Few stories in tech history illustrate the visionary personalities and technological innovation like the relationship between Steve Jobs and the Commodore Amiga. While their paths never fully crossed, the dynamics between Jobs’ Apple and Commodore’s Amiga reveal much about the era’s race for computing supremacy and the clashing philosophies that shaped modern technology. In the early 1980s, as Apple was experiencing both triumph and growing pains with the Macintosh project, the fledgling Amiga Corporation was on the hunt for financial backing and industry allies. According to Amiga investor Bill Hart, Steve Jobs visited Amiga in 1983, as the company was demonstrating its advanced graphics and multitasking capabilities. Jobs, ever the pragmatist and design perfectionist, toured the offices but left unimpressed. He reportedly said, “I don’t see anything here that would ever be a threat to the Macintosh.” Steve Jobs always favored minimalist, highly controlled architectures—a stark contrast to Amiga’s engineering ethos. The original Macintosh was notoriously restrictive, with limited color, memory, and expandability. Jobs was personally involved in these decisions, believing that simplicity and tight control would make a superior product and user experience. Amiga, spearheaded by Jay Miner and his team, believed in the opposite approach.
Their computer debuted in 1985 as a multimedia powerhouse, featuring heavy focus on custom chips for graphics and sound, true multitasking, and capabilities that left competitors like the Macintosh and IBM PC visually in the dust. Where Jobs saw “too much hardware” in the Amiga, Miner saw creative potential. However, after the Amiga 1000 launched, Apple realized it needed to catch up. Apple started adding color, better sound, more memory, faster CPUs, and multitasking to the Macintosh to compete with Amiga’s multimedia power. This was a clear response to the sudden Amiga’s technological lead in multimedia. In essence, experts see the Amiga as a hardware-innovative system and Apple as the design-focused, business-driven ecosystem that incorporated multimedia and multitasking inspired by the Commodore Amiga A1000, blending power with elegance and ease of use. This contrast between Amiga and Apple design philosophies also highlight the debate between complexity vs. simplicity, openness vs. closed control, and technical richness vs. user experience priorities in personal computing history.
image source: generated with chatGPT
More Amiga news
How Apple’s most ambitious computer ended up in the trash
The Sage IV computer system and the Amiga 1000: a legacy of innovation
The impact of Jack Tramiel’s continued leadership on Commodore: a hypothetical exploration
Amiga’s AGA delay: impact on the evolution of Amiga custom chips
The DraCo vision: pioneering non-Linear video editing on the Amiga platform
What’s the difference in programming on the Amiga vs the Atari ST?
Unveiling the multitasking magic of the Amiga operating system
A brand new Apple Lisa with no original Apple hardware
The acquisition of Amiga by Commodore and Atari’s involvement, and what if Atari had won the bid?
How the Amiga’s professional software ecosystem left an indelible mark on the computing industry
The real inside story of how Commodore crushed the Amiga’s future
April 1987: Commodore releases the Amiga 500
7 Most popular home computers in history
Tutorial: How to Vampireze your Apple Mac
Transform your iPad into an Amiga powerhouse with iUAE 1.3.0