This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest.
The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac.
This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing).
At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.
Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.
Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come.
As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint.
That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.
Remember setting up X11 and needing to manually set signal timings for your monitor? Good times.
That experience ranked up there with writing my own PPP init scripts and endless hours tweaking my fvwmrc. I didn't play video games during that period, because I was quite seriously having more fun learning every nook and cranny of any unix or unix-like system I could get my hands on.
Haha setting up X very true, really made me laugh thanks. And then the same pain with ndiswrapper because I bought cheap wifi cards that there were no drivers for....
And then folks complain today about the tiniest things!
The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac.
This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing).
At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.