Reply to post: Much negativity, such wow

Much negativity, such wow

I was a wee bit too young to be interested in computers at the time, and the Wikipedia article does seem to indicate that the memory limitations (and lack of a built in programming language) were points raised in reviews of the original Mac.

OTOH, the Lisa had been roundly lambasted for being too expensive, and unless you were willing to throw a stupendous amount of money at your computer, RAM was still very expensive in 1983 (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm - 256kb cost around $500 in 1983) and barring the IBM PC, there wasn't that many computers which had much more. E.g.

* Commodore 64: 64k ram, 16k ROM

* ZX Spectrum: 48k ram, 16k ROM

* The various 8-bit Atari models topped out at 64k

Then too, when the Amiga and Atari launched a year later in 1985, they both only came with 256kb!

(Even today, trimming memory and storage tends to be the main way in which manufacturers keep prices down - after all, these are pretty much the only things not integrated into the main CPU these days!)

Admittedly, the 384*512 display occupied approx. 21kb of that ram, but the Mac still had more than any of it's consumer-level rivals.

Reading between the lines of the Wikipedia article (it's a shame there's no references for the story about the engineers sneaking extra address lines onto it; if nothing else, this seems to contradict the statement that Apple had always planned to produce a 512kb model), I do think the Mac was the Apple's (or more precisely, Jobs) first attempt to create a "solution" rather than a "system": a black box which can't be upgraded or repaired, but which performs a specific set of tasks well.

Alas (?), computer technology arguably wasn't mature enough to support this concept, especially with Moore's Law making huge strides in cost reduction, performance and features, and so later Macs ended up just as configurable and expandable as it's rivals.

But when Jobs came back from the desert, pretty much the first thing he did was to strip Apple's product line down and focus on black-box "solutions", starting with the iMac and continuing with the iPod and then the iPhone...