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Why iPod Can't Save Apple
MadMirko writes "MacNN quotes an article from Money Magazine titled Why iPod can't save Apple, which says 'the buzz on the digital music player and "swank" storefronts are masking an ebbing bottom line, noting reduced CPU sales (resulting a shrinking marketshare), decreased profits (in part due to the lower-margin iPod and little-to-no profit at the iTunes Music Store), failure of the iPod to drive CPU sales, failure of the retail stores to increase marketshare, hidden retail store costs, no operational income, and little value in the stock.'"
- OS X
- G5
- iApps
But they all suffered problems. Here are the main reasons- The G5, Althogh briefly lord of the processors, for about 3 months it was quickly quashed by the launch of Athlon 64, Pentium Extreme Edition. No only that benchmarks showed that G5 lost by a CLEAR margin, the price is still to high! You can pick up a 3.4Ghz machine for the price of a emac, while I could buy a freaking beowulf cluster of them for the price of one G5
- Linux distributions have caughtup and surpassed OSX in terms of ease of use, avalible applications and price. Take Mandrake 10 for example, I am writing on it now, and the Galaxy II theme gives Aqua a thump in the face! Plus with Wine I can run all the MacApps I need if I wanted (but I don't)
- Proprietery hardware and form factors. You can't just go out and buy a snazzy ATX case for your Apple, your stuck with the ugly cheese grater design that apple gives you. My computer comes In a jeantech case with neon fans, and case window. I can't get that with Apple!
- single vendor. I can't go to Dell and ask for a G5, I have to ask Apple. Loads of companies are making innovative cases and machines in the highly competitive world of the AMD64/IA-32
- People demand more than just pretty colours. Linux give them an industrial strength operating system, as used in neuclear weapons simulations, while still providing a pretty face. Out of all the companies I have been contracted to fix their servers, only one had an Xserve. This company was mostly Sun/Win.
So there you have it, Apple is still in the proprietery dark ages while Linux and open hardware is ruling the enthusiast market, and with new technology such as Winex, Lindows, Xandros and Linare, it is taking over what apple really wanted, A simple, affordable computer that anyone can use! If Apple wants to survive, it needs to:Perhaps that's a very apt comparison. After all, Cadillac is having its lunch eaten by BMW, Mercedes and Lexus.
In fact, what I see is a LOT of Apple users hanging onto their OS 9 machines for dear life, because OS X is such a pig they'd have to buy a new computer to get the same performance on it, and they feel (imho correctly) that OS 9 had a much better user interface.
I have an OS X machine and a Windows box at work. I'm not at all impressed with OS X, even after I replaced the mouse with something decent.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
anyway in summary, Apple's OS licensing is more reasonable for Apple than for customers. It keeps them coming back and paying for the OS over and over again. The discount is just to make you think you saved money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well great. You have determined that virus coders don't waste their time with the smaller market. If / When OS X becomes a large part of the computing population you can be sure it will join the ranks of virus ridden computers. But as it stands, an OS X virus would have little effect on the few hundred thousand computers it would infect. Windows on the other hand is in use on a few hundred million computers.
The more people who 'convert' the bigger likelihood of causing a problem.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
How many tech companies (which were media darlings) imploded during the Dot-Bomb? Apple wasn't among them and they've been "Dying Since 1976".
Not at all. Until the late 1980's, Apple was a hot company. Their products had enormous impact in the market and Apple was perceived as an innovator.
The first problem appeared when Apple tried to assert ownership of all GUIs, in particular against Microsoft. This backfired because it became clear to many people that Apple didn't, in fact, invent most of the things they claimed ownership to. It also made Apple pretty hated in the (then pretty small) free software movement.
I think Apple has indeed been going downhill since then. In the mid-90's, they killed their research labs. A little later, they threw out their core technologies, because they had deteriorated to the point of being a drag on the company, and switched to NeXT's software platform.
What does Apple have these days? An OS and GUI essentially based on oddball 1980's technology (Mach, Objective-C). But because developers aren't taking to that in great numbers, they are also throwing in C++ toolkits and Apple-specific Java. That doesn't look like enough to succeed in the market in the long run.
What should Apple do? They need to become even more mainstream and standards-based. For example, X11 should become an OS X API on equal footing with Quartz and Carbon, so that people can develop in the toolkits they like and are used to. Objective-C, Cocoa, and Mach should probably be de-emphasized--I don't think they have a future.
In the long term, I think Apple should aim to have everything from X11 on down (command line, servers, kernel) to be standard Linux and add value with what they are good at: graphic design, hardware design and packaging, sales, documentation, and small end-user applications. That is, what I think Apple could become and thrive at in the long term is a consumer Linux-system vendor with their own desktop environment, but based on X11 so that it actually allows Gnome, KDE, and other applications to be run. But I think there is so much prejudice and attitude within Apple and the Apple community that that isn't going to happen.
I still think OS X is going to save Apple. [...] Ever since, I have been estatic about its performance, beauty, and stability.
Little of that is related to the underlying technology: Mach, Objective-C, and DisplayPDF don't make the Mac any faster, more beautiful, or stable. Performance is achieved through tuning, beauty through design, and stability through testing and using better tools.
Does the Mac have an advantage there? I don't think so. I suspect on most objective measures, Linux, X11, and Windows XP beat Mach and DisplayPDF in terms of performance. The use of scalable graphics in Gnome, KDE, and Windows allows them to look beautiful (and there are lots of beautiful themes for all those platforms). And Linux and Windows XP are both very stable. If anything, the tools that are becoming mainstream on Linux and Windows these days (Render, SVG, C#, GDI+, etc.) are technologically better than what OS X is based on.
What the Mac offers is simple answers: if you buy it, you know you are getting a certain level of quality and performance without having to think about it much. That level of quality and performance is arguably worse than what you would get out of Windows or Linux if you knew what to choose, but with Apple, you don't have to think about it much.
But don't mistake Apple's good branding strategy and good product strategy with good technology: technologically, Apple has little if anything that its competitors don't have, usually in better form.
Dell has revolutionized the computer industry as much or more (arguably) than Apple.
Not with their computers, but with their business models.
They invented the concept of JIT inventory for the industry, of high-volume custom configured machines, of pushing margins to the floor, of cutting costs, etc.
The industry, or at least the consumer, holds a big debt to Dell for transforming the way we buy computers.
Of course, they suck, but oh well...
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
The latest census forcasts predict whites will be a minority in the US by 2050. If that isn't death, I don't know what is.
WiFi - Linksys, D-Link, WiFi Hotspots... not apple.
USB - Windows 98, USB devices... not apple.
Firewire - DV Cameras, Sony... apple helped a little, but not much.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Uh, dude, you ever hear of Mac OS X 10.0? It sure impressed the hell out of me that they SOLD the broken-ass beta version.
That's great. He said......and your solution prices out at $899.00. How much was the shipping again?
QED.
Virg