Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting. However this must have changed in the last few (read: >5-7) years.
Pretty certain this is also incorrect.
My recollection seems to accord with the Wikipedia page on the history of the Safari browser which (although it doesn’t itemize the default StartPage for each version) doesn’t cite any inclusion of an AppStore link, as far as I can see.
I believe it is correct. It was back when we didn't call it a new tab page, but 'homepage' and it was set to an actual website.
Of course Safari defaulted to apple.com, what else was it supposed to default to?
I’m not sure how long they did that for, but like you said, what else were they supposed to do? It was a different time, homepages were treated differently.
about:blank until the user sets something else.
