[II2II]

The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place.

Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)

I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.

[bombcar]

The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The mandatory graphic GUI - and MacPaint - made the point that the Mac was primarily a visual design tool that happened to handle text.

That was absolutely revolutionary.

S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics.

The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based.

Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.

[michaelcampbell]

> The mandatory graphic GUI...

What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?

[simondotau]

And perhaps most critically, other semi-GUI platforms made lesser attempts to demand consistency.

[II2II]

Early on, sure. I seem to recall Apple having their Human Interface Guidelines early on, which helped, yet there were developers who were either unaware of them or experimenting with different ideas. Other platforms tried to improve consistency later on though. For example: there was CUA for IBM. Of course, most of that went out the windows in the late 1990's and early 2000's when companies figured out that the easiest way to differentiate their products to consumers was visually, rather than technically.

[getpost]

> While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III

Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars).

"It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985."

https://apple-history.com/aiii