Apple without Steve: Most impactful products of the 80s and 90s

With Apple turning 50 years old, there’s been plenty of reminiscing about all the great things people are doing with Apple products around the world. But the times haven’t always been so rosy at Apple. Just 10 years after the company’s founding, in fact, founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were out of the picture as the company struggled and nearly slipped into bankruptcy.

Yet despite its troubles, Apple still launched some incredible products that had a lasting impact on the company and the PC landscape. Take a look at some of the innovative new products Apple launched between 1986 and 1995.

January 1986: Macintosh Plus

The original Macintosh changed the face of computing when it touched down in 1984, and Apple knew it had its work cut out to follow it up. But before a true successor arrived, the company rolled out the Macintosh Plus in early 1986.

It wasn’t as flashy as the original Macintosh, but the Macintosh Plus left a lasting legacy of innovation. It was the first Mac to come with wide range of features that later became mainstays among Apple’s computers: a SCSI port that paved the way for CD drives and hard disks; a double-sided 800KB 3.5-inch floppy drive and user-upgradeable SIMM memory; and an expanded keyboard with a number pad and directional arrows.

It was such a consequential Mac that it stuck around unchanged until October 1990, a total of 1,734 days, one of the longest-running Macs ever. Combined with frequent discounts, it remained a favorite of Mac users for years.

March 1987: Macintosh II

While the Macintosh Plus was something of a stopgap product, the Macintosh II was the true heir to 1984’s Macintosh. It marked a radical departure from its predecessor, both in form and function, and was intended to address key complaints with the first-gen model.

While the original Macintosh was a compact all-in-one, the Macintosh II separated its computer and display into modular elements, the first Mac to do this, in fact. That modular design allowed users to supply their own screen, but to entice users to stick with Apple, the Macintosh II offered a color display, as well as internal slots for extra hard drives, a feature originally opposed by Jobs. But with him out of the picture, Apple was free to take new risks.

January 1988: LaserWriter II

In the mid-1980s, printing documents at home was well out of reach of most people. Apple’s LaserWriter helped kickstart the desktop publishing revolution.

The original LaserWriter launched in 1985 and was an immediate success. The LaserWriter II followed in 1988, and it was intended to expand upon its predecessor and cement Apple’s advantage in this area. It did just that by offering more models at a variety of price points, helping to expand desktop publishing to a wider audience.

The LaserWriter IISC, for example, saved on costs by omitting PostScript compatibility, meaning Apple didn’t have to pay a license fee to Adobe. The premium LaserWriter IINTX, meanwhile, added a SCSI controller for users who wanted to store printer fonts. These products ensured Apple could continue to ride the printer wave and closely link itself to creative individuals and companies – an association that continues today.

September 1989: Macintosh Portable

These days, Apple excels at packing high-end power into thin and light laptops, but that wasn’t always the case. After all, back in the late 1980s, the technology simply didn’t exist to make desktop computers truly portable, but that didn’t mean Apple wasn’t willing to try.

The result was the Macintosh Portable, and it proudly took its place as one of the industry’s first-ever laptops. Its name might have been a little misleading, though, at least by modern standards – this “portable” product tipped the scales at 16lbs, almost six times the weight of the latest M5 MacBook Air. As the first battery-powered Mac, Apple claimed it would last about 10 hours before needing to be charged, but it drew so much power, it needed the battery to start up even when plugged in.

Still, it was an undeniably ambitious machine. The Macintosh Portable came with a built-in trackball for mouse usage on the go, a high-end active-matrix fold-down display, and a low-power hard drive in an attempt to save battery life. Yet its big, bulky, heavy battery – coupled with its eye-watering price tag that topped $7,000 – doomed it to poor sales and ignominy.

October 1991: PowerBook 100 series

The failure of the Macintosh Portable only proved that there was a market for on-the-go Macs. Really, the company was just getting started, and it followed up with the PowerBook 100 series in October 1991. Comprising entry-level, mid-range and high-end models, the PowerBook 100 learned the lessons of the Macintosh Portable and got Apple’s laptop range on the right track.

Indeed, the PowerBook range was everything the Macintosh Portable was not. The PowerBook came in a sleek new dark gray color scheme and clocked in at around a third of the weight of the Macintosh Portable. It also sweated the small stuff: one of its well-received innovations was the fact that it included a built-in palm rest below the keyboard, something that’s standard on almost every laptop today.

The initial selection of PowerBooks was an incredible success for Apple and reportedly captured around 40 percent of the laptop market in its first year. The PowerBook 100 was innovative and groundbreaking, and is still hailed as one of its most influential PC laptops ever.

May 1992: Newton MessagePad 100

The Newton MessagePad doesn’t have the greatest reputation. However, while Apple’s first PDA was far from perfect, it paved the road for many of Apple’s iconic products.

For instance, it was considered one of the most exciting products on show at Apple’s August 1993 Macworld Expo and sold 50,000 units in its first three months of availability. In the burgeoning world of PDA devices, the Newton MessagePad 100 was a visionary product that introduced many of the tools we use today, including handwriting recognition, screen rotation, and adaptive virtual keyboards.

Still, Newton’s initial handwriting system drew criticism for its inaccurate interpretations of users’ words (although later updates vastly improved its abilities), while the MessagePad 100’s use of AAA batteries was also sub-optimal. But it remains that it had a sizable impact on the tech landscape.

February 1994: QuickTake 100

During the 1980s and 1990s, Apple was more than just a Mac maker, as evidenced bt the LaserWriter II and Newton MessagePad 100. Another product to take Apple’s interests outside the Mac was the QuickTake 100, one of the first consumer-oriented digital cameras and a trailblazer in the field.

As is still typical for Apple products today, the QuickTake 100 was focused on ease of use as a key selling point, and early reviewers commended its strides in this area. By today’s standards, though, the QuickTake 100 feels somewhat primitive. It could store up to eight photos at 640×480 resolution, had no focus or zoom controls, and didn’t even offer a way to preview or delete individual images after capture.

Despite its early promise and positive reception, the QuickTake range was discontinued – along with other product lines such as the LaserWriter and Newton ranges – when Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997. However, its brief outing showed what was possible when Apple ventured into the world of portable consumer gadgets.

March 1994: Power Macintosh 6100

Since its inception, Apple had long collaborated with Motorola as its main chip supplier for Apple’s computing lineup. But by the early 1990s, however, Apple was getting frustrated at Motorola’s inability to keep up with Intel. To address the situation, the Apple-Motorola pairing enlisted the help of IBM, with the resulting AIM partnership birthing the PowerPC processor and the first Mac to feature these chips: the Power Macintosh 6100.

Named for its 60MHz PowerPC 601 CPU, it dramatically boosted performance over the Quadra. As Macworld wrote at the time: “Not only has Apple finally regained the performance lead it lost about eight years ago when PCs appeared using Intel’s 80386 CPU, but it has pushed far ahead.” A year after launching, the Power Macintosh line had almost completely replaced all other Mac offerings, while the market for add-in “accelerator” cards was made redundant due to the reasonable pricing of Apple’s own booster card. It was, in other words, a revelatory product.

The Power Macintosh’s success underlined Apple’s confidence in its decision to shift to PowerPC processors. It was just the first of several major architecture shakeups to come, but the Power Macintosh and its PowerPC chips showed that change—and chip transitions—didn’t have to be painful.

This is part two of a five-part series exploring 50 years of Apple product releases. Stay tuned to Macworld all week as we explore the other decades: 1976 to 1985; 1996 to 2005; 2006 to 2015; and 2016 to today.