for a little less at about five thousand, five hundred at some places. The computer boasted a thirty two bit microprocessor for Motorola, running at sixteen mega hurts clock speed. It also had one megabyte of RAM expandable up to sixty eight megabytes, and two d fifty six kilobytes of ROM. It was also the first Mac to support a color display. This was Apple's first big step to creating a three M machine. Now, this was a term used in the early eighties to describe a computer that had at least one megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a mega flop of processing power. There was actually another project that was supposed to get Apple to that fabled three M land. It was called the Big Mac. Steve Jobs had overseen the project back before he left Apple. The computer was supposed to run Unix as its operating system instead of the system Mac Operating System. After Jobs left and guess A took over his role, GASA canceled the Big Mac project. Much of that work was then transitioned over to the Macintosh to design. The Macintosh two had a megabyte of memory, and when paired with the right display, could support a million pixels, but it fell short on the floating operations per second metric, topping out at one sixty kilo flops. The leads on the Macintosh to design were Michael Dewey and Brian Berkeley and Heartmot s Linger. Now, back when they first started on the design works, Steve Jobs was still around. They kept their work secret because they were expressly violating Steve jobs as wishes with the Macintosh two's features. Specifically, Steve Jobs was not in favor of color displays and Macintosh computers because at that time printers were monochromatic. So if you could view colors on screen, but you could only print and black and white, the print outs would not represent what you were working on. That would be a disconnect. This was a viole lation of the what you see is what you get or whizzy wig design philosophy. Jobs was also against the idea of expansion slots, which the Macintosh two had. Jobs felt that expansion slots were great for hobbyists, but that they made the experience complicated for the average user. The secret project had a code name Little Big Mac. It was developed in parallel with the Big Mac project that Jobs was overseeing before his departure. The Macintosh two ended up being sort of a combination of these two projects. Actually, it had several code names, many of which were city names during its whole design process. The case design of the Macintosh two made it look a lot more like your standard IBM compatible machine. Had a case that you would placed on your desk horizontally. You'd set your monitor on top of this horizontal case. The keyboard was separate and would sit in front of the case. The Macintosh two was one of the first Macintosh machines to feature the Apple Desktop bus ter used by the Apple two GS, and from that point forward, Macintosh computers would typically ship standard with the Apple Desktop bush and The Macintosh two was also the first of the Macintosh computers to feature what is commonly referred to as the chimes of Death. Well the Macintosh se which came out the same month as the Macintosh to also had the chimes of death. This was the sound notification the Macintosh would make when there was a critical failure in the system. The sc was more of a traditional Macintosh computer, souped up a bit for the business world. It cost three thousand seven dollars upon release, making it a less expensive solution than the Macintosh too. The same year, Apple spun off its software division as a new company called Claris. The company was able to focus on developing software for the Macintosh platforms and had licenses to several legacy mac programs like mac Wright and mac Paint. It would operate as a separate entity until nine, when Apple would reacquire the company. Also in nineteen eight seven, Microsoft released the second version of Windows. The first version of Windows, which came out in nineteen eighty five, hadn't received much attention. Most people dismissed it as being clunky and not terribly useful, but Windows two point oh was doing a little better. That prompted Apple to sue Microsoft and Hewitt Packard with a claim that the Windows Gooey the g Uy infringed upon the intellectual property of Apple. The claim stated that the Windows platform too closely resembled the Macintosh user interface. The courts ultimately decided against Apple on this front. When Windows three point oh debuted in nineteen nine, it marked the beginning of a big transition in IBM compatible personal computers as they began to migrate from DOSS to Windows, and it reduced one of the qualities that differentiated Macintosh computers from IBM compatibles. Believe it or not, even at this stage, ten years after the day Dave view of the Apple to, the company was still selling Apple two machines. Many of those products, even the updated, enhanced versions, would finally say goodbye. In the early nineteen nineties. Apple made an Apple to E card that could be used with Macintosh computers to make them backwards compatible with certain Apple to software packages, but even that would take a bow by The Apple two platform still helped provide revenue to Apple, but it was clear that the Macintosh was going to have to step up. What followed were a series of Macintosh computers that followed the design philosophy of Gassa and the Macintosh too. These were expensive desktop publishing machines that were technically sound, but at a premium price. The Macintosh started to gain a reputation for being a bit elitist. It was undeniably useful for many processor heavy applications, but it was so expensive and the suite of software was so much more narrow than the library available for the IBM compatible computers that a lot of average consumers dismissed the platform out of hand, and a smaller user base meant that software developers had less incentive to create programs for the Macintosh. The logic goes like this. You're a programmer and you want to create a really cool application. Let's say it's a game. You want that game to reach as many people as possible, both because you want people to experience your work, and of course you wish to profit from that work. You want to make some money. It makes sense to focus your efforts on the largest possible audience. Now, if you don't have time to develop and program a game for both Macintosh and PC platforms, you have to choose one or the other. With way more people owning IBM compatible machines, at this point, it just makes sense to develop for the PC and Windows platforms. That's where you're going to reach the largest number of people. Assuming your game resonates with your intended audience. Now, that didn't mean there weren't developers, even game developers who concentrated solely on the mac Kintosh. There were. There, just weren't as many Macintosh developers as there were Windows or PC developers. By the late nineteen eighties, the Macintosh stood as the only real challenger to the IBM compatible PC. Other companies had withdrawn from the home PC market, acknowledging that it was too competitive to make a go atit. Tandy and Texas Instruments were out. Atari was in rapid decline and soon would exist only in name. Commodore had retired the Commodore sixty four, but was still hanging in the race with its Amiga line of computers. But by the mid ninety nineties, Commodore couldn't hold together and declared bankruptcy. The game was essentially down to all the companies that were making IBM compatible machines or Windows based machines or DOSES based machines, and Apple, and Apple had a tiny, tiny sliver of that market share. Apple had carved out of market, but it was a small one. It was no longer a dominant player in the home computer world, but it was the only real alternative to the Windows machines. Those DOSS machines. The IBM PC clones that were running uh either DOSS were increasingly at this point Windows. In nine, Apple would release the Macintosh Portable. Now, this was the first truly portable Macintosh computer with an incorporated screen that could fold down to make the computer into a kind of clunky wedge shape. It had a track ball in place of a mouse, had cereal and scuzzy ports for peripherals. It had a floppy drive and a forty megabyte hard drive, had a megabyte of RAM, and use the Motorola sixty eight thousand processor running at a sixteen mega hurts clock speed. The portable machine cost a hefty seven thousand, three hundred dollars. It ran on mac Os six point oh four when it launched. As for its power supply, that came in the form of a rechargeable battery, Only it wasn't a lithium ion battery. It was a lead acid battery, you know, kind like the kind that you would find in a car. That added a couple of pounds to this portable computer. So the whole thing weighed about sixteen pounds or seven point three kilograms. In other words, it was a hefty portable computer. You probably wouldn't want to lug it around everywhere you go. A couple of years later, Apple would give the portable computer another shot, you know, he would say, let's try and get this form factor down, and they released the power Book one hundred. Only this computer wasn't actually designed by Apple. The power Book one hundred was based off the original Macintosh portable schematics, but it was designed by Sony la gasp Sony helped miniaturize the components that made the Macintosh portable so gush darn anti portable. The power Book one hundred launched in ninete, and while it wasn't a solely Apple design product, it did help put Apple back on the right path. In the magazine Macworld published in our icle written by Jerry Borrel that had some troubling implications now, Borel cited an earlier interview from n in which Apple executive Mike Spindler, the CEO, who well at the time he was still under the CEO, but he would become the CEO of the company, said that they were investigating the possibility of licensing the Macintosh operating system to other hardware manufacturers. Now, this was very much the opposite of what Steve Jobs felt was the right path for Apple when he was still there. From its earliest incarnation, Apple had done its best to protect its hardware and software. It had sued companies that put out clones of the Apple two platform. But as Apple and the market changed, so too did this philosophy. By the early nine nineties, it sounded like Apple was interested in making some cash by licensing the mac os to other types of hardware. While the interest was there, Apple didn't make a move to do this until John Scully had left in ninete, replaced by Michael the Diesel Spindler and I'm not making up that nickname, so the same person who gave that interview in ninety one was now running the company. In nine Apple made a big switch. The company had depended upon Motorola produced microprocessors since nineteen eighty three, when the failed Lisa computer had a Motorola sixty eight thousand chip in it, But delays in manufacturing a Motorola at Motorola rather meant that some of the higher end computers in the early nineties they used the Motorola sixty eight O four OH processors were launching behind schedule, so Apple executives decided they would switch to a different CPU, and there were a couple of different options available now. The most popular and arguably the most powerful choice would have been Intel, the company lead the pack in microprocessor technologies, But rather than switched to Intel, Apple executives decided to go with power PC. Starting in nine with the power macintoh and perform A six series, the company began using power PC chips as CPUs. John Scully would later admit that it would probably would have been a better idea to go with Intel from the start. After two thousand five, that's exactly what Apple did, they switched from power PC to Intel processors. But during this power pc era, there were many different lines of Macintosh computers on the market, all of them on the high end spectrum for computers. Macintosh accounted for about seven percent of the overall market share for desktop computers. There were some unauthorized Macintosh clones being sold in various places, and Apple executives decided it was better to make some money off of official, licensed Mac clones than to see these unlicensed ones pop up with no benefit to Apple. The company began to offer up a license to the Macintosh ROMs and operating system to other manufacturers. This gave Apple a quick jolt of cash, but before long Apple began to regret this this vision because other companies were able to make McIntosh compatible computers using power PC based machines for less than the official Macintosh computers on the market, so Apple was undercutting its own sales in other words, because it was allowing these other companies to make Macintosh compatible machines. Michael Spindler would step down as CEO and nine During his time at the HELM, he was rumored to have held discussions with big companies about possibly selling Apple to a competitor like IBM or Sun Microsystems, that obviously didn't happen. His replacement was Gil Emilio, who was only CEO from ninety six to Amelio wanted to address some of the big problems left in the wake of Scully and Spindler, namely some pretty public failures like the Apple Newton and the less public but perhaps more impactful failure of an operating system upgrade called Copeland and in a moment I will talk more about this would be successor to the macOS known as System seven. But first, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay. So, by the mid nineties, it was clear that the Macintosh line was going to need a new operating system. System seven, which was introduced in was a good OS and had a lot of useful features and support, but it was showing its age. The original intent was to do a huge overhaul to the operating system and come up with something that was more future proofed. This project was called Copeland. It was supposed to have several next generation features that would push Macintosh into a new era of sophistication. It was born out of a practice Apple was following that has the informal name of blue or pink. During brainstorming sessions, developers would propose upgrades to existing operating systems features that they thought it should have. So ideas that were considered to be relatively easy to implement would go on blue cards. Ideas that were a little more difficult and perhaps a bit further off would go on Pink cards. Ideas that were really tricky but considered to be worth doing would go down on Red cards. Then developers would essentially divide up into a couple of teams the Blue team would go to work on the near term upgrades to whatever operating system they were working on. The Pink team would concentrate on something a bit more revolutionary. Copeland started out as a Pink Team project. However, as time went on, managers began to pull ideas from the Red cards and put them in with the Pink team's plans. So this is another case of feature creep, something Apple had struggled with many times in its past. As new features were added to the specs of the operating system, the development time grew longer and the project fell further behind schedule. After gill Emilio replaced Michael Spindler as CEO, he brought on Ellen Hancock from National Semiconductor to come men and review the operating system in development to see if it was actually close to where it needed to be. Hancock did a full review and she concluded that the operating system was in a total shambles. She said that while parts of the development process were fairly well along, others were lagging way behind, and there was little hope that all these various pieces would be able to come together into a cohesive operating system. Amilio was then left in a really bad position. The company had put a ton of effort into developing this new operating system, and it just wasn't where it needed to be. He made the call to purchase a new operating system rather than continued down the path of trying to develop Copeland. His decision led him to purchase a fledgling computer company called Next. Now, this was a company that been founded by a very special person. That person was Steve Jobs. Emilio announced that Apple would acquire Next and that Jobs himself would come over to Apple in an advisory position. Amelio made this move in an effort to right the corporate ship. Jobs would end up contacting the Board of directors and he argued that Amelio should be removed as CEO, that Apple was on the verge of collapse and that a series of bad decisions made by the last three CEOs had put the company in a terrible position. The board agreed with Jobs. They removed Amelio, and then Jobs took over as interim CEO. He would become the official CEO of Apple by two thousand. Jobs made some really big changes soon after his arrival, which included canceling a lot of projects that were in development. And also firing people. It was around this time that the term getting jobs emerged, meaning you didn't want to find yourself alone in a room with Steve Jobs for fear of getting fired on the spot. Jobs called for an end of the licensing program for Macintosh technologies. He wanted to see no more Mac clones on the market, and he wanted everything to fall fully under the control of the company. Again, no version of Macintosh should ever come from anyone other than Apple, and while Apple developers continue to go down the legacy operating system route for a couple of versions, Jobs helped foster in the mac os ten build, sometimes called mac os X because it's Roman numeral ten. This introduced many of the features that were originally promised in Copeland, so it wasn't exactly the same as the one that was in development, but it had a lot of the elements that were in development from a few years back. Jobs even presented at a Macworld conference and he included a live streamed message from the rival, you know, the the anti Apple, the big adversary, Bill Gates, keeping in a mind that Apple and Microsoft had had a very long relationship with each other, sometimes adversarial, but Bill Gates live streamed a presentation at Macworld, and he announced that he was making a one fifty million dollar our investment in Apple on behalf of Microsoft, which got a rousing round of booze from the crowd, who were all very much, very passionate Apple supporters and thus a little biased against Microsoft. Apple introduced an all in one computer called the iMac. The iMac represented a return to Apple's focus on home users. It was aesthetically pleasing, it was available in various colors after its initial launch, and it seemed to go back to what set Apple apart in the first place, this idea of a friendly looking machine that's meant for the average person, not something that is cold and calculating or intimidating. The iMac also adopted universal standards like USB and got rid of those proprietary connectors Apple I've been using for more than a decade. So that bus that Apple had developed, which was useful for the Macintosh, was abandoned for the more standardized universal Cereal bus. The USB in Apple retired the Macintosh name when it discontinued the Power Macintosh. That was the last machine to actually be called a Macintosh from that point forward. The computers in this line were just referred to as MAX, not Macintosh Is. A couple of years later, Max began to include hardware that had been standard in BCS for a while, like CD rewriteable drives, so those are optical drives that would allow you to write data to c d s. Until about two thousand two thousand one, you couldn't find that in MAX. And then Apple also began including DVD drives on machines. The Mac was now getting position not just as a computer, but as a media device. This also helped boost sales and launches of other products like the iPod and iTunes. Helped even more because Apple products worked really, really well together, and now you could get Apple devices to communicate with stuff made from other manufacturers, but the experience was never as seamless or easy. A good example of this is iPods and iTunes. I had an iPod, I did not have a Mac, and I found it really frustrating to update my iPod to transfer music over the iTunes build for Windows just didn't work as well as what I kept hearing about, because again I didn't have a Mac. I finally got a Mac and then the experience was incredible and I realized, oh, this is a very nice design approach where you make sure that all of your stuff works seamlessly, and maybe you make sure it doesn't work quite as well if you're using other people's stuff. I can't say for certain that the decisions were conscious to make that happen, or that it all was purposeful, but it was certainly convenient and in favor of Apple because it meant that you were much more likely to go with a full Apple ecosystem because everything just worked with each other, as opposed to mixing and matching where things may not work so smoothly. Oh and Jobs also oversaw the transition for power PC machines to Intel powered Mac computers, and to this day Mac uses Intel chips. So that's kind of how Apple survived the PC wars. For a really long time. The company was just largely dependent upon a proven but aging technology in the form of the Apple two platform. It's it's hard to stress how important the Apple two was to Apple the company. Without the Apple two platform and it's long long life cycle and the fact that it was relevant or managed to remain relevant for so long, Without that, Apple would not have lasted because it was really putting its neck out with some high risk projects like Lisa and the Apple three that ultimately failed. Without that Apple to safety net, the company probably would not have existed. It wouldn't have it wouldn't have lasted, and all we would have at this point would be IBM compare doable windows based machines after the Apple two platform is all about leaning heavily on high end, high profit margin computers in the Macintosh era, which ended up being unsustainable in the long run and nearly led to the company's collapse. Only when Steve Jobs came back and laid down the law did the company seem to get its footing again. Would Apple have survived without Steve Jobs returning to the company, Well, it's hard to say, because obviously we can only see what has happened, not what would have happened. But Jobs certainly had a major impact on the performance of Apple, even if it was just through what people called his reality distortion field. Today, Apple is an insanely successful and valuable company. It's constantly right there on the verge of becoming a trillion dollar company, But there were times in its history when it could have joined the ranks of Commodore or Tandy or Atari. It's kind of amazing it survived long enough to become the powerhouse that is now, and also amazing that much of its success is due to stuff that isn't a computer at all, like the iPod or the iPhone or the iTunes suite. That's pretty phenomenal. In our next episode, i'll explore how IBM got into the personal computer market and why the company made the decision to get out of it. We'll also learn how tons of companies were able to create machines that emulated IBM's design and to find the PC market as it stands today. If you guys have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, maybe there's something you would like an update on something I've covered in the past but has changed since the last time I covered it. Maybe there's a brand new technology or a company or a person in tech that you think I should cover. Or maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest host. You need to let me know. Send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is text Stuff HSW make sure you follow us on Instagram. Check out all the behind the scenes stuff going on over there. And remember you can watch me record podcasts live every Wednesday and Friday, or I shouldn't say every nearly every Wednesday and Friday. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. 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Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And we're going to continue our discussion about how Apple survived the PC Wars. So if you haven't heard part one, that was last week's or the last episode rather, you should go and listen to that. The episode before that was all about obscure or semi obscure computers that time has forgotten, So computers that came out in the seventies and eighties that did not stand the test of time. So these are all sort of part of kind of a series about computers and why the computer landscape is the way it is today. Why don't we have a Commodore sixty four, a really you know, would be like a Commodore like two thousand forty eight or something at this point. Why don't we have that? Instead? We've got these various Windows based machines and Macintosh machines or mac machines. Why is that? So we're looking at the Apple side of that story and continuing that story today. Uh. In the last episode, I talked about the early history of Apple computers and how the company hit a home run with the Apple two platform, but then found itself on shaky ground. When Apple launched the Macintosh in night four, the company was still depending upon revenue generated by Apple two sales, mostly in the form of the Apple to E computer. The platform had the benefit of a large library of programs. A lot of developers had made software for the Apple too, and the computers were dependent upon processors that have been manufactured in the late nineteen seventies, which raised some eyebrows because now you had this increasingly old platform, had a good library of software, but couldn't remain relevant. At the time, the software rarely required more resources than the Apple two could provide, so they hadn't quite hit a a true stopping point yet. There there were some concessions being made by software developers to make sure that their programs could run on Apple two properly, but it was good enough. It didn't push the the the capabilities of the Apple two platforms so hard that it was unable to meet the requirements of the software. It didn't hurt that Apple two had a text based operating system rather than the graphic user interface that the Macintosh introduced to the home computer market. Because, if you remember from our last episode, one of the big challenges the Macintosh faced was that the gooey this graphic user interface took up most of the computer's memory, which left very little for it to do other applications. The Apple two didn't have that problem. It was all text based, so it could reserve its memory for all the programs. Meanwhile, the Macintosh continue to struggle in those early days due to an expensive price tag and a limited number of application is available for the platform. When the McIntosh came out in nineteen eighty four, it was not alone. Apple launched another computer a couple of months later, while it also launched the Lisa two, which was an attempt to salvage the Lisa project. It would ultimately rebrand the Lisa Too as the Macintosh XL. But that's not the computer I was referring to. Instead, I'm talking about the Apple to See. So even as Apple was trying to forge a new path with the Macintosh line of computers, it was still leaning heavily on the Apple Too platform. So what set the Apple to See Apart from the Apple to E, which had launched in three Well, for one thing, it was a lot smaller the C and Apple to see stood for compact. It was, at least by some definitions, portable. The basic computer had a handle that could fold down to become a stand that would tilt the computer keyboard into the proper position for typing. It did not, however, have an degraded display, so you would have to carry a separate display around with you and connect it to your portable computer. Also, it didn't have a battery power supply. You would have to plug the computer in somewhere. Now, eventually you could get battery packs that the computer could use as a power source, but it didn't ship with them. Still, the industrial redesign of the Apple form factor and its versatile size UH and its features meant it got support in the market. Even though it was built on an aging foundation of the Apple two platform. It actually received the highest number of day one orders in Apple's history, and it initially cost hundred dollars. After a year on the market, it sold more than four hundred thousand units, so it proved that the Apple two platform still had legs seven years after it had been introduced. In April, Apple officially retired the Apple three platform. Between the Apple three and the Apple three Plus, which was a slightly upgraded version, the company had managed to sell only sixty five thousand computers. It had manufactured ninety thousand. The Apple three was just about, by any measurement, a total failure. In Apple announced it had shipped seventy thousand Macintosh computers within the first one hundred days of it being available, though I should point out that shipped and sold are two different metrics. Still, this was not a bad number, but it was still shy of projections Apple had made when the Macintosh was still in development. They had said that they needed to sell forty seven thousand units per month. Instead, they had moved seventy thousand units in a hundred days, so they were still falling short. In September, Apple introduced the five hundred twelve kilobyte version of the Macintosh. This version was more expensive than the base model. It cost three thousand, two hundred dollars when it launched. The following month, Apple announced they had sold the two millionth Apple two computer. That means in just a little more than a year, the company went from producing it's one millionth Apple two machine to selling its two millionth unit. Now, this was spread across the family of Apple two computers at that time, so the Apple to the Apple two E and the Apple to C the Apple two line continued to keep the company afloat. By the end of nineteen eighty four, Apple had sold a quarter of a million Macintosh systems. It was a modest success, but far short of those two point two million units the company had hoped for back in nineteen eighty one. Still, the Macintosh was a nice change of pace. It was not a commercial flop like the Lisa or the technical flop like the Apple three. In Night five. While struggles at the management level would ultimately prompt Steve Jobs and Apple to part ways, the company was still struggling with what to do with the Lisa Too. At first, the company rebranded the Lisa Too and called it the Macintosh XL, but the rebranding wasn't enough to save the project, and ultimately Apple would abandon it in April five, just a few months after rebranding it. Also that year, Apple made some major cuts. The number of employees had topped five thousand, seven hundred at Apple, but in June the company eliminated about twenty percent of all of its positions. In nineteen six, Apple was a very different company. Both of the co founders were gone. The Apple three and the Lisa projects were both a thing of the past. The Macintosh line was continuing, as did the now ancient by computer standards Apple two line. On the tenth anniversary of Apple's founding April first, nineteen eighty six, the company announced the Apple two GS. This was the last major update to the Apple two platform. Apple would later introduce upgrades to the Apple to E and the two C lines, but the two GS represented the last big development on that platform. It was the ind of the life cycle for the Apple two platform, or at least the beginning of the end. The G S and two g s, by the way, stood for graphics and sound. This is one of those things that confused me back when I was a kid, because we had an Apple to E. The Apple to C came out after the Apple to E, but in the alphabet, C comes before E, and I didn't know that the letters actually stood for stuff. And then the Apple two GS came out, and I really was wondering what was going on. That's because these letters actually were standing for different terms in this case, Like I said, g S stood for graphics and sound. The Apple two GS at a graphic user interface that was similar to the Macintosh Gooey. It also had a mouse. It did not have an integrated floppy drive in the computer case, but rather it would have an external floppy disk drive, so you would have to connect it via a cable to the CPU. These were three and a half inch discs at this time, not the old five and a quarter inch discs. Some people mistakenly at the time would call these discs hard disks because three and a half inch discs were in hard plastic as opposed to that thinner, more flexible stuff that the five and a quarter inch discs used. But they were still technically floppy disks, not hard disks. That's a tangent. The two GS had a different processor than it's Apple two computer predecessors. It used the Western Digital sixteen bit sixty five C eight sixteen microprocessor. However, that microprocessor was compatible with the older six five O two processors that other Apple two computers used, so the two GS retained backwards compatibility with existing Apple to software. The clock speed on the new processor could reach two point eight mega hurts, though, if you were running old Apple to software, you would have to limit the clock speed to one mega hurts in order to make it compatible with that old programming. If you bought third party hardware, you could actually over clock it to a then blistering eight teen mega hurts. The company all so boasted two hundred fifty six kilobytes of RAM, which could be expanded up to eight megabytes. The company had a display that or the computer rather had a display that could support a resolution of six hundred forty by two hundred pixels in four color mode or three d twenty by two hundred pixels in sixteen color mode. So still well, it was high definition at the time. It's pretty low resolution these days. The two gs also introduced a new hardware element that found its way into the Macintosh line after a little bit. This was called the Apple Dusktop bus. Now, a bus is a communication system within a computer or between computers. Its job is to transfer data between components or between computers. For example, a computer's CPU and its memory are tightly coupled, and a bus provides the communication link between those two components. The Apple Desktop bus was a peripheral and external peripheral that allowed users to connect different devices to a proprietary standard for Apple systems. You can use it to connect stuff like a keyboard or a mouse to a computer. This was Apple's proprietary approach to a universal connector universal within the world of Apple, but not outside of it now. Eventually, the company would discontinue this BUS system in favor of following the industry standard of USB later on. Much later on, as Macintosh computers will continue to use a dB until the late nineteen nineties. The a dB was one of many projects Steve Wozniak had worked on before he left the company in Ve. Also in nineteen eighty six, Apple swapped out the five twelve kilobyte Macintosh for a new enhanced version that cost less. The new machine sold for two thousand dollars, and the Macintosh Plus also debuted in nineteen eight six. It had a whopping hole megabyte of RAM and a ES of read only memory or ROM. This machine was capable of running more demanding applications and put it beyond the limits of what the failed Lisa and Lisa two platforms were supposed to do. So finally, Apple had moved beyond those and it cost dollars, which was expensive, but not nearly at the levels of the earlier Macintosh and Lisa computers. By this time, Apple was really swinging focus to the Macintosh line. The Apple two products were finally running out of steam. There are only so many updates Apple could make to the legacy platform to keep them relevant in the face of competing machines. Those machines were largely IBM compatible PCs at this point. Now I'll talk more about them in the next episode, but the Macintosh line looked like it was truly going to be the future of the company. Now. That did not mean that Apple would abandon the Apple two platform right away. Sales were still okay, so they were still bringing in money for the for the company, and the Macintosh sales figures had not quite reached a level that was sustainable in the long term. The former president of Apple France, a man named Jean Louis Gassa, came over to Apple's US operations to take the role that Steve Jobs had held for years. Gassa made decisions that were very different from its predecessor. He wanted Apple to stop concentrating on making machines for home users and focus on the more profitable business and high end consumer market. He wanted Apple to focus more on technical superiority than aesthetic design. He had a mantra that many at Apple began to repeat, and that mantra was fifty five or die. That was a reference to Gassay's goal of hitting a fifty five percent profit margin on Apple computers, meaning that you're selling the computers at more than what it cost you to make them and market them. It was at this time that Apple really cemented its reputation as offering computers that were more expensive than the comparable IBM clones on the market. At first, Magotosh computers also suffered from a lack of software, and to be fair, the Macintosh platform consistently lagged behind IBM compatible computers in terms of a software library. That said, the emphasis on power and technical specs meant that developers could create sophisticated software for the Macintosh that IBM compatible machines could not easily replicate. This was a trend that would last for years, with certain types of processor heavy applications like video, photo and audio editing software becoming the bread and butter for the Macintosh line. That remains true to this day. If you look at the production machines here at how stuff works, you'll notice an awful lot of Macintosh computers because the people who are using it to edit audio and video work need that power, and McIntosh is still known for that to this day. I've got a lot more to say about Apple and how it survived the PC wars of the early eighties all the way through the nineties. But first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In Apple sold its one million Macintosh computer. That was good, but again, their original goal was to hit that two point two million units sales from nineteen eight to nineteen eighty five. So eighties seven hitting one million, they're a little behind schedule. The Macintosh and debut in nineteen eighty four, it took three years to hit that one million units sold. Still, the Macintosh Apple was offering was a very different machine than the one the design team had had in mind way back in the early nineteen eighties. Remember, they had wanted to create a user friendly home computer that could be sold for around a thousand dollars. The actual machines had so many more features than the design team had originally intended that it cost more than twice as much as the goal price the team had anticipated when they were first talking about it. That spring, Apple introduced the Macintosh to This was the first of the computers of the gas Say era. It cost a whopping six thousand, five hundred dollars when it was released that you could actual we find it for a little less at about five thousand, five hundred at some places. The computer boasted a thirty two bit microprocessor for Motorola, running at sixteen mega hurts clock speed. It also had one megabyte of RAM expandable up to sixty eight megabytes, and two d fifty six kilobytes of ROM. It was also the first Mac to support a color display. This was Apple's first big step to creating a three M machine. Now, this was a term used in the early eighties to describe a computer that had at least one megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a mega flop of processing power. There was actually another project that was supposed to get Apple to that fabled three M land. It was called the Big Mac. Steve Jobs had overseen the project back before he left Apple. The computer was supposed to run Unix as its operating system instead of the system Mac Operating System. After Jobs left and guess A took over his role, GASA canceled the Big Mac project. Much of that work was then transitioned over to the Macintosh to design. The Macintosh two had a megabyte of memory, and when paired with the right display, could support a million pixels, but it fell short on the floating operations per second metric, topping out at one sixty kilo flops. The leads on the Macintosh to design were Michael Dewey and Brian Berkeley and Heartmot s Linger. Now, back when they first started on the design works, Steve Jobs was still around. They kept their work secret because they were expressly violating Steve jobs as wishes with the Macintosh two's features. Specifically, Steve Jobs was not in favor of color displays and Macintosh computers because at that time printers were monochromatic. So if you could view colors on screen, but you could only print and black and white, the print outs would not represent what you were working on. That would be a disconnect. This was a viole lation of the what you see is what you get or whizzy wig design philosophy. Jobs was also against the idea of expansion slots, which the Macintosh two had. Jobs felt that expansion slots were great for hobbyists, but that they made the experience complicated for the average user. The secret project had a code name Little Big Mac. It was developed in parallel with the Big Mac project that Jobs was overseeing before his departure. The Macintosh two ended up being sort of a combination of these two projects. Actually, it had several code names, many of which were city names during its whole design process. The case design of the Macintosh two made it look a lot more like your standard IBM compatible machine. Had a case that you would placed on your desk horizontally. You'd set your monitor on top of this horizontal case. The keyboard was separate and would sit in front of the case. The Macintosh two was one of the first Macintosh machines to feature the Apple Desktop bus ter used by the Apple two GS, and from that point forward, Macintosh computers would typically ship standard with the Apple Desktop bush and The Macintosh two was also the first of the Macintosh computers to feature what is commonly referred to as the chimes of Death. Well the Macintosh se which came out the same month as the Macintosh to also had the chimes of death. This was the sound notification the Macintosh would make when there was a critical failure in the system. The sc was more of a traditional Macintosh computer, souped up a bit for the business world. It cost three thousand seven dollars upon release, making it a less expensive solution than the Macintosh too. The same year, Apple spun off its software division as a new company called Claris. The company was able to focus on developing software for the Macintosh platforms and had licenses to several legacy mac programs like mac Wright and mac Paint. It would operate as a separate entity until nine, when Apple would reacquire the company. Also in nineteen eight seven, Microsoft released the second version of Windows. The first version of Windows, which came out in nineteen eighty five, hadn't received much attention. Most people dismissed it as being clunky and not terribly useful, but Windows two point oh was doing a little better. That prompted Apple to sue Microsoft and Hewitt Packard with a claim that the Windows Gooey the g Uy infringed upon the intellectual property of Apple. The claim stated that the Windows platform too closely resembled the Macintosh user interface. The courts ultimately decided against Apple on this front. When Windows three point oh debuted in nineteen nine, it marked the beginning of a big transition in IBM compatible personal computers as they began to migrate from DOSS to Windows, and it reduced one of the qualities that differentiated Macintosh computers from IBM compatibles. Believe it or not, even at this stage, ten years after the day Dave view of the Apple to, the company was still selling Apple two machines. Many of those products, even the updated, enhanced versions, would finally say goodbye. In the early nineteen nineties. Apple made an Apple to E card that could be used with Macintosh computers to make them backwards compatible with certain Apple to software packages, but even that would take a bow by The Apple two platform still helped provide revenue to Apple, but it was clear that the Macintosh was going to have to step up. What followed were a series of Macintosh computers that followed the design philosophy of Gassa and the Macintosh too. These were expensive desktop publishing machines that were technically sound, but at a premium price. The Macintosh started to gain a reputation for being a bit elitist. It was undeniably useful for many processor heavy applications, but it was so expensive and the suite of software was so much more narrow than the library available for the IBM compatible computers that a lot of average consumers dismissed the platform out of hand, and a smaller user base meant that software developers had less incentive to create programs for the Macintosh. The logic goes like this. You're a programmer and you want to create a really cool application. Let's say it's a game. You want that game to reach as many people as possible, both because you want people to experience your work, and of course you wish to profit from that work. You want to make some money. It makes sense to focus your efforts on the largest possible audience. Now, if you don't have time to develop and program a game for both Macintosh and PC platforms, you have to choose one or the other. With way more people owning IBM compatible machines, at this point, it just makes sense to develop for the PC and Windows platforms. That's where you're going to reach the largest number of people. Assuming your game resonates with your intended audience. Now, that didn't mean there weren't developers, even game developers who concentrated solely on the mac Kintosh. There were. There, just weren't as many Macintosh developers as there were Windows or PC developers. By the late nineteen eighties, the Macintosh stood as the only real challenger to the IBM compatible PC. Other companies had withdrawn from the home PC market, acknowledging that it was too competitive to make a go atit. Tandy and Texas Instruments were out. Atari was in rapid decline and soon would exist only in name. Commodore had retired the Commodore sixty four, but was still hanging in the race with its Amiga line of computers. But by the mid ninety nineties, Commodore couldn't hold together and declared bankruptcy. The game was essentially down to all the companies that were making IBM compatible machines or Windows based machines or DOSES based machines, and Apple, and Apple had a tiny, tiny sliver of that market share. Apple had carved out of market, but it was a small one. It was no longer a dominant player in the home computer world, but it was the only real alternative to the Windows machines. Those DOSS machines. The IBM PC clones that were running uh either DOSS were increasingly at this point Windows. In nine, Apple would release the Macintosh Portable. Now, this was the first truly portable Macintosh computer with an incorporated screen that could fold down to make the computer into a kind of clunky wedge shape. It had a track ball in place of a mouse, had cereal and scuzzy ports for peripherals. It had a floppy drive and a forty megabyte hard drive, had a megabyte of RAM, and use the Motorola sixty eight thousand processor running at a sixteen mega hurts clock speed. The portable machine cost a hefty seven thousand, three hundred dollars. It ran on mac Os six point oh four when it launched. As for its power supply, that came in the form of a rechargeable battery, Only it wasn't a lithium ion battery. It was a lead acid battery, you know, kind like the kind that you would find in a car. That added a couple of pounds to this portable computer. So the whole thing weighed about sixteen pounds or seven point three kilograms. In other words, it was a hefty portable computer. You probably wouldn't want to lug it around everywhere you go. A couple of years later, Apple would give the portable computer another shot, you know, he would say, let's try and get this form factor down, and they released the power Book one hundred. Only this computer wasn't actually designed by Apple. The power Book one hundred was based off the original Macintosh portable schematics, but it was designed by Sony la gasp Sony helped miniaturize the components that made the Macintosh portable so gush darn anti portable. The power Book one hundred launched in ninete, and while it wasn't a solely Apple design product, it did help put Apple back on the right path. In the magazine Macworld published in our icle written by Jerry Borrel that had some troubling implications now, Borel cited an earlier interview from n in which Apple executive Mike Spindler, the CEO, who well at the time he was still under the CEO, but he would become the CEO of the company, said that they were investigating the possibility of licensing the Macintosh operating system to other hardware manufacturers. Now, this was very much the opposite of what Steve Jobs felt was the right path for Apple when he was still there. From its earliest incarnation, Apple had done its best to protect its hardware and software. It had sued companies that put out clones of the Apple two platform. But as Apple and the market changed, so too did this philosophy. By the early nine nineties, it sounded like Apple was interested in making some cash by licensing the mac os to other types of hardware. While the interest was there, Apple didn't make a move to do this until John Scully had left in ninete, replaced by Michael the Diesel Spindler and I'm not making up that nickname, so the same person who gave that interview in ninety one was now running the company. In nine Apple made a big switch. The company had depended upon Motorola produced microprocessors since nineteen eighty three, when the failed Lisa computer had a Motorola sixty eight thousand chip in it, But delays in manufacturing a Motorola at Motorola rather meant that some of the higher end computers in the early nineties they used the Motorola sixty eight O four OH processors were launching behind schedule, so Apple executives decided they would switch to a different CPU, and there were a couple of different options available now. The most popular and arguably the most powerful choice would have been Intel, the company lead the pack in microprocessor technologies, But rather than switched to Intel, Apple executives decided to go with power PC. Starting in nine with the power macintoh and perform A six series, the company began using power PC chips as CPUs. John Scully would later admit that it would probably would have been a better idea to go with Intel from the start. After two thousand five, that's exactly what Apple did, they switched from power PC to Intel processors. But during this power pc era, there were many different lines of Macintosh computers on the market, all of them on the high end spectrum for computers. Macintosh accounted for about seven percent of the overall market share for desktop computers. There were some unauthorized Macintosh clones being sold in various places, and Apple executives decided it was better to make some money off of official, licensed Mac clones than to see these unlicensed ones pop up with no benefit to Apple. The company began to offer up a license to the Macintosh ROMs and operating system to other manufacturers. This gave Apple a quick jolt of cash, but before long Apple began to regret this this vision because other companies were able to make McIntosh compatible computers using power PC based machines for less than the official Macintosh computers on the market, so Apple was undercutting its own sales in other words, because it was allowing these other companies to make Macintosh compatible machines. Michael Spindler would step down as CEO and nine During his time at the HELM, he was rumored to have held discussions with big companies about possibly selling Apple to a competitor like IBM or Sun Microsystems, that obviously didn't happen. His replacement was Gil Emilio, who was only CEO from ninety six to Amelio wanted to address some of the big problems left in the wake of Scully and Spindler, namely some pretty public failures like the Apple Newton and the less public but perhaps more impactful failure of an operating system upgrade called Copeland and in a moment I will talk more about this would be successor to the macOS known as System seven. But first, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay. So, by the mid nineties, it was clear that the Macintosh line was going to need a new operating system. System seven, which was introduced in was a good OS and had a lot of useful features and support, but it was showing its age. The original intent was to do a huge overhaul to the operating system and come up with something that was more future proofed. This project was called Copeland. It was supposed to have several next generation features that would push Macintosh into a new era of sophistication. It was born out of a practice Apple was following that has the informal name of blue or pink. During brainstorming sessions, developers would propose upgrades to existing operating systems features that they thought it should have. So ideas that were considered to be relatively easy to implement would go on blue cards. Ideas that were a little more difficult and perhaps a bit further off would go on Pink cards. Ideas that were really tricky but considered to be worth doing would go down on Red cards. Then developers would essentially divide up into a couple of teams the Blue team would go to work on the near term upgrades to whatever operating system they were working on. The Pink team would concentrate on something a bit more revolutionary. Copeland started out as a Pink Team project. However, as time went on, managers began to pull ideas from the Red cards and put them in with the Pink team's plans. So this is another case of feature creep, something Apple had struggled with many times in its past. As new features were added to the specs of the operating system, the development time grew longer and the project fell further behind schedule. After gill Emilio replaced Michael Spindler as CEO, he brought on Ellen Hancock from National Semiconductor to come men and review the operating system in development to see if it was actually close to where it needed to be. Hancock did a full review and she concluded that the operating system was in a total shambles. She said that while parts of the development process were fairly well along, others were lagging way behind, and there was little hope that all these various pieces would be able to come together into a cohesive operating system. Amilio was then left in a really bad position. The company had put a ton of effort into developing this new operating system, and it just wasn't where it needed to be. He made the call to purchase a new operating system rather than continued down the path of trying to develop Copeland. His decision led him to purchase a fledgling computer company called Next. Now, this was a company that been founded by a very special person. That person was Steve Jobs. Emilio announced that Apple would acquire Next and that Jobs himself would come over to Apple in an advisory position. Amelio made this move in an effort to right the corporate ship. Jobs would end up contacting the Board of directors and he argued that Amelio should be removed as CEO, that Apple was on the verge of collapse and that a series of bad decisions made by the last three CEOs had put the company in a terrible position. The board agreed with Jobs. They removed Amelio, and then Jobs took over as interim CEO. He would become the official CEO of Apple by two thousand. Jobs made some really big changes soon after his arrival, which included canceling a lot of projects that were in development. And also firing people. It was around this time that the term getting jobs emerged, meaning you didn't want to find yourself alone in a room with Steve Jobs for fear of getting fired on the spot. Jobs called for an end of the licensing program for Macintosh technologies. He wanted to see no more Mac clones on the market, and he wanted everything to fall fully under the control of the company. Again, no version of Macintosh should ever come from anyone other than Apple, and while Apple developers continue to go down the legacy operating system route for a couple of versions, Jobs helped foster in the mac os ten build, sometimes called mac os X because it's Roman numeral ten. This introduced many of the features that were originally promised in Copeland, so it wasn't exactly the same as the one that was in development, but it had a lot of the elements that were in development from a few years back. Jobs even presented at a Macworld conference and he included a live streamed message from the rival, you know, the the anti Apple, the big adversary, Bill Gates, keeping in a mind that Apple and Microsoft had had a very long relationship with each other, sometimes adversarial, but Bill Gates live streamed a presentation at Macworld, and he announced that he was making a one fifty million dollar our investment in Apple on behalf of Microsoft, which got a rousing round of booze from the crowd, who were all very much, very passionate Apple supporters and thus a little biased against Microsoft. Apple introduced an all in one computer called the iMac. The iMac represented a return to Apple's focus on home users. It was aesthetically pleasing, it was available in various colors after its initial launch, and it seemed to go back to what set Apple apart in the first place, this idea of a friendly looking machine that's meant for the average person, not something that is cold and calculating or intimidating. The iMac also adopted universal standards like USB and got rid of those proprietary connectors Apple I've been using for more than a decade. So that bus that Apple had developed, which was useful for the Macintosh, was abandoned for the more standardized universal Cereal bus. The USB in Apple retired the Macintosh name when it discontinued the Power Macintosh. That was the last machine to actually be called a Macintosh from that point forward. The computers in this line were just referred to as MAX, not Macintosh Is. A couple of years later, Max began to include hardware that had been standard in BCS for a while, like CD rewriteable drives, so those are optical drives that would allow you to write data to c d s. Until about two thousand two thousand one, you couldn't find that in MAX. And then Apple also began including DVD drives on machines. The Mac was now getting position not just as a computer, but as a media device. This also helped boost sales and launches of other products like the iPod and iTunes. Helped even more because Apple products worked really, really well together, and now you could get Apple devices to communicate with stuff made from other manufacturers, but the experience was never as seamless or easy. A good example of this is iPods and iTunes. I had an iPod, I did not have a Mac, and I found it really frustrating to update my iPod to transfer music over the iTunes build for Windows just didn't work as well as what I kept hearing about, because again I didn't have a Mac. I finally got a Mac and then the experience was incredible and I realized, oh, this is a very nice design approach where you make sure that all of your stuff works seamlessly, and maybe you make sure it doesn't work quite as well if you're using other people's stuff. I can't say for certain that the decisions were conscious to make that happen, or that it all was purposeful, but it was certainly convenient and in favor of Apple because it meant that you were much more likely to go with a full Apple ecosystem because everything just worked with each other, as opposed to mixing and matching where things may not work so smoothly. Oh and Jobs also oversaw the transition for power PC machines to Intel powered Mac computers, and to this day Mac uses Intel chips. So that's kind of how Apple survived the PC wars. For a really long time. The company was just largely dependent upon a proven but aging technology in the form of the Apple two platform. It's it's hard to stress how important the Apple two was to Apple the company. Without the Apple two platform and it's long long life cycle and the fact that it was relevant or managed to remain relevant for so long, Without that, Apple would not have lasted because it was really putting its neck out with some high risk projects like Lisa and the Apple three that ultimately failed. Without that Apple to safety net, the company probably would not have existed. It wouldn't have it wouldn't have lasted, and all we would have at this point would be IBM compare doable windows based machines after the Apple two platform is all about leaning heavily on high end, high profit margin computers in the Macintosh era, which ended up being unsustainable in the long run and nearly led to the company's collapse. Only when Steve Jobs came back and laid down the law did the company seem to get its footing again. Would Apple have survived without Steve Jobs returning to the company, Well, it's hard to say, because obviously we can only see what has happened, not what would have happened. But Jobs certainly had a major impact on the performance of Apple, even if it was just through what people called his reality distortion field. Today, Apple is an insanely successful and valuable company. It's constantly right there on the verge of becoming a trillion dollar company, But there were times in its history when it could have joined the ranks of Commodore or Tandy or Atari. It's kind of amazing it survived long enough to become the powerhouse that is now, and also amazing that much of its success is due to stuff that isn't a computer at all, like the iPod or the iPhone or the iTunes suite. That's pretty phenomenal. In our next episode, i'll explore how IBM got into the personal computer market and why the company made the decision to get out of it. We'll also learn how tons of companies were able to create machines that emulated IBM's design and to find the PC market as it stands today. If you guys have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, maybe there's something you would like an update on something I've covered in the past but has changed since the last time I covered it. Maybe there's a brand new technology or a company or a person in tech that you think I should cover. Or maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest host. You need to let me know. Send me an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is text Stuff HSW make sure you follow us on Instagram. Check out all the behind the scenes stuff going on over there. And remember you can watch me record podcasts live every Wednesday and Friday, or I shouldn't say every nearly every Wednesday and Friday. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. 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