SEPTEMBER 2020 MACWORLD 9PowerBook 5300cs, a symbol of the Doom Era.
of television. Microsoft was on the march,
and the release of Windows 95 massively
closed the gap between Macs and PCs,
robbing Apple of one of its great
advantages.
The PowerBook, released at the very
start of this era, was a winning product that
helped earn Apple a lot of goodwill. But
that goodwill was rapidly squandered with
the disastrous second-generation
PowerBook, the 500 series, and its even
more disastrous successor, the
PowerBook 5300.
Apple CEO John Sculley was booted
during this period, and his replacements
got increasingly less inspiring. Apple had a
whole lot of money during this period, and
not a whole lot of sense, and it flailedaround to find a solution that would allow it
to become the legendary Apple of the
previous era again. It also shot itself in the
foot repeatedly, as it did when it licensed
Mac OS to outside hardware makers to
create Mac clones.
And just like that, the money ran out.
Gil Amelio, the clueless executive left
holding the bag, only had a few moves
left. Even his single best decision as Apple
CEO was a happy accident: Desperate to
find a modern operating system because
of Apple’s inability to build a new version
of Mac OS, he ended up getting talked
into buying NeXT.
Yes, NextStep became the foundation
of all of Apple’s operating systems to this
day. But even more important was that the
founder of NeXT, Steve Jobs, came along
with the purchase.THE RESURGENT ERA
(1998-2008)
The popular narrative of Steve Jobs’s
return to Apple is simple: Jobs came back
and saved everything. Which, yes, that did
end up happening. But I think it gives short
shrift to this very interesting period at
Apple, where Jobs was back and putting
his plans in motion—but Apple was also
hungry to try anything and everything to
get back in the game.
We remember the successes. The
original iMac, introduced in 1998, really