Who WAS Apple's customer base during the classic MacOS era?
I remember Apple II's dominating when I was in school back in the 1980's. Then in the 1990's when I was in college, all I remember seeing anywhere were PC's. DOS and then Windows for the masses, and this new thing called Slackware Linux for many of us in the CS department.
In the 2000's I started hearing about Macs, but only for creative domains like Photoshop or video editing. Then the Intel CPU switch happened, and today I'm on a MacBook just like pretty much every other programmer I know.
What was Apple's "niche", and who was their "base", back in the 1990's?
They were big in education-- student computers in elementary and middle school for me (basically, about 1992-2000) were basically 100% Macs. It wasn't until high school that Windows boxes started showing up in classrooms and computer labs.
They've also always had a decent base in the creative space-- Photoshop 1.0 being a Mac app had a big impact. Scully's mismanagement of the company meant a lot of people dumped the company in the mid-1990s, though; Jobs' return, the OSX transition, and the Intel switch were all necessary to bring the Mac division back up to where it is today.
As one of those customers back then: lots of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. Upgrading from a 7100 to a Sawtooth G4 was a dream come true. It was still running 9.2 when I left that office.
It used to be really hard to get printer output to look the same on the page as what you saw on the screen, and the small details matter when people are laying out a complicated magazine (or whatever) page and need text to flow around images and other design elements. There was a whole Adobe-vs-everyone battle over things like outline (as opposed to bitmap) font technology since they controlled the standard for PostScript fonts as used by printers like LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1
Then still lots of back and forth over things like Adobe's multi-master fonts vs TrueType GX which despite being part of the "failed" QuickDraw GX actually lives on in OpenType today:
"he calls the layout artist (which was probably Jacob Riskin or George Weising at the time), 'my trusty [Macintosh] Quadra operator'. What an assface."
For publishing, color management was also a huge thing - at the time Apple's ColorSync [1993] was vital to getting your display, local proof printer, and the printing press all color calibrated together. Adobe developed a Windows version but it was never as well-integrated/supported.
I remember Apple II's dominating when I was in school back in the 1980's. Then in the 1990's when I was in college, all I remember seeing anywhere were PC's. DOS and then Windows for the masses, and this new thing called Slackware Linux for many of us in the CS department.
In the 2000's I started hearing about Macs, but only for creative domains like Photoshop or video editing. Then the Intel CPU switch happened, and today I'm on a MacBook just like pretty much every other programmer I know.
What was Apple's "niche", and who was their "base", back in the 1990's?