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Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited
allgood2 writes "John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a great article exploring the myth that Apple could/would be Microsoft if only they had licensed their operating system. This myth has oft been purported in technology and business media."
In Q2 2004 Apple's market share was at 3.7%, while in Q2 2003 Apple was at 3.8%.
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Even then Bill knew the OS was a marginal business ($50) vs selling an office platform $450 on a $2500 PC. (average price in those days). When Bill realized this wasnt going to happen he built the platform he needed to run his software. IIRC, excel first shipped as a Mac product.
I originally chose the Mac over PC. It was 1990 and I was looking to get a new computer. I went to a computer store and looked at what they had on the shelf. The Mac Plus was used, but it was still a current machine. It was still being manufactured by Apple and it was so much slicker than the DOS machines that were on display.
I was primarily a Mac user until 1996. I wanted to get into PC Gaming. I built a Pentium 100 PC. Over the years that followed I spend money upgrading both platforms. My PC was for gaming and my Mac was for everything else. Over time I just became less and less interested in the Mac platform. When Apple eliminated onboard SCSI, Serial and ADB they made ALL of my peripherals obsolete. So not only would I have had to buy a new mac, I would have had to buy all new peripherals. That was the final straw.
Two years ago I bought two dead iMacs and pieced them together into a FrankenMac. I have all of the guts (sans monitor) running inside of a briefcase.
It runs great and is going to fulfill its intended role perfectly. But, I have no intent to ever go back to Mac as my primary platform. In my mind, the extra cost and diminished software choices don't make it worth the extra polish that Apple puts into its machines.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
No they didn't.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done.
And also something of a rip-off of MacWrite, which also came out 6 years before. It was MacWrite that was everything above you claim for Word, and it inspired Word for Mac, which long predated the Windows version. So if your argument has merit, one could say that what Apple should have done was to develop MacWrite and make it available for Windows as well, much like their modern iTunes strategy.
Actually, Sun does make desktops (that's what their workstation machines are, really. they stand alone quite well) and there are notebooks.
/ 11 23542.html
http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Well, not necessarily.
The problem was that the IIgs had a 65816 processor, not a 68000. So it's not quite an "underclocked Amiga". Now, the 65816 is pretty impressive given the context, but even then, it really didn't have much future to it compared to the 68k series.
And, if you look at the competition, everybody else on the 6502 (NES, Commodore, Atari, Acorn, etc) reached for the 68k, except for Acorn who made the ARM instead. And the big people working on the 6502 line was Commodore (who owned MOS) and Western Design Center (who were and still are a small company). Whereas the 68k line was backed by Motorola, who has a lot of resources to throw at it.
And the IIgs, while well designed, was pretty far out of headroom for growth, without some major changes.
So really, even though the IIgs was a great computer, Apple really shouldn't have released it because all it did was prolong the inevitable end of the Apple II line without actually "parlay"ing it into the future.
Really, they "should" have killed off the Mac and do what Acorn did -- release a new computer based on a newer processor that was able to emulate the Apple II. The problem is that, while the ARM was fast enough to emulate a BBC Micro, the 68k probably wasn't, so they wouldn't have been able to just make the Mac do it.
Gentoo Sucks
The version of Word which killed WordStar 2000 and WordPerfect came directly from the Mac:
For the release after Word 2.0, the team merged with the MacWord team (then on release 5.1), and built a shared product called Word 6.0 (released in late 1993). That's why on Windows the Word version numbering seemed to jump from 2 to 6 - because the Mac was already on 5.x.
---http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2
So your hypothesis that MS owes it all to Word needs additional support, for, if all people wanted was a perfect processor, they could have switched to Mac.
By the way, Word was born for the PC, but did not go anywhere until it gained steam on the Mac. See the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
How Mac Word beat MacWrite... that's a mistery to me. I used to run a Mac lab in college in the '80s and the simple and elegant MacWrite was complex enough for people. Word was torture, when compared to MacWrite. I guess people are willing to suffer in the name of feature creep.
The next pasture is always greener
Moderators, this isn't Informative; this is Redundant. The site is neither /.ed nor registration required, and its formatting is a hell of a lot better than this guy's. Even worse, in order to read all of this guy's copy and paste, you have to click the 'read the rest of...' link. How is that any better than just clicking on the already posted link? At least this guy posted AC, but there is no reason for him to have done so.
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
First, he goes to a lot of trouble to explain that you couldn't run Mac OS on the PCs that were already shipped because they wouldn't have Mac ROMs.
.
Well, a computer company that licensed the Mac OS could include the Mac OS 64k of ROM on the motherboard with minimal difficulty; the whole 64k E segment of the first megabyte of memory was reserved for BIOS use, but was not actually used on any machines until the PS/2 came out. (Heck, of the 64K in the F segment, only 8k was used by the actual BIOS; on the original PCs and XTs, 32k were used by the IBM Basic and the other 24k were unused.)
There was no retail OS market at the time, but they could have been accomodated as well; ship an adapter card with the ROM on board, to be decoded to the reserved-for-adapter-card-ROM C or D memory segments. Heck, use the same adapter card to attach a bus mouse if you like . .
Graphically, he's wrong, too. A 1982 Hercules graphics card was perfectly capable of displaying 720 x 348 on 1981 IBM monochrome monitors. Sure, that's 36 pixels shorter vertically than the Mac display, but it's actually higher resolution (250,560 pixels vs. 196,608). When dealing with monochrome graphics, the computer neither knows nor cares whether the monitor uses amber, green, or white phosphors. And a 1984 EGA display, at 640x350, is just barely inferior to a Mac in resolution, and delivered sixteen colors.
There are other issues, of course, which may have made making a Mac out of the PC much more difficult. But Mr. Gruber clearly doesn't know what he's talking about when he opines on early '80s PC hardware.
"""But then of course the libertarian crew will shout me down for suggesting that a market alone isn't the best way to regulate industries ;-) """
Are you joking? Why would a libertarian shout you down for that? -A Libertarian
Well to begin with, two of the core ideas of liberalism are the free market and small government (with a little "g"). If the market isn't the only regulatory mechanism, then that implies some form of governance, be it from a national government, or an international "authority" (e.g. the UN or ICANN). That's an expansion of government into the free market.
And second, because I've heard too many libertarians play devil's advocate over the Microsoft antitrust case and get themselves into a real muddle, torn between the Ayn Rand nonsense and common sense. Regulation in the IT market to stop Microsoft would either have meant an antitrust authority with real teeth, or laws to tackle the root of the problem, e.g. mandating compatability with established standards, including prosecution of companies that don't release interoperation specifications, etc.
If one were to change the context and talk about regulation and (Tobin style) taxation of financial markets for the sake of keeping people off the poverty line, a libertarian would have to object out of principle.
Yes, exactly! While technically not Windows, OS/2 1.1 didn't suck according to many and was much earlier than 1995. IBM had Deskview and DR had GEM far earlier but lost out to Windows. Both ran on top of DOS. MS had a fully virtualized, fully preemptive version of Windows (Windows/386) in 87 or 88. Macs followed a decade later.
Another bone I'd pick with the article was stating that PC's of the day were limited to 320x240 graphics. Fact is there was never a PC so limited. Text mode PC's had no graphics at all but all others were better and the EGA (85?) was far better than what mac offered. Hardware was no impediment to implementing a GUI on PC's in those days.
If apple licenessed its software hardware, it woudl find itself in the same position that MS is in today. They would have the same problems with compatibility and realibility because of the various configurations and hardware allowed to run their software. The amount of programs and users using their system would create bigger system holes, and the shere number of computers would make hackers exclusivly focus on that OS instead of Windows.
In otherwords its a double edge sward the bigger you are the bigger the target you become the more flaws there will be in your system. Its not even a game of good software vs. bad software, its just statistics.
As far as what type of inovations apple would have broght to the table vs. MS, i think its relative, but they were ahead like the article points out 10 years ago. There could have been great things, but than again we will never know.
The original Macintosh was a work of art. Both the hardware and firmware/software were optimized as well as possible. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
BYTE Macintosh Preview.
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview.
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
That's Libertarianism, not liberalism...
Just to clarify, not only is liberalism not libertarianism, but neither is "Libertarian" equal to "libertarian". (No more than Republican means republican)
The lower-case form is the simple idea that personal/individual liberty is valuable. A libertarian can, for example, argue that strong state protections are needed to protect individuals from corporate tyranny, a position anathema to the Libertarian Party.
is I didn't see how your comment related to this:
There's no good business reason for the dominant player in a market to use open standards... unless facing the threat of eventual government antitrust action, a threat which wouldn't exist in a Libertarian nation.
Although the idea of licencing its OS or harware would be impossible today (OSX on x86 would have no software), and Apple's foray into clones in the mid-90s almost killed them, they could possibly have created a large market for clones if they had done so earlier.
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (1987) was therefore version 2.0
---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel
Your corporate clients knew Excel was the right took. They just never dared not buy IBM-compatible. Wimps. Just like today they do not dare buy OS X.
The next pasture is always greener
Here here! I really like OS X and Apple products but here's what happened when I bought a new PC last month, my choices were (all prices Canadian):
$2399; 12" Powerbook, DVD+RW;
$2099; 15" Compaq Laptop, DVD+RW;
$2429; 17" iMac DVD+RW, 1.25GHz G4, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$2799; PowerMac DVD+RW, Dual 1.8GHz, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$996; Sony Vaio DVD+RW, 2.8GHz P4, 512M RAM, 120G HD
I bought the Sony, it easily out-guns and way under-prices the others. Sorry Apple, I really like your products but the fact that you can't entice an Apple fan like me to buy one of your desktops is not saying much for your pricing strategy.
For what it's worth, there's nothing in the Windows world that touches your laptops, but they're still a little too pricy for me. (Also, I'm simply *not* interested in that hideous eMac -- especially since I already have a 17" CRT.)
SLL
I bought a new (faster) CPU for my mac here.
The problem with this is, at the time, the kind of hardware needed for a GUI was extremely expensive. The idea, originally, was for the Mac to be a very cheap ($1000) machine, and the Lisa to be a high-profit machine. But the hardware required to do everything kept increasing as development proceeded. Apple was not focused on profits, nor on market share. They were letting the engineers and programmers drive develolpment, and they kept demanding more powerful hardware. See Folklore.org for more. The result was an extremely well-designed, but also expensive, machine. Much better than you could get by improving the Apple II, or using PC-standard hardware. Indeed, with the Apple IIGS, they did try to create a Mac-AII hybrid, but the result was yet another bastard platform (GS-OS) that almost nobody was interested in.
The Lisa ended up as a $10,000 flop, and the Mac as a $2500 luxury machine. And I won't debate you that Apple quickly decided to use the Mac as a high-margin profit center. But in the beginning, the Mac was not as overpriced as you imply.
In 1984, they must have been. The Amiga didn't come out until mid-1985.
Your Amiga was released in late 85.
Your C64 GEOS package wasn't available until late 86.
He makes the argument that because Apple was 10 years ahead they couldn't have licensed their stuff and taken the places of MS. I make the argument that because they were 10 years ahead they were in the prime position to take the lead.
No he doesn't, he says that what Apple made in 1984 couldn't be done on then current PC hardware so the OS was worthless without the hardware. As for licensing the hardware, remember that the hot technology stocks of the mid-80's were DEC, Tandem, Wang etc. Any of those companies, had it chosen to, could have bought Apple 10 times over, then bought Microsoft for dessert. Apple would have lasted a nanosecond as an independent company in a world of Macintosh clones in 1984, any major technology player of the time could have simply undercut Apple's prices and used their cash horde to gain market share at a loss. Then pick of the empty husk that was left of Apple if they felt benevolent. That is of course, if any major technology company had felt the market the Macintosh opened was worth the trouble, which was not at all clear at the time.
I know people who had to buy new USB 600$/800$ dollar graphics tablets because Apple dumped serial/ADB. Apple wouldn't even add support to OSX for the popular USB adapter for those old Wacom's that worked fine in OS9...
$2799 for a dual 1.8? Where the hell did you pull that number from? The Apple store has them for $1,999 with the exact same configuration.
Here: http://tinyurl.com/4853k
As I said, all prices are Canadian.
SLL
If Apple was going to force me to purchase new peripherals to replace all of the (perfectly functional)ones I had, I saw no reason to reward them for it.
Now I'm using all kinds of USB peripherals with my x86 boxes. Thanks Apple!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
At one time, Apple had the best hardware, the best OS, and all the big hit programs came out on the Mac first. IIRC even Excel came out on the Mac first
I doubt if that was because of the superior hardware. Gates got a lot in return: Apple killed their superior BASIC, and they gave Microsoft a license for certain "minor" features of the Mac interface to use in Windows, which at that time used a "panes" approach that was not directly competitive with the Mac's overlapping Windows. Unfortunately, Apple discovered that Windows' panes were part of a bait-and-switch--Microsoft turned around and released a version of Windows that was a blatant copy of the Mac GUI. When Apple tried to sue, they discovered how completely Gates had outmaneuvered Jobs--those minor features that they had licensed were precisely the ones that were original to Apple, and the license set no restrictions on what Microsoft could do with them in future versions of Windows.
According to Barefeats the Opteron and G5 are basically neck and neck.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
-- thinkyhead software and media
These days, I think that looks and the want to be different are teh two main reasons people buy Macs. Back in the day, MacOS really was as good or better than Windows at everything (compatibility aside since that's not relivant here). MacOS really did do graphics better, it did have a more usuable GUI, it was more stable, etc.
/., Windows XP is quite stable, PCs have the latest greatest in graphics, both have easly usable UIs (some argue that OS-X is less usable than OS9, but it's still quite usuable) etc.
These days, it's pretty much a wash. Despite what people like to crow about on
So you've got a platform that costs more money, doesn't run all the games as you noted, and doesn't offer any real noticable improvements to your average user other than eye candy both on and off screen. Means that the eye candy crowd is who you are going to attract.
The third one does, and but only in the context of dragging icons and double clicking them (in the June of 1981 line item). It comes up tangentally later in the 1988 and 1991 sections amount Microsoft. That particular line item in June of '81 I believe is referencing a computer made by Xerox not Apple.
Any chance you'll point out the specifics of the text that clarify that the Mac's didn't specifically take the concept of Icon's from Xerox? Or that Job's inspiration for developing a GUI based computer didn't come directly from his visits to PARC.
Heck, even Jobs openly admits that at PARC, they showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't even notice the other two (OO programing, and networking).
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html
Search for the text "three things". It's right there. Now, Raskin did work there for a little under two years before the PARC visit, but unless it's the "PITS" thing, I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Apple didn't get the idea of a GUI directly from PARC. Raskin might have had the concept in a design 15 years early in his Ph.D, but PARC appears to be the one who shocked Jobs into realizing it was a revolutionary idea. So in the end, it appears PARC deserves a lot of credit you seem to want to deny them.
I agree with you completely. The author started out with an opinion, and then crafted the facts to fit. It's a lame article. In fact, the reason that Apple had such high margins is that we couldn't make Macs fast enough in around 1990, so we charged what the market would bear. In retrospect, the right manufacturing partners with the right business arrangement (such as HP or IBM) could have put Macs everywhere. The author's assertion that businesses wouldn't use Macs is simply untrue - many did and others would have if they were from IBM. At that point Apple's market share was approaching 20% (although it was still single digits in the corporate markets.) I think the main reason Apple didn't do licensing is that while gross margin would have gone up, total revenue would have dropped, and they didn't want to explain that to the markets. The later Umax deals et al were too late - the margins weren't there anymore to allow another manufacturing tier, and IBM and HP had moved on.
They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't.
Ermm, remember the Performa series? Also known as the LC. My first Mac was an LC475 back in the day, basically was was a small case and an FPU-less '040 at 25 Mhz. Came with 4M RAM and a 250M HD, but I upgraded mine to 12M and 1.3G!! Or the iMac?
Apple has tried on multiple occasions to have a cheap entry-level option, with varying degrees of success.
For quite a few years AppleTalk was a pretty amazing protocol. Once AARP was implemented in the early 90s it became quite a bit more manageable even on larger networks. AppleTalk made networking computers and other devices relatively simple and very Mac-like. However cross-platform compatibility was not AppleTalk's forte. For as cool as AppleTalk is it requires too much hacking on non-Apple systems to get working properly.
Rendezvous is designed to solve the interoperability problem since it can run on top of TCP/IP which everyone else is comfortably running. While some individual developers might think Rendezvous is something magical they "invented" it is simply a good implementation of ZeroConf. The chide about finding services on other subnets is ill-placed since the DNS-SD aspect of Rendezvous can easily run over unicast DNS and according to the Rendezvous developer list will do this RSN.
The choice here is easy to see from a network administrator point of view. In MacOS 7-9 it was entirely possible to share a folder containing files you weren't necessarily meant to share. The old sharing scheme while convenient was not safe and bad practice. The sharing scheme in OSX, which can be modified via third party tools, is more inherently secure from a confidentiality aspect and doesn't give users too much rope to hang themselves with. The sharing scheme in OSX also reinforces the idea that the root directory is not the proper place for individual user files no matter how old versions of MacOS used to work. The "Public" and "Sites" folders are regular and logical and it is easy to tell users to simply drop files into there they would like shared.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What a lot of absolute crap that is. Cisco products are incredibly flexible and beautifully engineered. They are reasonably complex devices though, and are not designed for simpletons.
You do know that you are comparing prices for the ultra-low-end IBM PC without Floppy and monitor (instead with TV and cassette interface) text-only and 16KB of RAM to the III (revised) with 256KB RAM, build-in Floppy and high-res graphics? (I can't find information whether that price includes the Monitor III)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Uh, I have OS X running on an iMac with 192MB of memory. It will run fine on a iMac/233 too.
What were you smoking, again?
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Insightful my ass - you're full of shit. They seem to have been profitable for three YEARS prior to the iPod, due to things like the iMac, iBook, Powerbook, etc. Gee, these are HARDWARE devices that they may not have sold if they'd licensed the OS. They tried the OS licensing idea - it was the clone years of the mid-90's. It was a flop - people didn't buy more Macs, people just bought cheap hardware from clone makers, killed Apple's profits, and saddled Apple with a huge support legacy.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
It's because of compatibility. If you want to move from one platform to another, companies move with the path of least resistance. Over time, CP/M gave way to DOS, which went to Windows 3.1, to Win 95, to 2000, to XP. Each time there was minimal pain in moving.
Meanwhile, Apple II users had NO upgrade path. They migrated sometimes to the Mac, sometimes to the PC. Why didn't they all go to the Mac? They bought into a platform (the Apple II) that cost them less than $1000, and were being asked now to buy into a platform that cost at least $2500, usually more, plus all new software.
That brings me to my final point - even if Mac OS X were available on generic x86 and Apple found a magical way outside everything we know of economics to survive, a lot of people STILL wouldn't migrate. They'd still have to buy all new SOFTWARE, and let me tell you - for a lot of people that can dwarf the cost of the hardware.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Actually, the G3, G4, and possibly the 603/604's all use the same 630 bus spec. Apple changed connectors a few times, but the bus it self was the same. This is what let aftermarket companies drop 'high' end cpus into older macs without crazy custom electronics.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the serious computers of the day. They were still single-user (mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
ObCitation: here.
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.
Or I could travel miles to my nearest apple store, send it back to Apple, or open it up and ruin the warranty.
I call bullshit. Since PowerMac G3 B&W, the case can be opened very easily. Without screwdrivers. Just lift the tab. My advisor literally dropped his jaw watching me pop open the case, snapped a 32MB RAM module in place, close the case and reboot in a minute. "That's it?" he repeatedly said.
Compare this to the Gateway computers we had that were sealed with holographic stickers to prevent unauthorized opening.
Your system was a lot more than $700, as NO PC cost that little.
The Mac II was released in 1987, and supported 8-bit color on a variety of video cards and monitors, up to at least 1024x768. As of 32-bit QuickDraw in 1988, you had full 16.7 million colors with alpha channels. There was no "default" resolution to speak of, as it had no on-board video. It's capabilities were limited only by what card you put in it. Of course, if that wasn't enough you could hook up 6 monitors if you so desired. Yeah, we could do that in 1987. Windows was just figuring that out in Windows 2000... Linux is in the process of getting this right.
The original (back to 1984, or did you miss that?) Mac display at square pixels. All of the displays and resolutions on PC's prior to VGA were RECTANGULAR, or didn't you know that? Do the math on the various resolutions being posted, and you'll find that rather than have square pixels, they had very tall rectangular pixels. It's extraordinarily difficult to create a decent GUI with such a screen - witness GeOS. Mac displays were well known for being razor sharp at the time. I mean, go LOOK at one of those original displays from a PC of that era (many public schools are still stuck with them).
System 7.0 had bugs like any x.0. 7.1 was perfectly stable. 7.5 was a bit of a disaster, but as you said 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were fine. This was during the dark days of the Copland era, pre-Amelio.
Bzzzt. You lose on the facts, wanker.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
DYnamic LANguage
It was hugely object-oriented (at a time that popular languages were procedural) and insanely dynamic (everything was typed at runtime only). I remember a lot of articles in the early 90s in MacTech saying it was the language we'd all be writing in soon. I never used it.
Dylan was created in the early 90s. By then other object oriented languages like C++, both Apple, Borland, and maybe even Microsoft at that point had their Object oriented versions of Pascal (Microsoft's was closer to Apple's Object Pascal. Borland made their object model compatible with C++) Also consider that the Gang of Four's book Design Patterns was out around that time. (There is a brief mention of Dylan in the book.)
What made Dylan stand out was an object model that was closer to CLOS, with generics and multiple dispatch. It also was a dynamic language that could compile into something as efficient as C. (between type narrowing that could give hints to the compiler, and implicit typing that could determine how a type was used, it could often optimize out most of the dynamic behavior into a simple subroutine call.) The developers of Dylan were also interested in making the language work well within a Hypercode IDE envionment, where the code was kept in a cross-referenced database.
If you are interested in hints of where Dylan was going, there is a free software project called Gwidion Dylan that has implemented a subset of the language and environment.