[pjmlp]

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.

As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

[thewebguyd]

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

[linguae]

Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.

Here's a Titanium PowerBook G4 ad that says "Sends other Unix boxes to /dev/null": https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/b4kojo/sends_o...

Here's a snapshot of the software solutions page for the aluminum PowerBook G4 from November 2004, proudly touting Unix and even X11:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041126011836/http://www.apple....

Some quotes from the Power Mac G5 page (https://web.archive.org/web/20041126015955/http://www.apple....) from the same era:

"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."

There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)

[pjmlp]

Yes, as they were fighting for getting out of bankruptcy and were reverse acquired by NeXT.

I also attended a marketing session at CERN, when they came to visit our IT department in 2003, when there were still people using Sun pizza boxes as their desktops (aka SPARCstation).

Anyone that has been around Apple long enough can recognise the old Apple (pre-OS X), on current Apple, now that they can be their old self.

Any good biography on Steve Jobs, like The Next Big Thing, Folkore or Cult of Mac, will show that underlying culture.

[xp84]

This rings true to me.

Mac when I got started on it in the 00s was really dependent on everything to do with creative - Photoshop, publishing, etc. It kept that for a decade or more, and added a ton of the software developers market in the 2007-2017 era. During that era, they at least made a show of seeing us as an important demographic. Since about that time though they've had so much success in the "mainstream" that it seems like if there is any decision where software developers would want X and it would be better for mainstream nontechnical users if Y, they go with Y every time, and often no longer even bother accommodating the "X" use case at all.

Silly point: Years ago, the iChat client that is the forefather of "Messages" on Mac let you choose a sound for an alert, and it would include whatever sounds you had put in ~/Library/Sounds. Today, it only offers the fixed list of canned alert sounds that shipped with the computer. Because why would a mere user even know what a wav or aiff file is? Why should the user get to choose?

[pjmlp]

Or even had they acquired Be instead.

Microsoft had "WSL" earlier, only badly.

The only reason I started with Linux at home back in 1995, was the half hearted UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

Had they been serious about it I am sure GNU/Linux would never taken off.

As shown by Apple sales of folks buying POSIX instead.

[kalleboo]

I don't think Apple was ever really strong with the "idiots" market until the iPhone halo effect came into being, as much as they may have tried in their marketing.

That market always bought the cheapest machine (or "best value", by specs/$) they could find (or, if they were really an "idiot", the machine that Best Buy had the highest commission on), which would be a PC.

In the beige days, Apple's bread was buttered in the publishing market, once they moved to OS X, they got the "professional nerds who wanted UNIX but not doing sysadmin at home".

[coldtea]

>The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

I'd call the power user market that - the kind of idiocy that's more interested in the process than the results.

The actual target market was "people that have a life outside computers".