The C64 had a GUI OS available for it. It was called GEOS. But that wasn't my point. My point is the actual presentation here for the Boston Computer Society, which definitely played up things like the paint program, chess games, etc. The Mac wasn't just meant for publishing and business, but as a new "desktop appliance" meant for the masses. But I'm sorry, black and white only should have ended in 1960s. It's one thing to say that it was out of their price range to do publishing in color at that time, but that doesn't mean the entire computer itself should be limited to black and white.
I also didn't care for the built-in monitor then any more than I care for the iMac now. Look at the motherboard for the Mac and imagine how small a computer they could have made without the monitor being present. An Amiga or even a C64 can be connected to just about any display imaginable even today. The original Mac is stuck with the CRT it came with and if it dies, well have fun getting it repaired.
Now I'm not arguing that the targeted high-end markets for Amigas and Macs were different. As you say, the later Macs were VERY high-end PRICE-wise, at least and geared towards graphic publishing and the like. Some of the Mac II models were pretty impressive for their day for what they shipped with hardware-wise, but the prices were even more impressive (in a bad way). Some of them topped out around $10k.
Now my Amiga 3000 wasn't cheap, but it wasn't $10k. I got one for $2700 ever so slightly used and eventually expanded it to 18MB ram, a 24-bit graphics card and multiple hard drives and used it on the Internet right up until about 1999 so I think I got a pretty good life-span out of it considering I had no CPU upgrade. OTOH, once the Mac got into the PPC arena, the prices plummeted with OSX. In fact, a $1500 range tower with expansion is exactly what some of us wish we could get today from Apple. Instead, it's back up to the $3k range and closer to that $10k figure with a top-notch model so we've gone back to the Apple of old in some respects for high-end machines and like Jobs wanted for the original Mac, no internal expansion.
Ultimately, the Mac was good for certain niche markets (publishing) but you paid for it. On the other side of the coin, while it was an easy-to-use GUI for a desktop home computer, it was both high priced for that use and had a terrible core OS (i.e. no memory protection or preemptive multitasking, something which oddly enough the Apple Lisa DID have, but not enough power to make it work smoothly). Between the high price and the lousy OS (in those regards), I had ZERO interest in one until I was forced to buy a PC in 1999 due to the Amiga being discontinued and too outdated to continue using. I mean there are worse things in life than having to use Windows98, but I missed the Amiga and heard good things about OSX.
I went to a pinball show in Allentown, PA and they had a computer show next door at the fairgrounds and one dealer had some used Macs and I decided I wanted to try one out and see if I was missing something good. I picked up a PowerMac Digital Audio (circa 2001) used there for around $200 with dual 550MHz G4s and 512MB ram and an ATI Rage 128 video card and I think it had a 40GB hard drive or something. OK, it was pretty slow in 2006 when I got it, but it was obvious that it was a pretty cool operating system and because it was a Digital Audio model, I could boot OS9 as well which was kind of fun to play with since I never owned an older Mac either, but it did confirm, I didn't care for that OS. But when I saw what I could do with iTunes plus an Airport Express, I decided I wanted a whole house audio system (and later video when I saw the AppleTV), but it was obvious I needed a faster system for a server and Internet terminal. I already had $200 invested and the first Mac Mini Intel wasn't very impressive. I ended up buying a 1.8GHz G4 accelerator, a flashed PC ATI 9800 Pro graphics card, a Sata hard drive controller and a USB2.0 card. It cost about as much as a Mac Mini (not counting the hard drives added), but it ran all the PPC/OS9 software plus the newer Tiger then Leopard operating system and ran pretty quick at the time considering. It did a great job running my whole house audio/video system and let me play old PPC games and an Internet terminal, etc. I didn't replace it until 2012 as a server, but I did buy a Macbook Pro in late 2008 for music production. I haven't bought another Windows PC since 2006 (when I built one for gaming).
Ugly rectangular pixels? AFAIK, pixel shape is a result of the resolution selected. The Amiga could do 736x483i (16-color including all grey-scale if desired) or 368x483i (32-color). These are standard NTSC operating modes and not square pixels. The original Mac was 512x342, which is somewhere in-between resolution-wise, but far less flexible as you were stuck with it and nothing else. The Mac was set well for publishing at the time, but the Amiga was set for doing video (genlocks came out almost immediately and the Video Toaster existed precisely because the chips were all NTSC/PAL).
Well, it was more in terms of home user use, not professional.
It was relatively primitive and took some 3rd party products to make it pleasant to use for file operations (e.g. I liked Dismaster II), BUT it was incredibly powerful for multi-tasking and the computer was well-suited to animation and video overlays, etc. in terms of its professional use.
I'll agree, but many 3rd parties greatly enhanced and extended the Amiga's capabilities through library additions. But unless you worked in those types of jobs, it really doesn't matter how good the typography is. Localization was added in AmigaDos 2.0, BTW. Commodore obviously could have improved the GUI a lot more, though.
That's a very gross simplification and as it happens, quite inaccurate as well. If you look at how the Video Toaster worked, it made direct use of the custom chips on the Amiga and in fact could not work without them. This is why the "Mac" version of the Video Toaster was actually a full-sized de-badged Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster card in it and software to network it to a Mac. I can understand why most Mac users would think that it was just a box from NewTek, but it was a running joke in the Amiga community that these Mac users all owned Amigas and didn't even know it....
