Apple was the antithesis of Commodore in those days: Aiming for the high-end market (post-Tramiel Commodore US tried that; the rest of Commodore focused on the low end, the Tramiel had from the start[1], with some exceptions - Commodore Germany did well in the business market - and the non-US subsidiaries sold far more Amigas that way), and focusing on far simpler hardware designs, and on selling into businesses and education.
And they too just barely survived. To the point that there was widespread talk of bankruptcy for several years. And there was that infamous cash injection from Microsoft.
There was also their brief flirtation with allowing clones.
At the same time Commodore was management-dysfunction central in a way that Apple, even with the Jobs ouster and return, never was (Commodore did oust its founder too - the aforementioned Tramiel -, but he bought their arch-rival - Atari - and went into head-to-head competition in their most lucrative markets instead of eventually returning).
[1] Tramiel's slogan in the early days of Commodore's entry into the home-computer market was "computers for the masses, not the classes".
AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.
Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops.
People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.
> there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy
Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.
I have an Amiga 1000 with an expansion package called A-Max. This allows my Amiga to use a real external Macintosh floppy drive. But it also allows me to use a separate partition on the A1K's internal hard drive where I've installed System 6. A-Max allows me to have what would essentially be a Macintosh Plus with crazy stats for the times, including a mild accelerator. The little thing flies. Two computers in one!
Since most software except certain Mac games (cough!) ever hit the Mac custom chips, virtually everything I throw at it works flawlessly.
MS Word, Mac Draw, Hypercard, Quarterstaff... It's pretty cool.
Almost nobody has the fastest Macs either, and high end Macs were not the market segment Commodore competed against.
Maybe it'd have gone better if they did. But the vast majority of Commodores Amiga sales were the low end machines that were hurt by being overtaken by PCs in the games market.
There has never been any such distinction. The 68k has a 24 bit address bus, and a 16 bit data bus, but addresses are 32 bit. As such, apart from a few stupid programs (cough Microsofts Amiga Basic cough) that assumed they could use the top 8 bits of some pointers to store data, AmigaOS was 32 bit from the very start.
> and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.
AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking from the start. I'm sure there were features of System 7 that were better than AmigaOS, but all I remember of the OS differences at that time was how we ridiculously primitive everyone I knew considered MacOS to be for lacking basics like that.
Even a couple of years after Commodore's bankruptcy, I remember visiting a publisher, and marveling at how primitive MacOS seemed on the surface at least.
And it was the access to that software much more than the hardware that mattered - even when you could buy far more capable PC hardware for less, being able to run e.g. the Mac version of Quark outweighed any cost and performance considerations in those specific niches (I helped out with tech for a newspaper for a short while in that period, and it was beyond frustrating to have to deal with the printers who only used Macs).
>AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.
You CANT be serious. The multitasking on System 7 was a joke compared to Amiga. And Amiga had AREXX, which was absolutely ahead of its time. I had easily written scripts that connected all kinds of Amiga applications together, nothing like that existed on System 7 and I doubt it really exists today on OSX.
>People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price.
AREXX sounds very similar to AppleScript/AppleEvents which came with System 7 and exists in macOS to this day
Apple Events even worked over a network so you could trivially make scripts that remotely controlled other Macs over AppleTalk. This was great for making HyperCard stacks (HyperCard had native AppleScript support of course) that worked as remote control panels and such.
Apple Events were also emitted by applications when you were running them, so you could make an AppleScript simply by hitting "record", acting out what you wanted to do, and then edit the script to add any kind of interactivity/customization you wanted to do.
Apple Events was supported by a whole scripting subsystem in System 7 called the Open Scripting Architecture, so you didn't need to use AppleScript's own language, you could plug in other languages. Third party companies made Python and JavaScript language plugins so you could write (or record) scripts in those languages, and any app that wanted to add macro features would instantly support it. AppleScript itself was even ported to other human languages - Apple made a French version to demonstrate the capability
“the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly” very funny statement circa 1994… just three years before the infamous “Pray” issue of Wired. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/
I've always been kind of amazed by nostalgia for the Amiga. I was a young computer user in this era, and — despite having heard of the apparent media superiority of the Amiga — had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. I felt like more people claimed to have portals to Narnia in their closets than had Amigas.
> had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one.
Are you in the US maybe? Most of the Amiga market was in Europe (though here too it varied greatly by country). In my school classes alone there were several Amiga owners.
In the US Tramiel managed to burn Commodore's computer shop dealer network to the ground with his pricing shenanigans and deal with Kmart to bypass computer stores for the Commodore 64. As a result, when the Amiga was too expensive to sell well in budget outlets, Commodore US basically had to rebuild their dealer network from the ashes that Tramiel left on the way to buy Atari.
Meanwhile, in Europe, most Commodore subsidiaries grasped the opportunity to push the Amiga as a games machine starting with the Amiga 500, while Commodore US kept pushing it as a professional machine.
You see this difference very clearly in the computer press - where the US Amiga magazines are all serious, while e.g. in the UK the most famous Amiga tie-in was a package with game for the 1989 Batman movie[1]. While many of us also used it for non-gaming stuff, it was games that sustained the bulk of Amiga sales, to the point of e.g. putting Commodore UK in a position where they considered a management buyout of Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt...
Apple appeals to a totally different customer. They want something that they’d needn’t fuss with. The other Apple customer is the developer who’s forced into ownership so that he/she can sell to that first Apple customer.
Edit: until this became the Apple way, Apple was on life support and headed for hospice. The market chose the appliance like computer and explicitly rejected tinkering.
