Mac Kit to Die For??? Maybe, but given this issue of The Mac hit the streets in early December 1996, maybe it should have read "Mac Kit Apple is dying from!" You'll understand why once we get to the ads...
The news pages lead with the triumphant announcement that Apple had returned to the black in its final quarter of the 1996 financial year. The piece states a $25m profit against expectations, which when you consider the Q2 loss of $700m, combined with a Q3 loss of $34m, any positive number was a good thing. CEO Gil Amelio had previously boasted that Apple would by out of the red by Q2 '97, so they were early achieving that. However, revenues were collapsing and the 1996 as a whole would see losses totalling $816m. That, gentle reader, was just a taster. It's no great spoiler that Apple's '97 expectations were hammered with a loss of over $1bn, before a turnaround in '98 with a $309m profit. Fear not, fans of fruit based computing, they made a profit of $96.995bn in 2023. As Mr Watson warbled, "It's been a long road..."
Also in the news was Apple's desire to double growth (uh-oh...), as well as ongoing confusion of Apple's OS issues. Apple had also cut 65% of its authorised reseller network which shocked no one as there were plans for Apple to open its own retail stores. That didn't pan out (you can guess why), with the first Apple Store only opening in the US in 2001. The UK got its first Apple Store in 2004.
Internet Explorer 3.0 (those were really not the days, my friends, I'm glad they did end), was now available to Mac users, as was the link kit to connect Palm Pilots to Macs. Having written about Palm PDA's both here and in Pixel Addict, all I can reiterate is that they were brilliant devices for their time. Meanwhile, Iomega were planning a new compact storage format that could fit a 20Mb on a 5cm by 5cm cartridge. Heady tech for the time (seriously), this product was crying out for a cross-marketing campaign about N*Sync-ing your data via your N*Hand cart. My talents are wasted, honestly...
Reviews next and first up we have FreeHand 7, rated "the best drawing tool available", which probably validated its price tags of £450 and £646.25, depending on which add-on it was bundled with.
Apple's latest Power Mac, the 4400 comes under the spotlight and come just over the grand mark (£1,056 inclusive of VAT, £899 ex). A score of 4/5 is pretty good, and for the time that was a reasonable ask. As technology advanced to new generations of processors, the asking price of a decent machine rose. By late 1996, the idea of a general home computer for less than £500 was having a rest as the rise of advanced new processors (Pentium, PowerPC and StrongARM) meant that new desktops had settled around the £1,000 mark, albeit temporarily as the latter half of the decade saw prices (in the Windows world at least) tumble - all helped by the tussle between AMD and Intel.
More Apple kits gets the once over with what appear to be advanced looks at the MessagePad 2000 and the eMate 300. Let's get this clear: by this point, the Newton had matured into a reasonably capable platform if you wanted to have computing on the go without the bulk of a laptop. Sure, smartphone users today will fall about laughing at the size of the revised PDA but for the time, this was serious kit. The StrongARM SA-110 was a powerful leg up for processing power, and the software offering was in a much better place compared to the original Newton. That being said, with an expected price of around £750, it was still a ton (or several) of money for something that merely acted as an extension of the desktop/laptop experience.
Not so the eMate 300, and I have to admit that this piece of portable tech was something I really wanted to get my hands on back in the day. Effectively placing a Newton into a laptop style case, the idea was sound, even if the size of it was off-putting for school use. Compare the eMate to the Alphasmart range of devices. The latter were smaller, lighter, lasted longer and were more suited to being mishandled by children. They were also cheaper, an important consideration when it comes to bulk buying. Still, the eMate was a sexy bit of kit and its failure was not down to the concept. The execution was ok, but Apple, being Apple, decided it was for education only and missed an opportunity to widen the user base. But hey, this was mid-90's Apple, it was a shit show anyway...
Games reviews kick off with Actua Soccer for footie fans, and Marathon Infinity from Bungie. Considered flawed and the weakest of the Marathon trilogy, Bungie would move on to other things, including an eventually un-released real time strategy title codenamed Monkey Nuts, eventually morphing into the original Xbox launch title (and all-round classic, Halo: Combat Evolved).
There's also a review of Avara, an online multiplayer shooter that, whilst looking basic, appears to have neatly given gamers a taste of fighting the world. Well, as long as you had at least a 28.8kps modem. 14.4kps was a tad slow, and even the higher speed option could struggle with lots of players! Early days, people, early days.
Zork Nemesis would keep adventure fans happy, and MechWarrior 2 proves that ports from DOS can work on the Mac, and be the better for it.
An end of year issue is never the same without the Reader's Awards section and it's no surprise that Apple win the Mac Manufacturer of the Year award. Ok, that sounded sassy, but the clones were beginning to make themselves known on the market and, as noted above, would not help keep Apple afloat. Demon Internet (remember them? Ah, the good old days) won Internet Service Provider of the Year, Netscape Navigator best Internet Software, and the Iomega Zip for Best Storage Device.
There is a "How to buy a Mac" guide that is a time capsule of how things used to be when buying a computer, though the near-traditional advice of "use a credit card if you can" still rings true to this day.
A round up of 17-inch monitors is guaranteed to take your breath away, and not only for the prices (the Applevision 1710 at £830 inc VAT was cheap for a Trinitron tube, but expensive in this round up), but also for their weight. The 1710 came in at 49lbs (22.2Kg) for a tube that could give you 1280x1024 at 75Hz. Good spec and picture quality, but this was not something you moved around much. The 1710 takes away the Not So Cheapo Editor's Award, whilst the £527 CTX 1765D snags the El Cheapo prize.
A proper "how quaint" moment now with coverage of the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) format. Very early days here for the wonder disc format but it would prove successful. I can still remember popping into Dixons in Kingston Upon Thames in 1997 and seeing a player for sale with five movies (the only five at the time, I think), with naff all change from a grand. As an impoverished student (who'd blown a fair chunk of his student loan on an N64 and Turok!), all I could do was gaze in wonder.
The how to guides section gives us advice on Self Assessment completion for your tax concerns (yay?), and how to sort your travel plans on The Net. Such a charming term, The Net, redolent of dial up modems and eye-shrivelling website design. There's even a box out on finding your search engine first: Alta Vista was apparently the fastest, but Yahoo and Lycos were easier to use. Compare and contrast to the absolute shit show that is Google these days... Yeah, if there was ever yet another example of how the drive for greater revenues fucked things up, Google search is up there with the most egregious.
e.Zone takes a look at the online goings on, the highlight being an interview with William Gibson. There's chat around his then-new book, Idoru, and his love on the Mac, although he believes his next Mac would be a clone. It might have been, but the next one after that would have been a Cupertino original.
A guide on how to succeed at Warcraft II is followed by some Q&A pages, before the buyers guide takes up pretty much the rest of the remaining pages. As is decreed in the ancient by-laws of computing magazines, the final page is a humorous look at the year just gone, and rather funny it is too.
(Deep breath)
So..... Apple wasn't in great shape as the count down clock to Millenium Armageddon hit 36 months, and if you want a reason why, I give you this page from Apple dealer, Gordon Harwood:
Can you see what I mean? Which model? Which spec?
Let's say you have £1,500 to spend on a Mac, and yes, I know, that was a lot of money in 1996/7, but the nature of computing had pushed prices up between 1994 and 1997 as new processor tech and add-ons like CD-ROM drives, graphics cards and modems arrived. Every format saw spec/cost inflation in the middle of the decade, and £1,000 seemed to become the de facto entry point. For this example, you have £1,500 which, as a consumer, meant £1,275 before VAT.
Now let's check out what GH could offer. That Performa 5320 with a 15" built-in monitor looks decent, although the printer bundle would take you just over your budget. But wait! The Performa 6320 doesn't include a monitor as standard, but the bundle with a 15' doofer (minus the multimedia TV shenanigans) was yours for £1,280 and you got a keyboard with it. More RAM too, but no modem, but you still had cash to spare. Why the emphasis on the keyboard inclusion? Look closely, and you'll see that the very cheapest of each of the Performa ranges (5320 excluded) do not include a tactile terror. Nor a monitor, come to think of it, so yeah, the initial price looks cheap for a Mac, but to actually buy a usable desktop? That 6320, starting at just £799 ex VAT. Nope. That'd be £1,089 ex for something you could use out of the box, and to be honest, you'd spend the extra forty odd quid on the 15" option.
You could argue that Apple were merely catering for all possible users, so upgrading peeps might already have a monitor and keyboard. You could also say that they were nickel and diming the customer in order for their good to appear cheaper. A mix of both maybe? Not that it matters now, but it does hark back slightly to PC box builders in the first half of that decade advertising machines without an OS. It knocked anywhere between £50 and £100 off the headline price and was only noted in the "optional extras" section. An operating system... optional...? That practice soon ended. However, if they could make "A.I." optional in modern OS's, that would be just great, thanks. Unless they can make it genuinely useful and not just some data slurping funny picture generating boondoggle. Alas, I fear not.
A Powerbook was just within reach - ok, maybe a couple of quid over, but a Power Mac was also just about do-able if you took the very base option, as you didn't get a keyboard or a mouse. Going back a couple of paragraphs: really, who the actual fuck ships a grand and half computer without a f-ing keyboard?
Anyway, on to Computer Warehouse and the really damning evidence of why Apple was two steps away from Destination F*cked. The first two pages concentrate on the top of the range clones from Power Computing. These were often as not as expensive as the equivalent Apple product, but they were also often faster and offered greater expansion opportunities. Not see the threat yet?
How about mid-range, and the Power Center 132MHz 604, 16MB RAM, 1GB hard drive and 4x CD drive. No monitor or keyboard, but yours for £1,499 ex. A couple of pages on, Dabs Direct had Apple's equivalent, the Power Mac 7600/132 (1.2GB drive and 8x CD) for £1,649 ex. That £150 could go a long way, even with the slightly lower storage and slower CD drive. And yes, it gets worse.
Switching to Dabs Direct, the full Mac range from Apple is here, as are the clones from Umax. If money was really tight, then Umax could do you proud with it's range, starting at £799 ex. You could argue semantics about value and mandatory add-ons, but the point here is that Apple, whose bread and butter was computing at the time, was in direct competition with box builders who could sell roughly the same kit but cheaper.
There was another fly in the ointment: confusion. Check out MacLine. On the page to your left, a goodly selection of Mac models, bundles and offers - but only a selection. On the right, the Umax offering. ALL OF THEM. Two ranges, three models a piece, offering six separate price points, each easily discernible from the others. Now look back at what Apple were trying to hoof out of the door. It's a mess. You had ads featuring the Performa 5200 5260, 5300, 5320, 5400, 6320, 6400, and as for the Power Macs, there were the 4400, 7200, 7600, 8200, 8500, and 9500 models. Never mind the different configs per model, the number of models was mind-boggling.
Just to hammer the point home, even the buyer's guide notes how great the value is with the clones. In the sub-£2,000 bracket, clones outnumber Apple machines by 9 to 5, it's evens in the £2-3k range, and Apple are dwarfed by 10 to 2 in the £3k plus spectrum. In each area, Apple was having to fight to retain any semblance of value for money, especially against Umax, and that's not what the clones were meant to do.
It wasn't all hardware though, with MacGold Direct sorting you out for software, including a rather impressive range of games and entertainment titles.
And that's it for The Mac in 1996. Bit of a weird one, and not just because of the fashion on show (or the full page ad for Maxim magazine...), given that on the surface it looked like things were getting better for Mac users, but in actual fact, the platform was close to dying simply because the host organism was unable to do the one job it really had to do. It would take a year or two and a lot of red ink, but Apple would turn things around, surprisingly so. But that never happened for the format I'll cover in the next MOYY.
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| The more tame section of mid-90's fashion. |
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