Amelio, Raskin, Gassée On What Apple Means

John Paczkowski writes: "SiliconValley.com is currently hosting the third in its series of online Roundtable discussions. Our topic is 'Does Apple Matter?' and as you might imagine conversation has been quite spirited. Among our guests: Jean-Louis Gassée -- chairman and CEO of Be and former head of head of product development at Apple, former Apple chairman and CEO Gil Amelio, former Macintosh project manager Jef Raskin, and Mark Gonzales, a former senior Apple product manager who worked on the company's 'Star Trek' project. You'll find the introduction to the event here and the discussion itself here."

Comments

Innovation

[BWJones]

Many folks forget just how many things that Apple has contributed to the computer industry.

The home PC. Would it have happened? Yes, but Apple was there first with some innovations like built in video with color, built in BASIC etc.etc.etc... Apple was the first to offer color in the personal computer industry. And by the way Woz designed the whole damned thing. Apple I and Apple II........ himself. No engineering team needed until packaging and optimization were required.

The GUI thing has been hyped to death and yes I know that they bought the rights from Xerox. But what about the CD drive? Remember having to install applications using floppies? Hell, M$ office was a little skyscraper of floppies. Apple adopted the CD drive mechanism and ended up paying the cost via a lawsuit from Apple records claiming music infringement. And while we are on removeable media, Apple essentially standardized the little 3.25 in hard plastic floppy. Yes they were around, but nobody in the PC business was using them until Apple in the IIe and Lisa.

The first real portable computers. Yes I remember the Osborne. But at 50 pounds with a 4in screen I hardly call that portable. The Mac Portable was still 25 lbs but you could carry it on an airplane and fit it under the seat. However the first real portable that we consider being laptops was again Apple with the original Powerbook. This computer standardized the palm rests with they keyboard in front and the pointing device between the palm rests.

What about USB? Yes it is an Intel standard but nobody was really using it until Apple standardized it on the iMac. And what about Firewire? Again, Apple.

The PDA. The Newton was way ahead of its time, but would we have Palm Pilots without it? Probably not.

How about Colorsync? Thats color matching software for those that don't know. It was a bit of a stealth software package but many industries rely heavily on it.

Hey, BUILT IN NETWORKING!!!! Back in 1985 Apple started shipping systems with built in networking presaging the concept of networked computers and the Internet.

Apple was the first company to combine TV with a PC. Back in 1993? I think I can remember seeing MacintoshTVs in our campus bookstore. They were black. Pretty cool. This essentially is years ahead of where we will be in the next three years with TV and PC's.

Speaking of multimedia, Quicktime. Back in 91 I think, Apple comes out with this cool software that does it all. Video sound and other multimedia that is cross platform.

Plug and play. Apple was years ahead of anyone else here and they still are. Damn, remember all of those ISA bus conflicts and how hard they were if you happened to have two or three cards installed at the same time? Also Apple allowed any configuration to be done in software instead of cracking the case and playing with DIP switches.

Essentially fronting the development of the laser printer and making it practical. Apple funded Adobe to get their start and produce software to drive laser printers. Thus starting the whole desktop publishing industry.

Case design. I am not talking about iMac juicy goodness. I am talking practical case design to allow one easy access to the guts. The 8600 and 9600 models started this with easy open sides and flip apart cases that allowed easy access to memory and PCI cards.

We could go on and on here with past innovations, but is Apple still relevant and is the industry still following their lead? Yes. Apple is the first company to really take UNIX by the horns and make it a mainstream OS for the masses that still retains the power and flexibility of UNIX. This is huge. They are still driving engineering with Firewire (something the rest of the industry is now adopting. Even Intel) Quicktime has yet to reach its stride. Eventually it will become a platform of its own for the dissemination of media. M$ knows this, they know that Apple has better technology and it scares the piss out of them.

iMovie and iDVD are revolutionary in the power they give to the average consumer that never before was available unless you wanted to spend $5-10k on software and hardware. Now you can purchase an iMac for less than $1000 that will do this.

Apple was the first company to go to an all LCD line. We all knew this would happen, but Apple is again the first company with the balls to do it.

One has only to look at M$ in their software products. M$ Windows certainly owes much to Apple, but so does their bread and butter product Office. Apple fronted development of Excel for the Mac and Powerpoint from another company. Even today M$ borrows heavily from Apple in all of its software. Control panels, trash cans, in older software, newer software contains all sorts of appearance issues, interface issues and applications that can all be seen cropping up in XP and their product previews for after XP.

Again, we could go on and on here, and I have no idea why Apple does not spend any marketing efforts on showing the world how innovative they are, but as any individual or company that is truly innovative and running so far ahead of anyone else, they are busy doing the next big thing and not focusing on the past.

Does Apple still matter?

[DwarfGoanna]

Aside from playing R&D lab for the rest of the industry, and the fact that Apple stories here (a mainly Linux crowd) generate the interest that they do.......

I think one of the panel members summed it up best by saying something along the lines of... "If they didn't, why would we be talking about them?"

=)

IBook

[plastik55]

I love my new iBook. I spent a long time comparing specs on new laptops and came to the conclusion that the iBook packs the most features in for the least money.

I got mine with a DYD-ROM and 256MB of memory for $1500 -- I looked at what Sony and Compaq etc. had to offer, and the nearest offerings wre usually lacking something big (like, say, the CDROM) or had about 50% of the battery life (or, even worse, didn't mention the battery life at all.) I can watch two DVD movies on this, back to back, before the battery runs out.

It works well with Linux too. The hardware is almost entirely supported now. There's a preliminary sound driver, and a daemon for answering requests from the volume/screen brightness/eject CD buttons on the keyboard. Wireless networking is fully supported, and since the iBook has an antenna built in to the case, you'll get much more range than with a run-of-the-mill 802.11 card. Power management on Apple laptops under Linux is actually better supported with pmud than with the APM support on most other laptops. Hmm, what else... the latest XFree86 supports the ATI chip with DRI support, so the video is fast. Since it's a new machine, a lot of the drivers are floating around as kernel patches on linuxppc-dev, but I fully expect them to be rolled into benh's kernel tree in the next couple weeks.