A great feature on AppleInsider tracked Apple’s dramatic rise. It also showed how that rise helped counter the myth that the OS platform was the only important factor in picking who won the tech wars.
Apple somehow regained market power and began selling new volumes of Macs, assisted by the support of new sales of mobile devices. That dramatic shift, which resulted in Apple completely turning the tables on Microsoft, began in less than a decade after Windows 95. In the early 2000s, Apple’s iPod made an appearance that many discounted as irrelevant. Just as Windows 95 couldn’t immediately compete in Apple’s core markets, iPod similarly wasn’t competing with Microsoft’s bread and butter Windows PCs; instead, it was opening up a new market for very personal mobile devices, with media features and prices Microsoft and its licensees were unprepared to match. By 2004 iPod had trampled Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and PlaysForSure “Portable Media Player” platforms. Three years later iPhone similarly crushed global Windows Mobile handsets almost immediately out of the gate. Three years after that, the iPad not only crushed the emergence of Windows Tablet PCs and netbooks but also destroyed any future growth of PC sales.
Check It Out: How Apple’s Success Changed an OS Myth
This is like well we lost the Big War but hey look at the newer shinier wars we’ve won since. Don’t forget the fails, too. Newton, Printer, Mac Portable. Clearly you weren’t there as back in the start and still today Windows “crushes” to use your term Apple in mkt share for computer OS’. If Apple didn’t have that crazy ez OS for the “comeback” fruity iMacs i.e. if IBM came out with the iMac it would’ve bombed in a world of beige faster cheaper expandable PCs; the Mac OS helped a LOT on that one. In fact the Mac OS planted the seed in people of how things should work on a screen – WYSIWYG, drag n drop, multi layer, icons, settings, navigation all easier than Windoze. So you want to talk the iOS “toys”? Well, Apple is “crushed” in that OS arena too. So you want to talk devices – BIG selling devices? That’s fine but it has ZERO to do with the legacy Apple Computing Co. OS. To be fair Apple threw a lot of darts that failed before they got the iPod/Phone correct – Mac Portable, Camera, Printer, Newton, the “Ash Can”, eWorld ….
Many thanks for sharing this, Charlotte.
This was a nice lunchtime diversion. Very well thought out and evidence-supported review of history. It reflects many of the discussions that we have had here at TMO over the years about how Apple adroitly adapted to its fight to emerge from near death to global dominance as an unambiguous tech giant and industry standard bearer.