September 27, 1979: Years before the first Macintosh will ship, Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin clash for the first time over the direction of the R&D project to produce Apple’s revolutionary computer.
Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project, envisioned an affordable machine that could put graphical computing within reach of ordinary people. Apple co-founder Jobs had a very different idea: Forget the price tag and build the best computer possible.
Guess who won?
Macintosh project’s early clash over price vs. features
The philosophical face-off between Jobs and Raskin helped shape the Macintosh long before it reached store shelves. It set up a battle between Raskin’s vision of democratizing technology and Jobs’ obsession with building something extraordinary.
September 27, 1979, brought Apple’s earliest cost investigation for the Mac. Raskin’s revolutionary idea was to build a computer, based around a graphical user interface, that would cost $500 or less.
That price (which, with inflation, would be more than $2,300 today) seems fairly standard by current terms. However, at the time, it would have been significantly cheaper than most regular personal computers. An Apple II, for instance, cost $1,298. And even the Tandy TRS-80 — a fairly low-cost, bare-bones computer of the time — sold for $599.
Even as a startup, however, Apple already took a high-margin approach to its business. The company expected to put a 400% markup on its machines. That meant Raskin’s computer would need to be manufactured and packaged for $125 or less. The September 27 memo spelled out that this was not possible. It suggested a more reasonable retail price of $1,500.
The memo caused a clash within Apple. Jobs told Raskin that he shouldn’t “worry about the price” and should instead “just specify the computer’s abilities.”
Jef Raskin rips Steve Jobs on Mac pricing
A bristling Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo to Jobs, replicated in the excellent book Apple Confidential 2.0:
“[I want] a small, lightweight computer with an excellent, typewriter style keyboard. It is accompanied by a 96 character by 66 line display that has almost no depth, and a laser-quality printer that also doesn’t weigh much, and takes ordinary paper and produces text at one page per second (not so fast that you can’t catch them as they come out.) The printer can also produce any graphics the screen can show (with at least 1000 by 1200 points of resolution). In color.
The printer should weigh only a fraction of a pound, and never need a ribbon or mechanical adjustment. It should print in any font. There is about 200K bytes of main storage besides screen memory and a miniature, pocketable, storage element that holds a megabyte and costs $.50, in unit quantity.
When you buy the computer, you get a free unlimited access to the ARPAnet, the various timesharing services, and other informational, computer accessible databases. Besides an unexcelled collection of application programs, the software includes BASIC, Pascal, LISP, FORTRAN, APL, PL\1, COBOL, and an emulator for every processor since the IBM 650.
Let’s include speech synthesis and recognition, with a vocabulary of 34,000 words. It can also synthesize music, even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, with various reverberation.
Conclusion: starting with the abilities is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology. These factors must all be juggled simultaneously.”
Why the clash over the Macintosh price matters
A few things about the clash between Jobs and Raskin fascinate me. The first is that Raskin’s sarcastic version of what a Macintosh should include isn’t worlds away from Jobs’ vision.
The second is that, while history tells us Jobs had the right impulse for the Mac (Raskin’s idea wound up launching as the Canon Cat a few years later, and promptly disappeared), the reality is more nuanced than that.
Jobs’ “feature creep” insistence on building the best possible computer, with no thought for a price point, wound up undercutting a lot of his work at NeXT, the company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985. Raskin’s approach, meanwhile, was based on the idea of democratizing technology — which is something Apple has become known for over the years.
Finally, although it took several more years for Jobs to seize control of the Macintosh project, it’s easy to see that as far back as 1979, Raskin and Jobs were never going to happily coexist on Team Mac.
When the original Mac shipped on January 24, 1984, it retailed for $2,495.
