[vidarh]

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.

In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.

That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.

In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.

[atomic_cowprod]

The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.

[dd8601fn]

Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else.

At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.

Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.

[vidarh]

It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)

[anthk]

In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6. Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games.

In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.

[thijson]

I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.

[pjmlp]

Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT.

In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.

[anthk]

Mac was the platform for journalists and printed press audio and media producers in Spain. Outside of that niche... good luck.