The Apple we know and love today is full of smart cookies who are confident in their product mix and clear in their direction: Innovate, iterate, and don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror while leaving the rest of the industry in the dust. But on the way to the top, the company took some weird twists and turns that just seem so...un-Apple. Then again, without these growing pains, Apple wouldn't be where it is today.
Let's look back at some of the major forks in the road...
If Copland hadn’t failed, we might not have OS X.
In 1994, Apple CEO Gil Amelio, correctly predicting stiff competition from Windows 95, launched Copland, a do-or-die mission to build a new version of the Mac OS for the future. But like similar efforts dating back to the late 1980s, Copland saw lengthy delays and little concrete progress. In 1996 Apple canceled the project and announced that its most important features (like preemptive multitasking, memory protection, and multi-user support) would be released piecemeal in updates to the existing Mac OS. For millions of Mac users, developers, and Apple’s bottom line, that wasn’t nearly good enough.
Unable to write a new OS itself, Apple had to do something drastic. So they started shopping around for an existing OS that could be adapted to meet their needs. Like the finale to the most intense reality TV show in tech, the decision came down to two candidates. One was BeOS, the work of former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée. The other was OPENSTEP, the brainchild of some guy named Steve Jobs, then CEO of NeXT. BeOS had many of the modern features Apple needed to bring to the Mac, but OPENSTEP was more sophisticated and complete. In early 1997 Apple bought NeXT, snagging its OS and bringing Jobs back to 1 Infinite Loop as an “advisor.” It was easily the best $429 million anyone spent that year.
The rest, as they say, is history. OPENSTEP and the Mac OS were combined into Mac OS X, which launched in 2001 to…well, mostly surprised relief. That first release lacked some important features, native apps, and the speed we take for granted today. But it finally delivered a rock-solid foundation for the Mac and paved the way for Apple’s future growth with a little something called iOS.
It wasn’t always Intel inside.
For years after its introduction in 1994, the PowerPC gave Macs an edge over slower Intel-based offerings from the Windows world. But the chip couldn’t keep pace with the competition, leading to embarrassing product delays and no roadmap for the smaller, more powerful laptops Steve Jobs wanted to build. So in 2006 Apple jumped ship to Intel, seamlessly allowing switchers to run Windows while existing Mac users ran old PPC-specific software. Six years later, the move is still paying off, with sleek powerhouses like the Mac mini and the MacBook Air, Apple’s most popular machine in years.
Long over, the clone wars are. Won them, Apple did.
Apple’s most desperate times called for desperate measures, and in 1995 the company did the unthinkable by allowing other companies to sell computers running the Mac OS for a licensing fee. Cloners, including current smartphone rival Motorola, built many cool ersatz Macs, but don’t expect Tim Cook to license iOS if iPhone sales suddenly take a nosedive. Instead of boosting the Mac’s flagging market share, clones only robbed Apple of badly needed hardware sales, and the experiment was ended two years later. We hear that these days Apple is doing all right with sales of its own hardware.
From big ideas and a big machine called Lisa, the Mac was born.
Famously named for Steve Jobs’s oldest daughter, the Lisa was Apple’s original attempt at a computer with a GUI and mouse. Released in 1983 with a $9,995 price tag, it sported powerful features like a generous amount of RAM, expansion slots, and a numeric keypad aimed at business users. Unfortunately most users weren’t lured from the popular IBM PCs of the day, and Lisa sales stalled. But a year earlier, Steve Jobs had joined the Macintosh project, and by designing a powerful, compact machine for the masses at a dramatically lower price, he and Apple changed computers forever.
