A few corrections to note...
IBM originally resisted opening up their PC standard, but soon realized that they'd be better off going with it than fighting it, as "IBM Compatible" still meant they got the recognition and advertising every time the name was spoken.
IBM did *not* "open up their PC standard." It was reverse engineered by everyone and their brother. Not too tough back in those days.
Soon, you could buy peripherals and software that was written by companies other than IBM, Commodore and Apple, but those accessories were only available for IBM Compatible PCs.
There has always been software and accessories from third parties for every computing platform. The Mac, being 3 years behind the IBM PC in its release, had to play catch-up. They did a LOT of advocacy work with developers prior to release (that was
Guy Kawasaki's job) and afterwards as well.
In fact, at Apple's launch, some of the earliest third-party software was available from none other than Microsoft, which released Microsoft Basic (interpreter) and Microsoft MultiPlan (an early Excel predecessor).
In 1986, Apple decided to stimulate third-party development even further through a program called Project Rota (no idea where the name came from) where Mac hardware was seeded to potential developers and academic institutions for the purpose of further software development on the Mac.
I know this because "my" (father's, actually) first Mac came from Project Rota. Mac Plus, with a then-industry-leading 1MB of RAM standard, a monster of a 20MB external hard drive, and a pair of printers (ImageWriter II 4-color dot matrix and LaserWriter Plus 300 dpi laser printer, both of them absolute tanks).
Apple sued and won many times for people creating clones of their keyboards and other peripherals and trying to sell that at much more reasonable prices than they sold the parts themselves.
Apple has had a lot of lawsuits, but I don't ever recall any over software and accessories. I worked at a Mac accessory store back then and we sold third-party keyboards and mice. Kensington was very popular.
The spiral continued until the invention of the PowerMac, which was the first attempt by Apple to become more like the PC. You could finally start to open PC disks, you could do a lot more PC stuff with the Mac
Nope... OrangeMicro released a "DOS Card" in the early Mac II days (circa 1987) which had an Intel processor, actually an entire Intel machine basically, on it. Apple did the same thing later with the "Centris 610 - DOS Compatible" model, around 1991 or 1992.
As far as reading and writing PC disks, that happened with the move to the "new" 1.4MB 3.5" floppies, which Apple called "SuperDisks." SuperDisk drives would read PC disks and were introduced on the Mac IIx in 1988, a full 6 years prior to the Power Mac. This really didn't make the Mac more *like* the PC, it just allowed people with Macs to interact better with PC's, already a necessary evil at that point.
The Mac gained more ground when the Pentium processor came out with a flawed math processor, and the Apple fanaticism started to get insane.
The Mac fanaticism was around loooooooong before the Intel math problems. Trust me, I was one then too.
In fact, I regard the Intel math bug as largely insignificant in the grand scheme of the never ending debate.
Then came the iPod. The phenomenon. The one tool that single handedly brought life back to Apple. Without the iPod, I firmly believe Apple would have gone out of business.
Nuh-uh. Apple has been on a huge and accelerating upswing ever since Jobs' return in 1997 and more specifically the release of the iMac in 1998. The guy's nuts, but he knows how to put together an elegant computer. FWIW, I thought the iMac was the beginning of the end for Apple myself... I mean, who'd buy a Mac with no floppy drive and no built-in SCSI port?
It brought enough money for Apple to complete its transformation into the "Sub PC" by creating an OS based on Unix (FreeBSD I believe, but some here say Unix, and I'm not gonna argue that).
No, it really didn't. OS X came about in kind of a funny roundabout way. Apple had wanted to do a next-gen OS for a long time, and had things code-named "Rhapsody" and such. Unfortunately, the home-spun thing just wasn't working out. Meanwhile, Jobs, who was fired from Apple in 1985, had gone off and started another computer company, NeXT. The NextStep OS was revolutionary in its ease of development, but like Mac OS on the Mac, NextStep ran only on NeXT hardware until the later release of OpenStep (which, ironically, ran on PC hardware but not Mac hardware - Jobs and his grudges...) Anyway, Apple had basically trashed Rhapsody and ended up purchasing NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold with it for $400 million in 1997. The GUI was redesigned to make more sense than either Mac OS or NextStep had been - Basically a ground-up re-evaluation of why certain elements should be placed in certain spots and such. The end result was Mac OS X, which came out before the iPod was announced and certainly LONG before the iPod was so popular. OBTW, to this day, the Mac OS X API calls all start with "NS" (for NextStep).
It also shows that by Apple's very actions of becoming more PC-ish, they recognized that the PC was superior.
I still don't see how Macs are becoming "more PC-ish." Sure, we're on Intel now... Whoopty do. A chip is a chip is a chip, a means to an end if you will. The OS is what's important. Mac OS has always been a GUI, where Windows evolved from an add-on to the command-line MS-DOS into... wait for it... a GUI!!! A few other things I can think of right offhand... Macs got multiple-monitor capability in 1987. Windows machines got it in 1998. OK, I'm done thinking. You're the only person I've ever heard this "Macs copy PC's" assertion from, so I won't waste any more time with it.
edit: I forgot the "Pineapple" computer, the Korean Apple Ripoff, available only overseas. Was the only unchallenged clone of the Apple computer because they were not governed by the same laws as the United States was....throw that into history in the late 80s somewhere.
Completely, utterly wrong.
The first "clone" was an early laptop with an amber gas-plasma display... The name "Kangaroo" seems to be hopping out of the depths of my brain, but chances are it's wrong. They got away with it because it did not have the essential Mac ROM's, so you had to buy a Mac, remove the ROM chips, and install them in the laptop. Apple didn't care because you still had to buy a Mac.
Then, after hearing for ages and ages how clones were the way for Apple to save the Mac, they began licensing clone makers. The largest was Power Computing, which was quite successful for a year or two. Then, Apple realized that Power Computing was simply stealing existing Mac customers and not doing a damn thing for the overall Mac OS market share, and revoked all clone licenses. (I believe Power Computing still makes PC's, though I'm not sure.) So, the cloning thing WAS tried in the 90's, and it failed miserably.
Man, I love computer history. This has been fun.
I still have my April 1987 Macworld magazine trumpeting the introduction of the Mac II with a picture on the cover and a single word: "Color!"
Also, the ads for the old Jasmine hard drives, the cheapest of the day. $649 for 20MB, $999 for 40MB.
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