alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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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.
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.
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.