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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?"
It's a little late in the game for this kind of second guessing. I think what Apple needs to do NOW is to do the port, sell the software, and see where the market goes.
Apple should realise that how ever fast or powerful the G5 will be (yeah right), it needs to move over the dominant mainstream platform, that be x86. They should start making an x86 chip to open up the market more as well. And of course port MacOS X over to Intel, at which point I will buy that and move to MacOS X for ever and ever amen.
Dave Bell
Its killed KDE/LINUX!. Its fun to trick people into thinking I've got a macintosh!
All the Apps are there
Itunes = JuK
Safari = Konqueror
Finder = Konqueror
Dock = Kicker
Menubar = Kicker
bbedit = Kate
Quicktime = Kmplayer!
Appleworks = Koffice!
Had nothing to do with the processor architecture they chose to go with; that was nearly invisible to the end user, and the only things switching to x86 could possibly have helped with was possible binary compatibility with dos/windows, and better a better perception of performance in the mid to late 90s. Apple's key error (in hindsight) was the failure to commoditize their hardware at the right time, probably in the mid '80s, when apple had a reasonably useful graphical OS far more advanced than dos, an "OS" which could've been put together in a week by a competent hacker. Commoditization would've led to multiple manufacturers competing (and enlarging the market, with their advertising dollars) on costs and hardware features, rather than a lone company trying to maintain multiple product lines and losing focus in the process. Apple could've emerged as a really viable alternative to Microsoft, and could in fact be in the same position MS is in today (but with fewer security holes along the way, and a saner platform ;-). But I prefer apple the way it is now, fairly lean and mean and focused. I think there's a non-zero probability that the apple culture would've led to complete self-destruction beyond a certain company size. Sculley did an okay job considering his background, but he's a hypocrite (as is SJ) who has no real clue about technology, although he had a better grasp than Gil Amelio (read his autobiography, his "tech" comments are hilarious).
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
At the time that the Mac moved to PPC there is no way that Intel could have offered such a seamless transition. The ability of the PPC to emulate the 68k at good speed was what made the transition work. If Apple had tried to move to the x86 platform they would have lost a lot of customers with a big investment in software as the x86 could not emulate the 68k at usable speed.
Using an alternative archetecture has also allowed Apple to hold on to its uniqueness, which has in turn guarded it somewhat from fierce comparison to the x86 crowd.
No-one in the PC business saw Dell coming, if Apple had been just another x86 vendor with a nice OS they would be facing the same problems as HP, Compaq etc did when confronted by Dell's better supply chain model.
I think that Sculley is being remarkably revisionist in his views. The article points out a lot of the folly in his musings.
The G5 and the relationship with IBM is more than enough to now justify the choie of the PPC architecture.
I want to use these Mod points but I can't find anything Interesting, Informative or Insightful on Slashdot.
Document contains no data.
This is all so one-sided. Let's all talk instead about what would have happened, had Apple switched to the X86 architecture, shall we?
I think Apple would have lost control of their hardware, lost control of the drivers, and would be forced to give up, as their share of the marketplace dwindled. I think that without complete control over the peripherals, Apple would have had to negotiate with each hardware vendor, somehow coercing them into providing two driver sets, or making some sort of intermediary bytecode-like driver. Apple would slowly become Windows compatible. Windows would slowly evolve to run Mac software. Then Mac would be history, failing to compete in the price category. Apple would have to do just as much work as MS, but would sell 1/4 or less the number of copies. After a while we would have seen a true monopoly instead of a near-monopoly.
Discuss.
There's one HUGE obstacle they would have to overcome though, and that's hardware vendor support.
A hardware company chooses what OS they will release drivers for and as a result Apple would completely be at the mercy of companies that produce them.
If Apple ported to Intel it might help get users away from Windows. At the moment the only two OS's that most people know of are Windows and Apple. Apple also runs more of the apps (native) that most people (for some reason) need - photoshop & MS office. If people moved to OSX it would be less of a jump to go from there to another *nix OS like Linux.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Moving on to Intel hardware would have been the death of Apple... They should have move to *nix a bit sooner though!! Intel hardware may be cheaper (as there is more of it manufactured), but it is bulkier and much louder than the hardware made by apple. If I want a nice dual machine running linux and microsof office applications, which I can leave on overnight without keeping me awake, then I have only one real choice and that is apple. On the whole, apple hardware to me is the best thing about the machine. Now there is a decent OS running with thousands of apps available, I would find it hard to find a reason to by anything else. Johnny. P.s. I dont work for apple (unless they want to give me a job)
Right... now who was it that really pioneered the use of USB? Oh, that's right.... It was Apple.
"it's time they make the final leap and get out of the hardware business"
Hello!!!! How many times does it have to be said? Apple is a Hardware company if you don't want to invest in an Apple that's fine, but they are never going to try to be a software company only.
I want to use these Mod points but I can't find anything Interesting, Informative or Insightful on Slashdot.
No. You're only discussing about a 15 year old frame, here : if Microsoft had switched to 680x0 or to the PPC 10 to 15 years ago (or any other reason that would have made the motorola platform a more dominant one), then it would have been improved in the same way than the x86 did but it would also slow down after gaining a monopole.
Now, Apple is backed by IBM and they already got G4, then G5 to run on multi-processor consummer computers.
I guess, we're only in the beginning of this story and I consider the variety is what will keep our market evolving.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
it would be great to be able to try it, but I'm not going to dump $1500 or so for the priviledge of getting some overpriced, proprietary hardware platform.
How much have you dumped for the priviledge of running Windows so far?
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Whatever they decide, with the Windows world stalled until 2006, now's the time for the *NIX based solutions to make hay, whatever their CPU architecture of choice...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
This enables Apple to deliver a quality product without having to dedicate a massive amount of resources for development on "generic" platforms.
If Apple were to go the x86 route, they probably would create their own proprietary x86-based systems, and develop OSX to run on these systems only.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Agreed, and the related issue of a zillion different possible hardware combinations to be compatible with; but Linux shows us that it's possible to have a stable OS on generic hardware.
I think at least the big-name hardware vendors would develop OSX/x86 drivers; many already do for hardware that is compatible with both systems. You might not get it for every $15 widget out of Taiwan, but the decent graphics cards and such should be supported pretty quickly.
And I don't know if the OSX architecture supports it in a GPL-friendly way, but there are certainly plenty of open source drivers that could be ported, although this might interfere with the image of Apple boxes as easy to set up and use.
but I'm not going to dump $1500 or so for the priviledge of getting some overpriced, proprietary hardware platform
First off, the hardware is not proprietary. The BIOS, however, is.
Second, you can get a Mac for under $1000.
Lastly, Apple's profits are not from software sales. If they were to start licensing the BIOS out AND port OS X to x86, they'd be sunk. Go back and take a look at how hard Apple got hit the first time they tried licensing the BIOS. Think of how much worse it would be if they had x86 computer companies undercutting them, too. Apple's profits are more from hardware sales than anything else, which is why allowing the production of clones and porting OS X to the x86 makes TERRIBLE FISCAL SENSE.
If Apple supported the X86, it'd feel like the current PC OS's.. everything would be a driver issue. Not that OS X doesn't have a driver issue ever in its life, but it'd feel too much so. I like the fact that I can garantee that my mac works with OS X. The only external factors there are, are printers, wacom tablets and cameras (dv or still).
Anytime I've dealt with a PC OS, I've had to worry, will the sound work (onboard or not), will the ethernet card conflict with anything. Do I need to worry abot the video driver. I also don't have to worry about vendors writing their own drivers and breaking OS X.
With the two or three top of the line equpitment supported, plus their own line of peripherals, I think I'm quite happy. Am I disillusioned here?
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
I don't think that it would have been a very good move for Apple if they switched. It is like saying Sun should ignore their hardware developments and just rely upon x86 / commodity for everything.
It would have been difficult for Apple to maintain their quality control, especially when any Joe could have installed their OS. IIRC the article states that Apple would have become just another relatively small PC supplier and essentially just a competing OS company.
While a lot of Apple's decisions have seemed bizarre to the public, history has shown that they have something special (especially their HIG and provocative industrial design), and their ongoing relationship with Big Blue will be profitable for a long time. They haven't looked stronger than this for a long time, and are guaranteed of their future without needing to go x86 (although it took the G5, iMac, iTMS and iPod to do it).
Anybody saying that they should be going x86 is just pissing in the wind. If you don't like the Apple tax, don't pay it (although it doesn't really exist for comparable specs), but don't bleat about Apple not giving you beige box pricing, I don't hear anyone calling for Sun to sell their HD's for $100.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Wow! I bet if they had been smart like you suggest, they would be rivalling BeOS's market share today!
You sound like the perennial broken record that plays whenever this topic comes up. No, Apple hardware is not overpriced and is a good value proposition if you can afford it. Just because it's proprietary and not priced at rock bottom doesn't mean it bad. The opposite is true. Commodity hardware and OSes have given us Windows and PCs.
Contrary to what you say, it would be a mistake release OS X for x86. It would lose it's integration and ease of use which constitutes a large part of its value and it would send Apple broke. No-one has been able to make money against the Microsoft homogeny and you're suggesting that Apple dump their hardware and compete against a predatory monopoly. Pure genius, pal.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
If Apple would have changed to Intel in the late 80's, today it would most likely have evolved into yet another dull Dell competitor (pun intended), making generic PC clones. That is, if the company would have survived such a blow at all. (Consider for instance the fate of Be, Inc).
I think Sculley just proves how little he still understands about Apple and its customers, and the core values of the company. For those of you ancient enough to remember those days: Imagine the badwill among the late 80's Mac users if, all of a sudden, the Macintosh (essentially) would be changed into a customized PC! I, for one, would have cringed and squirmed in agony and pain...
(Today my opinion about a potential CPU switch may differ, but that's another discussion).
What is, is. Switching to x86 wouldn't have had me drooling of envy each and every time I see an iBook.
Or they could just die off, as they should have over a decade ago. 97% of the market share have spoken: "Apple, we don't need you, and we don't want you."
Anonymous Coward certainly is threatened by non-microsoft software. If google really is the measure of market share, it also suggests that you don't want any UNIX type system, either. We should get rid of those, too. After all, your ``market share'' research suggests nobody needs or wants UNIX systems, either.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
OS X=Frosting on cake.
Apple makes money by getting people to buy boxes with the highest profit margin in the PC industry. They do this by making them fairly tasty to a small group of folks with cash. So far, this has given them a 25 million user market, which is slowly expanding, though not at the rate that the X86 market is expanding. The thing is, it is still growing. Yes, their market share has dwindled, but the market has grown so large, it's not life threatning to them. Same thing goes for developers. It's argued that no one's going to want to develop for a platform with miniscule mindshare. Bullshit! How'd Linux happen, then? As long as there's even 100,000 Mac users, you're going to have developers. It's even more true, now, with OS X, as so much stuff is readily available for porting/compiling.
Even if Apple switched to X86, they would not go and step into the ring, going up against Microsoft and Dell. They'd have propietary logic boards/boxes that would keep people buying their stuff at premium prices. You'd never see OS X able to run on a Lindows machine.
A great example of what happens if you move into the X86 world is both BeOS and NeXT. They both started out making their Motorolla based machines, switched to X86 and then, when selling hardware didn't pan out, became software only companies, duking it out with MS. NeXT was smart enought to go and take over Apple, moving away from X86 while BeOS has whithered on the vine. Personally, I was hoping for Apple to bring BeOS in and use that as their new OS. That could have been interesting.
You can see a couple other hardware companies trying the X86 route as well; Sun and SGI. While they have slightly different market segments, they still face the problems of trying to make money off of software as opposed to hardware in X86 land.
I drank what? -- Socrates
- If Apple releases an x86 OS X, the chances are it will NOT be a product you can walk to the store, buy in a box, and install on your current PC. First off, the margins are relatively slim on software OSes. Apple hardware is so expensive BECAUSE it's subsidizing the production of OS X. To survive as software, Apple would have to charge prices people wouldn't pay for software. Much more importantly, though, the fact apple has a working "x86" OS X in the lab doesn't mean they have an x86 OS they can sell. The "PC" hardware world is simply massive. At the time Windows 95 was released, the press was saying that more than half the code in W95 was hardware compatibility. Apple does not have the resources to spend huge amounts of time supporting and debugging every sound card, video card, joystick card, etc, in the universe.
Moreover, once you have this x86 OS X, what will you run on it? All the OS X software in the world would have to be compiled specifically for your x86 OS. Apple would have to convince ALL its developers to recompile and spend forevermore having to clumsily offer dual downloads/distributions of EVERYTHING based on target chip. There goes a big portion of the "it just works"-ness of OS X. Moreover some developers might refuse to compile for OS X out of spite. Apple could alternately try to create some kind of wine-like layer to let os x/x86 run windows software, which would be extremely costly and take away most of the "mac experience" feel of using the OS.
- If Apple did release their x86 OS X, it would most likely just be the same as today-- premium boxes based on commodity PC hardware parts, but in a shiny apple-branded case and with a high price tag. The only reason for this would be if for some reason they could put PC hardware together so much cheaper than PPC hardware it would justify the difficult switchover. (It is unlikely the price savings would be THAT much.) That would be about the only difference. But if they did this, they lose almost all of their justification for CHARGING their high prices in the first place-- you're no longer buying some kind of "special" apple box, you're buying a PC that just happens to be more expensive because it has a shiny case and can run OS X. Since the boxes would still be expensive, this would mean that you would lose the ENTIRE thing that all of you PC people clamoring for an x86 OS X want [Mac OS X on a $500 computer].
- "But wait", you say, "if apple were selling x86 computers, they could open up the hardware for cloning, or people could build their own, thus meaning the prices would be cheap again!" Well, no. Apple can do this just as easily while still using the PPC. Moreover, Apple has tried this with the PPC already. It didn't work. The other clone vendors, not having to use their money on R&D and developing the Mac OS, undercut Apple's prices and took away all of Apple's sales in the high-end, high-margin area. Apple lost a lot of money during the cloning experiment.
Apple is making money with their current scheme. It is questionable whether Apple could make money after changing the scheme to "something x86-based". The only x86 strategy that would significantly make more money than Apple's current strategy would be selling boxed OSes, which would be risky since it would require apple to drop their per-sale margins and spend massive amounts of time and resources on supporting the myriad of x86 hardware.It isn't going to happen.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...makes for boring OS-X files.
Hahahahaha I'll be here all week.
I wrote a long comment explaining that it was at the time and still is a bad idea to go with x86 becuase with x86 you have a certain amount of chip-vendor lockin, meaning if Apple suddenly has to change from Intel to AMD, or something, and still retain its special aspects to its chips (Altivec, etc) it's moving to a chip that has the same instruction set but no other similarities, thus making the changeover very difficult. Meanwhile, with PPC, Apple partially owns the patent pool, and so they are able to pick up their designs and move to another manufacturer. Note that once Apple chose to give up on the increasing disaster that was Motorola's PPC production, they were able to switch to IBM relatively swiftly.
I tried to post this comment about like four times, and every time comments.pl timed out on me. So use your imagination and pretend that the above post was much more erudite and detailed.
Good lord, what is happening tonight? I feel like I'm on kuro5hin.
Either way, it is at least somewhat beneficial for Apple-- being a dual hardware/software company-- to be using a microchip that they have some direct control over, such as the PPC.
No. There is no BIOS. Macs use Open Firmware, which is (you've guessed it) open. The motherboard, however, is proprietory, which is one of the reasons why you can't build your own Mac.
He didn't say that Apple wrote the standard, he said Apple pioneered the use of USB. Are you even aware of what happened at the time? USB was languishing in PC land, because every system had both USB & legacy connections, so no one migrated. Apple converted wholesale -- completely removing support for all legacy ports and switching entirely to USB. It forced the issue. At the time, I was quite furious with Apple. It was, again, Jobs making decisions for everyone else, and too damn bad if you had to re-buy every peripheral you had accumulated. But it was that very thing that caused USB to take off -- manufacturers scrambled to create USB mice and keyboards and other items that Mac users suddenly began demanding.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Yes, and also, I think one of the reasons macs in general work so well is that there's only a limited number of hardware platforms available. Sure, you can add graphics cards and stuff, but it's still not the jungle of different motherboards and CPUs that the PC industry has to face. I'm impressed Windows works as well as it does.
Martin
..to have had the Mac o/s on a PC in the late 80's, if you remember what a mess MS got into (whats new eh) with OS/2 & then the long delay before Win4.0/95.. I think it could have worked too, especially if it had some sort of DOS emulation, running win apps would have been less important. Mind you, the 486's were crappy compared to RISC, which did seem to be the future at the time.
Other wishes?
The Amiga O/S on the PC in the late 80's.. (with optional plug in vid board)
I brought one of the first books on 68000 asm in around 1980/81 - I wish the guys designing the first IBM PC had done the same!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
In 5 years Apple will be primarily a music sales company anyway, with their mildly successful niche computer/OS sales department just kind of chugging along as it always has in the background..
just use darwin, you get the OS, just lacking the GUI and all those cool apps
It's quite easy to write about a strategic subject after the battle, but as far as I can see, Apple has handled the situation with a visionary approach: don't use Intel but use standard components (IDE/PCI/RAM...).
The point is to use good and cheap components, simple and build on order product lines, and to avoid competitors. Apple decided to avoid competitors with a dedicated architecture (PowerPC, dedicated hardware+software) and Dell decided to avoid competitors with obsessive efficiency and speed.
Let's see the result now: we meet two companies working well (I mean earning some pennies) in the "PC" business. Both are improving their product lines with inexpensive (eMac, iBook, Axim, 1U servers, etc.) and top performance (G5, Precision 650) offers.
The strange experience I did recently was to compare some Dell & Apple products for my personal wish list: a solid desktop for development/office tasks, able to handle some multimedia for free-time and a laptop for mobility (web surfing/ messaging/ coding) and audio connection. Basically the performances where close, prices were really close (+/-10% max on both sides) and the differences were on accessories (nice looking good LCD screen or basic one, RAM, disks, all of them compatible with competitors).
I'll certainly choose Apple because of the nice looking/ well assembled machines and because I haven't got to choose between Linux and XP as best of both is integrated in MacOS 10 (plus some little more, thanks to integration).
That leads me to a simple conclusion: these two companies have made a similar good choices which are not at all in the Intel vs PowerPC discussion but standard components choice, build on order based on the client needs, firmly choose an OS and some markets to work on. This leads to a similar result: two companies doing well in the business with satisfied customers.
ClaudeBBG
All this talk about Apple moving to Intel architecture neglects the most important current fact: As of right now, Apple has the best hardware. The Dual G5 has the best bus, the fastest interconnects, the best peripheral support and the best (in my opinion) Operating System.
Why would Apple be interested in an endeavor that guarantees massive headaches (heterogenous hardware support), sends a mixed signal to the marketplace (about which platform is better) in order to run their OS on a platform that would have no (ZERO, NADA) application support for years and, again, would run slower than what is currently shipping from Apple?
This whole article seems like FUD to try to cloud the issue (that Apple has surpassed WinTel) to me.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
As Feynman says and Dell shows, here's always room at the bottom. As the existence of Apple shows, there usually is room at the top, too. In between, that's where the crowd is. To move to an intel platform is not the issue for Apple, and it never was. Not becoming just part of the crowd when doing so is.
Look at SUN. They made the best machines you could buy for internet applications at a time back in the nineties, and charged you a lot of money for it. Today the rest of the world has caught up, we all stack our racks with linux pizzaboxen now, and SUN is in trouble. The company has to decide: is SUN a hardware company? that would mean investing a lot in the development of SPARC, killing the Solaris x86 line and fighting Linux, or move entirely to Intel, giving up software development altogether and become like Mike. Or is SUN a software company? that would mean cancelling further SPARC development and concentrating on Solaris and Java. Eventually, this would kill SPARC.
Strengthening the hardware section in SUN would hurt the software guys, and beefing up the software department could easily hurt the hardware sales. Not a good strategic position. Apple could easily be (or have been) caught in the same situation. To compete with Dell you have to become like Dell. If you don't want to do this, you must find a different market for yourself. Or be just part of the crowd.
I'm not going to dump $1500 or so for the priviledge of getting some overpriced, proprietary hardware platform.
... and all the reasons for running Linux (open source tools) are just as valid now under OSX, so ...
I did. And I do not regret it. I've been a computer-user since the 70's, and as far as I'm concerned this tiBook has been the best computer I've ever invested in, and I've owned many. I've gotten more done with this than I ever did with a PC, I've had *NO* virus problems, no crashes (really, not a single system-failure type crash in the 3 years I've had it), and it has been around the world with me, twice, and still keeps on running.
I had to work on PC hardware today for a few hours. Man, I'm so sick of having to deal with PC hardware problems.
Just give me a machine that works, a decent operating system, and get out of the way. Thank you, Apple.
That said, if I could find an Intel laptop with the same design as a tiBook, I'd probably run Linux or FreeBSD on it - but, frankly, I doubt it would be more cost effective to do so than just upgrading to a newer 17" alBook
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Only unethical, leacherous scum use pirated software running Windows Products.
Run Linux and preserve your ethics, if you have any.
In all however, OS X and Apple Hardware is second to none.
Read what Panther OS X 10.3 comes built-in and tell me if Windows XP offers the same experience, out of the box.
They could have even built binaries that ran across both platforms without recompiling.
Fat binaries, anyone? This already didn't work for NeXT.
I'm an Apple customer, and if they move to Intel, I won't be.
... well, maybe XScale, but there ya go ...
...
I'm much, much happier writing code for the G5 than I am for anything that Intel has put out
The x86 architecture is a dog. Total and utter dog. There are far better CPU's out there for new applications to be written on
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I don't think nearly anyone doubts that OSX is a nicer os than windows xp. I think the real issue is that Apple makes their money on hardware, not software.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
After reading yet another "How John Sculley fucked up" article I feel I can say few things. The first is that the board of Pepsi is, with the same hindsight that John Sculley now has, probably enormously glad that he buggered off to Apple in the 80's and didn't stay at Pepsi where they would have had to fire him a few years later for plain apocryphal business decision making.
Because John Sculley, with his wonderful hindsight, still doesn't "get it" and that says a lot about him. His absolutely idiotic remarks about Apple moving to x86 are worth less today than they were when Apple had actually ported Mac OS to x86 in a project called "Startrek" in 1994, only to call it off at the last moment.
The Brand is everything with Apple. Check it out. Go to the website, go to an Applestore. The design of the hardware, the design of the software, the design of Steve Jobs' stage appearances, the design of the Website, the design of the Apple store, everything is made to fit into the brand. There is practically NO other company that does this as well as Apple. No one. Nada. Zilch. Or why do you think that mac OSX doesn't have themes and skins as part of the basic OS? (Yes, I know that 3rd party people make skins, but they are not endorsed or supported by Apple)
I hate car analogies, but in terms of branding, Apple is the BMW of computing. The designs are timeless in a way that makes my 4 year old Lombard Powerbook as interesting to look at as my 2 year old Titanium Powerbook (Ever notice that Apple used two shades and textures of black plastic in the Lombard/Pismo design?). It's a design that makes a 4 year old B&W Tower interesting and a design that makes you stop and stare when you see a G5 from the outside as well as the inside.
It's something that "cheap and ugly as you can be as long as it's fast" tech nuts and ex executives of bottled sugar water don't "get".
Technically, it would have all been possible, and in 1990 Apple stood a good chance of beating Microsoft at its own game as all the graphical applications would have been forced to move over to x86 along with Apple, and Mac OS 7 was way better than Windows 3.0, but by 1994, when the "Startrek" project was underway, it was already too late. Apple had gotten lost in the future OS dealings with Taligent, Pink, Starttrek and the miserable Copland effort.
Buying NeXT was the best thing NeXT (excuse the pun) ever did. And while the clones being lost was sad. Apple would not have been able to turn its business around with the clone competition. It would have diluted the Brand, which was something that Jobs understood correctly in doing.
Today Apple could in no way switch again. They came very close to losing Adobe and Macromedia with the switch to OSX and would almost certainly lose them if they switched to x86 (or Itanium or Opteron or whatever). Those applications are part of Apple's bread and butter business and Apple knows it. But the G5 and the coming G3 with Altivec look good for the near future despite or because of Intel vapourware announcements to scare of opteron customers.
Joel Spolksy has some articles on why Microsoft succeeded. In most cases, MS simply did nothing stupid while its competitors committed corporate suicide. Hiring someone like Scully who even now doesn't "get it" was Apple throwing away its soul and it did come close to being the death of the company.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
While Apple could conceivably make x86 hardware that only ran OSX due to proprietry firmware etc, which they would have to do because they make the bulk of their money with hardware, the real problem lies with software. Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, Oracle, Sybase, Digidesign amongst others would not switch again after taking years to switch to Mac OSX, and would more than likely simply abandon the market. That would leave Apple with a fantastic OS with almost no software, and I assume you can imagine what that would do to Apple's bottom line.
Be tried this very thing with BeOS, which by all accounts was far superior to NT back in the late 90's. Microsoft fucked them at every corner and where is Be today, a passing note on slashdot and a website selling an OS with no software.
Unless I've got the wrong end of the stick, Motorola has been Apple's number one pain in the arse. Motorola: American company. Other pains in the backside for Apple have come from Microsoft (Windows, troubles with Mac versions of Office.) What is the Japanese problem you refer to? I'm not very up on my Apple history so I'd be interested to know.
You can get a new eMac for $799. These are like the original iMacs, but with a G4 and a 17" CRT monitor. Maybe $500 used. Or get a used G4 tower for a few hundred and share your existing monitor.
... if I could find an Intel laptop with the same design as a tiBook, I'd probably run Linux or FreeBSD on it... try take a look at : THIS. It's a beast, and its insanely expensive, but thats as close as you get ;-)
I had a friend in school that has successfully ported osx to x86. It looked horrible (no proper video drivers) and next to none of his hardware worked. His mouse actually work though. I didn't believe it untill I saw the internals of his machine (PIII IIRC) but it would not run on any other machine. Maybe he was lucky, maybe its just the way he compiled it. I am still trying to figure out how he got the source, he claims he decompiled it. It can be done, but only mac could do it right. It would be cool, I would most definately give it a try.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
This is why Dell can outperform its competitors: because competitors cannot really match its business processes. It's yet another example of how such patents harm competition. And, you already know, most of those patents are for things that would be considered obvious to a moron who is deaf, blind, and dead for decades.
Apple had gotten lost in the future OS dealings with Taligent, Pink, Starttrek and the miserable Copland effort.
Copland wasn't that bad. OK, so it wasn't the second coming of Christ but it's probably Sylvester Stallone's best movie since Rocky and it's got some great performances by an awesome cast - Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, John Spencer, etc.
Definitely worth two hours of your time.
Huh? Whatcha mean that's not what you meant? You did say Copland, didn't you? D'oh!
Oh, and by the way, how is it you can say that Apple is all about the brand and not realise that Pepsi (where Jobs hired Sculley from)is too? What the hell are colas and other soft drinks all about then?
Heck, if there's one industry where branding is the only thing that matters to the marketing guys and the execs it's soft drinks! D'oh again!
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Selected quotes from a confidential memorandum from Bill Gates to John Scully of Apple dated June 25, 1985.
Source: Wired Magazine, November 1997, page 126-128.
A memo on "Apple Licensing of Mac Technology."
Apple's stated position in personal computer is innovative technology leader. This position implies that Apple must create a standard on new, advanced technology. They must establish a "revolutionary" architecture, which necessarily implies new development incompatible with existing architectures.
Apple must make Macintosh a standard. But no personal computer company, not even IBM, can create a standard without independent support. Even though Apple realized this, they have not been able to gain the independent support required to be perceived as a standard.
The significant investment (especially independent support) in a "standard personal computer" results in an incredible momentum for its architecture. Specifically, the IBM PC architecture continues to receive huge investment and gains additional momentum [...] The investment in the IBM architecture includes development of differentiated compatibles, software, and peripherals; user and sales channel education; and most importantly, attitudes and perceptions that are not easily changed.
Any deficiencies in the IBM architecture are quickly eliminated by independent support [...] The closed architecture prevents similar independent investment in the Macintosh. The IBM architecture, when compared to the Macintosh, probably has more than 100 times the engineering resources applied to it when investment of compatible manufacturers is included. The ratio becomes even greater when the manufacturers of expansion cards are included.
Conclusion:
As the independent investment in a "standard" architecture grows, so does the momentum for that architecture. The industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers. Thus APPLE MUST OPEN THE MACINTOSH ARCHITECTURE TO HAVE THE INDEPENDENT SUPPORT REQUIRED TO GAIN MOMENTUM AND ESTABLISH A STANDARD. [emphasis mine]
The Mac has not become a standard:
The Macintosh has failed to attain the critical mass necessary for the technology to be considered a long term contender.
[...]
Recommendation:
Apple should license Macintosh technology to 3-5 significant manufacturers for the development of "Mac Compatibles".
US manufacturers and contacts: ideal companies - in addition to credibility, they have large account sales force that can establish the Mac architecture in larger companies:
- AT&T, James Edwards - Wang, An Wang - Digital Equipment Corporation, Ken Olsen - Texas Instruments, Jerry Junkins - Hewlett Packard, John Young
Other companies:
[ list of companies and contact names deleted ]
Apple should license the Macintosh technology to US and European companies in a way that allows them to go to other companies for manufacturing. Sony, Kyocera [...] are good candidates for OEM manufacturing of Mac compatibles.
MICROSOFT IS VERY WILLING TO HELP APPLE IMPLEMENT THIS STRATEGY. We are familiar with the key manufacturers, their strategies and strengths. We also have a great deal of experience in OEMing system software.
Rationale:
1. The companies that license Mac technology would add credibility to the Macintosh architecture.
2. These companies would broaden the available product offerings through their "Mac-compatible" product lines:
- They would each innovate and add features to the basic systems [...]
-
and they seem to have their hands full keeping the quality level up just supporting their chosen subset of hardware. When they have a major change there are still things that were apple approved that don't make it into the new way of doing things (scsi cards that shipped with the machines from apple that worked under 9 but were more trouble than they were worth trying to get them to work under OS X,the first g3 powerbook not getting OS X support, the (temporary) problems with cd-burners in the early versions of OS X, etc etc) there are a lot of ducks that they have to keep in a row as it is and they handle it with less grace than we'd like sometimes. So i'm glad they didn't try to further over extend themselves. The close match between the OS and their chosen hardware is one of the things that makes it worth my while to bother with using a propretary platform like apple.
Interestly enough, the reason IBM canned the personal powerpc systems was that OS2 for PPC completely blew its schedule several times over. IBM had a personal AIX edition for PPC ready but chose not to go with that. The reason. Unix would never make it as a mainstream operating system for PCs.
Ever heard about compilers? Some say those are great to write architecture independant code....
What is the thing about calling Macs overpriced? I don't own a Mac, but go to dell.com and spec out a PC similar to a Mac G5. The price will be pretty close to what the Mac costs.
Yes, you can get a PC for $299. Yes, you can build one yourself for not much money. But once you get into the corporate, workstation-quality and performance area, the prices are very similar.
Personally, I dislike the Dell machine I have to use at work. The build quality is pretty poor - my CD drive has died, the keyboard/mouse are poor quality. The IDE cable popped out of the CD drive in the machine on the next desk because it wasn't quite long enough.
...but a real Mac still looks much nicer, as demonstrated here.
Hail to the thief, indeed.
They don't need Opteron. They have the 64-bit RISC PowerPC G5 which is backwards compatible with all Mac software since 1996. Why change binary architectures when you don't have to?
Stick Men
Really!
For me Apple has the best hardware, best designs, best OS.
This won't be true anymore if they have to deal with every x86 hardware. And I prefer they tweak the OS for a few hardware configs (including mine) than spend their time working on configs I don't even care of. Plus, PPC is better. We forgot that because of Motorola but IBM will remind it to us, starting now.
And even if Apple have to go x86 one day, i'm sure they won't make Os X (or XI, XII...) open to every hardware.
They are an hardware vendor first!
One thing I really don't understand is why everybody always forget that Apple IS profitable?
They have to increase their market share a little, not change everything. And that's what they are doing now.
Have you really looked at a G5 or a PowerBook? Why would we want something else to put OS X on? "Cause it's cheaper"? Is that it? Won't you ever understand that you DON'T have a Porsche for the price of a Nissan? And i know that some Nissans can be faster (or whatever) than Porsches, so what?
If you want one and don't have enough money to buy a mac, find a good job or steal it. And if you don't like macs or don't want to spend that money, or think that Apple should blah blah blah: Why don't you leave us alone? Use you ugly OS on your ugly box and LEAVE US ALONE!
You know, you can buy a supercomputer that's even faster than a G5, and even more expensive too!
Until Apple can release decent spec machines at vaguely realistic prices there is no merit whatsoever in the claim that "Apple has surpassed WinTel". At the moment here in Australia I could buy 4 or 5 very quick AMD based boxes for the price of one shiny metal G5, and I am guessing the situation is the same in the US.
I am no Intel/Windows apologist - I have been itching to buy an Apple for a couple of years now. Sadly, there's just no way I can justify springing A$3000 for the equivalent of an A$1500 PC.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is - even if the current Apple lineup is 'faster' (whatever that means) that the Intel crop, (a) it won't last longer than 6 months tops before Intel and AMD have shot past again and (b) I'm sure if Intel and AMD produced hardware aimed at the same prince-point as Apple it would be twice as quick. Fortunately for their stockholders they prefer to aim at the price-point that people are actually going to buy products at.
Read Pynchon.
Of course, everything you say is pure speculation and Apple could do quite the opposite.
.mac and iCal en masse.
They could not realistically hope to do anything worthwhile in the x86 market without giving people who *already own computers* the chance to 'switch.' If they somehow linked it to proprietary hardware they would just get the same customers they already have taking advantage of the cheaper systems - and they ain't making a lot of money right now. The other market segment they might get with this kind of move would be Linux users who want Darwin - again, not exactly making inroads into mainstream desktop computing. Ergo, Apple will probably NOT do what you suggest.
What I want to know is: is Apple ready for the kind of hardcore piracy that x86 software developers have become used to battling? I predict that the day an OSX port hits the market it would become one of the most pirated pieces of software in history.
Furthermore, is Apple ready for a more anonymous, amorphous, cantakerous group of users than it has ever experienced? Whereas us Windows users rebel violently against Microsoft's every attempt to integrate its software with on-line services of various kinds, as far as I can tell Apple fanboys and fangirls are frantically lining up for
Well, time will tell.
Read Pynchon.
Amazing notebooks, it's true.
Unfortunately go-l seems to be all a hoax.
But a pretty good one.
You know, you can buy a supercomputer that's even faster than a G5, and even more expensive too!
Interesting that you mention this, because I am currently examining that. I have a rack of 6 dual-P3s that range from 800mhz to 1ghz. I have structured that rack into a cluster that does genetic algorithm / genetic programming processing in Java.
I am a Linux guy, generally, but like the polish of "OS X" on the desktop, so I bought one of the new G5s as a development platform. Last week, I did a test run on my G5 and discovered something I did not expect; The dual G5 ran generations faster than my cluster!!!
This is no-bullshit, for real. I am not making this up. The rack was taking 20-30 seconds per generation (with a total of 6 machines and 10 processors, each running 800mhz-1ghz). The G5 was processing generations in 17seconds. Granted, the P3s in the rack are not the newest intel Xenons or anything and the G5 does not have to go through the overhead of distributing work and collecting results, nevertheless, the results took me by surprise.
I am running on Panther (7B85), if that makes a difference to anyone (it is much faster than 10.2.8). After seeing this and scratching my head about it, I certainly came to understand VT's decision much better.
This is directly relevant to your comment, BTW. Certainly a rack of Xenons would tear the 17second number to peices, but each Xenon is the same or higher price than a G5, so we can't really do that comparison.
The rack of lower-price intel commodity hardware just doesn't cut it.
Interesting comparison. What networking infrastructure is there between the intel hardware? And how is the work distributed? I've done a fair bit of distributed/parallel computing and the differences you can get out of a set of hardware by changing the structure is unbelievable. Likewise, what is the memory speed, bus speed and hard disk speed in the P3 set up? IO costs alone on that number of machines might cause them to get slaughtered.
:)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it is possible that a bunch of dirt cheap AMD's with Gigabit LAN, fast HDDs and high-speed memory subsystems would do a *lot* better.
Plus let us not forget the principle that having a whole pile of really big computers is obviously way cooler in terms of geek chic than having some fancy pants little silver box on your desk
Read Pynchon.
Like the grandparent poster said:
"only fools and businesses pay for Microsoft software."
I don't think it would be so nice..
NEY it's Sculley and not Scully..
dREI
The only reason why people want them to switch is the hopeful idea that the prices for their machines will be cheaper then their current cost with the G4/G5 procesors.
But would it? Why would it be cheaper? Who's to say that Apple wouldn't use their own BIOS, so you can't use/make a hombrew clone, and that they wouldn't tack on their "Apple Surcharge" because this is apple h/w?
Now, the reason that Apple considers switching, IMHO, is two-fold:
1. the promise of expanded marketshare
2. they currently have OS X working on Intel already w/ limited driver (er extranous hardware) support.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
One reason I like Apple's products is the fact they aren't x86. x86 is very behind the times when compared to the PowerPC architecture. Especially considering Intel's efforts to butcher design principles to get higher and ultimately meaningless clock speeds. There is no doubt in my mind that what Apple has now is superior. No reason to fuck that up.
Furthermore, if Apple made "the switch", they would really become very disinteresting from a layman's point of view. Having an x86 processor means they are just another PC, possibly with some cooler bells and whistles. The perception that they use certain technology because of good engineering decisions would vanish despite all other efforts.
Of course, Apple knows this. I think we can safely say it won't be doing anything this foolish, especially considering the cheap fabrication costs of the G5 and the fact that chip blows away the competition.
Join Tor today!
You're forgetting the third way Apple could do itself a favour. They could open source Aqua. Imagine the possibilities: 1. I'm pretty sure that a project would have Aqua running on Linux or FreeBSD in a few months. In the meantime, Apple gets free development and bugfixes for Aqua, and when it's finished, we get the modern, excellent X Windows replacement (with a backwards compatible rootless X Server) people have been wanting for years and years. 2. Apple can still sell their own hardware, and they can limit key products like iTunes to PPC binary. This way, they don't loose out to comoditised x86 boxes. 3. Microsoft won't be pissed and stop producing Mac Office (which is important to a lot of people on the Mac), because again they can just produce PPC binaries instead of x86 binaries. Instead we get OpenOffice.org for Aqua (hopefully faster after they dump the horrendous toolkit they're using now).
I mentioned that I hate analogies, and I meant it. It's the first time I've ever used it with respect to Apple, and I meant it soley with respect to branding, not as regards technical specifications. But whatever...
I'm not some luddite, who is overburdened with the concept of having to use a computer. I was until recently a sysadmin in a mixed Windows and Novell shop, and have done my time as a web developer as well as just about everything else in between. I actually quite like Windows XP, but I abhor the manic control that Microsoft has, and dual booting with Linux or running VMware is not what I want. I get a lot of value out of my two Mac machines, both of which I use, and will not sell unless absolutely necessary.
Of those things of value that I get are computers with considerably higher resale value (if I were to resell them) than comparitively aged x86 Laptops, and an open OS with all the tools available to Linux and a free IDE and development environment that would cost me as much as the whole OSX itself, if I were to buy it on Windows.
That's my value.
As for porting to OSX, it would kill Apple's hardware market, because people like you wouldn't buy into it I assume, as you don't buy into it now. Apple subsidises its OS through hardware sales. There would also be no software available (for all your talk about using OSX, would you do it if you couldn't game or run Office?) and no drivers.
Apple would be gone in three years at the most.
I say it's better the way it is.
Hindsight is not always 20/20. Some people still don't see well, even in retrospect.
Because of the restrictions placed on PC vendors by Microsoft it was almost inevitable that a company like Dell would appear. Few options were available to vendors. They could innovate on form factor. But the corporate world sees that as just fluff. They could innovate on peripherals. But that doesn't do much to sell PCs. Or, they could innovate in the area of business processes. That's what Dell did and it has worked well for them.
The only way Apple could have competed with Dell would have been to get into the corporate space. People eventually just wanted the same machine at home as at work. Switching to Intel processors would not have helped. There were other factors involved.
Yeah, some people still don't "get it"
This is false. Apple's product is NOT OsX. Apple's product is the Apple computer. One must take the systemic approach with this. An "Apple Computer" is more than the sum of its parts (design, hardware, os, etc). Apple claims that "the Apple Computer" is superior to the wintel combo. OsX probably is a better Os than Windows, but to experience it, you need the whole thing. I'm betting that a good part of "just works" is the issue-free hardware. How hard is to test 30 HW configurations for "just works"?
Nah! It would be useless; applications would still need to be ported to the Apple toolkit and system libs. Take linux/FreeBSD and MS, they all run the same CPUs but good luck running programs across platforms ;-) No, Apple needs to push their platform out of the niche they escaped to in the System N days. Get high profile engineering/science sw to Os X: EDA, CAD, simulators... workstation markets are essentially left to windows and although linux is growing, it's not at the same rate (boh, I wonder why... probably computer science isn't a prerequisite...) I'm thinking: matlab/simulink, labview, spice, fpga tools, autocad, etc... many already run RedHat and some even link against TT-Qt. When facing the risk of dodgy security destroying weeks worth of work would you jump ship? Yeah, I bet you'd do if your tools were available. Apple should offer these developers active support (hell, subsidize the port!) although DeveloperTools are already offered for free it doesn't seem to be enough... pay for the developer, walk them through the port process. Next keynote I'd like to see fpga synthesis shootouts: blazing Dell Vs. whisper cool G5.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
"I am Locutus of Borg, resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over."
Anonymous Coward - if Apple were to die, as you so eloquently stated (/sarcasm), who would be left for Microsoft to copy? Hmmmm? No answer? Didn't think so.
As a user of both platforms, I for one, am glad that there IS a platform choice.
Bob
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
I agree, it is impressive.
I wonder if anyone's done a serious test to see, for example, what is the best number crunching performance you can get for $6000. I guess the intricacies of setting up a distributed system would be rather prohibitive. It would also be cool to see how different types of application would go - even though overall the memory would be slower on the P3s there would be a heck of a lot of cache if you add it all together, which counts for something.
Blades would be nice... plus your geek-cool would be through the roof with those things. Nice to see IBM still making serious computers IMHO, evil super-corporation or not.
Read Pynchon.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It's a good thing for x86 users that Apple, IBM, and Motorola got together to produce the PowerPC architecture. At the time Apple was looking for a new chip, the x86 architecture was looking pretty weak. PowerPC, on the other hand, held lots of promise for huge speed increases far into the future.
Had Apple chosen to go with x86, the fire under Intel's ass that was and is PowerPC would never have been lit.
In the years since the introduction of the PowerPC 601, Intel and AMD have both shown themselves to be intense and thoroughly competent competitors. Motorola, on the other hand, seems to have taken its eye off the ball a little too often, and it's a good thing for the PowerPC users among us that IBM has stepped in with some serious innovation.
Both sides should remember this, however: if Intel and AMD could transmogrify the ugly x86 line into the computational powerhouse that it is today, there's no reason that IBM and maybe even Motorola can't continue to make huge improvements in the PowerPC architecture. There's also no reason that Intel and AMD can't do it again.
For all practical purposes, when NeXT was bought by Apple, they came in and soon changed the way Apple was doing things. Job pretty much forced Amelio out and brought in his tech people. Yes, it's still Apple, with NeXT running things.
I drank what? -- Socrates
With the iTunes Music Store about to come to Windows, and the iPod already working well there, I'd say Apple has already successfully entered the Windows market by doing an end run around Microsoft. They've found a way to make money from Windows users -- first with hardware (iPod), then software (iTunes) -- without taking any Windows marketshare at all.
Replacing Windows with OS X is a big change for any computer user. Adding an iPod and iTunes to Windows is much, much easier. They don't have to beat Microsoft to make money.
in late 2000 when Motorola was beginning to show how they were going to fuck up G4 production in the future
Let me channel text from Apple Recon from that period:
Jobs had a meeting at Motorola. Topic of discussion was the 'working relationship'.
Jobs had cancelled the Mac clones. This meant that Motorola has lost 87 million dollars directly in the shutdown of the clone line. In addition to screwing up the %age of PPC chips that would be produced and put into general purpose computers.
Instead of the over 15%, Motorola was left with 5% of the chip volume going to Apple. Motorola execs were not happy. Jobs response? 'It will be great in 2 years when we won't be using you!' (Remember, at this time there was: Blue Box - Mac OS 6-7-8 API Yellow Box - The NeXTSTEP API Red Box - NeXTSTEP still on Intel) Sometime after this meeting, Red Box was 'quietly' dropped. And Motorola - they ended up introducing 'altavec'(sp) op codes. Ever look at those Op codes? They are more DSP centric than general purpose computing centric. And Apple 'hyped' them as a 'feature' - like killing Red Box the hyping was to attempt to smooth over things with Motorola.
Meanwhile, the comment 'in 2 years we are dropping you' stayed with Motorola, and they positioned the chip to work better in the remaining 95% of the market. Why should have Motorola spent time in improving the chip for a customer who was going to leave?
Thus Jobs's hot headded comment to Motorola cost Apple PPC preformance and Apple had to kill the promised public continuation of the NeXTSTEP product on X86.
Most of the 'Apple zealots' forget Jobs's meeting with Motorola.
It would be child's play for Apple to switch today, now they have a fully portable O/S which already runs on x86... Plus it makes sense for reasons of market segmentation, especially to maintain profit margins on the consumer level gear.
It never did make sense to me to have the same expensive CPU in your grandma's (i|e)Mac as in a high-end G5 production workstation. The pro equipment would use the 64-bit PowerPC while the consumer price-sensitive models could switch to cheap AMD/Intel chips to maintain profit margins. Surely I'm not the only one who sees the sense in that?
It especially puzzled me why Apple didn't flirt with x86 architecture during the agonising wait for PowerPC to catch up performance-wise.
you had me at #!
Sometimes, hindsight is a lot less than 20:20. It is worth noting that a bunch of companies tried to compete directly with MS for the windowing operating-system market. Do you even remember their names? I had to look them up: VisiOn, GEM, DesqView. But MS had the inside track, because it controlled DOS. Even IBM tried to challenge MS, with OS/2 Warp, and failed. Whatevery else you might say about Bill Gates, when it comes to business maneuvering he really has no peer. Witness the way Gates tricked Steve Jobs into licensing to MS the "signature" features of the MacOS.
Except, of course, that Apple's current chips are speed-competitive with top-of-the-line x86 chips, so there's no reason why MacOS would run any better or faster.
I have one quibble with this - is the x86 market still expanding? In the developing world, I suspect pretty much everyone who needs a computer already has one, and unless they do video or games their raw hardware is fast enough for what they do (word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing).
If this is true, then what we're left with is competition of style (ease of use, fit and finish) versus externalities (compatibility with the rest of the universe). If there's any justice, Apple ought to continue to grow.
Though I hope they don't "win" - a monopoly Apple would probably become just as fat, lazy, and obnoxious as Microsoft.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Isn't that just an alienware re-branded?
...
I dunno, I don't think this would swing me towards x86, I've still got my eye on the top of the line 17" alBook
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
There are some OSS apps that I used to like, from back in the 1996-98 era of Linux and OSS.
But some of them have been taken over by one borg or the other. Some got swallowed up by Gnome,and some by KDE. In most instances, the nice stand-alone apps that I remember have a K or a G prepended on them, and the dependencies to build them now require all kinds of bloat crap. There was an audio recording package that I used to like. Now, in order to build it on NetBSD you've got to first have fucking KDE Games installed.
It's annoying as hell, although I guess the people who work on a project own that project and can wander off wherever they want.
Projects used to have seperate, independent websites. Now it's all been sucked into a few huge 'take down big chunks of the OSS community when the site fails' central locations like Code Forge or whatever it's called.
But on the topic at hand: MacOS on the x86 processor. Why does everybody assume that if MacOS was ported to the x86 processor that Apple would adopt a standard 'PC' architecture. The legacy barnacles and hooks and crap that bog down the historic 'PC-AT' architecture that the modern x86 platform came up out of coulc be pitched by Apple. They could and should 'roll their own' x86-based platform.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Weren't those the names for the common PPC spec? And Motorola was a partner, too. I forget what they stand for, though. "Common Hardware Reference Platform" and "PPC Reference Platform"?
Clear, Dark Skies
And just look at the fantastic piece-of-crap clones resulted from the licensing of Mac technology an architecture to Motorola, Radius, Umax, and Power Computing in 1996-1998.
It was almost the ruin of Apple.
Who cares. Apple didn't switch to an Intel chip, Apple stayed with Moto's chips (until now). If you are going to play the what-if game, you should be asking:
What if Apple had switched to the super-cheap, now known to be poor performing, but highly tasty Dorito Chip? They would have used the Doritos cool ranch for the laptops, and the always popular Nacho favor for the desktops (Nacho is hotter).
I got my RDRAM based P4 board and P4 cpu itself burned and buying a G5 64 bit Mac in 2 days.
If "mac" was just a cool looking x86 box (or even Itanium) having custom themed XP or something I wouldn't think it even.
So its end of discussion on x86 on macintosh...
Yes it continues to be a CHOICE. Thank god for that guy who left/got fired from Apple couldn't be suscessful on his Intel idea....
...for your average Joe and Jane Computeruser. Tech nerds like us can debate endlessly about CISC vs RISC, bus speeds, etc... but face it people, we are a minority. Average Joe and Jane Computeruser just want machines that allow them to read mail, game, surf the web and publish documents. I feel that it's not the small segment of hardcore Macintosh users and the edge Apple used to have in professional graphics applications that has allowed them to hang on to and even expand their niche. Macs have become cool all over again since the first iMac because of their looks and sleek design. Owning a Mac has become a fashion statement and the reason Joe and Jane shell out more cash on a Mac then they would on a PC with comparable techspecs is the fact that it is "hipper" and goes better with the furniture. Since the advent of OS X I would love to see a x86 compatible Mac OS but if I were an Apple CEO I'd worry about a company like Dell hiring a couple of Italian designers to create a new look for their top of the line machines...
They HAVE ported OS X to x86, they simply won't release it, because within months of releasing it, Apple dies the death of a thousand cuts. Apple makes all of their money from hardware, not software. The people who want Apple buy Apple boxes anyway. Maybe Apple would double, or even triple, their OS marketshare overnight by releasing on x86; but their hardware marketshare would drop like a stone.
Here's a question for you: why don't you switch from Intel to the G5? I can tell you that my single-processor G5 beats the pants off my P4. The reason you don't want to switch is probably cost: Apples cost more than Dells. But that's how Apple makes their money, that's their business model. A software-only Apple couldn't survive.
I have one of those IBM boxes in my collection here. It's a desktop IBM PPC box that uses the PREP (PPC Reference Platform) design. It has VGA video, uses PS/2 type mouse and keyboard. It has S3/Trio64 video embedded into the motherboard. It is set up to run AIX and can run NetBSD as well. It's interesting to think of it running OS/2. It would be a really nice machine for that. It's not really scaled properly to run AIX for any useful purposes.
A Good Intro to NetBS
It happend just before Steve J. regained control of the company. Two or three Asian comanies were allowed to offer the Apple OS on their hardware. However, Steve ended this program pretty quick.
Does anyone remember the names of these companies?
If my ignorance of licensing law is showing, consider me blushing.
Transistors and Beer!!
1. There would be 5 screens on the System Preferences just for configuring scroll speed.
2. Anti-aliasing text would be scrapped. It slows down the refresh 0.033 secs. Unacceptable.
3. There would be several overly configurable docks. Eventually, it would be a sign of one's geekiness to have 4 docks (and a fifth "slideout" dock).
4. The File menu would be five screens long. After all, there are infinite things to do with a file, aren't they? Let's just put them into the File menu for ease!
5. The OS/X icon would be turned into another blasted Windows program listing menu by unimaginative code hackers who want an easy way to fit more apps onto their screen (aside from their 5 docs)
6. Lastly, even though Apple would release Aqua as open source, they would still be accused of "not contributing to the open source community"
Where does it end with you people? Keep your filthy paws off my Aqua.
It seems they needed Apple's business more than they thought - I haven't seen many uses for a G4 outside of a proper computer, it's much to power-hungry to be embedded, but far to weak to be a real desktop competitor anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if Moto quietly knifed the line when Apple goes entirely to G5s.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Really, go look at the x86 boxes Apple benchmarks against, and go price one out yourself. And no cheating with el-crapo parts, Apple uses at least semi-quality hardware.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Here's a question for you: why don't you switch from Intel to the G5?
I am not switching to Apple because it costs twice the money for the hardware and software. And the PC world has many freebies to use.
Software makes more money than hardware. Look where Bill Gates is. All that money made from software. Software has added value that hardware does not have: beyond production costs, 90% of every CD sold is pure profit.
I don't buy it that a software only Apple could not survive. It's not like BeOS: BeOS had no software...Macs have thousands of apps. The problem most probably lies with Microsoft: Apple can't be a direct competitor to Microsoft, propably because of some deal under the table made when Apple was in need of cash.
Selected quotes from a confidential memorandum from Bill Gates to John Scully of Apple dated June 25, 1985.
Let's remember that at this point in time (when the 286 was king) Microsoft was not the monolithic, monopolistic, industry leader we identify it as today. MS-DOS 2.x was their core product, and the text-mode abomination of Windows 1.0 was just barely being prepped for release.
This document should be read as a business recommendation intended to benefit both Apple and Microsoft, not as a ham-fisted attempt to build and maintain a Microsoft monopoly at the expense of Apple's market.
not to mention that the G5 now beats the penitiums in every area: raw cpu perfromance, vector processing, wide data busses, and hyper transport. Plus its loping along at a mere 2Ghz and a rather small chip area while the x86 technology is sweating bullets (and heat) at 4Ghz trying to keep its pipelines full and branch predictions correct and its massive chip real-estate in sync on the clock signal.
The itanium technology of very long instruction compiling is falling on its predictive race condition petards with two speed rollbacks to date.
The PPC software world has yet to truly exploit those sexy well thoughtout vector ops (altivec) and that insanely fast bus, so there's lots of legs for improvement even without processor speed bumps in the near future. the small chip are will end itslef to muliple uints per die, the future still looks bright.
meanwhile the only real developments in the x86 world is the transition to 64 bit (and maybe when the motherboards start to catch up, to ubiquitous hypertransport). But perhaps its nearing the end of its speed, chip area, coherent vector instruction set life cycle?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It began as PReP at IBM, the morphed to CHRP when other vendors signed on, then finally got knifed. Apparently, IBM and Moto killed CHRP not becuae of OS/2 PPCs snafus, but because Apple would not license MacOS.
Here's a list of PReP/CHIRP systems that shipped:
Motorola
* PowerStack series
* MVME
* MTX
IBM
* RS/6000 40P 43P
* PowerSeries830
* ThikPad850
Apple
* ANS(Apple Network Server)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I remember running a demo/eval version on a 486-33 and was quite impressed at how well it ran.
I think that Apple really could have made some serious waves had they ported MacOS to x86 and offered Windows application binary compatibility.
But it would have had to have been done in the early 90s, before Win95 was available. The Mac UI was vastly superior to Win31, and there was still a farily substantial Mac foothold in the business world at the time.
Fat binaries, anyone? This already didn't work for NeXT.
If you're referring to the technical strategy (i.e., did fat binaries offer multiplatform portability), you are incorrect. Fat binaries worked very well: compile once on my 68K machine and produce an application that ran on 4 different hardware platforms (5 if you count the unreleased PPC product).
If you're referring to the business strategy, then you are right. The ability to run NeXTSTEP on 4 different hardware platforms didn't save the company the way they had hoped it would.
Yes, thousands of apps that would have to be ported to work on OSX/x86. Do you really think that software companies would port their mac apps to the new platform? Especially when most of them also maintain windows versions of their stuff and they don't want to piss off Microsoft.
-sam
I was just here, where did I go?
...since they'd have to spec the former 2x2GHz G5s with 2x3.2GHz Xeons. Might even make the price go up, Xeon 3.2s are around $950 on PriceWatch, dunno what they are in lots of 1000 though. Damn...that's almost 2/3 the price of a new 2x2 G5, for just the processors...wow.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Then in 4 or 5 years, I could see them taking off - if comparbly-spec'd Apple boxes were available at every price point over $700, there'd be a huge flow of people like you who would, at their next computer purchase, decide to switch boats. Why buy a $900 crap Dell when you can get a decent $900 iMac with OS X? Unless you're a raging x86 fanboy, the hardware underneath the OS shouldn't matter.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Yes, it's still Apple, with NeXT running things.
LOL, we should be so lucky. Apple buying NeXT is more akin to someone buying a Monet and scribbling all over it with pink and orange crayons. I love Mac OS X, but it's no NeXTStep.
It seems all Intel has done since the PII is add more pipeline stages and crank up the speed. Of course, that's all it takes to sell the public..."Well my p4 has 2GHz, so it must be better than your mac, it only has 1.25GHz!" (actual quote - i HATE when non-geeks say a computer 'has' so and so many hertz...oh, and the kid shut up when i said i had two of them, so mine is clearly superior)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
If you are going to have an orgasm over the look of a computer case, I suggest you reexamine your hoity-toity attitudes over "tech nuts". Can your 4 year old Powerbook run all the latest software from Apple? It most probably can't (such as Apple's recently released videophone software). But a 4 year old BMW can continue to run on gasoline, because gasoline technology (which actually does change year to year with new additives) is made to be "backwards compatible" with all cars. Thus, you spend a lot of money for the former item, which looks beautiful but will be a door stop in the near future. The latter looks beautiful and will continue to be used for (hopefully) decades.
Yes, the four year old PB can run iChat software - but not very quickly. Just as for the cars - yes a four year old BMW can use normal gas today. But will it be as powerful as the BMW you buy today? Nope. So the original car analogy holds much better than you seem to think it does. Your wierd "gas" thing is rather more equivilent to noting that yesterdays computers use the same sort of electriciy that todays computers use.
A "brand" is "an advertisement". "Advertising" is all about "mind control" and "attitude manipulation". Apple is simply ringing the bell, and like Pavlov's dog, your mouth is watering, even though there's no food (token Matrix quote:"There is no spoon."). It's just a bell , ding-a-ling. You are too easily mesmerized by the quality of the advertising, and confusing it with the concept of a quality product and quality company.
Your hatred to advertising blinds you to real quality, I guess. Sometimes advertising is just that, but other times quality products are reflected by quality advertising. To put it another way, the presence of quality advertising does not imply the lack of same in product.
Actually, your statement is no less idiotic. Today over 90% of personal computers run Windows . This means that over 90% of computer hardware is based on the 0x86 architecture. If Apple made the switch, they would have almost instant access to a market much much larger than their current base. If they ditched the hardware side of the company, they would be saving tons of money, and their profit margins would be much higher. However: This is would occur only if OSX really is a superior product over Windows.
To use a different analogy: Suppose I am making music videos (Apple software) with an NTSC camera (PowerPC). I want to sell them in Europe, which I know has television sets that use the PAL system (Intel). I can see two possibilities...
Your argument holds no weight. For one thing, 90% of computers SOLD today run Windows... now some of those will have windows removed. Then some of them will decay and be chucked. It's well known that Mac's work a bit longer than PC's (check resale prices on eBay for older computers of both kinds). That means that after a few years the end effect is that a higher percentage of people are running Macs than would be indicated by the sales figures. And the Mac's sales figures are still growing... But that starts to diverge from the point I really want to make, which is that if Apple had moved to x86 they would have been another compnay like BeOS (closest company I can think of in terms of quality of OS, though advertising was not there...) that was simply marginalized and then collapsed. I think even you can agree that 0% of 90% is still a lot less than 6% (or whatever the current figures are) of a huge, rapidly expanding market.
Your analogy of NTSC and PAL videos is seemingly clever, but easily counterd - IMAX. IMAX screens are a marginal presence in the movie business. But they off a platform greater in scope than normal movies allow for, and so it is for Macs where the uniformity of OS and hardware makes for an easier platform to build IMAXesque software upon. According to your argument, IMAX movie releases make no sense. Yet that is a growing market and very large movies are pushing to be released in that format now - just as major software makers are once again starting to offer more Mac support.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article offers some insight into Sculley's ongoing technological ineptitude.
Much like selling fizzy water products, this guy kept trying anything to lower costs while maintaining high margins (Gee, just like soda pop). The end result was horrible hardware quality and multitudes of machine-specific OS patches to attempt to work around various hardware flaws. As a support guy at my U's college of education, Sculley and this lack of quality (followed by Gil Amelio's lack of direction) is what eventually drove me from the Apple brand. I just wasn't getting what I was paying for, and stuck dealing with mountains of reliability problems.
This revisionist history is laughable. Sculley appaarently thinks that Intel chips would have saved him more money while allowing him to continue charging high prices (like soda pop). Even though at the time Pentiums were just coming out, hugely expensive, and not compatible in any way with the current MacOS/Motorola CPUs requiring massive redirection of programming resources both at Apple and by third party developers.
{ - Generic Guy - }
What Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, needs to do is to add ECC (error correction code) memory to the G5 to create a variant of the G5 and call it "G5-W". The G5-W would essentially be a workstation. Then Jobs should work with IBM and RedHat Linux to certify that RedHat Linux runs on the G5-W. Apple can be the de facto workstation division of IBM. Apple retains the original G5 for consumers but enters the more lucrative market for workstations. Margins for workstations are significantly higher than they are for mere personal computers.
Moreover IBM has been wanting to do a tour-de-force in the workstation market, but there are all these pesky Pentium 4 boxes in that market. With the G5, IBM can sell at machine that is competitive with the very best Pentium boxes. The floating-point unit of the PPC970 should make those engineering calculations really fly.
Selling a significant number of processors in the workstation market helps to amortize the cost (on the order of billions of dollars) of processor development. The success of the G5 actually helps IBM's processor division.
Of course, the implicit observation here is that Sun Microsystems is dead meat. Sun is expected to lose about $300 million for the 1st quarter of FY2004, according to "Sun warns of hefty loss". The Power4 and variants (Power4+, PowerPC970, etc.) are killing Sun at the market's high end (for both workstations and servers), where Sun has traditionally obtained most of its profits.
that 97% includes Linux and "Other" but I guess you were too fucking stupid to add that up.
Dear Anonymous Coward.
It explicitly says Linux has 1% while OS X has 3%. That means that 99% of end users don't use Linux.
The point, of course, is that this is a stupid metric.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
The problem is that the PPC and x86 have completely different instruction sets and architectures. This would mean that anyone who wanted to make software for both types of machines would have to produce and test two different binaries. Or, you would wind up with software that would work on one line of machines and not the other.
It makes me shudder just to think of it.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
I agree... I like to write in C or C++... I haven't mucked with any assembly on the x86 since college.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
for the two of us...
Now, now, I thought I had the honorary role of 'zealotous Mac user prone to rudeness and insulting foreigners.'
I will now have to revoke your secret membership in the 'Cult of the Dead Mac'
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
at this point, the only thing that makes an Apple different from an AMD64 system is OpenFirmware and the instruction set ever since they went to HyperTransport.
And it's not like people would be trying to run Windows apps on the machines, because Darwin has yet another executable format (not ELF, not W32). Apple could probably charge for an Apple localized version of Crossover Office or WineX to get full Windows compatibility.
Tout it like this new whizbang feature (no VirtualPC needed) without explictly stating why.
In fact, the best trick they could pull on that front too is to require Opterons, you know, and certain chipsets that are known to be working. You could limit yourself to NForce3 and AMD8151 and be done with it.
Another idea: ring-1 USB, serial, etc. periphial drivers that act like libraries so that quick-n-dirty manufacturers can write periphial drivers for shit made in Tawain, and when they die they don't bring down the OS. (That's why I love how gphoto2 uses libusb, such a good idea)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
How would Apple have used Intel/AMD chips? Would they have made a unique architecture the way they currently do? If that's the case, then it wouldn't matter all that terribly much which processor they used. I actually blame the performance gap Apple used to suffer on Motorola. Now that Apple's gone with IBM for their processing future, that future looks brighter than it ever has. And as the comment in the article said, could the outcome have been predicted at the time?
Or would Apple have been PC compatible? If Apple did that, they would cease to be a hardware company overnight. They would instead have followed in the illustrious footsteps of BeOS, Solaris x86 and that little thing you may have heard of a while ago called NeXTStep. All compete (or competed) directly with Microsoft and all of them failed to make any inroads. A lot of the blame for that lies in Microsoft's anti-trust violations, but that doesn't alter the outcome. Linux and *BSD have done well, but as open-source software their growth stems from an entirely different mechanism. I don't think that anyone would seriously argue that if Linux had been done as a commercial OS by a traditional OS company it would be where it is today.
They already did -- back with Windows NT 4. Plus MIPS and Alpha. But as new service packs came out, they gradually dropped support for anything but x86 (again).
There are some PPC-based CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform, IIRC) machines out there, designed to run Windows NT, which can also run recent[ish] versions of the Mac OS instead. I don't know whether or not any Macs will run NT 4.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
He knows nothing about computers. He came over to Apple from a freaking soft drink company. He's a perfect exemplar of the professional manager class: people who operate under the delusion that they don't need to understand the details of their particular businesses, as long as they know business.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
>>Sadly, there's just no way I can justify springing A$3000 for the equivalent of an A$1500 PC I hope you drive a CHEAP russian car with a 2 stroke engine. Why in the PC world do people always buy the cheapest nastiest products? I laugh when I meet guys driving BMW;s while piloting a nasty cheap plastic Dell. I myself Drive a Subaru and only Mac's both quality products that start first time every morning. My Mac has been dropped on a tile floor 6 times now, the case is cracked to hell BUT WOW, the extra money for quality means it works still. My friend dropper a Dell on the carpet and 6 weeks later and MUCH bucks, he got a bootable computer. I just came back from Afghanistan, there I needed quality. Horrible dust and heat, and it still works. Don't you just love the smell of 2 stroke engines, they smell.......cheap.
That suddenly makes the Sun workstations look like a good deal. Much easier to deal with, and they have the same level of hardware support (essentially).
You don't heat anyone calling for Sun to sell their HD's for $100 because people do it anyway and don't tell them (sshh!!! I was never here.)
You try to avoid going through Sun as much as possible. This is why they are losing money in a painful fashion.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Ahhh, 1997. The Mac hardware was opened up, Mac clone production was in full swing, and PowerComputing was a scrappy Mac maker.
But the clones made such good business that they cannibalized Apple sales significantly... but the Mac market as a whole (when you looked at sales figures) was growing! However, the f***ing stupid media continuted to report on Apple sales alone, time after time, and the PERCEPTION that Mac sales were declining was starting to hurt ALL mac and mac-compatible sales, so Jobs got out the axe.
As a side note, PowerComputing had the best advertising I have ever seen. They even had a sense of humor- when Jobs axed the clones, PowerComputing ran a full-page ad with a pic of a teenager giving his license to a cop, with the caption "Our license got revoked!"
the workstations are still ass for the price compared to Dell or Apple. It's a shame too.
What's interesting is the new line of Sun Fires. That v440 is pretty damn good for $10,000, comapred to their offering a year ago. Which means, well, I don't know what, but their high-entry/middle-tier is becoming more accessible.
Sun can't compete on the low end, it may improve their profit margin to justify having those product lines, but it doesn't improve sales any.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Yeah. Sure. You wanna spend 15 cycles on a 7-word instruction, go right ahead. I know you've got a fancy pipeline to play with.
Me, I'm far, far more interested in the vector capabilites of G5, and yes, even more so than the x86, thanks very much.
{It's not just the compiler, its the architecture. And its not just the architecture.}
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Let them give it to me. I'll take proper care of it.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
OS X runs on commodity x86 hardware
That is a different topic. It is complete nonsense to think that using an x86 CPU means you have to build PC compatible hardware. Apple could easily (hardware perspective) continue to build its proprietary designs but with a different CPU.
Mac is NOT x86 and never will be. PCs are x86. Apple is what it is today because of that
And "what it is" is a smaller player in the computer world. Using x86 effects only two things outside of Apple. One, programmers, well some of them, the one who write assembly language or debug at the assembly level. Two, consumers, who would have had lower prices due to economies of scale and also those who would have bought a Mac rather than a PC had a Mac been less expensive.
It is complete nonsense to assume that using an x86 CPU means Apple would also have to use a PC compatible architecture. Apple could have had a proprietary design just like today's, OS X, Quartz, etc. on x86 and not been threatened by generic PC hardware.
As for G5 being faster. Go look at the real SPEC scores for the models Apple used in it's comparison, not the one generated by Apple's proxy. There is a 20-30% hit by switching to gcc IIRC. I don't mean to restart the flamewar but using gcc on both sides only gives the illusion of fair play to those with only a shallow knowledge of compilers. Gcc is a great tool, but it is designed to be portable and adaptable and most importantly free of proprietary IP. The latter restraint is not shared by commercial compilers. Gcc's performance varies from platform to platform. And like ALL compilers performance varies from program to program.
I believe the topic was not dollars per MHz runing an arbitrary OS, but a box that would run OSX.
Apple would have lost control of their hardware
It is rediculous to assume that x86 CPUs require PC compatible hardware. Apple could produce proprietary designs with x86. However by using the same CPU as the PC folks Apple could benefit by economies of scale.
One other thing that needs to be considered is what your going to use the computer for. Sure I can buy a car for less than I'd have to pay for a pickup truck but if I need to pull a trailer or haul a lot of stuff, 10 cars won't be as effective as the one truck.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Hindsight is usually interesting, but seldom useful. However, as things stand today, I do believe it would be in Apple's best interest to move towards compatability with x86 architecture... I remember back when the mac-clones were undercutting Apple's hardware profits, but these days Apple just doesn't have the dynamism necessary to keep up with hardware development when compared to the PC side of things. Introducing PC compatibility and ditching the hardware business may very well be the best course for Apple to take. Though, this would make them a rather high-priority target for a certain evil empire... :)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I'd reject that assumption for many applications.
The desktop of OSX is vastly superior to Linux on the Desktop of even products like Ximian. Further there is far more productivity software for OSX than Linux.
Realistically though one can ask if a x86 OSX would have all its software ported. So you do have a point. But I think that in terms of user friendliness OSX beats any Linux distro and saying that Linux will get there "real soon now" is still wishful thinking. (IMO)
OSX also has features Linux doesn't, such as Applescript.
It seems like every other post is making the same erroneous assumption. Folks write the following on the black/whiteboard a few times:
x86 CPUs do require PC Compatible Hardware.
x86 CPUs do require PC Compatible Hardware.
x86 CPUs do require PC Compatible Hardware.
Apple can still have proprietary designs while using x86 CPUs. IRQ conflicts and all the other headaches are due to the PC architecture, not x86 CPUs. A headache due to the CPU is a smaller number of registers but that is only a problem to the compilers or assembly language programmers. The lower cost of x86 CPUs more than offset this IMHO. You can still have a clean hardware architecture with x86. You can still have MacOS X and Quartz with x86. And most importantly for Apple you can still have no clone hardware with x86.
I agree with your reasoning. Moving to x86 at this point would be the death knell for Apple. Similar forces contributed to the demise of Be. Had they stuck with their own proprietary systems, I think Be would still bea round today (maybe in a audio/vidio niche, but still around none-the-less.)
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Switching to 'closed' IA32 hardware wouldn't do a lot to increase their marketability. Price is important and building a market based on increased cost on commodity hardware would be senseless.
Besides, us IA32/?64 computer nuts need to be able to build our own with scraps and inexpensive ots parts. I'd love to be able the throw together a new PC and boot up the latest OSX. But I wouldn't be much more likely then I am now if I had to use Apples own marked up prebuilt setup or even a marked up processor/mb combo. I like to get my hands dirty building a PC and digging for the cheapest (in cost) parts on earth. Its just not as much fun any other way.
Quack, quack.
This is like taking a nice sports car and putting Ford Fiesta internals inside of it. You buy a sports car because it has a great engine, handles well, looks nice, etc. Yes you can take a sports car body and put it on a crap fram with a crap engine but why?!?!?!? Nobody does it because it's stupid. Apple doesn't port their OS because not many consumers, if any at all, want to drive a sports car that handles like a Buick and has the power of a Yugo. With the new G5 processors, Apple has finally achieved (or so they claim) the nice powerful engine to put under the hood of their "sports car" OS.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Some people spend money on the tools of their trade and expect a return on their investment.
$1000 isn't much money. I spend that much on a set of tires, or a new musical instrument or something. I spent much, much more than that on my source of livelihood, my UNIX workstation.
You, on the other hand, don't expect much more than 150fps until you drop another $1000 upgrading your machine next year.
You're right. Apple can't touch that market, and nor do they want to. Have fun shooting 'em up.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I've refuted this before, but then again, I'm not sure you've seen my post. It's still valid, even after the Athlon 64 (since that proc is not dual-capable).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I find all the anti x86 comments odd. I, for one, would be glad to use OSX if it came to x86.
I like the new OS, but I don't want to pay the hardware premium, and I don't want to buy hardware with vendor lock in attached.
We can all see that vertically integrated software is bad in the case of M$, why can't you see that vertically integrated hardware/OS is bad in the case of Apple?
Long live freedom of choice.
Peter.
...tools of their trade and rexpect a return on their investment.
:p
This is a home machine. For writing letters, browsing the net, watching movies, playing games.
$1000 isn't much money. I spend that much on a set of tires, or a new musical instrument or something. I spent much, much more than that on my source of livelihood, my UNIX workstation.
For those of us without your income, $1000 can be quite a bit of money. It's all well and good that you can afford to spend thousands on tires and instruments, and even more on a piece of equipment that you need for work. This is a home productivity and entertainment system.
You, on the other hand, don't expect much more than 150fps until you drop another $1000 upgrading your machine next year.
While I do enjoy playing games, I can't see any reason why I'd spend another grand next year. My current $1000 machine has lasted me 3 years, and I'll probably sell it for a few hundred (as pieces).
You're right. Apple can't touch that market, and nor do they want to. Have fun shooting 'em up.
I was challenging the grandparent posts assertion that the "Apple Tax" didn't exist for "comparable specs."
And FWIW, I will have fun shotting 'em up, with the variety of games on my PC
Can your 4 year old Powerbook run all the latest software from Apple? But a 4 year old BMW can continue to run on gasoline.
What a terribly muddle you have made of the analogy. A car runs on fuel, software runs on hardware. Note the difference between "runs" and "runs on".
because gasoline technology (which actually does change year to year with new additives) is made to be "backwards compatible" with all cars.
You must be too young to remember the introduction of unleaded petrol!
This means that over 90% of computer hardware is based on the 0x86 architecture.
x86 refers to a series of chips all ending in the number 86, not to a hexadecimal value.
If Apple made the switch, they would have almost instant access to a market much much larger than their current base. If they ditched the hardware side of the company, they would be saving tons of money, and their profit margins would be much higher. However: This is would occur only if OSX really is a superior product over Windows.
I see the company you work for (who am I kidding?!) doesn't compete with Microsoft.
Which one is the plan that will cause all of the Europeans to sneer in my face? And which one of the plans will produce the results I want?
Amusingly, I live in Europe, and all video players sold within the last five or ten years can play videos in the NTSC format. But the more general answer to your question is "whichever plan makes the customer's life easier", which is what people who don't use Macs don't tend to understand.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
One question, ar you going to put Windows, Linux or BSD on that system, cause you didn't mention it and if you are going to use windows that's another 150+ more for a full copy of Windows XP.
But I'm sure that you weren't going to pirate it right?
If you read my comment more carefully, you would have noticed "My current $1000 machine has lasted me 3 years, and I'll probably sell it for a few hundred (as pieces)."
So I'll use the copy of Windows I already own.
OK, I was not only around back then but I was actually talking agressively with IBM on the issue.
First let's lay the scene: Microsoft has a "huge" lock on the market with about 70% of the desktops out there. Apple owned the graphics and education markets, but they were small and specialised. Also, MacOS was painful--it had never actually evolved beyond the ground-breaking first generation product it was. AMD and Cyrix were bit players, not even playing in the same game as the others.
Microsoft announced Win4.0 would be coming out "soon," as a replacement for Win3.1. It would run on Intel, of course.
Then came IBM's OS/2 2.1, and the Motorola/Apple/IBM joint venture to come up with a replacement for the aging 68000 series CPUs.
The chip came out: The PowerPC. Apple would make their systems based on it. IBM would release legacy-free commodity PCs (i.e. no 5.25" floppy, no stupid IDE drives, no IRQ setup hell) running OS/2. Suddenly the first generation Pentium (formerly 80586, until Intel discovered they can't copyright a number) CPUs hit their infamous floating point error, and Microsoft was frantically delaying the release of Win4.0, because they had to battle OS/2, which was a robust and native 32-bit OS instead of a 16-bit shell on top of DOS.
If IBM had released OS/2 for the PowerPC according to their plans, they could have stormed the market, driving up their market share and pulling Apple along, based on the strength of the vastly superior PPC chip. Instead, IBM pissed around with things, refusing to release the OS until it was perfect, and finally mothballing the project once Win95/x86 came out.
IBM shot themselves in the foot (nothing new there), and in doing so, destroyed the PPC as anything more than a niche processor. Furthermore, they are to credit/blame as much as anyone for pushing Microsoft to the current complete dominance of the consumer computer market.
So John Scully, don't blame yourself; blame IBM.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
NetBSD, and over 3500 packaged applications, is qualified for OVER 53 architectures!
Debian Linux is qualified for at least 10 architectures, including its library of over 12,000 applications.
OS X, like the above examples, is based on GCC, the most portable C compiler yet built. Portability has always been a design goal of OS X and its predecessor, NEXTSTEP, which ran identically on at least M68K, Intel, PA-RISC and SPARC, transparent to the developer (like BSD and Linux).
you had me at #!
"The Dual G5 has the best bus"
Try the AMD Athlon FX. 6.4 Gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth (with the controller right on the CPU for lower latency), plus 6.4 Gigabytes per second of I/O bandwidth. Even the G5's 1Ghz bus isn't as fast.
"the fastest interconnects"
Hmmm... Wrong again. That would go to... AMD Athlon FX. 12.8GByes/sec of total bandwidth.
"the best peripheral support"
Don't know what you're smoking here, but you can get *way more* peripherals for PCs.
"and the best (in my opinion) Operating System."
You're entitled to your opinion. I personally prefer Linux.
You sir, are a sucker.
I assure you my PC is made from only the finest parts. ASUS motherboard, ATi manufactured video card, Corsair RAM, Western Digital hard drives, Sony disc drives and a diamond encrusted keyboard coated with mink fur and hand carved elephant tusks.
I am *so sick* of the myth propagated by Mac users that PC parts are low quality. They aren't, and if they break you can get them replaced. I have three newish PCs and none of them has had a significant hardware failure at any stage. I went in to an Apple store to buy an iPod for PC the other day and the Applebot there warned me ominously that PC firewire cards were 'generally pretty low quality.' I asked him what he based this on and what brands were meant to be problematic and he had no idea whatsoever - but at least he was happy in his little world o' assumptions.
Anyway, enjoy paying large sums for the peace of mind of knowing that you have been told by the company that makes your product that it is good quality!
Read Pynchon.
Well, I was actually referring to ordinary desktops and laptops. Apple have not offered anything even vaguely competitive for years on that front. For instance, I can either get an 800MHz iBook or a 2GHz IBM laptop. I can either get a 1GHz iMac with a GeForce4 MX and 256 MB of RAM or a 3GHz+ Intel with 512 Megs of RAM and still have change to by a GeForce FX or a Radeon 9800.
So, IMHO, if I bought an Apple I would be paying for little more than image and I would be getting about half as much actual system for my dollar. As a serious computer user I care way more about what's under the hood than image, plus if I bought a Mac I wouldn't have enough money left to buy a black turtleneck and a beret anyway so it would be pointless.
As for the price comparison, in $A since I'm not in the States I have found after a quick scan around:
- dual opteron motherboard: $1100
- opteron 242: $930 (x2)
- RAM: $300
- Case and PSU: $350
- 120 GB SATA HDD: $250 (x2 for RAID)
- Radeon 9600: $500 (same as for G5)
So... that all adds up to about A$4500. The G5, meanwhile, comes to A$5,600. Even if we factor in a bit of extra cash to buy Opteron 244s (or alternatively we could wait a month or two and the price will start plummeting like it always does for PC processors) the Opteron system is looking pretty reasonable. But anyway...
Read Pynchon.
There seems to be no real advantage to Apple in letting all the Wintel box builders eat their margins on hardware sales. And supporting an OS on every scraped together mix of flea market junk is a problem no OS developer would choose. So, I guess the only reason for asking this question is that there are a lot of folks who have Wintel boxes and would like to run a Mac OS on them.
All the buzz around this issue, year after year, boils down to a simple issue of Mac OS envy. Get over it. Go to Apple's web site and buy an eMac or low end laptop for less than $1000 or get a used one on ebay. Don't worry they don't turn into a ball of slime in a year or two like the lowball boxes you are used to.
In addition, there are actually functioning 64 bit chips and 64 bit operating systems running on PPC. (AIX being notable; I'm not certain whether or not Linux or *BSD do 64 bits on appropriate generations of PPC yet..)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think that the way everyone is conceiving of an Apply x86 shift is rather shallow.
Here is a scenario I would really enjoy to see happening:
a)Apple works together with IBM or Intel or whoever to provide reasonable (not great, just reasonable enough for legacy apps) emulation of the G4 (G3), so that a P4/K7(or K8) 1.5+ Ghz could run G3/G4 software at a reasonable clip. Trolls who say that G3/G4 are much faster than comparable solutions from intel/amd? Bug off--->the G5 maybe in the same performance class as modern Intel/AMD offerings, but the G3s definetly were not, and the G4s were pretty weak, too.
b)Apple moves out of the hardware business, into the 'open standards' business. As well as selling systems OR software, Apple would sell reference design licenses to OEMs, who would then produce an 'Apple conformant' PC. OS X, Apple approved drivers, Apple approved software, Apple approved hardware designs---> We would see Apple doing exactly what Microsoft is trying to do with the whole Windows vertical integration scheme, except Apple does a much better job.
Apple could continue to sell its own 'name' branded hardware, but in the long run it would serve their interest to enter the 'exclusive' oem reference design business; fewer manufacturing problems to deal with, all that liability can be someone elses problem.
Apple COULD compete with Microsoft, if it attacked it in the same fashion that Microsoft is trying to control the industry--->It must address the entire product chain, and it should outsource manufacturing and sales to OEM distributors--> NeXTstep, BeOS, OS/2, and all of the workstation *NIX companies sought to maintain their own hardware/operating system combination, and lost big.
Apple is still surviving, but hasn't yet understood the way Microsoft manages to sell 'Windows Machines' without actually building a single computer.
You don't call it a Compaq, or a Dell anymore. You don't call it an IBM, or a PC, or an x86 box.
The vast majority of consumers call them Windows boxes; and I think that Apple could play that game (in the x86 world), and beat Microsoft at it.
I thought that IBM could do the same thing with OS/2, but they just didn't have the balls for that.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Or maybe I run linux on my mac...
-- JP
Are you on crack? Maybe I've been trolled, but... ...no version of Windows NT was ever "User Friendly". Just try installing an Ethernet card under NT 4 (or even better NT 3.51) and tell me I'm wrong.
I'd also like to address the myth that prior to OS X the Mac had no multitasking. A lot of Windows users who never used the Mac seem to be under this impression because the Mac was known to not support "pre-emptive multitasking" - instead it employed co-operative multitasking, like in Win 3.x. Co-operative multitasking was not as stable as pre-emptive because a crashing app could bring down the whole OS, but decent, stable apps worked just fine. Some software was also not "multitasking friendly", which meant they were CPU hogs and background apps would not perform well. But it still worked. In fact it has worked since the System 6 "Multi-Finder".
Pre-emptive multitasking was introduced by MS with Windows NT, and it was supposedly rolled into the Windows 95/98/ME family but let's face it: those operating systems, despite the hype behind them, were really never any more stable than good ol' Macintosh System 7. As Windows 98 and ME rolled around, so did Mac OS 8 and 9, which did lots to improve stability. In fact I would honestly say that I would feel more comfortable running mission-critical sofware on OS 9 than Windows ME, despite the latter's protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. These claims may have been true in theory but I saw so many nasty apps crash entire Windows installations that I can truly say I believe they were just marketing hype. I would rather have well-written obsolete code than crappy, bug-ridden state-of-the-art code any day.
Remember: Microsoft marketed Windows 95 as "32 bit" as well, when in fact it barely was even that. (It was 32 bit as much as Panther is 64 bit).
Win 95 was impressive when it came out because Microsoft had finally begun to realize 90% of the usability of the Mac. It still wasn't good enough, as Mac users swore by their consolidated menu bars, consistent desktop icon placement, spacial finder, true plug-n-play, no stupid 'parent/child window' concept, Apple menu, drag-n-drop installations and de-installations, etc.
Mac OS would not have died to Win 95 on x86 because of any product superiority. It would have died for the same reason OS/2 died: it was a superior product that just didn't have the Microsoft hype engine behind it.
Finally, OS X is great but it's widely believed that what "saved Apple" is the iMac, not OS X. The original Bondi Blue iMac was a solid, well-performing computer with a bold look for a little money. It paved the way for legacy-interface-free computers, as Apple did away with SCSI, ADB and serial ports in favour of IDE and USB. It was truly innovative, and that's what sustains Apple in the long-term: some people (including me) want to buy products they can be excited about. They are proud to be part of a movement towards real innovation, solid products, and separation from a computer market that has just gone all wrong. We like to watch while our Microsoft-dependent friends all get clobbered by nasty virii and cheap, cruddy unstable hardware.
Most numerical tasks scale proportional to clock speed, and proportional to number of cpus^0.5 (very roughly).
/should/ be as quick, and you seem to be saying that it is 15-20% quicker. I'm happy to accept that it is a good result, but it is not really a blinding result.
So your cluster would have a predicted performance of 900MHz*10^.5, 2.846 GHz.
Your G5 should have a performance of 2GHz*2^.5, 2.828 Ghz.
So by this simple rule the dual G5
For sheer number crunching per dollar you should be buying trailing edge current technology, I think - probably an Athlon 2 GHz cluster. After all, your Pentium cluster is using the CPU from a console, almost.
There is an interesting read about John Sculley's tenure at Apple, a sample chapter from the book "Apple Confidential" in pdf format, if anyone is interested: read it here.
There rest of the sample chapters, which appear to make up the whole book, are here.
Um, red face. I don't have a link. I worked it out a while back looking at benchmarks on multi cpu boards, but assumed it was common knowledge. Isn't it?
It would appear that 15-20% more gets done in a G5 processor cycle by these figures.
This article asks the wrong question or asks it backwards: IBM should have chosen the 68000 from Motorola for the original PC, rather than Apple later retooling for the x86. Linear memory space is a programmer's best friend! Intel's filthy paged memory f**ked-up the evolution of software for more than a decade.
"It has an army of programmers and beta testers that MacOS developers simply cannot match."
"Army" implies a cohesive unit with discipline and control. The Linux developer community is perhaps better described as an 'ocean'.
No, I haven't. I am well aware that properly strutured problems should be able to achieve more of a benefit from multi cpu setups. Most supercomputers are designed around specific tasks, and I suspect have the programs re-written around the number of processors.
n 2c pu.html
http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/spec95oct
has a reasonable sounding discussion, note the average speed up for a 20% increase in clock speed is 17%, and the average increase (which he specifically says is a bad idea) for 2 processors is around 40%.
Tests on dual cpu vs single cpu are probably a bad guide when trying to establish a general rule, but (a) I'm pretty sure I didn't invent it and (b) what do YOU propose instead?
Erm... but this is what they have done.
AGP, PCI-X, USB, etc., are all Intel-platform standards. Many moons ago Apple had a fully proprietary architecture. Today the only thing which really sets them apart from an x86 box are the processor and the OS. And yes I do realise this is a simplification. However, it is wise to keep in mind that once upon a time, PCs had ISA and PS/2 whereas Macs had NuBus and ADB.
Apple has done a brilliant job of adopting "commodity" (e.g. Intel) innovations while maintaining a distinct hardware and OS identity, by cherry-picking the good while not having to contend with the legacy problems of the Intel architecture...
I'm a student with a part time job.
I make less than $30k a year.
After I factor out rent and utilities and necessary living expenses (like, food), I still have nearly a thousand dollars of cash per month. Here's a hint, don't buy useless shit, and you'll have plenty of cash for the things that actually MATTER.
I think saving a few months' of spare income on my #1 most important tool of life isn't a big sacrifice. There are much better areas to pinch pennies at.
Just my opinion on the matter.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Bill Gates's money was made on the basis of his business model, not the software in and of itself. Two things happened: 1. he got a licensing fee from every piece of IBM and clone hardware - so that chunk of his money came from hardware sales, not direct software sales - it was a captive market, and so isn't comprable to a putative OS X business plan, and 2. he came up with some brilliant marketing ideas for MS Office - the Office bundle itself being the key one - while his competitors made serious mis-steps (e.g., WordPerfect 9 was a dog). A question (maybe the answer will reinforce your argument, but I'd be surprised): if you take MS entirely out of the equation, which makes more money: software or hardware? Who has more money, Dell or the #2 profitable software company?
Sorry, in your first post you said that you were talking about a new computer. Then you said that you might sell the old one off.
I'd say that if you plan on never buying a whole new computer and just slowly upgrade then PCs are by far the cheaper and better option all the way. You never have to plunk down a lot of cash to make the transistion.
Mac's are not for you. I have a friend that has had the same case for almost 10 years now. He's just upgraded the components, but kept on building using the same case. So he'd also never consider buying a new computer let alone a mac.
Everything is new except the monitor (which is a month old) and the OS. I thought about taking the "just upgrade a little" route, but the price crept up to the point that I decided to just get a new one.
No, why do you ask?