on 31 May 2009
Mac versus PC. Apple versus Microsoft. Mac OS versus Windows. It’s a conflict that’s been raging since personal computing began – sometimes as a heated battle, sometimes as a cold war. But what are the origins of the rivalry? And for ‘IBM-compatible’ PC users, has Apple’s existence been useful competition, spurring on other computer makers to improve their technology, or just a perennial annoyance, charging inflated prices for virtually the same product?
To answer these questions, we need to review a bit of history and examine just what Apple has brought to the computer industry since the day when a bearded geek and a clean-shaven kid got together in a Californian garage.
How it all began
In the mid-1970s it was becoming possible to build small, cheap computers. One of the first was the Altair 8800, a rough-and-ready kit for under $500. At the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, near San Francisco, two enthusiasts thought they could do better. Steve Wozniak, the engineer, designed the Apple I; Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur, talked a local store into ordering fifty. Apple Computer was in business.
Some key elements of the Apple phenomenon were already apparent. The Steves designed their own hardware and operating system. They rejected the Intel 8080 processor chip, popularised by the Altair, in favour of the rival Motorola 6800 (though cost forced them to compromise on the cut-down MOS 6502). And they focused on look and feel, giving their machine a neat wooden case.
On the opposite coast, at Harvard, another two-man team was at work. Paul Allen and Bill Gates saw the potential of the Altair and wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for it. They called their new software company Microsoft.
IBM was still catching up: its cheapest computer was the 5100, at around $10,000. But by the summer of 1980 the top-secret ‘PC’ project was ready to find an operating system. The contract ended up with Gates. This time, instead of sitting down to write the code, he simply bought an OS and repackaged it as MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System).
What Gates lacked in originality, he made up for in nous. He persuaded IBM to let Microsoft keep the rights to MS-DOS and sell it separately from the PC. As the ‘IBM-compatible’ platform became established, buyers of ‘clone’ PCs from other manufacturers could also choose MS-DOS. Microsoft was set to reap the rewards of the computer hardware revolution – without ever making any hardware.
And the PC industry was on a collision course with Apple.
Words vs pictures
It’s well known that Steve Jobs got the idea for a mouse-driven user interface from his 1979 visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In this sense, the Mac concept was borrowed rather than invented – but such a radical development demanded the resources of a giant like Xerox, awash with government money. It was Apple that brought it into the mainstream.
Losing faith in Lisa, the computer he was working on, Jobs muscled in on another Apple project initiated by Jef Raskin. Raskin had a vision of an affordable computer, named ‘Macintosh’ after his favourite variety of apple, but wasn’t convinced it needed a mouse; Jobs was sceptical about the low price, but insisted on the mouse. They fell out, Jef left, and the Mac emerged.
Steve’s Mac team were known as the ‘pirates’, the underdogs fighting Apple’s increasingly corporate culture. The 1984 launch commercial for the Mac, directed by Ridley Scott, showed a heroic free-thinker destroying Big Brother with a sledgehammer; the Apple board hated it, no doubt seeing the subtext. But the in-fighting was incidental to the real point: Big Brother stood for ‘Big Blue’ – IBM – the epitome of dull, technical computing.
Witness the PC: a big beige box displaying monospaced letters and numbers, operated by typing cryptic commands. At a mere $1500 it wowed the business press, earning Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ award for 1982, but to the man in the street it was a closed book. The Macintosh, by contrast, was compact, offered detailed graphics and a range of fonts, and let you move files or paint pictures just by pointing with the mouse.
In describing the $2500 Mac as ‘for the rest of us’, Apple wasn’t claiming to democratise computing by lowering the price. The credit for that already belonged to the PC. Apple was selling ease of use, and not to the average Joe but to the aspiring middle classes. It made computers cool – a trick that PC makers would learn very, very slowly. Glossy ads depicted prosperous executives for whom the Mac was a practical lifestyle accessory.
Leap of imagination
Just how practical, though? Having been rushed through the final stages of development, the Mac had a meagre 128K of memory, no multitasking, and a single floppy drive. After three months, Apple was still struggling to sell the first 50,000 units.
In its favour were some great bundled programs, including MacPaint and MacWrite. While PC vendors soon learned to ship their machines with more than just a blinking cursor, Apple’s iLife software suite remains a selling point today. Jobs had also wooed business software vendors including Microsoft, whose Chart program brilliantly exploited the Mac’s graphics. A callow Bill Gates endorsed the Mac as ‘something that’s really new and captures the imagination’.
And it was with creative applications – a field on which Microsoft was to make almost no impression at all – that the Mac found its true niche. The graphical interface suddenly made it obvious that you should be able to design something on the screen that would look the same when printed – ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG). As luck would have it, along came the laser printer. Apple didn’t invent this either, but its LaserWriter, released in January 1985, came with Adobe PostScript, which enabled faithful output of text and graphics. By July, Aldus’ PageMaker program had appeared, and the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution was under way – all thanks to the Mac.
Let’s not get carried away, though. While the Mac did provide the impetus, PC users only had to wait another 18 months for their edition of PageMaker. It was made possible by another world-changing piece of software: Microsoft Windows.
Clone wars
Did Windows rip off the Mac interface? Microsoft began work on it as early as 1981, but version 1 didn’t arrive until nearly two years after the Mac, and though clunkier it had obvious similarities, right down to the double-outlined dialog boxes and round-cornered buttons. While a few Windows innovations would filter into the Mac over the years – for example, Mac OS X’s Dock resembled the Taskbar – most of the borrowing went the other way. Eyebrows were raised at the extent to which Vista duplicated Mac OS X’s features, though it added original touches such as Flip 3D.
Under the skin, Windows had one big problem: the PC. Apple made both the Mac’s hardware and its OS, so working seamlessly together came naturally. But Microsoft had no direct control over the hardware used to run Windows, and the need for compatibility with every PC, old and new, contributed to Windows becoming notoriously inefficient and error-prone.
Apple demonstrated an escape route in 1997, when it brought back Steve Jobs (who’d been ousted in 1985 after a final falling-out with the suits) along with a brand new operating system. Mac OS X proved it was possible to migrate a whole user base to a completely fresh platform, with clever emulation allowing most existing software to run.
Microsoft failed to follow suit. It hoped backward compatibility would encourage users to invest in successive versions, but in fact the lack of radical progress denied them an incentive. By the time Vista appeared, many saw little point in another prettier but bulkier upgrade.
That might leave Apple feeling smug, except that its own OS has been accused of resting on its laurels. In 2004, shortly before his death, Jef Raskin told the Guardian: ‘The Mac is a mess… Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.’ Instead of showing Windows the way, the Mac risks succumbing to the same stagnation as its rival.
Horses for courses
Hardware is another matter. The original Mac was an instant design icon, and in 1998 the iMac re-established Apple, though selling only a fraction as many machines as the combined PC industry, as the leader in innovation.
Yet it’s worth recalling that the intervening years saw some less than stellar Macs. By the end of the 1990s, the Apple PowerBook was the laptop of choice, carried by the coolest people and featured in major movies; but 1989’s shed-like Mac Portable had been inauspicious, and models such as the 5300, which was prone to crack, black out and occasionally catch fire, were less than endearing. Let’s not even mention the Newton MessagePad and its scary offspring, the eMate.
On the desktop, the iMac might look different but the idea of an all-in-one PC was hardly new. Earlier Macintosh Performa models combined computer and monitor in beige cases not unlike those from PC makers such as Compaq.
Inside the boxes, however, Apple seemed to have backed the right horse with its Motorola processors. As the 68000 series gave way to the PowerPC, produced by the Apple/IBM/Motorola (AIM) alliance, performance overtook Intel’s hot-running, glitchy Pentiums, especially in notebooks. This advantage, however, was lost by 2004 as the G5 fell short of its 3GHz goal, and Apple was forced to switch to Intel. Fortunately, it had secretly been testing OS X on Intel for years, and achieved another impressively painless transition.
But the question now loomed: with Macs based on the same hardware as PCs – including features such as the USB bus, pioneered by Apple and adopted by everyone else – where was the advantage to justify their higher price? Even as we write, Microsoft is running a campaign on the ‘Mac tax’, the extra cost of buying an Apple compared to a PC.
Looking at specs alone, it’s true that the same hardware costs more with an Apple badge, and iMacs are typically months behind mid-range PCs in the performance of components such as graphics cards. On the other hand, even PC brands such as Dell and Sony, which are finally making serious efforts to compete on style, haven’t yet matched Apple’s desirability. Under award-winning designer Jonathan Ive, everything down to the packaging exudes quality, delivering exactly the all-round user experience promised by those first Macintosh ads.
New horizons
This is true not just of Macs, but of the consumer gadgets that have played a growing role in Apple’s success. In the 1990s, Macs were the first computers to incorporate CD-ROM drives and multimedia features as standard, and Apple forged links in the entertainment business as well as the IT industry – a strategy that advanced further with the return of Steve Jobs, who also heads the Pixar animation studio.
Apple’s unique understanding of what people really wanted from digital entertainment enabled it to launch the iPod: not the first or cheapest MP3 player, but the one that crossed over into the mainstream, loved by both Mac and PC users. It followed up with the iTunes Store, the first online music source that found favour with both the public and the record companies.
In borrowing existing ideas and buying in third party technologies, Apple arguably became more Microsoft-like, and the abandonment of its traditional suspicion of anything ‘not invented here’ caused rifts within the company. But without Apple, it’s not clear who else could have kick-started today’s flourishing (if still troubled) digital entertainment scene. Surely not Microsoft, whose Zune media player has been a damp squib.
It’s perhaps a sign of things to come that the Mac may ultimately be eclipsed by other Apple products. Whoever takes the credit, personal computing has been one of the most influential phenomena of the past quarter century. Now, there’s a feeling that something different is overdue. Both Microsoft and Apple are pushing touchscreen interfaces as the next big thing, but if Jef Raskin was right, we need a more fundamental rethink of the devices and interfaces we use.
Unless they move fast, both of today’s leaders could be tomorrow’s Big Brothers – and we can only guess who’ll be throwing the next sledgehammer.
* * *
Who are the goodies again?
Fans of Apple and Microsoft respectively love to paint the other as the villains. Neither are right.
By allying itself with a whole industry of PC ‘cloners’, Microsoft opened up a much larger market than Apple could ever hope to capture. With its relatively small reach, its emphasis on innovation and its appeal to the individual user rather than corporate buyers, Apple cast itself as the virtuous underdog.
Yet by limiting the Mac OS to Apple hardware – ‘cloners’ were briefly licensed in the 1990s, but today are pursued through the courts – Apple represents a closed, proprietary model. This addiction to control persists in the iPod, which is only usable with Apple’s iTunes software and until recently was the only player compatible with tracks from the iTunes Store, and in the iPhone, which is exclusive to one cell network in each country.
On the other hand, Microsoft has shown little inclination towards open development, often imposing its own de facto standards. Though it continues to produce Mac applications, its commitment blows with the wind – Office for Mac sometimes leads the PC version, other times lags – and its investment of $150m in Apple in 1997 was seen in some quarters as a cynical move to head off monopoly allegations.
Microsoft is sometimes accused of trampling on smaller companies, but so is Apple, imposing restrictions on ‘compatible’ products and adding features that supersede third party tools.
What nobody can deny is that both companies have contributed hugely to the personal computer revolution. Oh, and IBM? It no longer makes PCs.
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language 