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Apple, Scully, And Intel vs. Motorola
fsharp writes "I've heard too many comments suggesting that Apple should have moved to Intel (x86). The Register has an article exploring John Scully's recent comments about his failure to move the Mac to x86. Scully critiques his decisions based entirely on hindsight, and in doing so, identifies Dell as a the chief competitor and the way Apple could have slayed this evil dragon would have been to move to Intel early on in his tenure. Not so fast. Hindsight can be 20/20, however it can also be quite myopic if one suffers from selective memory. The article does a good job of examining the options available at the time when Apple rewrote the MacOS for the Intel x86. How safe a bet or great a risk would it have been for Apple to switch, given the quality of chips offered (at that time) from Intel?"
DO EET!
Apple has realised the dangers of x86, and so they leave that to the open source community. For example, the darwin kernel has been ported to x86. Another example is Apples involvement with KDE! Look at the changelogs and you will see a lot of apple developers.
Try the KDE 3.2 beta, its a lot easier to use and is definately a Windows replacement! EyeKandy, Shiny fonts, Reduction of K-names, Less buggy and can emulate MacOS X very easily, check kdelook to see screenshots of what it can do!
So, if you want apple on x86, go with linux! The days of crappy fonts, confusing interfaces and dependancy hell are long gone!
Sony has thrown away its opportunities in the portable media department because of bickering over DRM crap, while its competitors' iPods, TiVos, and portable video players take over this market.
Microsoft is getting the death by 1000 cuts from the rampant viruses, trojans, and security problems. They say security is job 1, but it's apparent that marketing is really still Job 1. Everything Microsoft must integrate with everything Microsoft because it keeps people tied to the platform. It also provides a nice pathway for malware to spread around when Outlook so nicely integrates with IE and Word, and they all share the virus infection.
Then there's Xbox and PS2. Microsoft's spat with nVidia and giving the Xbox2 contract to ATI is going to really hurt backward compatiblity. If the PS3 comes out with backward compatibility it will clean up. But both of them may piss people off by adding too many extra features, like video stuff with obnoxious DRM.