The Mac had ridiculous margins compared to PCs by 1987 - especially for color Macs.
Jean Louis Gassée (founder of Be) was the main executive of Apple who went for short term margins instead of going for market share.
I got my first Mac in 1992 after owning an Apple //e for years. For the price of my Mac LCII - 68030-16Mhz with slow built in graphics, and a 512x384 12" monitor that wasn't compatible with most Mac games, I could have gotten a much faster 386, a sound card, and better graphics, much cheaper. Then Apple even cheap out more and had a 16 bit bus instead of the 32 bit bus. The Mac used 68030 processors that were used by other workstations, SCSI chips that were widely available, etc.
Yes, they managed the company terribly in the years after Jobs left (with the exception of the alignment with IBM and Motorola for the Power architecture and chip transition). Apple had something like 5 different CEOs in 8 years before Amelio decided to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back into the fold.
Sculley wasn't a bad CEO. He was Steve Ballmer style CEO. He knew how to profitably manage a company but he had no vision. Under his leadership, he brought Apple from the brink of extinction in 86, led the transistion to the PPC, the PowerBooks defined what a modern laptop should be and between 1989 - 1992, Apple was at it height. Scully would have been a better CEO than all of the CEOs that came between 1993 and the return of Jobs.
There are very few tech companies that successfully pivot into new areas and can transistion when technology changes that are not led by their founders. Just like "only Nixon could go to China", only Jobs could make the famous deal with Microsoft in 1997.
but then there was Spindler and Amelio. Though Spindler handled the 68k->PPC transition, and Amelio did pull the trigger on Next over Be and brought back Jobs.
Jean Louis Gassée (founder of Be) was the main executive of Apple who went for short term margins instead of going for market share.
I got my first Mac in 1992 after owning an Apple //e for years. For the price of my Mac LCII - 68030-16Mhz with slow built in graphics, and a 512x384 12" monitor that wasn't compatible with most Mac games, I could have gotten a much faster 386, a sound card, and better graphics, much cheaper. Then Apple even cheap out more and had a 16 bit bus instead of the 32 bit bus. The Mac used 68030 processors that were used by other workstations, SCSI chips that were widely available, etc.