a thing i am always thinking about is how there just aren't that many programs for the classic mac platform. no, like, really. go download the macgarden scrape from IA and flip through it - i've done this, and there's pretty much just a few categories of program:
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word processor
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drawing app
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other desktop publishing (layout, etc.)
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games (probably more numerous than anything else, but only after the low-cost color macs dropped in the 90s; prior to that, just dreary sliding-block puzzles and stuff)
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terminal emulator
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system utility (compression tool, 'add a clock to your titlebars', and other 'meta' software that just served to improve the host system in some way)
that's almost entirely it, throughout the eighties and first few years of the 90s. the PC on the other hand had countless tens of thousands of programs released in the same period, as well as a staggering variety of hardware addons. i ascribe a number of reasons:
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bigger market share (obviously)
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lower cost of entry for both user and devs
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lower standards of quality lol
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near-universal color graphics
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gobs of expansion slots
those last two are really major elements imo, particularly because the first mac that solved either one wasn't sold until 1987 and cost as much as a midsize sedan.
seriously, the macintosh ii - the only mac that could deliver color graphics until the 90s, and the only one with more than a single expansion slot - was a unix workstation without the unix. it makes sense that apple intended to put unix on it, because it was an absolute beast that almost nobody needed. but it also was the only one that could do a bunch of stuff that every PC could do, and naturally that was "fine", in the sense that many people had no desire to expand their computers beyond what they bought them for, but I think that on the PC platform there was a lot more "oh, and,"
as in, you bought the machine to manage your budget and write letters, and it was fine for that, but when you saw an ad for some wacky gadget like a lightpen, or a color hires graphics card, or Kings Quest, or a rapid application development environment "no programming skills required!", or "Tax Filing Assistant For Delaware, Fiscal Year 1989" (this really existed, I have it somewhere) or any of a thousand other bizarre things that you probably didn't need, you could just go "oh, $200? i can scrape that up" and buy it. you didn't need to have literally the most powerful machine available, so it made sense that someone would bother to make these things. a return on investment was actually possible, whereas making any product for the mac without absolutely gargantuan mass appeal was likely to bankrupt you.
much has been said of the "no slots" practice of apple in re: the macintosh. i have a more nuanced take on it than some however: it was incredibly fucking stupid, one of the worst business decisions in history, nearly destroyed the company, and probably should have, the fact they survived was an accident. strong letter to follow






