The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?

[+save2600]

Between 1990-1992, I found it MUCH easier to sell a $3k-$6k PC compatible than a $1k Amiga 500 with monitor and extra floppy drive and before too long, I just said fug it and there the poor Amiga sat. With cool NewTek demo reels and other demo disks and games that I brought in, playing endlessly... waiting... waiting... waiting for the next person who actually knew what the machine was.
 

For those on a "budget" and after qualifying what exactly they want a computer for, I'd often steer them to the Amiga. Why? Because I knew it was semi-PC compatible enough for the "boring" business stuff, yet superior when it came to games, music and video work.

 

[Keatah]

You're absolutely right. I felt that same way when "showing off" my Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500. I always liked to be a tech evangelist back then. Thankfully much less so these days.

 

And cheap is cheap. I remember the Amiga mouse felt cheap and low-res. It was low-res, or at least the pointer looked low-res.

 

Now on the PC I got in 1992/1993, I remember the Microsoft Mouse. That was like razor precision compared to the Amiga I was coming from. I felt like I had BETTER than per-pixel accuracy. And it was buttery smooth compared to the clanky plastic of the Amiga mouse. It had a crisp response and flew around the screen like nobody's business!

 

11 hours ago, save2600 said:

Anyway, between 1990-1992, I found it MUCH easier to sell a $3k-$6k PC compatible than a $1k Amiga 500 with monitor and extra floppy drive and before too long, I just said fug it and there the poor Amiga sat. With cool NewTek demo reels and other demo disks and games that I brought in, playing endlessly... waiting... waiting... waiting for the next person who actually knew what the machine was.

That's just it. The demo reels were the same thing over and over again. They are of interest only the first time you see them. And the general public was likely asking themselves now how could I do something like that? And what more would I need to purchase? Assuming their imagination was as vivid as what was done professionally.

 

Huge disconnect there. Between talent of the consumer and talent of producers. And then, yes, could they take the Amiga home that day and make a video like NewTek's by the weekend? Without a couple thousand dollars more outlay? I don't think so.

 

11 hours ago, save2600 said:

For those on a "budget" and after qualifying what exactly they want a computer for, I'd often steer them to the Amiga. Why? Because I knew it was semi-PC compatible enough for the "boring" business stuff, yet superior when it came to games, music and video work.

I was on a budget, too. Smoke'n and doing cars and chasing women at the arcades. That's a huge money sink. So when I wanted to upgrade from the Apple //e I was stuck with the Amiga or ST. PC and MAC were out of the question. I went with the Amiga because I knew the ST was a toy. It was sold by a videogame company. Actually both were toys. Made of cheap plastic compared to the heavy stamped metal of a PC or clone.
 

The Amiga advertisements were enough to dupe me into getting one. Boy was I sucker for anything with custom chips. They had god-like powers above and beyond mere generic crap in other systems. Yes I really thought that way - to my detriment. Custom chips lacked future versatility and were stodgy things that got in the way of upgrades.

 

But, yes, the PC felt real and solid and was out in the world doing real work in thousands of professions. My school's technical lab and electronics lab had them. And that also kicked me in the ass and got me thinking, if the Amiga was so good, why wasn't it IN the lab?

 

12 hours ago, save2600 said:

I don't think that was it at all.  It was driven by non-gamers.   People deciding that "If I'm going to spend all this money on a computer, then I want something that can run the same applications I use at work, so I can bring my work home".  Followed by the clone market where you could have all that, but for a much cheaper price than IBM would charge you.

 

The promise of the Amiga being PC compatible was another farce. "semi-PC compatible enough for the "boring" business stuff" wasn't good enough. At the time I wanted to run Alpha4 and a decent telecom package like ProComm. Only a PC would do it. Any PC, really, from a 286 through Pentium. And that means there were literally thousands of clones and name brand machines. Why spend money on the Amiga with a promise?

[zzip]

4 hours ago, Keatah said:

Now on the PC I got in 1992/1993, I remember the Microsoft Mouse. That was like razor precision compared to the Amiga I was coming from. I felt like I had BETTER than per-pixel accuracy. And it was buttery smooth compared to the clanky plastic of the Amiga mouse. It had a crisp response and flew around the screen like nobody's business!

To be fair, you are comparing a mouse from 93 with a mouse from 85/86.   Most PC's didn't even have Mice or GUIs in 85.   And Amiga/ST didn't really need super hi-res mice given the resolutions they ran at.

 

4 hours ago, Keatah said:

I went with the Amiga because I knew the ST was a toy. It was sold by a videogame company. Actually both were toys.

I did quite a lot of real work on my ST,  and its "partial PC compatibility" meant I could take a floppy with  papers I wrote on my ST and pop them into a PC and print them on the laser printers in the college lab.

 

I don't think I would have been happy with a PC clone in the 80s because I liked to game too, and 80s PCs were weak gaming machines.

[carlsson]

OTOH I don't know if the mouses to the Amiga 1200 or for that matter 4000 (which was in the same price range as a reasonable PC) were better than the class of 1985-87. Physically Commodore improved the mouse for the 1200 to a more ergonomic model but I think sampling inside the computer was the same.

[+OLD CS1]

18 hours ago, save2600 said:

Amiga HD floppy drives actually handle 1.76mb... and require nothing more than a compatible drive and OS3.x. Maybe even 2.x come to think of it, as the A3000 came with a high density floppy. PC drives can be used with varying results and some third party software. 

By "compatible drive," this means a drive which modulates the RDY line with a bit-stream which indicates the drive is HD-capable, and a spindle which spins down to 150rpm with an HD disk.  Paula is only capable of 250kbps on the floppy line, so the HD disk speed was cut in half to drop the HD bit rate from the native 500kbps to 250kbps.

 

Not completely certain, but I believe the bit-stream can be absent.

 

It is a shame that moving from ECS to AGA did not upgrade Paula to support HD floppies without the 150rpm trick.  The ECS chipset upgraded Denise to EHB mode over the OCS Denise.  Why let Paula languish?

[tschak909]

On 2/26/2020 at 10:39 AM, OLD CS1 said:

By "compatible drive," this means a drive which modulates the RDY line with a bit-stream which indicates the drive is HD-capable, and a spindle which spins down to 150rpm with an HD disk.  Paula is only capable of 250kbps on the floppy line, so the HD disk speed was cut in half to drop the HD bit rate from the native 500kbps to 250kbps.

 

Not completely certain, but I believe the bit-stream can be absent.

 

It is a shame that moving from ECS to AGA did not upgrade Paula to support HD floppies without the 150rpm trick.  The ECS chipset upgraded Denise to EHB mode over the OCS Denise.  Why let Paula languish?

Simple answer? Severe budget cutbacks for the chip designers.

 

It was severe enough that the AAA work that had begun in 1988 only yielded the first rev of working chips in 1994 just a couple months before Commodore folded.

[chepe]

On 2/27/2020 at 7:24 PM, tschak909 said:

Simple answer? Severe budget cutbacks for the chip designers.

 

It was severe enough that the AAA work that had begun in 1988 only yielded the first rev of working chips in 1994 just a couple months before Commodore folded.

 

It is somewhat of a mystery to me where Commodore used it's money. Commodore had about twice the revenue of Atari, but Atari made more profit from the sales. Commodore had poor profit margins even in good years and when the collapse of sales came, the company folded nearly overnight.

I've read that Gould and his buddies leeched off the company a lot, but surely that would not explain everything.

 

On 2/26/2020 at 12:38 PM, Keatah said:

The promise of the Amiga being PC compatible was another farce. "semi-PC compatible enough for the "boring" business stuff" wasn't good enough. At the time I wanted to run Alpha4 and a decent telecom package like ProComm. Only a PC would do it. Any PC, really, from a 286 through Pentium. And that means there were literally thousands of clones and name brand machines. Why spend money on the Amiga with a promise?

"PC compability" thing Commodore tried to push for business Amigas was weird. Why buy an already expensive machine, and an emulator card to crappily simulate a PC when you could just, well, buy a PC?

[zzip]

2 hours ago, chepe said:

"PC compability" thing Commodore tried to push for business Amigas was weird. Why buy an already expensive machine, and an emulator card to crappily simulate a PC when you could just, well, buy a PC?

in the Mid-80s, nobody knew how they computer market was going to shake out, it's why you saw both Atari and Commodore make PC clones, make attempts at Unix workstations, etc.   None of these efforts really made a dent.

 

It's why I say now, Atari's best move would have been to focus on videogames and consoles,  and keep Nintendo/Sega from gaining the foothold they did in Atari's effective absence.

 

But in 1984, that was so against the conventional wisdom at the time...  consoles were dead,  computers were the future.   Well it turned out PCs were the future, and nothing Atari/Commodore could have done to stop that.   And consoles were far from dead, but Atari lost their commanding lead in consoles trying to chase the impossible dream of competing against the market IBM created.

[chepe]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

in the Mid-80s, nobody knew how they computer market was going to shake out, it's why you saw both Atari and Commodore make PC clones, make attempts at Unix workstations, etc.   None of these efforts really made a dent.

 

It's why I say now, Atari's best move would have been to focus on videogames and consoles,  and keep Nintendo/Sega from gaining the foothold they did in Atari's effective absence.

 

But in 1984, that was so against the conventional wisdom at the time...  consoles were dead,  computers were the future.   Well it turned out PCs were the future, and nothing Atari/Commodore could have done to stop that.   And consoles were far from dead, but Atari lost their commanding lead in consoles trying to chase the impossible dream of competing against the market IBM created.

That is fair assessment. PC market, as many other markets, was naturally inclined towads duopoly. And by 1985, main players were already in position: PC and Macintosh. Other players were either late to that party (like Amiga and ST) or already flopped (like Tandy's 68000 machine). Of course it is obvious only in retrospect. But if we look at Macintosh: Mac had 1.5 year headstart to Amiga and ST and although its beginnings were hardly smooth sailing either, in that time enough software was made for it so it could estabilish itself. It's the software which sells hardware.

 

In Europe it was bit different. Leonard Tramiel said this in 1988 and I believe he was essentially right, applying same to Amiga too:

"What you wound up with in Europe was the PC, Mac, and ST all arriving at just about the same time. People had a fair, uniform comparison, 'Which of these machines do you want?' and they looked at the price and performance and people bought STs. In the U.S., we had to fight an I-don't-know-how-many-hundred-million-dollar propaganda campaign from Apple, and we didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on propaganda. Finally, the phrase, 'No one was ever fired for buying an IBM' I don't believe has ever been translated into German."

 

As for consoles, it seems to me that Atari Corp. always saw them, and the 8-bit machines, as legacy items with which they could generate bit of profit and revenue and they were happy at that. They were too late realizing that big money was in consoles. They almost made it with Lynx, but Jaguar was dollar short & day late.

 

Perhaps one shouldn't be too hard on Commodore and Atari ultimately failing however. That was in fact what happened to most personal computer manufacturers of the era. PC as a platform became dominant, but individual IBM compatible manufacturers had it just as rough and most of them collapsed at about same timeframe as Atari and Commodore. Eventually even IBM itself had to quit PC making business. Apple survived - barely.

 

[zzip]

14 minutes ago, chepe said:

But if we look at Macintosh: Mac had 1.5 year headstart to Amiga and ST and although its beginnings were hardly smooth sailing either, in that time enough software was made for it so it could estabilish itself. It's the software which sells hardware.

It's funny, Macs did not even seem all that popular at the time,  at least not in the hobbyist magazines I used to read.  I mean, yes they wowed people at first,  But most consumer-oriented software seemed to come to PC/Amiga/ST/C64/AppleII and skipped the Mac.   I suppose Macs dominated in industries like publishing and music, and that's what kept them afloat.   I don't ever think I met anyone who owned a B&W Mac as a home system.

 

20 minutes ago, chepe said:

As for consoles, it seems to me that Atari Corp. always saw them, and the 8-bit machines, as legacy items with which they could generate bit of profit and revenue and they were happy at that. They were too late realizing that big money was in consoles. They almost made it with Lynx, but Jaguar was dollar short & day late.

I think if Warner had not hit the panic button and sold Atari, they might have stayed focused on the gaming market and kept Nintendo out.   Nintendo was actually afraid of competing against Atari, and offered the NES to Atari around 1983.   The Tramiels didn't seem to take games seriously enough until it was too late.

 

23 minutes ago, chepe said:

Perhaps one shouldn't be too hard on Commodore and Atari ultimately failing however. That was in fact what happened to most personal computer manufacturers of the era. PC as a platform became dominant, but individual IBM compatible manufacturers had it just as rough and most of them collapsed at about same timeframe as Atari and Commodore. Eventually even IBM itself had to quit PC making business. Apple survived - barely.

I don't blame them, but they were a little out of their league here.   They made their money selling cheap consoles and computers to the home market.   The 16-bit computers were just too expensive for that market.   Even the "Power without the price" Atari ST line could cost you $1000 at launch.   These were never going to be snatched up by parents in large numbers as Christmas gifts like the 2600 and C64 were.

[desiv]

One of the things that was problematic back in the day that I saw was the lack of Microsoft products.

The Mac got the Office Suite in 89.

Yes, the Amiga had WordPerfect.  It had other decent word processors and spreadsheets... 

But it didn't have Word.  It didn't have Excel.

I know people who bought PCs or Macs for those, or because they were available on them.

The business world was going PC.  The education world was adding (at least where I was) a LOT of Macs...

Desktop Video just wasn't a big enough market.

And gaming, while nice, could be done (maybe not as well) on the other platforms and / or possibly better with a console.

I did have hope when Wordperfect was released (even tho it was DOS Wordperfect with menus and EXPENSIVE)...  But I was hoping that might spur the competition in MS to release for the Amiga.  I mean, I wouldn't have bought the MS Office stuff...  But I know people who would have.  

[Keatah]

Early Macs were almost anti-hobbyist., with the bus being closed off and whatnot. Not like the II series or PC. All I remember was that Macs were good at DTP. And that was all the rage for a while.

 

 

[chepe]

59 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Early Macs were almost anti-hobbyist., with the bus being closed off and whatnot. Not like the II series or PC. All I remember was that Macs were good at DTP. And that was all the rage for a while.

 

 

That was Jobs' doing, he wanted everything to be as simple as possible for the user, he did not want Mac to be expandable at all because options would 'confuse the buyer'. He was always like that of course but during the Mac era he took it to extreme and finally they had to get rid of him.

To the day I have actually almost never seen a desktop Mac. I think one guy had one back in the '80s, it was laughed at because it looked so stupid and had small b/w screen. "Birdhouse", it was called. Then I didn't see a Mac until in university which had few for some time. In general, Apple was not a thing here, their machines were just too expensive and had little games. I recall when our local computer rag reviewed Apple IIGS, I thought it looked really pretty and refined, but it was so pricey and had inferior specs to Amiga/ST, why would anyone buy it?

 

10 hours ago, zzip said:

I don't blame them, but they were a little out of their league here.   They made their money selling cheap consoles and computers to the home market.   The 16-bit computers were just too expensive for that market.   Even the "Power without the price" Atari ST line could cost you $1000 at launch.   These were never going to be snatched up by parents in large numbers as Christmas gifts like the 2600 and C64 were.

Yes 16-bit market was fundamentally different from 8-bit market in that regard. RAM stayed relatively expensive through the '80s and kept the machine prices up. And software became more complicated and houses were less eager to port their stuff over multiple platforms. The market would not tolerate as many standards as it did during 8-bit era.

 

 

[Keatah]

Dunno where "here" is at.

 

The IIgs was pretty lame overall. Like two systems in one, with each half getting in the way of the other. And that tended to cloud the good experience of the standard //e side of things.

 

Standards and common file formats were hugely important to businesses. And in the home they made things more user friendly.

Edited March 5, 2020 by Keatah

[zzip]

15 hours ago, desiv said:

One of the things that was problematic back in the day that I saw was the lack of Microsoft products.

The Mac got the Office Suite in 89.

Yes, the Amiga had WordPerfect.  It had other decent word processors and spreadsheets... 

But it didn't have Word.  It didn't have Excel.

The ST had Microsoft Write, which was like an early version of Word I guess.   And Wordperfect as well.  

 

But it wasn't enough.   You had to be "adventurous" to try to use the same app on multiple platforms.   I'd say most business users wanted the computer at home to behave exactly the same way as the computer at work.  Workers of the 80s and 90s weren't nearly as tech savvy as people today.  A lot of them were pretty technophobic, and if anything didn't go exactly as they'd expect, they'd panic.   I know, I had to support these people :)

 

5 hours ago, Keatah said:

The IIgs was pretty lame overall. Like two systems in one, with each half getting in the way of the other. And that tended to cloud the good experience of the standard //e side of things.

I was always fascinated by the concept of IIgs, until I finally decided to try it under emulation.   Yeah it's messy.  And while the gs specs look similar to ST/Amiga on paper,  in reality, the slow CPU shows.   The screen refresh was abysmal in my experience.

[R.Cade]

You have to remember- during the Amiga's heyday, computers were still an enthusiast interest only. There was not yet a drive for everyone to own a home computer yet. Some parents would buy them for their kids because they thought it was the future, but they had no reason to own or use one themselves. It was already too late for the Amiga by the time the AOL (and then the Internet) came along where everyone had to have it, and the PC was the only real choice then.

 

This is from my perspective working for a Commodore dealer from 1990-1996 in Atlanta. These were computer enthusiasts and video editing professionals only buying Amiga.

 

 

Edited March 5, 2020 by R.Cade

[Bill Loguidice]

The IIGS is great if you want a hybrid 8/16-bit experience, meaning you want to do regular 8-bit Apple II stuff and occasional 16-bit IIGS stuff. It's reasonably compact and has those handy internal expansion slots. It really is sluggish in IIGS mode, though, which makes an accelerator a prized item, far moreso than on an Amiga or ST series computer. Interestingly enough, though, in my paired down collection and as it relates to those classes of systems, I only have an Apple IIGS and have faux Amiga and ST computers only through a MIST FPGA system. And this is from a huge Amiga guy back in the day and when I had my full collection.

In terms of word processing, I used my Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM as a word processor for some time, even in parts of college. Whatever word processors I had access to (if I recall, I bought FinalWrite or something with that name) were quite buggy and crash-prone. It was not a pleasant experience. The text-based DOS stuff was primitive by comparison, of course, but was quite stable and rather powerful once you got a hang of the commands. In fact, in one of my earliest jobs, I used the UNIX version of WordPerfect 5.x, which was functionally the same as the DOS version. It was a struggle to work with at first and felt like a step back from the WYSIWYG stuff I was used to from as far back as my C-64 days and GeoWrite, but the speed and reliability was undeniable.

As part of my latter day collection, I experimented with early Macintosh productivity software. It seemed more stable than the Amiga counterparts, for sure, but they also suffered from speed issues. It's no wonder, among all the other reasons, businesses stuck with straight up PC DOS machines for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc., despite the ease-of-use gains with early window-based OS's. 

 

My experiences with various computers (C-64, Coleco Adam, Amiga, PC DOS, PC GEOS, Windows 3.x, etc.) and productivity software over the years versus what I'm using now on modern Windows 10 machines is night and day. I know some people still pine for the old days in terms of productivity apps and want to use the old stuff for fun, but I never want to go back, especially since now I either have near perfect stability or perfect safety thanks to cloud redundancy of anything I do locally.

[zzip]

41 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

As part of my latter day collection, I experimented with early Macintosh productivity software. It seemed more stable than the Amiga counterparts, for sure, but they also suffered from speed issues. It's no wonder, among all the other reasons, businesses stuck with straight up PC DOS machines for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc., despite the ease-of-use gains with early window-based OS's. 

I think one of the mistakes of the 16-bit era was assuming that "bitmapped" graphics modes are the future, and so lets get rid of character modes.

These systems just weren't ready for that.   Text rendering in bitmap modes was slow, which made the whole systems feel slow compared to the speedy rendering of character modes on PC

46 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I know some people still pine for the old days in terms of productivity apps and want to use the old stuff for fun, but I never want to go back, especially since now I either have near perfect stability or perfect safety thanks to cloud redundancy of anything I do locally.

Just the low quality of old keyboards and mice will keep me from doing real work on these systems :)

[Bill Loguidice]

2 minutes ago, zzip said:

Just the low quality of old keyboards and mice will keep me from doing real work on these systems

True, but earlier PCs and Apples generally had excellent keyboards. Today, of course, keyboards are all over the map in terms of quality. I try to use only mechanical keyboards myself these days, but sometimes you're stuck with "low profile" garbage. 

[Bill Loguidice]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

I think one of the mistakes of the 16-bit era was assuming that "bitmapped" graphics modes are the future, and so lets get rid of character modes.

These systems just weren't ready for that.   Text rendering in bitmap modes was slow, which made the whole systems feel slow compared to the speedy rendering of character modes on PC

This is an excellent point. I wonder if more thoughtful consideration could have been made in this area, like just make text-based stuff more friendly with only select visual elements and full mouse functionality. Of course, the superficial sells, so it probably wouldn't have been a wise business decision to keep it low frills and faster versus superficially attractive but slow. I mean, on PC DOS the expectation was "business" and "sedate," so you could get away with text-based stuff before Windows really took off, while the ST/Amiga/Macintosh were cultivating a very different image from day one.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Bill Loguidice said:

True, but earlier PCs and Apples generally had excellent keyboards. Today, of course, keyboards are all over the map in terms of quality. I try to use only mechanical keyboards myself these days, but sometimes you're stuck with "low profile" garbage. 

The original IBM PC had amazing keyboards,  equivalent of what we would call a "mechanical" keyboard today.

 

My ST keyboard didn't have a great feel, and would cause some hand fatigue after typing a lot.   My friend had a "Mega ST" and that keyboard was pretty nice, much better than my 1040STe,  but not as good as the IBM keyboard.

[+save2600]

Timely how modern computing was used as an example as to stability - just had Excel crash on me while I was typing. And no, it didn't autosave. Lost a few dozen entries to something I just wanted to alphabetize.  

 

...and couldn't even check weather.com without Safari crashing, needing a reload. Par for the course I tell 'ya! 

 

I'll take the sensibility and relative stability of classic computers over modern any day. Now if only they'd surf the 'net, edit my photos and print competently to my color laser. ?

 

 

And surprise! Never had an Amiga spreadsheet crash on me doing something so simple as inputting data.  

 

[ChildOfCv]

59 minutes ago, zzip said:

The original IBM PC had amazing keyboards,  equivalent of what we would call a "mechanical" keyboard today.

 

My ST keyboard didn't have a great feel, and would cause some hand fatigue after typing a lot.   My friend had a "Mega ST" and that keyboard was pretty nice, much better than my 1040STe,  but not as good as the IBM keyboard.

I was marginally fond of the original PC keyboard.  It had the satisfying "click", but it would reach a point where key presses would either be intermittently missed, or would go into repeats.  And it didn't seem like there was a good reason for it either:  The keys were pretty close to a hermetic seal for their contacts.  We'd even pull the keyboard apart to clean it before giving up on it, and we found little to no dirt inside, yet the unreliability persisted.  Back then, replacement keyboards weren't cheap either.

 

On the other hand, the one I'm typing on now is at least as old as the best of our IBM keyboards, and despite its relative cheapness it's still soldiering on with no problems.

 

Of course I've had to replace the keyboard twice on my Macbook, and it's not even the newer butterfly design.

[chepe]

9 hours ago, Keatah said:

Dunno where "here" is at.

 

Finland...it was very much a Commodore country back then.

By ca. 1991, nearly all subadult boys in my town had a computer of some sort, most often C-64. Consoles were much less common, as for those you had to buy games (gasp!) instead of just copying...

 

I thought ST keyboard was quite good compared to what most other machines had at the time, of course nowadays it feels awful. I actually liked ST mouse, I thought it was more ergonomic than what it looked. Buttons in my mouse were super-stiff but for the low resolution it did not matter that much. I did not like Amiga 500 mouse at all, but A1200 mouse was better.

 

Oh don't get me started at what God-awful crap passes for a 'keyboard' today. It's as if all mobile devices available have made people forget what a GOOD keyboard feels like.

[Keatah]

Despite the Amiga having some advantages in video production. All of that was on the professional level. No regular consumer could really afford the rest of the necessary equipment - which advertising conveniently glossed over. Or downright ignored.

 

Additional stuff would have included. 2 tape decks, a heavy and expensive camera, genlocking device / toaster, a lot of interconnecting cables, a second monitor. Maybe even some sort of mixing board. Not forgetting specialty software and the Amiga itself equipped with extra memory, hard drive space, and extra MHz from an accelerator.

 

Personal digital video never really came into its own until the decline of the desktop personal computer, the rise of the smartphone.