The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

Using the Design Yardstick (introduced on August 19) to analyse and illustrate the evolution of Apple’s Macintosh.

I just realised that, in the entry dated August 25 [ Gauging a PC ], I said that I would illustrate the time dependency of the yardstick ‘readings’ over the life cycle of a product family. So, here it is. Let’s take the original Macintosh of 1984 launched with the support of the famous “ 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’ ” ad (referring to A. Huxley’s book). From a customer point of view, the 1984 Mac looks like that:

click to see the pic

The 1984 Mac had limited functionality and its $2,500 price tag was well over the initial $1,000 objective; but its ease-of-use was light-years ahead of its competitors.

Zoom into 2006 and you get a Mac with incredible power (the latest Mac Pro is insanely fast) and vastly improved functionality, still at the top in terms of usability, clearly standing out aesthetically; the whole justifying a price premium. Windows-based PCs have partially caught up in terms of usability and become the standard commodities; but they are still a collection of  ‘stuff’ bolted-on from multiple sources, that brings many frustrations, despite overall satisfaction. A necessary evil.

Here is how the two systems compare today:

click to see the pic

The good news is that, by switching to Intel chips , Apple is getting significantly closer to the ‘standard’, in a position to offer the best of both worlds. At the end of the tunnel I entered about ten years ago, I see a light telling me that, soon, I’ll be able to scrap my Windows PC and do everything on a Mac, again. Yippee!