Linked List: April 13, 2023

Thursday, 13 April 2023

‘Shareware Heroes’ by Richard Moss ★

From Richard Moss, author of the excellent The Secret History of Mac Gaming:

Shareware Heroes takes readers on a journey through a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model.

As commercial game distribution professionalised in the 1980s, independent creators with scant resources or contacts were squeezed out of the market. But not entirely. New technologies and distribution concepts were creating a hidden games publishing market — one that operated by different rules and that, at least for the first several years, had no powerful giants.

It was a land of opportunity and promise, and a glimpse of the digital-first future. This is the story of the games and developers who relied on nascent networking technologies combined with word-of-mouth marketing in an era before social media.

What a fun website Moss made for this. It’s just perfect. He’s got a preview from the chapter on Id Software’s Doom to whet your appetite. The book is available in hardcover, paperback, audio book, and e-book formats.

IDC: PC Sales, Including Macs, Are Way Down From a Year Ago ★

IDC:

Weak demand, excess inventory, and a worsening macroeconomic climate were all contributing factors for the precipitous drop in shipments of traditional PCs during the first quarter of 2023 (1Q23). Global shipments numbered 56.9 million, marking a contraction of 29.0% compared to the same quarter in 2022, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.

The preliminary results also represented a coda to the era of COVID-driven demand and at least a temporary return to pre-COVID patterns. Shipment volume in 1Q23 was noticeably lower than the 59.2 million units shipped in 1Q19 and 60.6 million in 1Q18.

According to IDC, Windows PC sales are down about 30 percent for the first quarter, year-over-year, and Mac sales are down 40 percent. Are IDC’s numbers accurate? We should get a sense of that when Apple announces results for the January–March quarter on May 4.

But we’ve already seen how strong the pull-forward effect from COVID and work-from-home has been: for the October–December 2022 quarter, Mac revenue was down 31 percent. And most strikingly, Apple had a record-breaking quarter for Mac sales in the July–September quarter of 2020 — after Apple had announced the transition to Apple Silicon at WWDC, but months before those much-anticipated Macs shipped. People buy new PCs when they need them, and zillions of people needed new PCs during COVID and with the post-COVID continuing transition to more work from home.

Update 4 May 2023: Apple’s actual results for the quarter show Mac sales down only 31 percent year-over-year.

InsideSticker ★

An idea so grotesque that it’s awesome: exquisitely designed holographic “Inside” stickers for Apple’s M-series chips. From the talented but obviously twisted mind of Vinoth Ragunathan.