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Top 10 Apple Flops
Kelly McNeill writes "Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history."
I suppose it's inevitable that (with the current flurry of Apple success stories) someone would come up with a list of things they got wrong. Wonder if he's an Apple fan, or if their current success is eating at his liver...
Show me a single computer company (hell, any company) that's been around for 25 years or so and hasn't made any mistakes. To succeed, you have to play the game, and playing is a risk.
So they screwed up a few times. So what ? I'd actually be defending MS on the same charge, even though I despise their OS. Linux has screwed up badly now and then as well - brown bag releases aren't unknown after all...
I just think it's a bit sad to concentrate on someone's failures. It seems such an
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I wonder why the cube isn't on the list. Seems like it should be.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
I love it. As perfect a description of a slashdotting as I've ever seen.
Do you want to play a game?
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
did they host this on a newton, a pippin, or an apple ///?
Even at flopping, they're quite innovative.
Seriously, everyone I talk to knows that postnuke (or even phpnuke) can scale easily. And then comes /.
This is a fairly good list of notable Apple flubs, but why include Microsoft Word 6? It sure was a dog, but that wasn't Apple's fault.
///. It was such a failure that perhaps the list's originator doesn't even know about it.
In it's place, I'd like to nominate the Apple
Blasphemy!!!
Of course, I own a pc...
According to the first one in TFA:
Problem in database connection
You'd think they'd be a little more specific.
I think a recent blunder many remember but will soon be forgotten is the whole iMac G5 blunder.
Apple misjudged product availability and actually ran out of iMac G4's for two months before they released the iMac G5.
Yeah, the iMac G5 has relaly been making sales records at Apple, but how much of that is due to there being nothing in the iMac line for people to buy for two months?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
No comments, and the the site seems to've been crushed already! Then I read your post :)
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
At least one of the flops isn't the OS the entire company is based on. Just sayin'.
I know nothing
0 comments and it's down already?
1 0a 3f342a33f43/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/8739fc09d2972ac584
MIrrordot to the rescue ^_^
3 words: HOCKEY PUCK MOUSE
"Problem in Database Connection" I think this site just flopped.
Why the heck isn't the Apple /// in there? They made it for three whole years, less than 100,000 units (something around 75,000 I believe?).
///'s reputation was ruined almost right after it was out of the gate, despite the advanced SOS. Production stopped in '83 I believe, and it's a damn good thing Apple had the Mac coming out right afterwards.
The first models were plagued by quality control problems - a clock chip from National Semiconductor that wouldn't work, inadequate ventilation resulting in the unseating of chips (which was rectified by lifting the computer a few inches and dropping it), too-short keyboard cables, and very little software.
The Apple
The coolest voice ever.
Apple has always had significant trouble when Steve Jobs is not at the helm. Gil Amelio and his drive to gain business credibility really put a huge pain on the company.
It has always been about Steve Jobs. The man has insight and what could almost be considered clairvoyance when it comes to building things that people crave. God knows that I'm one of those at his feet, weeping and bathing him in frankincense.
What a bad place for this notice on this website. I know where to go if I want a server that can't stand the heat.
-rich
The database would appear to be hosted on a Newton.
Umm.... wasn't it a poll?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Personally, I always loved that color and thought it was the most stylish one of the lot.
"she comes in colors everywhere..."
Sam
nothing rescued here
Any company that challenges the state of technology at any given time has to have flops. Hell, ANY business that strives to push the boundary has to have flops. Has MS had flops? Yep. Has GE? Yep. But the underlying strength of any company is how it deals with those flops, how it changes direction, how it survives, and how it kicks ass in the long run. However, the list would be interesting to see...though it's not loading for me.
A blog like any other.
lol... mirrordot couldn't even grab the story before the server melted.
(For every Cube Apple produces, Microsoft is happy to come back with a Windows ME or MS Passport. At least with Apple, the flagship OS doesn't kick you in the jewels every time you sit down to use it. ^_^)
...got to him.
Problem in Database Connection
Speak poorly of Apple, and you will suffer. The smily face in my Finder window is merely a distraction.
Because the only way you can innovate and try and make better is by getting out there and trying risky things and learning from your mistakes. I applaud any company willing go out and try these things.
What do you know I wrote a novel
http://www.mynewoffice.com/pcmuseum/AppleIII_336.j pg
You have to admit that it is cool looking. Weird-ass keyboard (why make a numerical keyboard with just subtraction?!), but cool looking.
I dunno, I honestly thought the cube "cracks" could take the place of something as lame as the asinine iMac colors.
For those who don't remember, the Cubes would occasionally develop these "cracks," for lack of a better term. IIRC, owners started to see hairline fissures slowly appear underneath the ploycarbonate surface. Apple played it off by saying it added to the "personality" of the cubes, since each set of cracks was unique.
Heck, I love the cubes and I'd probably put them in that blunder list; if Apple could've figured out a way to make them a bit more powerful or a bit cheaper, they may have been succesful. As it was, their exorbitant pricing simply reinforced the notion that "macs are too expensive."
So glad mirrordot is able to mirror the "Problem in Database Connection" page.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Posted anonymously to avoid whoring karma!!
--
Top 10 Apple Flops
Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history.
[Image] Apple and its compatriots have been highly innovative. These companies have proven that even if their ideas are well implemented, they cannot always promote them correctly. Other times, a good idea is implemented poorly, and despite their best marketing effort, the product fails. I have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that have failed.
Apple Pippin
[Image] Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin should have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.
Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit only 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.
The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS and with a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs at that time. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizable portion of the market.
OpenDoc
[Image] The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wished to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor. Instead, they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full-blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.
OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as Live Objects.
In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated Video Conferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.
Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commercial products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicked the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had
I'll need to know this information before I can top one, much less ten of them!
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Sites down atm (cue Nuke jokes here), but it's gotta be their one button mouse, shorty followed by their excuses that it's all people really need.
Really, JUST one button?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
was really the whole Performa line of computers. At the time the Performa's were aimed at the home user and overall they were a decent computer. But the flop part was the fact that there were something like 8,000 different versions! (Of course, I am exaggerating, but only by a little bit.)
I remember going to OfficeDepot and looking at the Performas and they along had like six different models with six different model numbers. Something like 6510, 6511, 6512, 6514, 6515, etc. (I know the actual numbers were different. These are to illustrate my point.) There were just very subtle differences between the models but for whatever reason, it warranted a different number. Basically it was a nightmare trying to remember what was the difference between any two numbers. That whole scheme of trying to provide a range of configurations was a flop. Fortunately, Steve undid that and cut down the product line into four basic models. I, for one, welcomed that.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Running Postnuke? After a slashdotting you'll wish you had signed up for Prenuke.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
If your going to /. a link somewhere, make sure its hosted on a static page at least.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
I think its due to the fact of how aggressively marketed Microsoft's products were and are. It has almost nothing to do with the technology, but the business aspect behind it.
http://mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=N ews&file=article&sid=137&mode=thread&order=0&thold =0
This one is probably the original that osviews.com is referencing.
creation science book
What they consider flops in terms of iMac stlyling were Flower Power and Blue Dalmation iMacs. For some reason those did not sell well at all.
I also really liked Tangerine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Macreate.net /.'d fast, but it's here as well!
This may be
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Or more like a half dozen, the way Slashdot has been since they announced the Mini. I have to wonder if they're not getting some ad revenue from Cupertino...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Not in terms of (lack of) success, but rather the Mac mini has all of the design features that made the Cube nice - lack of a fan, and a small form factor.
True it's not as expandible, but it solves the Cube issues in that it is cheap and fairly powerful (apart from the slow HD, which I iamgine you could rectify a bit with a nice 5200RPM model).
After seeing those results a friend of mine is thinking about a Mac mini over an iMac G5!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Submitted site to Slashdot before upgrading server
10 FLOPS? Come on, guys, even my pocket calculator does more than that. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
"We've had to take the site offline for some maintinence.
Or just tell the truth that your site can't handle the traffic. How about a static page with the article text?
-rich
You can take a program for the original Apple ][, pop it into a 5.25" drive on a GS, and run it without a hitch. A program for a 1977 computer running on a 1993 computer.
;)
That's the kind of backwards compatibility Microsoft, Sony, etc. can only dream of.
The coolest voice ever.
* Apple - Mac: Top 10 Apple Flops :: Open Content
Posted Jan 31, 2005 - 01:31 AM
Printer friendly page Print this story Send this story to a friend Email this to a friend
Apple
Contributed by: Thomas Hormby
"Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history."
--
Apple and its compatriots have been highly innovative. These companies have proven that even if their ideas are well implemented, they cannot always promote them correctly. Other times, a good idea is implemented poorly, and despite their best marketing effort, the product fails. I have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that have failed.
Apple Pippin
Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin should have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.
Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit only 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.
The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS and with a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs at that time. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizable portion of the market.
OpenDoc
The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wished to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor. Instead, they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full-blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.
OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as "Live Objects".
In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated Video Conferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.
Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commercial products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicked the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had failed to attract third party developers. Mac OS 8 was the last release from Apple to incl
Actually, the Apple /// was a fairly successful small business computer in the early 80s. Visicalc sold a lot of machines for Apple -- including Apple ///'s.
/// -- that was the problem.
Now, Apple SOS (Sophisticated Operating System) for the Apple
-Mark, who's having SOS coding flashbacks now, thankyouverymuch
a.k.a. the 'Road Apple'- This was the first of the powerPC laptops. But the batteries in this creaking, $5000 beauty would burst into flame while recharging. The press had a field day and the recall was the biggest Apple has ever seen, by far.
I'd say this was a bigger 'flop' than most of the items listed, especially things like 'MS Word 6' and a few of the wackier iMac colors. It's even worse than the 'hockey puck mouse'.
My, how quickly they forget...
How many people buy a computer and think "Oh I gotta get this because it runs on x86 architecture."? If the person is making a large business decision then yes, they should think of these things and what can run on them but not most home users.
Most people don't go out and buy an OS but buy a computer. They buy it for what they can do with it.
Most people don't even know they can upgrade their OS from ME to XP or anything else. They just go out and buy a whole new computer, monitor and all because that is the computer they bought.
-1 Not Informative
Anybody who is honestly not biased, who prices out Macs and PCs, can get similar performance for similar price; there are always exceptions each way, but in general Apple products equal or exceed the value of their TRUE COUNTERPARTS. Most price comparisons are by people with a vested interest, who try to put up an iMac vs. an Alienware, or a PowerMac G5 against some piece of shit Dell starter kit. Do your own price comparisons using your own "usability" criteria and you will get a reality check.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Clearly, by your logic, Ferrari is a failed car brand, because there are not nearly as many Ferraris sold as Hondas, or Toyotas, or Fords.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Very nice--too bad there aren't other Newton users in the discussion to appreciate the joke.
I know what you're thinking.
PHP-Nuke and Post-Nuke really aren't that bad, everyone here is just exaggerating, it's obviously just his provider.
Yes, there's some truth in that. But even Mirrordot couldn't get a copy of the site before it went down.
I think that perhaps we may have hit a new stage in the evolution of the "slashdot effect". Servers are now anticipating it and balking in fear of impending doom.
For those who don't remember, the Cubes would occasionally develop these "cracks," for lack of a better term. IIRC, owners started to see hairline fissures slowly appear underneath the ploycarbonate surface.
I don't know whether you're serious or not?! You've used "IIRC" (which you don't) so I actually think you are being serious!
As a cube owner, I've described what the cracks actually were in a post above.
I have to say, it's very funny what some people can be made to believe.
Ferarri was never the top vendor for vehicles.
Hey, any computer endorsed by the Cheat can't be all bad.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Virginia Tech did.
I had one of those steaming heaps! A Performa 630CD (I think), it was one of the last 68040 machines Apple made. The box claimed it was "PowerPC Upgrade Ready!" in 3-inch-tall red letters, but the PPC upgrade card never made it to market. It could only run the abominable System 7.5.x, and had possibly the world's slowest SCSI chip. Backing up files to an external zip drive required a Zen master's patience.
Some magazine (Macworld, maybe?) published a list of the 10 worst Macs ever made, and the 68k-based Performa line was near the top.
0 1 - just my two bits
I think it's hot actually; I'd buy it. Now eating it and thinking that it's Trident...that's a blunder.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
...it didn't have such unbelievably crappy video.
now i'm not expecting apple to put a geforce 6800 or radeon x800 in, but come on -- a 32mb radeon 9200??? .
I'm no fan of apple (I do like them, just not all their fanbois... same thing as linux, and to a lesser degree, windows)
.. Athlon XP 2800+ probably cost me $1200... with monitor)
But my guess is three things... PRICE and PIRACY.
Apple boxes are way too high priced for what you get, IMHO and the opinions of ALOT of people... if I can do the same thing on a PC for half the price, I will). Even their high end systems, are not high end by my standards... I mean if I'm paying close to $3000 (CND money) for a machine, I expect it to have a better video card then a Radeon 9600 (currently i have a 9800 pro which cost me $400 CND.. the whole machine it's in
Geek factor.. even tho I hate the term geek, nerd is much better. I prefer to build my own machines, even tho it's not very exciting anymore as I've done it a billion times, I prefer to chose every piece that is going into it.
Piracy... who here knows someone (besides a company) that pays for all their software? Piracy is accepted by most people as a worthwhile risk. It's much harder to find "warez" for the macs then for pcs. Incidently, I believe this is also a contributing factor as why Windows has the monopoly... both pirating of their OS, and of the apps for it. Kinda funny how MS is trying to fight it now.
Also, I have never met anyone who bought a mac to throw Linux on... altho I know it is possible. Yet friends of mine, and myself included, have bought machines specifically for linux (or BSD)
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
I'd personally like to find a list of SOS system calls so I can compare them to the ProDOS MLI calls I know and love. Too bad the web kinda fails at letting me have this info. Maybe it really doesn't exist!
Anyway, if SOS is anything like ProDOS from an assembly language point, I can't possibly see it being all -that- bad. After experiencing the hell that was programming to the File Manager for DOS 3.3, ProDOS (and perhaps SOS, since ProDOS was based on SOS) is a dream.
From what little I've used of the Apple III (on the Sara emulator), it seems fairly impressive. No way I'd be able to hack it like I can any Apple II series, though...
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
If Apple is really the brains of the industry--if its products are so much better than Microsoft's or Dell's or IBM's or Hewlett-Packard's--then why is the company so damned small?
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product?
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
If you answer yes to either of those questions, you're out of your fucking mind.
I'd also like to point out that the year-old article you're linking to predicts that the iPod will be crushed by competitors such as the Dell DJ "selling for as little as $299", that the iTunes Music Store will be crushed by Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Sony, and that it will take "at least a year" for Apple to sell 100 million songs. None of these things are even remotely true.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
What, you were expecting one button mouse to be here?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
if i am not mistaken, just for those who want pictures. Bit slow now, so apologies if in any way redundant.
& na me=News&file=article&sid=137&mode=thread&order=0&t hold=0&POSTNUKESID=7e761ab32b7b67210609bebf6a754b6 b
http://www.mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload
or just go to http://www.mlagazine.com/ and click the obvious.
No mention of the eMate, which was Apple's attempt at giving every kid in school a personal computer...
What?
The PDP-11 is an architectural parent of the 68000 in many ways but geesh. At least TRY.
Actually, the Apple /// was a fairly unsuccessful small business computer system. Remarkably so, although by rights it should have been a runaway success as it addressed all the business-related issues that had been plaguing the Apple ][ series from the beginning. Improved keyboard, cool enclosure, decent display, faster CPU .. pretty slick actually. Honestly, the Apple /// should have eclipsed the IBM PC ... it was there first, had the applications, an actual Business BASIC and backwards compatibility with the older Apple ][ software. What killed it was the initial (and well-deserved) bad rap it got for being unreliable (as well as pricey.) At the time (1980) I was working as a service tech for a local computer store, and the early units I serviced were flaky as hell. Hardly suitable for a home machine much less a business system. Furthermore, initial production runs had a defective real-time clock (great idea, Apple was again ahead of its time) chip. It wasn't until the IBM AT came out that IBM had a built-in hardware RTC. Anyway, Apple did eventually fix the problems with the Apple ///+, but by then it was too late ... it was considered a flop. A few months later the original IBM PC was released (I was sent to IBM sales/service school in Boca Raton the week before the official unveiling) and that sounded the death knell for the Apple ///.
But, yeah. SOS was kinda weird.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
OK. Here is my criteria
1. Runs Half-Life 2
that's it. How much do I have to spend on a Mac for this one?
Smile, I'm kidding. I like the damn things.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
don't even get me started on the Apple //c.
Don't forget the II GS. That was a killer machine with sound processing to die for. When it was released it made the available Macs look a bit weak (I think all there was available was the 128/512K models, the Mac Plus, and the Lisa/MacXL). All monochrome, very dull, totally unexpandable. Very pricey!
People who say that Apple's rot began when Jobs was fired miss the point. Jobs had managed to convince the execs (both regulars and the people who replaced him) that the II line was dead as a dodo and they should focus on the Mac. So Apple did, basically letting their mindshare evaporate within the personal and education markets. Apple had an extremely strong position but managed the transition to Mac very badly, or in fact failed to manage it at all. The II died from neglect.
One reason lots of other companies that emerged as PC makers in the 80s went on to massively outgrow Apple (think, Compaq...) is that they managed their transition from the 8/16 bit IBM PC through lots of architecture and CPU generations without suddenly dropping support for their existing customer base or alientating them completely. That kind of demonstrated lack of commitment to preserve existing relationships is why so many companies and purchasers found and find it hard to trust Apple, or to believe that its direction or strategy will endure past a few quarters.
Apple has always had problems as a company splitting its focus between different product lines. Witness the prolonged dullness and fading away of the Mac line the past few years as the iPod has obsessed the one-track-mind of Jobs.
The best thing for Apple the *computer* company right now might be to spin off or float iPod as a separate division, much as 3Com spun off Palm. use the massive cash raised to do something exciting for the computer line like, I don't know, buy Sun or something! Apple would then be selling both low-end, mid-range, and high-end Unix products!
Or given undercurrent of US regulatory resistance to Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, why not buy that? An Apple-IBM PC combination would easily pass regulatory hurdles, and uniting two premium brands might work quite well. And of course, the ironic denoument would be priceless.
Da Blog
Guess you never used the previous Flagship OS, known as MacOS.
Co-operative multi-tasking, crappy memory protection, and it goes downhill from there...
VT paid list price for their supercomputer. At least for the G5s. I guess it's possible that they got a discount on the Infiniband switches or something.
Wow, the first comment was one criticising any article that dare look at Apple in anything but the most positive light. Big surprise.
What went wrong with the Mac Portable is just as worthy of a question as what went right with the Powerbook. That are even better questions when asked together.
What is it about Apple that makes it's supporters so sensitive? This article doesn't look like a criticism as much as it looks like an analysis, and a worthy one at that. It's a computer not a lifestyle.
"Adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it. " - Horace
So what? My Powerbook works great, and I don't give a damn if more people buy Acers than Macs. They're welcome to their choices...they do not impact mine.
Market share is just not that important.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
After finding that out I pretty much lost all respect for the guy.
No, by his logic Ford would be a failure if they'd gone from "inventor of the mass-market car" to "bit player with less market share than Porsche"
I've meta moderated enough here to know when a subject line is out and out flamebait. This whole damn topic is flamebait from the start.
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
I bought a Dual G5 to put linux on it in a lab at work. I got one of there "cluster node" Xserves that is now running Gentoo Linux PPC64. It is exactly what I needed it to be... fast, fast, and more fast. Especially with that nice 1.15 Ghz. system bus and 2GB of DDR400 memory.
Sure, installing it with on a serial port console was a little annoying... but once we got an iso setup right it wasn't too bad.
I also don't happen to think 3k for a dual processor box with a Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL card capable of driving two 30" 2560x1600 resolution displays is too bad a price.
Course... that being said, I do still have a x86 PC running linux on my desktop.
I concur. My Titanium Powerbook (and the macs at my business) are mine by choice. The lowest common demominator is not always the best choice, even if the cheapest.
Log in and we can talk.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"Clearly, by your logic, Ferrari is a failed car brand, because there are not nearly as many Ferraris sold as Hondas, or Toyotas, or Fords."
Heh. Thought I was in a Nintendo thread for a moment.
"Derp de derp."
This article doesn't mention Apple's flirtation with clones-- probably the single largest flop in the company's history. I still fondly remember my PowerTower.
My husband still has his Tangerine iBook/300, even though he has a AL PB17" to replace it, the Tangerine iBook is still his sentimental favourite
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Over the years I spent a goodly bit on my //e's system. Transwarp, 10 MEG HD, 1 MEG of RAM on my 80 col card. Now even though the base //gs system had a lot of things built into it such that some of my hardware would be obsolete the handwriting was already on the wall for the // series.
//e around for some time and it did ok but I eventually had to turn to the PC. It had the feel of a real hackers box rather than the handholding you got with a Mac and didn't cost an arm and a leg to boot.
I kept my
Well that's all water under the bridge at this point and I'm happy to see Apple doing well but now they are up against Linux/BSD for the hackers market and of course MS will not go quietly.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
If you plugged the pins in out of line at the next power up they went BANG and dislodged your boss' toupee. Mind you, once bitten...
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
since when we do we rank the most important 10 floating point operations? badaboom. cd /..
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Are you an actual Apple developer? Their developer support is top notch. I can even get replies from Apple engineers on Apple's mailing lists. OS bugs are simple to submit. Just the other day Apple sent me a request making sure a bug I filed a year ago was still fixed. The documentation is great and every single last thing is covered. Not to mention they send all their WWDC sessions to developers out on DVD so we can get tutorial sessions on coding for the next version of OS X straight from the teams that wrote the feature. I'd like to see Microsoft do that...
I'm not sure what this says about me as a Mac user - I used eWorld, typeset a book on a Macintosh Portable, and still have a Dalmation Spotted iMac at home as a file server for our wireless powerbooks. :)
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
The company was going public and we were delivering the "pink sheet" of disclosures... it claimed we were not a one product company, that we had shipped two product lines.
/// was shipped to a relative of Wendell (I believe) so that the disclosure was accurate.
/// Apple was able to raise a few more 100's of millions of dollars that were ploughed into product development...
/// has sold only one machine, it made a ton of money for Apple.
A single Apple
By sacrificing the reliability of the Apple
So, even if the Apple
And SOS was good too... Bob Etheredge in Bandley 3 had the lead and was doing the most professional job he could given the daily euphoria that was Apple culture.
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
In terms of changing the world with the Apple II, then the Mac, putting style into computers, creating the iPod, launching iTunes... well, yes you can (correctly) point out that they weren't exactly first with these things. The Altair was the first home computer, Xerox did a lot of the GUI innovation, Apple wasn't the first to make a high-capacity MP3 player. But Apple has been revolutionary in doing more to take these technologies mainstream than anyone else. In those terms, they're a success. Apple is a success at making incredible products that people feel very emotional about (love AND hate, speaking as someone who got into computers through the Apple IIe). Microsoft is an insanely great money-making machine, Apple has a legacy of creating insanely great (sometimes just insane) machines and software.
So who would you rather be? Gates, with enough money to buy Bolivia? Or Jobs, who has less money (still more than you could ever use) and a legacy of cool innovation?
From the article:
The new manager decided to just use WinWord 2.0's code-base on the Mac.
Not quite correct. I worked there around that time.
The decision was to use the same source code to build both Windows and Mac versions.
With Pyramid, the goal was to make a word processor that would be carefully designed: back end universal, front end specific to each supported OS (which would be Windows, MacOS, and possibly OS/2 PM). When Pyramid didn't work out as well as they hoped, they decided to take the Windows source code and build it for MacOS.
Rather than running wild with #ifdef statements and trying to make a native Mac interface, they used a compatibility library. IIRC this was called WLM (Windows Layer for Macintosh). It was not unlike the "winelib" library.
Because both Windows Word and Mac Word were compiled from the same source code, the two products became fully compatible. This was a major leap in features for the Mac Word product. Previous versions of Mac Word had been much smaller and faster, but they were also missing features compared to Windows Word, which meant that file compatibility was not 100%. (You can't import a file, and then export that file with edits, if your word processor does not support all the features that file uses!)
Business users were much happier with Mac Word 6 because of the file compatibility. Home users, students, and magazine reporters tended to be annoyed about the slower speed of Word 6 compared to the older versions. There was a bug that made the "word count" feature particularly slow, and Microsoft caught a lot of heat from the press because magazine reporters tend to care a lot about word counts.
As for it being a top 10 flop, I disagree. I don't think you can reasonably call it a failure. From Mac Word 6 onward, every version of Word for the Mac has had good feature compatibility with Windows Word, and of course Macs got faster and got more RAM. And Microsoft wasn't making enough money on the Mac version to continue to support a complete extra development team with its own code base.
And by the way, the Mac developers I knew at Microsoft all really loved the Mac and wanted to make good software for it. You can accuse Microsoft of not caring about the Mac, or grudgingly writing code for it, but it's not true.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Have we come so far that we have forgetten the Newton? ~~~ Principal Skinner [speaking at an assembly]: Children, the times they are a-becoming quite different. Test scores are at an all-time low, so I've come up with these academic alerts. [hold stack of cards] You will receive one as soon as your grades start to slip in any subject. This way your parents won't have to wait until report card time to punish you. Martin: How innovative. I like it! Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin. [Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as "Eat up Martha"] Bah! [throws Newton] Martin: [being bonked on the head with the Newton] Ow! ~~~ Or what about the Apple Lisa?
The Houkster "Oh yeah brother, what you gonna do when Houk O' Mania runs wild on you? Besides wet your pants in laughte
Quote from the article
"Apple ended up teaming up with Sony to create the PowerBooks, which solved all of the shortcomings of the PowerBooks"
Under "Macintosh Portable", that's the last line.
The Newton was a Palm Pilot before there was a Palm Pilot, and it was supposed to have handwriting recognition, but it didn't live up to expectations. The breakthrough of the Palm was that you had to relearn your handwriting in this gestures thing the computer could understand.
The fault has been serious enough for Apple to run a free repair programme, which has just been extended.
There have been a large number of complaints about the quality of the iBooks, and a lot of people aren't happy.
I'm less than happy with Apple UK's service after I sent myiBook in for a new board, and when I got it back the HD was dead. Apple UK have said tough about the drive, even though it was damaged whilst in for repairs.
Although they make some *really* nice kit, having been bitten by their Customer Support I think I'll go elsewhere for hardware, as you are locked into them.
Reading the desciption of OpenDoc in TFA, I am reminded of Douglas Adams's article "Frank the Vandal" in MacUser in 1989. (Well, OK, I don't have 15 year old back issues of MacUser lying arround, but I do have "The Salmon of Doubt," which also has the article, the first on in "The Universe" section.) He pretty much describes the same thing, in between moaning about his electrician and talking about his Mac Portable, though he is talking about Hypercard, another canidate for this list.
#include <signature.h>
Its all you read about on /. these days.
/.
Yawn.
With all the incredible science, video games, nanotech, astrophysics, ip, genomics, sci-fi, communications and other geek culture issues we could be talking about... why on earth is Apple featured so heavily on
(I smell a publicist)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It's a bit aggravating trying to decode which model Mac you've bought these days.
Do I have a G4 "Mirror Drive Doors"? Or an essentially identical G4 "FW800".
Then there's my iBook, which is best described as "2001 Dual-USB 500MHz iBook".
It would seem to be much easier if they were just given simple, distinct product names that would distinguish the otherwise identical models.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
OK, here's a REAL flop that is so obscure, I bet that 99.9% of Macheads never heard of it, even if they were Mac users at the time it shipped:
A/UX, the first Unix OS for Mac.
A/UX included special battery support for the Macintosh Portable (yeah, the first portable, the flop, the really heavy one that used lead-acid batteries) and also had sleep support, which was totally unheard of at that time.
I took a certification class in A/UX, and the Apple guys told me they didn't seriously expect to sell many units, the product only existed to fulfill requirements for government sales that specified a Unix OS must be available for any personal computer CPU being requisitioned. Nevermind that the users never intended to USE Unix, the bids were rigged against Macs by specifying Unix must be available, and it wasn't, so that meant Macs were disqualified from bids and only PCs would be considered. But Apple won back some major government business by meeting this petty requirement. Cost em a bundle though.
It came with Mathematica bundled! Now a single license for that costs way more that a top-of-the-line PC. And a single UNIX license for that costs more than almost the best Mac available! ;-)
;-)
;-)
And, as far as I remeber, Next pioneered CD-roms, or was it CD-Recordables? I remember the cool story that you were supposed to carry your whole system (set up especially for you) on a single disk and boot from that. Knoppix, anyone?
I wish I'd have Next Cube somewhere in the corner, maybe I'll buy one on e-bay, just for the coolnest of it...
Paul B
I had seen only a few pictures of the mini dissasembled before, and did not see the fan - thanks for the correction.
I was wondering how that was really possible. So now the question is, how loud is the fan in normal use?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We have a mantra. If you don't occasionally fail, you aren't pushing the envelope.
--- Ban humanity.
The bundle of cash Apple blew on Taligent and Kaleida ought to be on there.
Maybe Taligent should be wrapped up with Copland and their other aborted OS development efforts.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
So much easier to knock down than to build up? If you want to see that in action, see if the Slashdot community can make a list of the Top Ten Microsoft Success Stories!
I did. I dare you to show me a thin-and-light laptop that's a better value than the 12" iBook.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
11. Screwy connectors. For video output we have VGA, Mini VGA, 13w3, DB15, HDI45, all off the top of my head and I'm sure there's more I could kill them for HDI45 alone. That mini AUI--who the hell ever used that?
12. Poor transition from Apple II to Macintosh. They were two completely seperate machines manufactured by the same company with surprisingly little cross compatibility. Could you even share files between them? Us Apple II owners had virtually no upgrade path when Macintosh came out.
13. Serial printers.
14. The IIvx, the LC's, the Performas.
15. Little component standardization. Drive sleds, motherboards, power supplies, even batteries, you name it, you could rarely make one live Mac out of two dead ones.
16. Missing the whole IDE/ATAPI boat. All the old macs used to be SCSI which drove up component cost even further. SCSI should have been an option, not mandatory.
17. Black box POSTing...when you turn on a Mac, you shouldn't hear the sound of broken glass if it's gone south for the winter. Error beeps, some explanation of what just went wrong, anything would've been better than that hideous broken glass sound.
18. Random non-standard-bus expansion cards...modems, video import, 802.11, bluetooth...
If I'm wrong, don't moderate, but reply--Since I spent all summer of 2001 refurbishing about 50 random macintoshes for a nonprofit and running into little cross compatibility, I've been very jaded on Macintosh hardware.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Though Apple is finally keeping their product line focused, they still haven't done what they need to do to get market share-
Make a powerful Mac that sells for about $1200, complete with monitor. One that will play games well. Which brings us to the next point-
They need games. They need to just pay-off id Software or Electronic Arts (yeah, they're evil) or any of the big game publishers. Get them to release some big-name games on the Mac FIRST and BEST.
But that will never happen. The rumor is that Steve Jobs doesn't like video-games.
I'm not even a fan of the Mac, but it drives me nuts that they continually limit themselves by not acknowledging the fact that price and games drive the market, not "elegance".
If they do go through with the extortion lawsuit, I'd encourage everyone to stop buying Beatles music and pirate it instead. Or stop listening to it altogether. Those bloody sell-outs symbolize everything that is wrong with the music industry and the legal system.
They have betrayed everything they claimed to stand for.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Free or cracked/hacked software is just as available for the Mac platform as it is for the PC.. What I found in the Mac community was that the process was more...organized. Neat. Tidy.
For example, finding a serial for QT on the PC, while easy, necessitates me navigating through up to a dozen poorly layed-out webpages crawling with pop-ups, exploits and viruses,
On the Mac, however, I just needed to make sure I had downloaded the latest list for an elegant and easy to use "serial directory" program that had been around for years and was well-trusted and well-updated.
Basically, as with everything else, the Mac can do whatever the PC can, just with more style :)
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product?
no one in their right mind would say yes to this.
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
Well, the quality of a company's products should contribute to its growth, and thus size.
On to TFA. I think that a company without a history of great failures will never have great innovations. The history of a willingness to accept the risk of failure is a sure sign that they are interested in innovation. I think Apple's problem has been less their products and more a misunderstanding of the market.
The Newton was pretty cool and innovative for the time. The market just wasn't ready at the time, and their marketing left a lot to be desired. Palm came in a few years later (with a less functional product) with some kick butt marketing and succeeded.
Now to argue against myself: Success in business comes from knowing the market, the product is secondary. For example, McDonalds sells the absolutely worst hamburger of any fast food chain. They also sell more than all the other chains combined.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
The Dell 600m has a similar base price point, and identical weight. Yet to call the 12" iBook thin and light isn't really accurate. Thin and light to me is under 4 lbs... which oddly enough no apple laptop has yet cracked.
Most of this info is not actually analysis, but cut & paste jobs from macreate.net. Way to research.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
A list of Apple's greatest mistakes must include the company wide product quality failure that occurred under Michael Spindler (*spit*).
Every major product shipped in late 95-early 96 under Spindler (*spit*) had a major flaw requiring recall or replacement.
System 7.5, the 6200 logic board, the plastics on the Powerbook 5300, flaming batteries on powerbooks, video cables on several all-in-one models, and many other flaws. I worked in Apple Tech support at the time and it was hell.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company. The "Great Quality Implosion", as veterans call it, would have killed any normal company. Only Apple's near fanatical consumer base saved the company.
Depends who your audience is. If my grandmother flips on her Mac and gets the crash of broken glass, she *knows* something is really really wrong. If she hears three beeps and a blank screen instead of one beep on a PC, she doesn't necessarily even know it's broken.
The Mac's Open Firmware support gave you the proper POST information, and was there for debuggers/maintainers in an easy to find area, but someplace where consumers wouldn't ever need to think about it.
Especially 'cause the broken glass sound meant a serious mobo/CPU issue - something far beyond the capabilities of a typical user to fix, unlike software or disk/RAM/peripheral problems.
18. Random non-standard-bus expansion cards...modems, video import, 802.11, bluetooth...
Non-standard modems? Not sure what you mean here, since Apple modems spoke the same language as all other modems out there, and could connect to the same lines. Maybe you mean serial modems? No different than serial PC modems.
802.11 is a flop? You looked around lately? It's everywhere, and Apple's implementation has always been bleeding edge - 802.11b when Linksys was still on a, g when they hit b, etc. Same thing with Firewire and USB - remember when everyone said 'there goes Apple using a non-standard device again'. Now, both are widespread standards. Just try to buy a video camera without Firewire.
As for Bluetooth, notice how it's standard on the new Powerbooks? Bleeding edge again - give it a year, and all the new cell phones will have it, and they'll instantly sync up with the Macs out there... Give it a year past that, and we'll see widespread PC support, too.
-T
yes. arab toilets have hose-jets. its not only muslim that washes their poo-holes afterwards - its most of the Eastern countries. Both cultures (Eastern and Western) sees the "other" practice (toilet paper or water) with equal revulsion.
The Dell comes pretty close, I'll admit, but it's missing a CD burner and wi-fi, and the extra RAM isn't enough to make up for that. Plus, it's got a 14.1" screen, so it's too big. Oh, and the biggie -- it's batter lasts about half as long as the iBook's.
So it's already not as good a value, even before you start getting into "intangibles" like OS X. Sorry.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I did say there are exceptions either way :D See other the other responand for details ;)
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Sun's been languishing at $5/share for months.
What exactly do they have that is exciting?
My word. The only good thing they might get out of that would be the code to the old Lighthouse Design NeXTSTEP apps that Sun bought and then stuffed under a mattress when, apparently, they realized that Java ports were infeasible.
Sun's in a definite malaise, with no signs of being able to pull out any time soon. If Apple wants anything of theirs, it would be better to wait. It'll be cheaper to buy at the liquidation, for pennies on the dollar.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I even added RAM to it, and a "Zip Chip" accelerator.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
The aricle says that Apple teamed up with Sony to create the Powerbooks. Anyone care to give some details? :-)
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Apple's support for sync'ing with non-US mobiles is pretty poor. You need 3rd-party stuff for all the i-mode and UMTS handsets.
No display? No one is going to want that. Lots of cheaper devices have displays, so why get a shuffle?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If the average Ferrari cost $30k, and they still sold the same number, then yes, they would be a failure.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
PC pirates don't trade serial numbers, they trade ISOs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apple definately makes some innovative products. I agree that they don't take their products to the same level that Microsoft does. For example, I really don't understand why Apple doesn't put in a little work and port the Mac OS to the x86 architecture. Sure they would lose money on hardware sales, but they could really compete with Windows. Think of all the people who would pick OS X over Windows if given the choice. If I could get a fast machine running OS X for the same price as a fast machine running Windows, I would pick OS X.
(if not earlier) and had taken his name:
"Fronting the band is Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs's teenage daughter, remembered by most of the crowd as the namesake of the ill-fated Lisa computer"
She apparently went on to Harvard, and possibly Kings College, London.
Seems to have turned out okay. Harvard doesn't exactly come cheap.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Marketing do matter, but Mac OS still haven't figured out a way to play games.
Something so simple yet still not nearly as competitive as windows in 2005. What am I saying, I don't think Mac Gaming is even as competitive as linux. Mac gaming is virtually nonexistent.
If the 'horror stories' are true, having an unmellowed Steve Jobs raise a child during its formative years might not have been such a good thing.
"Daddy, I drew a pony!"
"Pony? That looks like a lizard. This is shit. You're fired."
"Daddy, you can't fire me."
"Then learn to draw."
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Actually we took out a loan from our foundation for $5.2 million and the Colleg of Engineering, the University IT division, and the University Research division agreed to pay it back over a 5 year period. There was a $400,000 NSF grant that was also added to the pot, but that's it. We bought it ourselves with little to no outside help. It's all public info, you can request it from Richmond if you'd like.
Because IBM called their first personal computer a "PC", and everything else has been compatible with it (or at least, compatable with earlier generations of PCs)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Users were not universally pleased with the new mouse. It was now totally symmetrical, preventing many users from easily telling which way is up. Uh, maybe the top could be the part with the cable coming out of it? The one with the button on it? I for one thought that the iMac mouse wasn't that bad.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
The "government contract" angle might have had something to do with the birth of A/UX but I really doubt that was the only reason they built it. They continued to improve it for years - later versions were really quite nice. The documentation was also wonderful - probably the best set of printed manuals I've ever received with a UNIX distribution. Oh and running MacOS apps under it actually worked pretty well.
:-)
I definately think they tried to make a go of it. It just didn't work.
I think what killed it was the bang-for-the-buck problem. The serious UNIX users were running on RISC-based workstations far more powerful than a Mac. The cheapskates were running UNIX on PC's (SCO and its many competitors at the time). There just didn't seem to be a market for a UNIX box that was expensive and slow. Maybe if they had brought A/UX along when they moved to PowerPC it could have finally caught some traction.
Then there was Apple's 2nd foray into UNIX -- the Apple Network Server back in 1996. It was an Apple machine designed to run IBM's AIX. I think it was available for about 5 minutes before they cancelled the project - one of Apple's most impressive flops.
They also had mkLinux which was pretty cool (linux with, IIRC, a 1.3 kernel running under Mach on powermacs) I actually used this for quite awhile - I still have a 8100 that can boot it. The project never really went anywhere... I'm not sure if I can call it a "flop" since it was never an official product though.
Apple's fourth foray into UNIX seems to be working out better for them, though
I wouldn't say Mac gaming is non-existent. If you are not dying to play the latest titles you can find many decent games on Macs, but they are pricy.
Mac game typically come out one year after their PC equivalent, cost the same as the PC version when it was first shipped, and don't come down in price very fast.
It's almost impossible to find games for Macs on shelves even at Apple stores (they usually have a few token ones). You need to buy them online.
However a few publishers do have Mac-PC games in the same box like for the Myst series.
As for Linux the situation is not very good. Of recent memory only the Neverwinter and the ID games series have been good on Linux. The rest must be run through Cedega/WineX, and this is *hard*.
Neither Linux or Mac games are a patch on the Windows scene, and that one is being overtaken by consoles at the moment.
You can take a 5.25" floppy drive, plug it into the flopy port on any PC mother board, shove a disk for a program that ran on DOS 1.0 on the 8086 and run it on a PC built today. That's far better then the apple ][
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That's a really good way to fuck up your hard drives...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The apple ii gs was released in '86. The fact that they manufactured it untill 93 dosn't mean anything. If they're not working on new versions of the hardware, it's dead.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
and the number one Apple flop is:
Letting Woz get away!!! The man is a genius and could have saved Apple a lot of trouble if they had only listened to him.
W. M. Hawkins III usually goes by the name of Trip Hawkins and has been commonly referred to that way since 1967 (if not before).
Trip said that he came across Appple at the first West Coast Computer Faire in spring 1977. He apparently became disenchanted with the progress with the Lisa by late 1981 early 1982, left Aplle and had sold off most of his Apple stock.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I never ran A/UX on a regular desktop Mac, but I used to administer a Mac network at the ad agency I worked at just out of college. We had a Workgroup Server 95, basically a souped-up Quadra 950 designed specifically to run A/UX. It was our file server, connected not via Ethernet, but via oh-so-ungodly-slow AppleTalk, served over plain old twisted-pair phone cables via PhoneNet connectors.
The server was rock-solid, we never had a single problem with it, whereas our old file servers (running System 7.something I think) would crash all the time. I do wonder what I would have done had it broken, because I sure didn't know much about UNIX in those days (1993-1994).
Mac Gaming might be lagging well behind PCs now but where do you think Sims (SimCity) and Tetris came from?
Point is they priced the performance they could expect from a G5 solution against other computer solutions and went that route. Some deals are to be expected on bulk purchases like that, but VT had a definite point as to what they could build for how much. It's down to #7 now, but I think it still holds the definitive #1 point on price/performance.
This may be off-topic, but I have been noticing a trend lately. Now, speaking as a "devout" Mac Fan, I have to say that it seems that recently Slashdot has devoted *many* front page articles to Apple's exploits. While I appreciate most of these, it seems that many of them could have been relegated to apple.slashdot.org without posting them to the main page. I am speaking as a user whose first personal computer was an Apple ][e, and have since gone through many iterations (including system 7.5 on a Performa 5200, blegh)*. Currently I'm on a 20" iMac G5 and am loving it. I must say that I started reading Slashdot for not-necessarily-Apple-related articles, such as the recent post about the shroud of Turin and other interesting posts about human-computer interfaces etc. So... Message to Slashdot editors... please dig deeper, find those articles that will make us think, and please keep the mediocre Apple articles to apple.slashdot.org (which I will check religiously).
REMEMBER! I was drunk when I posted this...
"The Newton was pretty cool and innovative for the time. The market just wasn't ready at the time, and their marketing left a lot to be desired. Palm came in a few years later (with a less functional product) with some kick butt marketing and succeeded."
Note: I'm only commenting on this particular part of your post, not your whole point.
The Newton's failure wasn't because the market wasn't ready. It was because it was too large, too pricey, and too much like a computer. The Palm was tiny, had a very successful purpose it excelled at, and was considerably cheaper. It was more appliance than laptop. Apple may have been innovative with the Newton, but the design was doomed to fail. It was, at best, a niche product. Which is fine, provided they made a profit. (In that case, I'd probably retract the 'failure' comment.) But Palm did the right thing with their unit despite being 'less functional'.
"Derp de derp."
I wonder how many FLOPS can their server do?
ha.. I also have an old 8100 that's loaded with mkLinux, it's sitting about 3 feet from my desk right now, haven't booted it up in years.
I think what really killed A/UX was MAE, the Mac Application Environment for Unix, which was how you got Mac apps running on A/UX. I think I recall it ran on other platforms like SUN. There was a lot of pressure to release it on more platforms, which Apple definitely did NOT want to do. The last thing Apple ever wanted was to see a Mac GUI running on Intel hardware, and that's where they saw it going.
Now if you want a REALLY obscure Apple Unix, here's one: SCO Xenix for Lisa. I actually configured and delivered one to a client. He had a custom written accounting package, he got a serial I/O board and hung 4 dumb terminals off the Lisa, and had 5 working terminals (including the Lisa) to do data entry. I just couldn't believe it when I saw the Lisa boot up to a command line and run Unix. After seeing the Lisa's distinctive white screen with black type for so long, seeing white text on a dark Lisa screen was like staring into a black hole.
The time around MacWorld Expo has a tendency to be a bit more full o' news than other times of year. There's a rumor run-up beforehand. And the fakes. Then the reports of a site taking things down due to legal threat. Then the MacWorld reports. Then the financial results. Then the reports of the Expo things shipping.
Soon enough, things will probably quiet down until WWDC, when it'll start again. Then it'll quiet down again for a while.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Time to create article - 3 days /. - 5 minutes
Time to submit it to
Time to get a new webserver...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
At least one of the flops isn't the OS the entire company is based on. Just sayin'.
That depends on your definition of "flop". Apple looked initially like they were going to own the entire PC business because their GUI was more appealing than other PCs. But then they lost lots of market share with their systems up to OS9, and they were having more and more problems with the software. It got so bad that they dumped the OS and bought themselves a new one.
You may not consider that a "flop" in the PC world (Microsoft did the same thing), but people actually were capable of designing and implementing operating systems correctly even in the 1980s. Even OS X technologies are technologies (UNIX, Postscript, Objective-C) from around the time when the original Mac was created, so Apple can't plead ignorance.
Did anyone actually manage to spin off a mirror before it got /.ed?
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
Apple boxes are way too high priced for what you get, IMHO and the opinions of ALOT of people.
Too bad for you that prices aren't set by opinion alone.
As the saying goes, you get what you paid for. If you buy cheap, don't complain at the cheap security that lets your PC get buried under an avalanche of trojans and spyware...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
The original Mac ran on a 68000. A slow 16/32-bit processor with no MMU or support for VM. It also had limited memory.
There is nothing wrong with assembly language or cooperative scheduling, if you are willing to take the time to do it well and in a disciplined manner.
The Mac team did their best with what was available at a reasonable cost. I'm not going to blame them for decisions that were suboptimal on processors that would not exist for many years.
If you wanted a Xerox workstation, they were available, at stratospheric prices.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Apple boxes are way too high priced for what you get
Starbucks sells coffee that costs about $4 more than the ingredients.
There are probably lots of people who don't even flinch at dropping a Mac Mini's price-worth of money at Starbucks over the course of a year.
Some probably spend an iBook's-worth.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
ah, yes..
they probably don't think that was a failier, since they, probably, run thier postnuke on one.
So is BMW. Not all business models are alike.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money. Apple makes money. Apple is a successful company. Just because Microsoft makes even more money doesn't mean that Apple (or any other successful company) is a failure.
I'm sure they didn't sell many of them, but a couple years later people figured out how to install linux and netbsd on them, so I imagine there are a few of them still humming along somewhere. Probably not too many of them still running AIX though :)
I found the whole article to be fairly useless, many of those "failures" were recycled in to more popular ideas or were just ahead of their time. As others have stated, it takes less effort to tear down than build up and anyone who doubts Apple's role as key to change in the personal computing realm is living in denial. What's that old saying about breaking a few eggs to make an omelet?
I bought a Dual G5 to put linux on it in a lab at work. I got one of there "cluster node" Xserves that is now running Gentoo Linux PPC64.
Course... that being said, I do still have a x86 PC running linux on my desktop.
This is oh sooooo cool!!
Mac in the server room, Linux on the desktop *grin*
Raf
The author is rather given to hyperbole. The remaining Lisa computers (rumored to be 2700, although there doesn't seem to be any evidence for the exact number) were gutted and buried in Utah's Logan Landfill - hardly a "field".
Nor do I believe that 16.7 pounds would be sufficient for the average aircraft tray table to "snap under the weight" - if they were, airlines would be regularly repairing them every time a passenger accidentally leaned their body weight against an extended tray table when avoiding the in-flight service cart.
The @world Pippin. Basically a PPC 603 Mac, custom designed as a videogame console with net capabilities. in conjunction with Bandai. Barely sold enough in Japan, barely registered a blip in America. Considering it was released in 1995 and surpassed the Playstation in computing and graphical capabilities, it was definately ahead of its time, but miles behind decent marketing.
n /a pple_bandai_pippin.html
http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippi
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I managed one of those Apple Network Server AIX beasts for while. Not a bad machine, really, served a lab full of mac clients with aplomb...
But the serial number, I shit you not, was 008.
Averatec 3200 series. http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/3200series.htm
My dad got one for $999 with DVD burner, 80gb HD, etc.
Not only is this laptop sub-1000$, it specs closely to the Mac and is a much better deal than the 12" iBook. In fact, I bought one myself when I was shopping for a laptop and even w/ the Apple education discount, the Averatec was a better deal.
Apple is about new cool things. It cannot compete with Dell. (*Now* we have complete antonym of "Apple" - "Dell", now it is easier to compare).
If you want to make widely used computer systems, you have to bow to many customers & companies and their needs.
Remember this: Apple bows no-one. It is on innovative edge. It costs much. And they do mistake too. But it pays off too.
And you cannot be innovaitve and large at the same time. Widely used technologies take long time to create market - by time technology has chance for wide-spread huge market, Apple is already on something new.
P.S. iPod being recent exception.
P.P.S. Think of Apple as of engineering company. They generally - and Jobs in particular - do things people use every day. And Apple engineers are first to use this technologies - they their own dog food. They don't do recket science - they do things person can/want to have at home. And they know it not from analyst's papers, but from real life - they do things for themselves. Nothing more. Bit like history of Porsche - they started like little company to do *good* car for themselves and their friends. They are small, vvvery pricy, but they are still around because they are still very innovative. Thou Apple likes more to parallel itself with BMW ;-)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Ah, A/UX. We had an A/UX machine at Taligent. Mark, err, um, Mark Somethingorother (I'm embarrased I can't think he of his name -- he was a really sharp guy) had it in his office. It was the only viable way we could figure out to get the IBM AIX machines to print to the Macintosh printers. It was basically just an extra machine he had in his office, yet the entire company's print queues eventually ended up going through the thing! And it handled it just fine, although, annoyingly, he had to edit some access file every time we added a new machine that wanted to talk to the A/UX machine's lpd. (Nobody could figure out an easy way around that.)
The funny thing about A/UX was that it was a Unix machine and a Macintosh. If I recall correctly, it could even run Mac apps while in Unix mode. Which was a weird idea for a product, considering that most Mac people hated Unix (antithetical to the ease-of-use ideal) and many Unix people hated Macs (oversimplified and so much not-invented-here syndrome that it was totally not interoperable with anyone else). So, if you have this machine with dual personalities and everyone who likes one hates the other, who are you going to sell it to? It's about as viable as a pro-life porn star running for political office.
Interesting side note: Commodore pulled a similar move with the Amiga. They ported AT&T SVR4 Unix to the Amiga. They called it Amiga Unix or AMIX. I believe there were rumors in the Amiga community that they did for the exact reason you say Apple did A/UX for: some US government rule about computers not being eligible for certain bids unless the hardware was capable of running Unix. (And, of course, Apple and Amiga being as different as they were, Apple chose BSD while Amiga chose System V...)
I didn't realize A/UX was so obscure. I remember when it first came out. I actually didn't know anything about Unix until I looked into A/UX. I never actually got a copy myself, though I remember really wanting to.
Of course, my aunt was a manager at Apple up until the mid-nineties, so I was up in the middle of it. I also remember playing with a brand new Mac 128k as a kid, and seeing Kevin Pollak perform at the 1986 Apple Picnic. Man, I loved those picnics.
[insert witty quote here]
Mutant Macs (Cube, 20th Anniversary Mac, Color Classic, Portable)
My first Mac was a Colour Classic and it's still one of my favourite Apple products. OK, it was basically an LCII in a different box; but it was a box that rocked. Years later I've had offers for it just because the Colour Classic is cool. If only they had given the initial version a bit more power, or released the Colour Classic II worldwide (or better yet a III with an LC040 or whatever), then it could have been much more successful. There are some interesting mods around too (all the way up to G4s).
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
I can't see the newton here.
Like the lisa, it was revolutionary, like the lisa, it was an amazing flop.
It took palm to make its concept a success (althoug I still use a filofax).
But I still want to buy a MacMini
J
touching story in sig.
I'm tired of hearing about mac users say things like this, to try to justify their choice.
I'm a very competent admin, and i never have a problem with this on my windows or linux (surprise!) boxes.
If the mac had the install base that the mac does, I bet you anything that it'd have just as much ad/spy/crapware.
Nothing short of a lock out can stop ignorant users from installing crap.
Plus are you trying to say the mac is bulletproof? Even OpenBSD which has done an extensive code review for security has been cracked.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Be patient. You're disappointed because you hit the reset button before it plays the Stone Cold Steve Austin theme music.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Geek factor II.. Apple put a lot of effort into the interface and the pretty plastic case, but bugger all into the OS itself. MacOS 9 was still an embarassment from an IT POV, single processing, no useful memory management. Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Apple: the computer for people who care more about furniture than software.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
I really don't understand why Apple doesn't put in a little work and port the Mac OS to the x86 architecture.
Because they're a hardware company. To do as you say would mean a fundamental change in their business - they would go from a hardware and OS vendor (like Sun) to an OS vendor (like Microsoft). Even if you think it would be successful, it would be a huge business change and an enormous risk. Apple seem to be occupying a niche with their systems - to change their business so they are competing only with Microsoft would invite Microsoft to crush them (despite the superiority of OSX).
#define struct union
Stupid? I wonder why everyone does it then. The PC world is the same (e.g. I recently bought a Centrino laptop at about the same time Banias came out --- everyone was trying hard to clear Centrino stock). It's not so much to artificially create demand, but to prevent the old models and the new models from competing with one another, which if you're not careful can put downward price pressure on BOTH the old and new models.
Wow... I had the same experience in a place I worked. I was servicing an AST (God, i HATE and LOATHE AST and Acer) computer that got wierd General protection failures. When the machine was on for a while, it would fail. But no matter what component I tested, they all worked perfectly. Video card, memory, motherboard, RAM, network card, powersupply, audio card, CPU, all were in perfect working order. They just wouldn't work together.
So I explained the problemto my boss and he pondered about it for a sec before turning the computer off and WHAMMO! hitting it on the top just above the PCI card rack. "Now, turn it on and it will be OK" he said. Sure enough, the computer booted and remained OK. Problem? The AST case was so poorly designed, the heat from the CPU and harddrives would bent the motherboard downwards, thus unseating the main bus connector of the horizontally installed PCI cards. A whack to the top of the box shoved the connector in its right place for a couple of months more
AFAIK, Apple doesn't have much manufacturing anymore, they are outsourcing manufacturing to contract manufacturers in Taiwan and other places, the same companies that also make desktops and laptops for PC manufacturers.
Does anybody know whether there are still any Apple manufacturing facilities left at all? Do they still actually produce any hardware themselves?
They make a dozen cars a month yet make greater annual profits than at least 3 car makers with billion dollar turnovers.
Sure economies of scale is nice, but it's pretty pointless for companies like Mitsibishi if a company like Morgan can make a greater annual profit & return better dividends to their owners.
Of course it's not that simple, many large stockholders of large conglomerates make their private companies subcontractors of the conglomerates & get their returns that way while the conglomerate makes a 'on payer' loss for tax purposes, but you know what I mean - size is nothing if it doesn't equal profits.
This manipulates the supply side, not the demand side, as was implied. They're not "creating demand" they're "preventing a supply spike" caused by old and new models overlapping. You can't "create demand" by manipulating supply, you create demand by e.g. doing more marketing. Most shoppers aren't after a particular model, they just want a X or a Y, and could go either way while shopping depending on how they feel that day, which means X and Y effectively compete. By clearing stock of X before introducing Y you lower the supply and variety of choice.
Of course, by clearing stock totally before introducing a new product, and leaving a gap inbetween, with the hopes that those shopping during the gap will then wait until Y because they can't buy an X, is unwise because that shopper is more likely to just use that gap to switch to a competitor's product Z .. this is especially true in the PC market, where there is mostly competition amongst component manufacturers, e.g. ATI vs NVIDIA, Seagate vs Western Digital, and so on. For an Apple user it might mean buying a PC.
the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money.
Actually, it's all about returns for shareowners. And barring short-lived run-ups in Apple's stock that generally last 12-18 months, owning Apple stock over the past 25 years has been one of the consistently worst long major tech positions you can find. But it's a great stock to short on the way down! Actually, given inflation, shorting on the way down is the only way you could have made a decent return on Apple!
Da Blog
Market share is just not that important.
If you really believe that then you and the Amiga people have a lot to talk about...
Da Blog
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
Many people try to classify Apple as a luxury niche producer: a Ferrari, a Morgan. This is simple not true; Apple always was a volume vendor (in fact, once upon a time it was the world's largest PC volume vendor). It is still trying to be a volume vendor. In that kind of market, being late, failing to adequately fill your sales channels, and pissing off your dedicated channel vendors is a recipe for disaster. Apple has done all that.
the year-old article
It's predictions of the near-future were a little off. But its analysis of the past 25 years was pretty spot on. You know by lazily discounting the main thesis of an argument because of some speculative minor points is quite regressive. Apple has had minor run-ups in its fortunes before - they rarely last more than 12-18 months...
Da Blog
So you have this website , and they say it looks ok. Then you go watch and nothing there. Some people call this the slashdot effect.
Someone is bending spoons with sheer brain power. But each time you look it does not work, and he says "It sometimes fails it when you're slashdotting me".
Some experts will call slashdotting real. I have my own opinion.
Its ...dying! :)
The site the article has is out of order for maintenance. It has been 'slashdotted'. While there are generous posters that took the time to post the whole article in a reply, there is another possible solution: when one is to submit a story, there should be an optional URL of a web page that would be included, as static HTML, under the topic text (not in the Slashdot frontpage). This would have some advantages:
/. effect, at least for the most important material.
1) it would limit the
2) many posters who don't read the articles would actually have a look the main article was included right after the topic text.
3) there would be no need to post the story, possibly avoiding 'karma whoring'.
4) the posted article would contain the pictures of the original; right now replies can't have pictures (I think), only links to pictures.
Thanks. He was a great dog.
Most of their profits are thanks to the iPod, without it they might be barely making profits right now. Their computers are admired by many but they're too expensive for a complete Apple system (mini Mac isn't a complete system), you'd not want to use an ugly monitor with a Mac.
Except that most "non-US" mobiles are GSM, and sync fine.
Quote: "As the saying goes, you get what you paid for."
In the case of Windows, you pay for a monopoly.
In the case of Pepsi, Coke, most beer (at least in the US), and many other things you pay for a lot of fancy advertising.
In the case of Macs, you pay some for advertising, some for the people that design the nifty-looking stuff, some for R&D, etc.
Again Quote: "As the saying goes, you get what you paid for."
Advertising works, and sometimes we get fooled, and pay for it.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Word 5.1a or so was just about the point at which their releases stopped being useful upgrades and started being calculated mostly to control the market as part of the Office suite. I don't think I've ever run across anyone who used Word in a way 5.1a couldn't have handled, in any significant sense, but MS keeps on selling their "change for change's sake" upgrade path.
So I guess I'm with you. This wasn't Apple's bad, it was the lip of the MS cliff.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Gee, what about the Newton? Was that such a big flop that people don't even remember it to make the list?
I agree the Newton was missing from the list (flopped because of high price and too large). Today it would be silly if they couldn't overcome those issues. Aside from the original price and size, the unit was functional and fun. Truthfully, I would rather have a modern Newton PDA rather than a Microsoft or Palm one. These days they are all bunch of crap. If Apple could produce the iPod of PDAs they'd probably sell well. I know I'd buy one. Hopefully they're cooking something up in the labs.
Speak truth to power.
If you happen to have a female-female ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) cable, use it for you SVHS connection on your TV! or vice versa
With the first link, the chain is forged.
That was the place to go for all sorts of A/UX help. It was a sad day when it went offline, though it seems a mirror is still available.
s a. gov/pub/aux/
http://mirror.apple.com/mirrors/jagubox.gsfc.na
I still have my A/UX 3.0 CD's with the final 3.x update CD's, A/UX user guide and X manuals as well. I keep a Quadra 700 around in case I ever get nostalgic.
A/UX is the UNIX I ran my first Apache server on. I bought the A/UX CD's off of Usenet's AUX channel. I think Apache still has A/UX compiler diretives in it's source code, have'nt checked lately.
Apple created an amazing flavor of Unix with A/UX. It ran OS 7.1 as a process, integrated some nice BSD type features into it's SVR2 core and then added a bunch of Apple extras that made administration quite handy.
I think A/UX was reflective of something happening in Apple, mostly lead by Jobs. At the time Apple had worked with Sun on developing a Unix with an Apple UI, but Apple backed out. However, when Steve jobs was forced out of Apple he went and started NeXT, basicaly a Unixy Mac. Then Steve comes back to Apple and we have OSX. Not exactly sure what it all means but Apple spent a long time with what was basicaly OS 7 while Steve Jobs had become a Unix head. Apple had an opportunity to really do something special with A/UX but several factors got in their way, mainly themselves and AT&T licensing I'm sure. BSD got them out of the licensing bind.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Actually, A/UX _was_ SysV UNIX. OS X is a BSD derivative, but apparently back in the day that A/UX was an idea about to materialize, everyone thought SysV was the way to go...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
A/UX was the first commerical Unix for the Mac.
When I started at VT in the '85, one of the requirements for incoming CS majors was a Mac XL (rebranded Lisa 2), with a version of SysV.
That was a HUGE fiasco, the machine was cancelled before VT even started giving them out. So our class was stuck with this huge paperweight, that might run Mac SW or might not, MacWorks was good, but not perfect.
Yes, reliability was a problem, but Business BASIC and VisiCalc made it quite useful at the company I worked for. The Apple II emulator filled in many of the gaps in the available III software spectrum. P.S. I bought both of mine _after_ I left the company that used them.
Don't all those people that pay too much for coffee at Starbucks already own a Mac?
I want to read de article.
Ok,
...?
/// they would never have a computer with that number...
In the MAC line there was...
Mac
Mac II
There was NEVER a MAC III, and why? because they had VOWED that after the MONUMENTAL failure of the Apple
so they went on to the Quadra line.
This is an old, tired rant that has proven itself to be completely unimportant. Performance disadvantages of the instruction set have been largely overcome technically and if software compatibility was as unimportant as you say then x86 would disappear. I say this having decades of x86 assembly experience myself.
What you say about Athlon 64 is hogwash. Care to offer evidence of your 99% speed advantage claim? AMD didn't break binary compatibility either.
Then perhaps it's time that you check out OS X. I think you, and a lot of people, are missing a vital point. Mac users use the platform because it makes sense to them. Why do we go around telling everyone how great we think they are? Because we think they're so wonderful, that we just want to share it with you. That's all. Also, before you speak poorly of a platform, you should at least make a solid attempt at using it. Otherwise, just respond "I don't think it's for me."
You know you like it.
If everyone understands you in the same way, where is the fun in that?
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
Apple's biggest problem, after the release of their new Macintosh computer, was a failure to court software developers. While Microsoft was giving away free software development toolkits and having conferences everwhere to get developers on-board, Apple was inactive. Microsoft won the operating system war in '86 by capturing the mindshare of developers.
If it wasn't for that Apple would be where microsoft is now.
Why I agree with the notion that innovation is not a guarantee of success, that article you linked was a fetid pile of rubbish. My head spun as the author mixed up gross figures with net figures, and compared software revenues for a hardware company to total revenus for a software company.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...in the form of OS X :)
-JT
Not many of these flops have been recent. The most recent of which were the funky iMacs and the crappy KB & Mouse. It seems that Apple's learned quite a bit from past mistakes. We'll see if that stays true for the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini.
I don't think it was fair to put MS Word 6.0 on that list, though. Afterall, Apple didn't develop it, MS did. BUT, Apple should have had some say in the quality control or excercised that voice if they had it. And, yes, it was a big giant unpolished turd. I still have nightmares about it (I was doing tech support as an undergraduate when it came out--I hold it responsible for lost papers and premature gray hair).
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
If there is nothing wrong with assembly language or cooperative scheduling then you would like DOS just fine. The argument is that it's insufficient for a general purpose computing platform, though I don't think it's fair to criticise Apple in the beginning for it. Fact is that they clung to it far, far after it was outdated. MS had full virtualization, memory protection and preemptive multitasking in the late 80's with Windows 386.
Cooperative scheduling works great for some applications but not for general purpose computing.
The Macintosh TV was first envisioned as a tenth anniversary Mac, but it was eventually cancelled. After the unexpected success of the Color Classic, John Sculley requested that a machine comparable to the Color Classic be made with a CD ROM drive and a 14 Trinitron CRT. The logic card was a slightly modified IIvx, Apple's midrange 68030 machine. The Macintosh TV was released on October 23, 1993, shortly after being resurrected.
This isn't quite right. The Mac TV was based on the LC 520, which was only sold in the academic market. This machine actually achieved price parity with an equivalent Windows box (after educational discount).
Microsoft didn't just resell copies of MS Word 5.1. You actually had to buy Word 6, then DOWNgrade (for a fee) to Word 5.1!
-mkb
Not only was the product itself of questionable quality -- a big anchor around Apple's service contract system -- but the thing was so late claiming space in the laptop market that, just as portables really took off, Apple lost what had been a huge advantage in that market niche.
Up until around the time when they broke ground on "docks" with their Duo line, Apple had the best laptops out there. There was a long gap where they just didn't have any models, and they lost market share in a huge way while all they had was 68040 chip models to sell.
Of all the "supply chain"-style problems Apple's ever had, this may have been the most damaging on a high level. They were market leaders, and then they fell on their faces. Then the 5300 came in and it was plain shoddy. Those were bad times.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Yes, they finally made the great leap forwards into the 1970s. But we were talking about Apple's history.
Also, before you speak poorly of a platform, you should at least make a solid attempt at using it.
Er, how do you think I got so pissed off about having to reboot every time the web browser hung? The fact that after each such crash qit took half an eon for MacOs 9 to boot up on the iMac I was using did a lot to confirm my opinion of their priorites too. Clearly the eye candy was more important that actual practical usability.
OS X takes as long to boot and has as much pointless eye candy, and the same brain dead one-thing-at-a-time GUI, but needs to be rebooted much less often. Might even be enough to get me to use a Mac for real work rather than just cross paltform testing if I end up with one in the room anyway.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
As The Joker ( Jack Nicholson) once said: " ya gotta crack some eggs in order to make an omlette"
But does it run OS X natively? If not it's apples to oranges (no pun intended)
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Well, I have some of the original content for Disney World where you can navigate to different shops and find your way around the park. The interactive demos are written with quicktime.
Of course, back up the hard drive, and load Mac OS 7.6.1 on it and use it like a Quadra 610 - which is basically what it is.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Windows 386 ran on the Intel 80386, which had hardware support for those features. Apple didn't have that option with the 68000. They would have had to wait five years for the 68010 and would also had to add a MMU chip. It would have broken all the software written for the 68000 and eliminated backwards compatibility.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Sometimes, as with the iPod, they come up with the right product at the right time and win big. However, sometimes they get there too early: the Newton was ahead of it's time and much better than the other first generation PDAs, but people just weren't ready to buy them yet.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Meaning, it gained rather than lost a few minutes each day?
How about the 20th Anniversary Mac? It was pretty cool, but offered at a wacky price and never really sold. http://tam.axon.net/spartimage.htm
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
I hope your Powerbook serves you well. With my two year-old 15" Powerbook Titanium, I'm on my third power adapter, second battery, and second SuperDrive. I baby the thing, so I'm told it has actually held up better than many of the other Titanium Powerbooks at work.
The Powerbook is a great machine, and I love it, but sometimes I think it has as many design issues as my old Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c. Yay, screen clutch!
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
You were lucky. I forget what they used in '86, I don't believe the Mac II's were out yet, probably Mac Plus's.
;)
The Mac II was a cool box, for the time. It was the first truly expandable Mac, and a choice of monitors.
I have forgiven Apple for the Lisa/Lisa 2/Mac XL (mine still boots BTW), and own three current Macs.
(I have a Mac. Relax. It's a fricken joke.)
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
It's also hard to sell a machine to businesses when part of standard maintenance on it was to lift it two inches from the desk and drop it--especially when that suggestion came from the manufacturor (it caused the RAM chips to reseat).
hawk
Why is it whenevr anyone says anything that's even a little bit critical or analitic about Aaple they get modeed down by legions of Aaple fanboy idiots. If something is not the usual (OSX! WhooO! iPods! Whoooo!) dont just be a damn lazy coward and automatically mark it down. Thats a chumps game. Write something that tells me why that opinion stinks and yours is better.
Or is thinking too much about the Church of Fucking Gay Steve too difficult? Too hereticil?
Fucking Aaple sheep you make me sick.
A bare 68000 did not have the hardware to support a modern operating system. At a minimum, you had to add an MMU, and Motorola was slow in producing add-on chips for the 68000. I used to use some 68000 UNIX systems. They did include an MMU chip. Due to deficiencies in the 68000 regarding instruction continuation and restart, they did not support VM. The C compiler automatically inserted a TST instruction in the function prolog to force a recoverable fault if the stack needed more memory.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Apple pushed this as a business-class computer between the Apple II and Mac I. It was too stuffy for hobbyists who continued to upgrade their aging Apple IIs. And Apple did not have enough of an "adult image" to compete with the recently introduced IBM-PC. Apple finances were flailing during this period.
The Lisa(s) were another failed attempt in the business market between the Apple II and Macs, but other people have discussed that.
Mod parent up. My neural circuits seized up when my eyes saw the numbers 7.5.3 and it took a while for the memories to force their way through the coccoon of protection I had put up around them. Then I screamed and tried to put them back. 7.5.x was one of the darkest times I ever saw using the Mac OS: rampant system instability, installation hell, incompatible/buggy/broken extensions and control panels galore. 7.6.1 was the true beginning of the recovery in my book. Thanks, I guess, for the memories.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Naah. What killed A/UX was Apple's refusal to sell the product. If you weren't a developer, or an educational institution, you couldn't buy the damn thing for love nor money.
Made selling products into the marketplace pretty dang hard (guess who tried). :-(
I'd like to see someone hack a Mac Mini into a Color Classic case. It'd probably even fit.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Apple Pippin
Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin sould have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.
Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit on 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.
The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS. With a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizeable portion of the market.
OpenDoc
The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wishes to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor, instead they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.
OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as "Live Objects".
In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated VideoConferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.
Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commerical products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicced the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had failed to attract third party developers. Mac OS 8 was the last release from Apple to include OpenDoc, and it was quietly killed at the hands of Gil Amelio.
Mac TV
Apple was the first major personal computer manufacturer to release a machine with a bundled TV tuner to the public. The Macintosh TV was Apple's first effort in merging the home theater and personal computer. The machine was also one of the only two black Macs ever made (the second being a special edition 5400 sold only in Europe)..
The Macintosh TV was first envisioned as a tenth anniversary Mac, but it was eventually cancelled. After the unexpected success of the Color Classic, John Sculley requested that a machine comparable to the Color Classic be made with a CD ROM drive and a 14" Trinitron CRT. The logic card was a slightly modified IIvx, Apple's midrange 68030 machine. The Macintosh TV was released on October 23, 1993, shortly after being resurrected.
The new machine was designed to be low cost and have a small footprint. Its most notable features were its TV tuner card and remote control. The TV tuner code had RCA and coaxial inputs, allowing us
FWIW, I've been quite pleased with the durability of my 1st generation 12" PowerBook. It's always on, always with me, and has suffered nearly constant abuse, and I have to say that it's worked for me much better than I've worked for it.
The virus/spyware issue is where I think that the Mac gains a significant edge over Wintel machines in TCO. In my work environment it's nearly impossible to keep a Windows box spyware free for longer than a week, dispite a robust corporate firewall and significant web site blocking.
However, that's not why I'm replying to your message! Completely off-topic, I'm doing a little side project for which I'm considering cannibalizing the LCD from a Compaq Contura. I've been having difficulty finding some reliable specs, however, so maybe you can help. Specifically, is it color or monochrome, and do you happen to know the display's maximum resolution? Thanks!
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Beats me -- that's why I got an iBook instead!
(the Powerbook does have some advantages... but if they're enough to justify the extra cost, they're only barely so.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Just curious. You seem to have been in the repair business for several years. How do computers today compare to computers back then as far as repairs?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Anyone who had an original 128K mac (or even later models) was well familiar with the power supply problems. Later hardware, like the studio monitors, also had problems, and I'd be willing to bet that there are others. I don't think Apple is anything special when it comes to quality. Trendy, perhaps a bit innovative, yes. But based on my own experience, I'd say it's quite average.
I don't think Apple is anything special when it comes to quality. Trendy, perhaps a bit innovative, yes. But based on my own experience, I'd say it's quite average.
Highest resale in the industry, check. Highest customer satisfaction according to consumer reports, check. First mainstream offering of GUIs, mice, USB, firewire, etc., check. My six year old tower that has never been turned off for more than a day and runs 24/7 is still running as a PVR/mp3 player/DVD player/Web server having never had a single hardware failure, check. Based on my experience, and a great many industry evaluations, I'd say Apple is one of the best in the industry. They are innovative like no other retail PC vendor in hardware and software. As far as laptops are concerned, their are as many powerbooks here in my office as PCs, and many of them were purchased by the owner, not the company. Why do you suppose that is? I suppose it is because the engineers at this network security firm are really concerned about being trendy? Or maybe it is because quality hardware and software and good prices lead people who spend all their time on computers and do a lot of research into them to want to buy a good one.
If you are not dying to play the latest titles you can find many decent games on Macs, but they are pricy.
Not true, go to an Apple store. Even the smaller stores have an entire 8 rack shelf dedicated to games, and they really aren't all that pricey.
Mac game typically come out one year after their PC equivalent, cost the same as the PC version when it was first shipped, and don't come down in price very fast.
Wrong. Many games now come out simultaneously, and that is getting to the norm more and more, thanks to tech that allows porting of DirectX code to OpenGL easily and quickly. And of course they cost the same as the PC version on first release. These companies have to pay their employees.
It's almost impossible to find games for Macs on shelves even at Apple stores (they usually have a few token ones). You need to buy them online.
You've obviously never been to an Apple store. Of course online selection is better - there's no space constraints. Apple store's aren't the size of a Best Buy or a Circuit City. They have a ton of products to cram into a small space. But the game selection is actually quite large, and is given more shelf space than many other, more 'traditional' mac software markets like audio/video production.
Neither Linux or Mac games are a patch on the Windows scene, and that one is being overtaken by consoles at the moment.(/i>
Bingo. Anyone who's serious about games needs to buy a console. PCs haven't been at the forefront of gaming for a couple years now. The cost involved in having a super killer PC gaming box far outstrips the performance gains over a console. And if you really have that much time and money to waste just to play games, I implore you, read a book or get another hobby.
Er, how do you think I got so pissed off about having to reboot every time the web browser hung?
As a Mac user today, I honestly have to say that anyone who used a Mac from 1995-1999(OS X) really missed out on a much more advanced Microsoft product. Likewise, anyone who is still using Windows today is now missing out.
OS X takes as long to boot and has as much pointless eye candy, and the same brain dead one-thing-at-a-time GUI
some examples would be nice. OS X rarely needs rebooting. For a laptop, you never have to shut it down and the fast on feature gives you a working desktop before you can fully open screen.
No Eye Candy is pointless if it has been labeled eye candy. It is part of the finished product. Today, if a Mac application has a really bad icon... it almost is a sure thing that it is poorly written. Attention to details is everything.
one thing at a time gui? If you are complaining about the 1 mouse button... Buy a 2 button mouse(it works). If you are complaining about the layout of the OS, you need to learn how to use it. cmd+tab(switches apps) and cmd+`(switches windows). Bundle that with expose, the ability to effect windows without losing focus of the current window(hold the cmd button down when using the mouse), and the drag and drop of just about everything... I think you are confused.
I can't find a PC that has the options my PowerMac G5 has for the same price of $1,500. For example, the G5 comes with digital in-out. I'd have to buy add an Audigy to the PC to get that kind of functionality. Plus, the G5 is far quieter than a PC (although the fan noise it does make is annoying in a very quiet room; not white-noise). If you take what you get altogether and integrated, you still get more with Apple...
...until you try to buy one from the one or, if you're lucky, two Apple dealers within 100 miles who absolutely will not take returns and will charge you $100 an hour for repairs (for those people who do not repair their own PCs). This is where the Apple really falls short, IMHO. I am forced to deal with people who have the attitude, "What are you going to do -- buy it somewhere else???" Insert evil-cackle here. Imagine, a salesman saying to you, "Good thing you didn't register it. If you did, you'd be stuck with it." when I returned my iMac for an upgrade to a full G5 tower instead. Yes, I offered to give them $1,500 more when you count in the 20" studio display and RAM upgrade I bought, yet they still gave me 'tude like that.
Oh, that and the software problem. Adobe has stopped supporting FrameMaker 7 for the Macintosh. Now, I have to use OpenOffice, which is -- frankly -- clunky on the Mac. As if I'm going to shovel out $400 for Office. Yikes.
Less than what you'd have to spend for a Windows PC that can run Final Cut Pro.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
a lot of effort into the interface... but bugger all into the OS itself. ... Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
Nothing like having to reboot because I'd just looked at my network settings, without changing them, to convince me that I was using a toy. Oh wait. that was Windows 95, not OS 9.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
A bare 68000 did not have the hardware to support a modern operating system.
First of all, Apple had complete freedom in choosing their hardware; if you want to argue that the 68000 was a bad choice, Apple only has themselves to blame for it. They could have used one of the many alternative processors, or they could have added a trivial MMU outside the processor, like everybody else did.
But, more importantly, Apple wasn't building a multiuser system with a hard disk, they were building a single-user system with a floppy. Such a system doesn't need an MMU or VM or UNIX compatibility. But even without those capabilities, you don't have to throw any considerations of architecture out the window. A plain 68000 was a powerful machine at the time, and you can put a well-architected multi-tasking operating system on it.
Amiga, for example, demonstrated a high-quality, 32-bit preemptively multitasking operating system with a microkernel architecture on the plain 68000. Unlike MacOS, AmigaOS was a joy to program. Having the two machines side-by-side, two things were crystal clear right away: (1) AmigaOS was lightyears ahead of MacOS technologically, and (2) Apple was going to kill Amiga because Apple had better marketing. You don't have to take my word for it: you can still run the original Amiga and Macintosh as emulators today and see for yourself.
Whichever way you look at it, Apple cut lots of corners to beat others to market, and we all had to suffer the consequences.
As I recall, some early 68000-based workstations (Apollos, maybe?) had two processors... no, not for multiprocessing: one was running one (or more?) instruction ahead of the other, in place of an MMU.
Now that's just whacked.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Oh really? Consistently? Going from Apple's own investor relations information, I find the following:
2004
Net Sales:$8,279m
Net Income:$279m
2003
Net Sales:$6,207m
Net Income:$69m
2002
Net Sales:$5,742m
Net Income:$65m
2001
Net Sales:$5,363m
Net Income:-$25m (LOSS)
2000
Net Sales:$7,983m
Net Income:$786m
But there's a bigger issue in that Apple has been one of the most consistently strident anti-options expensing companies in Silicon Valley. This is because Apple has always engaged in massive year-on-year dilution of outstanding stock. It's one reason the Apple share price has been so crappy for years. And one reason why Apple's "profits" are less than the full monty.If Apple had expensed options last year it would have had to knock down its profits by a third. And it would have lost money in each of the previous three years. If Apple did something *useful* with its cash on hand, like invest in acquisiton growth or share buybacks, then it would be useful. Tech companies holding on to that much money as dead cash is just silly.
Now, why don't you go off and check your fucking facts and stop trying to substitute profanities for information because, subconsciously, you're over-compensating for what you know at your heart is a tenuous grip on what you are actually talking about.
Da Blog
Perhaps a better analogy would be "If Microsoft is the USSR, Mac is Beverly Hills 90210."
Feel free to disagree with the above -- I often disagree with what I say!
Okay, jackass, implement those "solid technical foundations" on an 8Mhz 68000 with 128K of RAM and a 400K floppy, yet still have room left for applications.
I don't have to, someone else already did: a preemptively multitasking 32 bit operating system with a microkernel architecture, programmable file system devices, and built-in scripting, running on pretty much the same hardware as the Mac (at a considerably lower price, too).
In the early 80's? On what GUI, pray tell? Apple was innovative for having a GUI, and being the first personal computer with one.
The first commercial personal computer with a GUI probably was the Xerox 8010, released in 1981. The Smalltalk GUI came into existence in the late 1970's, and the Lisp machine window system in the early 1980's, both powerful, well-architected, object-oriented systems. X came out in 1984 and rapidly evolved into X10 in 1985. The Blit was published in 1985, although it also had been in development for several years.
Everybody was developing GUIs in the early 1980's; Apple was just following an industry trend, and they cut enough corners to get to market a little earlier than the others.
NOTHING used object orientation yet outside of research; certainly no OS development - it was way too slow for the processors of the era.
Wrong. OOP doesn't require powerful processors, and there were several efficient object-oriented languages around already. Simula-67 came out in 1967 (!).
where do you think Sims (SimCity) and Tetris came from?
SimCity? First released in 1987 on Commodore 64 (first demo in 1985!). Re-released in 1989 simultaneously on PC and Mac. Also released in 1989 for Amiga, Spectrum/Timex-Sinclair, Amstrad, and Atari ST.
Tetris? First implemented on Electronica 60 (PDP-11 clone!) in 1985. Ported to IBM PC during 1986 and circulated. Ported to Apple II and Commodore 64 in 1986. Spectrum Holobyte commercial re-release on IBM PC in 1986.
Da Blog
The Mac portable was a hit in the group I worked in. I remember bringing it to a meeting, fireing up FrameMaker, and listening to the jaws of all of the Unix guys rattling on the table. "You can run FrameMaker on that thing?" Yup.
It was heavy. But it had enough horsepower to do outstanding stuff in 1990, stuff that noone thought a portable computer could do.
I'd have to buy add an Audigy to the PC to get that kind of functionality.
If you think that then you are missing out on one of the best sound cards of recent years: Via's Envy24. My Envy 24 HT-S does up to 192 KHz, has optical digital in and out, bit perfect output, ASIO support, 7.1 channels, and cost me $20.
Da Blog
I've read about that. I believe that was their kludge to work around the broken instruction restart/continuation in the 68000. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000 under "Interrupts" for a description.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
don't complain at the cheap security that lets your PC get buried under an avalanche of trojans and spyware..
I think you're being complacent. If the Macintosh installed base ever goes above 3% again then you will start to see viruses, trojans, and other nastiness. With a marketshare so low, Macintosh exploits are not culturally profitable for kiddies to create, and cannot reproduce because the Macintosh herd is so diffuse. Exploit propagation on connected networks is really a function of platform density.
Da Blog
you call that "fading away?"
Take a look at Mac unit sales and dollar volume sales from 5 years ago, and from the mid-90s. Then take a look at total PC industry unit sales and dollar volume figures. Then get back to me.
Also, the fact that Apple was rrefreshing their stagnant line of G4s for G5s (and in fact the channel dried up for G4s for almost an entire quarter) created a dead cat bounce.
Da Blog
Other than the minor detail that it probably would be a far worse hack than the 8086/186/286/386 instruction set.
The StrongARM architecture, which powers the iPod and a lot of other cool PDAs, is basically a souped-up lineal descendent of the 6502. Surprised?
Da Blog
Just the thought of giving that one 32 bit registers and calling it a day, is not a pleasant thought.
The StrongARM architecture, which powers the iPod and a lot of other cool PDAs, is basically a souped-up lineal descendent of the 6502. Surprised?
Da Blog
Yes, OS 9 sucked. It doesn't exist anymore. Get with the program, OS X is an *excellent* geek OS.
The 6502 series was 8-bit
The StrongARM architecture, which powers the iPod and a lot of other cool PDAs (and also powered the Newton), is basically a souped-up lineal descendent of the 6502. Surprised?
Da Blog
The 65816 got its doors blown off in the speed race by the end of the 1980s.
Yes, the 65816 had limited headroom. CISC gone mad. But there were other, better descendents of the 6502 available then, and now...
The StrongARM architecture, which powers the iPod and a lot of other cool PDAs (and also powered the Newton), is basically a souped-up lineal descendent of the 6502. Surprised?
Da Blog
I used eWorld for 2 months. I was there at the closing party. We all counted down to midnight.
5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1.. *click*. I was there the moment eWorld closed.
Man... I hadn't thought of that in years.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
As I pointed out, they eventually fixed it but was too late. Apple only sold about 65,000 of the 90,000 or so machines that were made.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, as I remember it would work for a while and then quit. The Apple rep told us that the parts were defective, but I don't really know what the actual problem was.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have the Tokyo 2000 (when they upped the memory to 64 MB and the hard drive to 6 GB) iBook in Tangerine, and while it can't keep up with my 800 MHz white iBook I sure prefer the older machine. It's not just the color, the smooth curve of the original iBook palm rest makes typing a lot more comfortable than the squared-off one that's digging into my forearms as I type this.
I'm trying to come up with a way to cram a 12" powerbook into an original iBook case--seems like there's enough space. If I do, you can be it'll be Tangerine!
Have you EVER heard of UNIX security?
My friend, I was online and programming on a Unix machine the day the Morris Worm took it down along with a big chunk of the Internet running BSD (the ancestor of OSX). If OpenBSD can be exploited (and it has!) then your magic incantation of "Unix! Unix!" carries about as much significance as the utterations of a shaman. Do you even know anything about epidemiology? Why not go look up the words "Prevalence", and "Incidence" and then get back to me.
Da Blog
They also have ported their OS to x86. Twice, in fact. The first time was in the early '90's, with the Star Trek project, which culminated in System 7 booting on x86 and a huge internal conundrum, and was killed because Apple is, first and foremost, a hardware company. Star Trek was also never released to the general public, although it would be really interesting to see the source for it...
Darwin is the second port of MacOS to x86, albeit this version is stripped down to just the core OS. My guess is, its x86 port was done to insure that the underlying OS core would port to different architectures. On the bright side, most of the rest of OS X should be relatively easy to port from unoptimized source code for the rest of the system...
... if any strategy pays off in the long run.
I think your comment is a cop-out answer to avoid the debate.
However, I found it insightful because it was funny.
------ no thanks... I've quit
Actually, I was only in the repair business in 1980-1981. I quit and went full-time as an independent consulting type after that (mostly industrial data acquisition systems, although I did a stint at Mindscape as a video-game developer at one point.) But still ... the Apple ][ was easy to repair in that all the ICs were socketed (all of them) but you had to have some idea what you were doing. The IBM PC came along and radically changed everything by their shotgun-service approach. Everything was soldered on the mainboard, and you simply replaced major components (mainboard, power supply, disk drive, and so forth.) Hell, on the first PCs that came out the RAM was soldered in as well. But that's pretty much how it is today too: chip level service is a thing of the past.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So, in other words, you lose all of the advantages of the ANS. ;^)
Sculley understood soft drinks - a mature industry. He had no idea what to do with a compuer company.
And ultimate responsibility for bringing Sculley on board rests with The Leader. Not that he didn't pay for that decision personally, but if you're going to blame Sculley, you've got to also blame Jobs for picking him and then convincing him to come on board.
The Leader is such a fascinating character. His ego is as legendary as his Reality Distortion Field (RFD). Yet one has to wonder what led him to select Sculley to run the company. Was he pressured by the board and the shareholders? Did he have insecurities about his abilities to lead Apple? Or was it both, an internal and external crisis of confidence that caused the RFD to malfunction, rendering the board temporarily immune to The Leader's charisma?
Another possibility is that Jobs thought he could rule Apple as if he were a prince with a personal fiefdom, and he thought he was appointing Sculley as Chamberlain to do the day to day drudgery of operating a company. The Leader mistakenly thought that he could concentrate on the "fun stuff", the "passion" to make insanely great products, without getting bogged down with the overall responsibilities. How crushing that must have been, to find that he didn't hold the keys to the kingdom, to be exiled from his paradise.
I think that moment of exile marks the beginning of The Leader's adulthood. But that is a story for NeXT time.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This is true. It is where they really screwed up. For some reason Apple has never been able to court 3rd-party developers well.
The last Amiga model was released in 1993. Amigas were being by Commodore till their bankruptcy in 1994.
Clear, Dark Skies
"Whichever way you look at it, Apple cut lots of corners to beat others to market"
Um, no.
They were making a product for the market existed, and even then, it *barely* existed.
The market you're talking about, the market of regular home, business, and education users for $15,000 workstations, did not exist.
Even NeXT, which probably "cut corners" by your estimation, was just over the price limit of feasibility, in 1989. And that was with underpowered hardware.
You can click your heels together as much as you want, and wish really hard, but you can't change the economics of technology of the 1980s.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
The Darwin port to X86 is a descendant of NeXT's ports of their operating system to X86, Sparc, and HP PA-RISC.
In fact, x86 was the primary platform on which NeXT's operating system ran at the time of the merger.
Apple more or less got it free with the acquisition.
It has no connection to Star Trek.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I remember Mindscape. (Am I getting old?)
the Apple ][ was easy to repair in that all the ICs were socketed (all of them)
Wow.
on the first PCs that came out the RAM was soldered in
Yeah. I bought an IBM AT at a flea market once. Its amazing how many RAM ICs are in there.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
There are certain styles of games that just aren't easily played on a console. Some games just need a mouse, and the keyboard doesn't hurt either. (Showing their age, but Diablo II, Starcraft, probably Civ type games too). Yes, I know there are add-on keyboards and such for consoles, but they aren't standard. On the other hand, it's sort of silly to have gamepad-style peripherals for a PC anymore because those games are indeed better played on a console.
Do you phonetically pronounce it the "Apple slash slash slash" or the "Apple three"? Am I the only one who can't stand this \/\/4cky \/\/4y 0f \/\/r1T1ng? Can't you just type "Apple III"? Yeesh.
-b (only half tongue-in-cheek)
myselfmusic
Of course, you can spec a system for any price you like... But I know someone who just bought a dual G5 and 30" and the total system cost was US$10,000. I don't pluck these figures from thin air, you know.
Unfortunately I am separated from my shelf of Mac magazines from the 1980s, so I can't cite exact list prices, but I recall paying around A$3,500 for my Mac Plus in 1987. I am sure that a modest G5 system (more likely entry) would be exactly that today.
I've been involved in pricing and purchasing every single generation of Macintoshes, and on that basis I can vouch that the price points have been very consistent for the entire 20 year period.
you had me at #!
What exactly do they have that is exciting?
Trust. And several well functioning sales channels.
Enterprises don't trust Apple. They certainly don't trust Jobs. And Apple's specialized sales channels (*not* Best Buy!), such as they are, are withering away and exist in a state of seemingly perpetual cold war with Apple. Which in recent years has been moving as quickly as it can to a Dell/Gateway direct sales with boutique model that only alienates them further.
Da Blog
This wasn't so much a flop as much as a product killed by marketing, but I have a working Beta CD of "NetWare for PowerPC". Which took a perfectly good macintosh (Circa 1995) and turned it into a NetWare 4.1 server...
To think, I ported 2 million lines of code and it sits on the shelf....
Ah well....
Since 1985 or so, an entry level system has always been about A$3500 and a decent production system around $A5-7,000.
Yes, but those are Aussie bucks you're talking about. For sake of comparison, in Australia a cup of coffee costs $28, a pack of cigarettes costs $130 and a mid-sized car costs $350,000.
(I kid my Aussie friends. I have about AUD$75 in my wallet right now. I keep them around in case I forget to carry a handkerchief. They're plastic, so they wash out real nice.)
I know someone who just bought a dual G5 and 30" and the total system cost was US$10,000.
You do know, don't you, that the 30" Cinema Display costs as much as the top-of-the-line G5? You can literally buy two dual-2.5 GHz G5s for the same price as one plus a 30" display. And if you want something more modest, say a dual-1.8 GHz, you can buy three for that price.
The 30" Cinema Display is a thing of beauty. Working in front of one is like working in front of a billboard. You have to actually turn your head to see the edges of the screen. It totally fills your peripheral vision. It's the most incredible computer display I've ever seen in my life.
But fuck, it's expensive.
The OS X designers made OSX work with a 2nd mouse button. So the OS designers at Apple think the 2nd mouse button is a good idea.
There's a really kick-ass word to describe what you did just there. Seriously, it rocks. Makes you sound incredibly sophisticated at parties. Makes chicks weak in the knees.
The term is "non sequitur."
Google it. You might learn something.
Um, no. They were making a product for the market existed, and even then, it *barely* existed.
It was a market that was going to exist whether or not Apple grabbed the lead by putting out a hyped up, heavily marketed, pretty-but-inferior product. In parallel with Macintosh development, there were several other companies that were developing inexpensive GUI-based personal computers. Barely a year after the Macintosh, Amiga started selling a machine with pretty much the same specs and price as the Macintosh, but with hardware graphics acceleration, a preemptively multitasking 32bit operating system, and a really well-designed microkernel. Workstation efforts were in full swing, which yielded graphical workstations that were no more expensive and far more powerful than a Macintosh shortly thereafter.
I suppose Apple employees genuinely believed the marketing hype of their own companies that they were the salvation for the "rest of us" and that the world came down to Microsoft and Macintosh. But the world only came down to Microsoft and Macintosh after Apple had driven all the other, innovative personal computers and workstation manufacturers out of business.
by Omniscientist (806841) I think its due to the fact of how aggressively marketed Microsoft's products were and are. It has almost nothing to do with the technology, but the business aspect behind it. Given that if you watch a hollywood movie you'd be forgiven for thinking Apple products are the only ones on the market that's a fairly thin argument. Apple market agressively. Unfortunately their products are comparitively expensive and no one buys them when they can get a cheaper option.
some examples would be nice. OS X rarely needs rebooting.
I didn't say it had to be rebooted as often, just that it was dog-slow. I've heard that the latest version is faster.
No Eye Candy is pointless
I'd rather have the cycles. I'd really rather have the deveopment resources gone into something which makes my life better.
Bundle that with expose, the ability to effect windows without losing focus of the current window(hold the cmd button down when using the mouse),
Why should I have to fight to read something different from what I'm writing on? My desk and paper allows me to do that trivially. I thought we were supposed to have had a desktop metaphore for a couple of decades. And what about having to switch focus to another application just to get at some trivial menu related to it? Why all this extra work? Because they're stuck with a GUI which was designed to work around an 8 inch screen and programmers who could't update overlapping windows properly?
Too many simple things require keyboard and mouse coordination, or going around the houses. Even Windows is less irritating, which is saying something. At least the icons don't bounce at me like derranged, well, paperclips.
Mind you, the Mac Mini plus a real mouse would make a nice VNC terminal. A bit expensive, but pretty.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
That's a little unfair. For people who care as much about furniture as software. ;-)
1- Apple stores in Europe, Asia and Australia carry almost zero games. Maybe the US situation is different, but I don't live there at the moment.
2a- Major counter-example not out on Mac yet: doom3. Major game that may never come out on Macs: HL2 (!), Major games that *will* never come out on macs: MystII Uru and many many others. One year wait is typical. There are better and worse cases of course.
2b - Major counter-examples that are *just* coming out on Mac: KOTOR (the original, not the sequel!), Homeworld2, Medal of Honor (how old is that game?), Halo (again, the original), Fallout2 (Isn't that incredible?). All at full price (US$49). For the PC you have been able to find FO2 for $5 for a long time now.
It seems porting is hard and expensive.
2c - Extremely Rare Exceptions: MystIV, WoW.
You've obviously never tried to buy Mac games. Do yourself a favour and look on the US Apple Store. You can now buy the *extention* to BG-II, a game that came out 4-5 years ago at the *full price* of the original game. RTCW is at US$40. The situation is even worse outside of the US.
Last time I went to a US Apple Store was in 2000, in SF. I wasn't impressed by the selection even then.
As for console, thanks but I'd like to play on the road with my laptop if possible. I wouldn't like to lug around these things and you can't play on airplanes (loooooong flights to anywhere from Australia).
I'm happy with playing old games but I don't like the small selection and the prices.
The super-killer PC you talk about to play nice games are all cheaper than all but the cheapest macs, and I have one around anyway that I use for other tasks, so it's zero extra cost. I only play old, tested, reliable cheap games my PC is way overkill to play. I once bought a new game (Falcon4), never again (bug galore). The games I'm interested in are mostly not available on consoles.
Finally I don't have a TV set, out of choice. I occasionally watch a DVD on the aforementionned Super Duper PC that cost a few hundred bucks to build months ago.
Yes, the Compaq website used to provide quite a wealth information and resources for their old notebooks. Unfortunately, that mostly disappeared when HP showed up.
More unfortunately, I believe there were a range of Compaq Contura models, and I only have experience with the Contura Aero, an odd-ball in the Contura family. I can tell you that the Contura Aero 4/33c featured a color screen, while the Contura Aero 4/25 was greyscale. Both were 640x480 and only 8 inches diagonal. Laughable today, but not bad for the first subnotebook all those years ago.
Anyway, good luck with your project. Your best bet for specs may be Googling for information on getting Linux--and more specifically, the X Windows System--running on Compaq Contura systems.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
If anybody writes an emulator for the Macintosh, it would be nice to emulate MMU and MMU-less original Macintosh II hardware.
There was no Apple product which ran the 68010.
all quite true. however, apple was in no way obligated to even release the x86 version of darwin, much less maintain it. further, i imagine that there was a bit of kernel level reworking involved in the source. As for Star Trek having anything to do with the current release of MacOS, I think I'd have an easier time trying to claim a connection between MS Windows v1.0 design or source and IBM System/360's. ;)
Apple is a hardware company, but a lot of the hardware in their computers are made by other venders such as a machines CPU, sound card, video card, memory, etc. Beside the iPod there's really not a lot that Apple makes anymore. OS X is by far their best product. Maybe they could have another version for the PC and call it something else. But, i'm not a business man. I think it would definately make things more interesting for us IT folks.
Oh yes.
Da Blog
And congradulations on the porting work, A/UX was something quite unique and special at the time, at least the 3.x series. I have 2.0 CDs but have never installed them. I don't think they had Finder integration until 3.0.
Did you guys do just the porting of, I believe SVR2 as well as the BSD integration, MacOS7.1 modifications and Apple Unix utilities such as the pop up command editor called, I think, Komander (to get it you type in a command, like "grep" and then hit <command>K to get a graphic dialog with most of the command options)?
Did you guys port the GCC tool chain or was that the community? Was Steve Jobs involved at all, as per my previous speculation? It looked like he was seriously eyeing the Unix market back then. Although you call A/UX a foot note to Apple.
You guys turned those boxes into real computers. While most people were dinking around with Windows 3.11 I had my Mac and Unix too!
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
I think I may just go fire up that Quadra sometime soon.
Thanks for the replies, I'm an A/UX cultist of one.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
The question was just laptops comparable to iBooks. Now personally I like OS X, I have a mac mini, but I can never get an apple laptop. Until they get one to below 3 lbs, it's just not going to happen. It's amazing to me that at 4.6lbs, the 12" Powerbook is one of the HEAVIEST 12" laptops on the market. You would think for the price they might make it portable.
Its memory lives on on Wikipedia, at least.
Say, if you were that deeply involved in its creation, is there any chance you could donate a nice PNG screenshot (if it had a distinctive-looking interface), or maybe some informative but really obscure tidbits to the article.
Just sayin'. Yeah, it's writing for free, but you're already doing it on Slashdot, and you'd be adding to the sum total of human knowledge that's in an easily-accessible form. Shiny!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Ah yes - Mac clones.
I wanted a Mac very much, but they were very expensive. Furthermore, no one was cloning them, like the PC was being cloned.
Also - there was no Mac-like operating system out there. Someone told me Apple had patterned the microcode or something, the first time I had heard of that happening.
THEN - I heard about this company making Mac clones! Oh Boy! I started investigating, only to have Steve Jobs buy the company and close it. This is the sort of restraint of trade that really bothers me.
So much so, I went out and bought an XT clone instead and the rest is history. I have never owned a Mac.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
The lack of an MMU was a conscious design decision. In fact, Apple DID have an MMU for the 68000 in the Lisa. Cost was the primary reason for not putting it in the Mac, and the engineers felt that as long as programs were well behaved, they could live without it. Of course, the original Mac OS also did not have multitasking, so the MMU was even less of a necessity.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Well, depends what you mean by "design heritage". We all use binary and programmable machines, so we're all indebted to Zuse's Z3 in some fashion.
But I am curious---what sorts of design elements were present in the Intel 4004 which are discernible in the Pentium 4? My knowledge of chip architecture is pretty sketchy, but I'd be interested to know what's survived over the years, even if it's something totally idiosyncratic and meaningless.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Dude! I remember Executor! Well, mainly I remember my brother saying it could run Mac things, and then not being able to boot it, probably because we didn't have a boot ROM. We gave up, and went back to playing "Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold" or whatever the hot warez were that week.
But it was the first I ever learned of emulation, before ZSNES and Nesticle. Ah, those were the days.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Thanks for posting this! I was disappointed not to see A/UX on the original list.
I did QA for A/UX 3.0 back in '91-'92 (as a contractor working at Apple), testing 3rd-party applications for compatibility. Various of us referred to A/UX as "Apple's best-kept secret"; most of my Mac-user friends had never heard of it.... As someone else noted in another comment, I don't think the government contracts were the only reason for A/UX's existence, but my impression was that pretty much nobody else was buying the OS.