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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?"
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!
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.
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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.
This would be just about the dumbest time since the introduction of PowerPC chips in Apple hardware to consider porting to x86. For starters, just a few years after making all their developers port from OS 9 to OS X, now they will have to port from PPC to x86. So let's piss off a bunch of people by making developers port apps for a second and making customers wait for these new x86 ports. (Although, if I were to ever hear a troll go on about how they aren't switching away from OS X-PPC because it runs Quark, I think the ensuing laughter would be worth all the trouble.) So, after paying this high penalty for changing chip architectures, you are left with one of two shitty situations:
1) OS X runs on commodity x86 hardware. Apple's hardware sales get eaten alive by Dell's ability to build machines in mass and cheaply. Then Apple is forced to survive as a software company on the sales of an OS squaring off with the 800 lbs gorilla of marketshare, Windows. Don't get me wrong, OS X is my baby, but the sheer numbers and monopolistic presence of Microsoft would make me very wary of the outcome.
2) OS X runs only on Apple-made x86 boxes. After doing a magnificent job of figuring out how to stick two G5s in a PowerMac, Apple engineers get to throw that all out the window and do it with Xeons or Athlons. Not to mention the aforementioned porting done by developers. And the pissing off of customers who now have incompatible software. All this for what, a chance at a slight speed increase? Depending on which benchmarks you believe, the G5 is either just below, on par with, or just above high-end x86 systems. You are telling me Apple should go through all this hassle for what's going to end up being unnoticeable in the end?
Maybe if you had suggested this in late 2000 when Motorola was beginning to show how they were going to fuck up G4 production in the future but before OS X was released, you might have had a case. But right now, things are looking the best they have in a very long time for Apple. Switching to x86 would be just about the dumbest move possible.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 [...]
-