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Is Apple & Community Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?

Posted by Zonk on from the too-cool-for-school dept.

kbeischer writes "John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch. In the editorial, he links to an older article on BOZO (bitter obstanate zealot order) users causing market share loss. All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?"

23 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Mistakes? well, maybe... by guyfromindia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Steve Jobs manages to repeat the very same mistake.
    I think NOT offering an Intel platform in the first mistake.
    Also, the author talks about revenue loss until the unproven Intel product was released!
    I am not sure, but Apple's announcement is certainly NOT stopping me from running and buying a Mac today...
    Heck, if I REALLY want a Mac, I get it... if not.. will hang around till other options are available .

  2. Here's the rest of my question... by kbeischer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For some reason the editors cut this part of my question out...All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform? Did the iPod become successful because of or because of a lack of evangelizing and is a backlash from Apple becoming a bit too much of a "cool" and "think" dictator coming from people seeing it as hypocritical to it's think different market image ?

  3. Harkening back to the SGI and DEC days... by CyricZ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This activity as of late harkens back to the DEC and SGI days. SGI took a similar route to Apple, ditching their high-performance IRIX and MIPS workstation platform in favor of a lower-powered, but Windows NT-based x86 workstation. In the end, SGI did end up returning to their IRIX/MIPS roots, but it was not enough. They had dischanted enough of their userbase that they never fully recovered. Their switch to the terribly performing Itanium platform has basically sealed their fate as a minor player in the workstation market.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  4. RDF by vitaflo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From the article:
    With far too few exceptions, this is a group that just days ago was smugly debunking, dismantling, and railing against the notion of Intel processors in their Macs, only now to squirm and slither out explanations that provide justifications to the contrary.

    I see the Reality Distortion Field has worked once again. ;)

  5. OMG! The sky is falling! by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is ridiculous.

    Let's take a step back:

    Apple is now less than 2% of IBM's PowerPC business, and less than 3% of Freescale's.

    IBM is focused on the server market, embedded markets, and gaming console marketplace. Not desktop and portable (especially), areas where Apple desperately needs processors.

    Freescale is, and has been, focused on the embedded, communications and automotive markets, and the fact that some of the processors were also good for some Apple products was almost incidental.

    PowerPC in the desktop marketplace is going nowhere fast, and IBM has shown that in spades for the last two years. Its renewed focus and commitment to the game console market eclipses any priorities Apple would ever hope IBM to have.

    So, Apple made a tough choice. A choice its been planning for, just in case, for over 5 years.

    The Intel (vs AMD) move was one of convenience and political expedience. Intel gets a big PR win, Apple gets its point across. Once the x86 architecture switch is complete, the hard part is over, and Apple is free to use other products from, e.g., AMD, as do many other x86 vendors. And Apple hasn't forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace in the least. The message now is simple, and has to be kept simple: we're moving to x86.

    Further, PowerPC support WILL continue for an indefinite period into the future. The Mac OS X product lifecycle is now about two years. Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will ship likely around MWSF 2007, and will support PowerPC. It will have a lifecycle of two years, for a total of continuing support for four years from now. Apple has been providing security updates for the previous version of the OS from the current one since Mac OS X 10.0; therefore, we can assume security updates and fixes for a minimum of six years. And that's just from what we know now; the support may in fact last longer than that.

    At some point, support for older hardware is dropped from the current version of the OS (e.g., G3s). What's the difference whether the hardware that supplants it contains an IBM PowerPC G6 or an Intel Pentium 6?

    Further, this crap about software companies - already using Xcode, mind you - arbitrarily dropping PowerPC support from their applications early is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Aside from which, the 68K -> PPC transition, as rocky as it was, is often viewed as the quintessential success in hardware transitions.

    I'm sorry if some people really want people to panic and stop buying all PowerPC hardware, and possibly commit mass suicide. But with the CLEAR commitment of Freescale and IBM to literally everywhere but the desktop(/portable) market in terms of the features and performance Apple needs, I can't see this decision as anything but a good thing.

  6. That's not the last "switch" folks. by melted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a few more in the pipeline:

    1. From Objective-C to something faster and less brain damaged. Let's face it, there's NO tangible benefit to using Objective-C. None. It's just an additional cost and pain in the ass.

    2. From microkernel to something less taxing in IPC department. Otherwise app startup times and multithreaded app performance will remain as crappy as they are now.

    3. From 32 bit to 64 bit for UI apps. Right now only console apps can be 64 bit.

    And you're gonna pay every step of the way.

  7. Re:"Scathing"....good word. by jcostom · · Score: 2, Interesting
    He's referring to what a number of people who saw the keynote, or watched the Quicktime stream of the keynote *thought they saw*. Steve brought up the "About this Mac" box, and it showed a Pentium 4 3.6 Ghz. They misread it as "4 Pentium 3.6 Ghz".

    Silly, I agree, but more than 1 person out there misread it. There was a whole discussion on macrumors.com about it.

    --

    The unsig!
  8. Re:It's NOT a 4-pentium-4 box by nuggetman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The line in the 'about' box said 'Pentium 4-processor', and the '-' was in the wrong place - it should have said 'Pentium-4 processor', but it *was* a pre-production machine for developers only... this audience is supposed to have a clue...

    Looks to me like there's no hyphen at all.

    --
    ...and that's all there is to it.
  9. Some legacy Mac apps, for nostalgia by 5n3ak3rp1mp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Dark Castle.
    Bolo.
    Early versions of MacWrite/MacPaint.
    Fool's Errand (and its sequels).
    NetTrek 3.
    Zork.
    Or anything that used to be shipped on a 400k, 800k or 1.4mb floppy(ies). Photoshop 1.0, QuickTime 1.0...
    Etc., etc.

    For those who grew up on Macs, these have nostalgic meaning. It would be nice to be able to run them, on a whim. I know it must seem silly, but I was a nerdy kid and spent a lot of my life on Macs and promoting Macs ;)

    Hopefully there will be an emulation solution for this stuff. I know that back when I was at college, people were using a Mac emulation environment on Wintel just to play Snood (which has since gotten a Wintel version). Perhaps that will get a new lease on life. I know there is a solution called vMac, but I don't think it's been updated in some time...

  10. Mourn this... by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Perhaps if IBM had shown us a portable G5 or a 3+GHz system... I would be morning their absence.

    IBM is showing you a 3-core 3.2 GHz "G5" and a "G5" with 8 integrated DSPs, either of which could have been used in a Powermac if Apple was actually interested in them.

    Freescale is showing you a G4 that'll run as fast as a 3 GHz Pentium 4 and cooler than a Pentium M and its bridge chips... because it's an integrated CPU with multiple independent memory and I/O ports.

    Mourn that.

    1. Re:Mourn this... by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You mean this? Rumors and some game developer comments (on the record and off the record) have Xenon's performance on branch-intensive game control, AI, and physics code as ranging from mediocre to downright bad? That's kind of a characteristic of long-pipeline cores in general.

      They've only been holding back since, oh, 2000 or so to enhance the dramatic effect.

      Um, the G4 core has always been close to twice as fast clock-for-clock than the Pentium 4. The problem with the G4 has been the slow I/O bus... and changing the I/O bus on the Powermac G4 was kind of hard to get Apple to go along with, thanks to their "ZIF" design. You wouldn't put a highly integrated G4 in a 166 MHz socket.

      So if they had something like the e600 in 2000... would Apple have used it?

    2. Re:Mourn this... by argent · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I wrote: "G4 core has always been close to twice as fast clock-for-clock than the Pentium 4"

      But do you remember how [the G4] took a year to scale from 450 to 500 MHz?

      Don't try and snow me, man, I'm not making a dramatic or surprising announcement here, this is a totally conservative prediction.

      It's shipping at 1.67 now. That would already be faster than a 3 GHz P4 except for the damn 166 MHz bus. There is absolutely no risk in predicting better performance from an e600 than from a 3 GHz P4, because Freescale doesn't have to do anything extraordinary to make that happen.

      The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4. That still means it's slower per clock than the e600. And the e600 will run existing Mac OS code native, not under emulation.

      Remember, we're talking about what use Apple can make of the Pentium M or the MPC8461. Not what the Pentium M can do in a laptop that already exists running software that's already compiled for it and optimised for it, because that's not what Apple has.

      Maybe this is their last gasp. Maybe they'll process-shrink it to 2 GHz by this time next year, I don't know, but when someone starts talking about the "G5 Laptop" as if that or the Pentium M are the only options... well, hell man, that's just not the case and you know it.

      Mot/Freescale has, since 2000, shown the classic symptoms of a company trying to compete in a capital- and R&D-intensive industry without sufficient resources.

      And yet despite that they've managed to keep clocking up the short-pipeline G4 and keeping the core within spitting distance of Intel's MUCH more expensive effort. And what's been holding them back? A frigging socket!

      Now they've come up with a damn good solution to that, Apple pulls out. And you're telling me that's their fault?

      Intel has been plowing along with a variety of architectures, one of which was bound to not suck.

      Intel has precisely two architectures right now. The P4 core, and the old P6 core. Everything they're shipping is a variant of one or the other of these. Whether they call it Celeron or Pentium 4 or Pentium Mobile, it's one or the other of these two designs.

      That's one more core than either IBM or Motorola/Freescale, yes, but despite having all the resources and all the time and all the talent of two major former competitors in hand... they're still barely ahead. And they've screwed up badly before... they got the StongArm from DEC and developed a successor that was barely faster at twice the clock rate.

      Yes, the odds favor them. But the odds have favored them for years and they haven't managed a clear victory... ever. They've marketed and made deals and bluffed their way out every time. That's how they beat Alpha, that's how they beat MIPS, that's how they beat PA/RISC. They convinced people they were unbeatable, like they've convinced you they were unbeatable, and when they've shown their hands it's been a pair of Itanics.

      For better or worse, Intel is the only major supplier of PC CPUs in the world

      As of Monday, yes, that's absolutely true.

      But that would have been try no matter when Apple pulled the plug. They would have done it in 1997 if they thought they could get away with it: that's when Rhapsody was announced as the Macified version of NeXTSTeP. They would have done it in 2000 or 2001 if they'd been able to swing people over to the original plan for Rhapsody, instead of having to come up with Carbon as a stopgap to keep the ISVs from revolting. None of what you're saying now was any less true back then.

      All I'm saying is that there's no other reason to do this NOW, rather than in 2001, or 2003, or 2007, other than Apple's got enough market share and cash to risk it now, and they've got enough developers on the NeXTstep-derived API that they can risk losing a few of the ones still coding to MacOS-derived Carbon for whom conversion is too much of a hurdle.

  11. Re:Outright knock each other based on gut feeling by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've seen them for sale on "hardcore modder" sites. Pissing on AMD/Intel/ATI/nVidia, since with every other PC part there's actual competition. Zealots only pop up when there's only two choices (which their tiny brains grok as black and white, right or wrong).

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  12. BOZO, indeed. by Watts+Martin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There've certainly been Bitter, Obstinate Zealots around in the Mac community for a while now. They're the ones who've railed against every move that Apple has made that shakes their world view. The amount of flamage directed from the "old guard" at OS X went on for years. Putting the application title in the menu makes the system completely unusable! What idiot came up with the Dock? Where's my control strip? If the trash can isn't on the desktop it's no good! And -- my God -- the Finder isn't perfectly "spatial" anymore! Wah! Wah! Wah! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law!

    Jesus Christ, people, give it a rest.

    You know what? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they've actually, y'know, put some thought into this decision and aren't just doing it because they think x86 chips will look prettier in those brushed aluminum cases isn't blind zealotry. Saying that, yes, you'll be willing to look at Intel Macs when they come out isn't blind zealotry. But rending your clothes and beating your chest and screaming, "No! Never! I'll keep my PowerMac until you pry my cold, dead fingers from my mouse, and goddammit, my mouse has only one button!" ... that's blind zealotry.

    Mr. Kheit, for your long and distinguished service in saying "Hell No, We Won't Go" to every single change Apple has made, I award you the Big Red Clown Nose of Bozo Punditry.

    (And, don't worry, Dvorak fans! I have faith he'll reclaim it soon.)

  13. for what it's worth by cvd6262 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are two types of Mac fans:

    The first is the more sincere user who is having a hard time figuring out what to think about the move.

    The other says this was unquestionably a good move, and Jobs is, once again, steering the company right. (Forget the fact that these are the same people who defended PPC as vastly superior to x86 just a month ago.)

    An example of the second type would be a guy I knew who at our company who has a habit of overstepping his bounds. He got really upset at us for buying Spruce DVD authoring systems because they were NT-based, and not going with Sonic, which was Mac-based. When Apple bought Spruce to make DVD Studio Pro 2, he told me, "You know, in retrospect Spruce was the way to go because Apple wouldn't purchase a dead-end company."

    (This guy also told me regarding one of our vendors, "They're expensive, but they're coming along.")

    As an example of the second type of Machead, here's a recent email thread I had with a recovering Mac zealot:

    >>> This is an interesting theory that answers your random complaints...
    >>>
    >>> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609. html
    >>>
    >>> -b. smith
    >> Thanks for the laugh.
    >>
    >> To cite a Slashdot post on the issue:
    >> When a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
    >>
    >> --j
    >>
    >>
    >
    > I think the guy went over the edge... but it was an interesting theory.
    >
    > Although, it seems like the vast majority of the Mac Community is supporting Jobs' move. Does this guy have too much power over our hearts and minds? You would say yes.
    >
    > -b. smith
    >
    >

    Ah, my son. The moment you asked that question, you took your first step into a larger world.

    --

    I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.

  14. Here's one who's leaving by theolein · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If you're looking for people who are sick and tired of Apple's policies, here's one. I'm dropping Mac OSX. I'll be getting a PC and be dual booting Windows and Linux. They may possibly be worse than OSX, but they are much more consistent.

  15. Helps by LanMan04 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?

    Well, I'm a Mac zealot, and I've convinced 4 or 5 people who were fed up with there shit-riddled Windows boxes to switch to Macs. They've never been happier, and tell their friends about it. So...it helps.

    The only people Mac zealots piss off are PC guys who know, in their heart of hearts, that OS X is waaaay better than anything that will ever ooze its way out of Redmond.

    --
    With the first link, the chain is forged.
  16. Speaking Of Zealots... The Megahertz Myth Video by meehawl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apple's original, flim-flam video explaining why Intel CPUs sucked arse. And the (deleted) web page at Apple explaining, in more details, why Intel CPUs sucked arse.

    --

    Da Blog
  17. I believe now its the best time to buy macs by Enrique1218 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Current Macintosh users and would be switchers should buy now more than anything. The reason is simple that Mac OS X (ppc) is fully matured. All major apps and drivers have been fully develop with little bugs. Moreover, with universal binaries, most developers will support ppc for at least till 2009-2010. Apple will be completely switched over by 2007 but a majority of mac users won't. So, there is no reason to believe developers will drop ppc support anytime soon. In contrast, I worry about the early adopters of X86-macs. Will all your devices work and will your software supplier have universal bninaries by then? Will Rosetta run your software well till it is? My guess is no. I was an early adopter in the Mac OSX transition, and it was not pretty. My system was only partially useful until 10.2 was released ( a good 2 years). I could accept it because it was just the OS, but I would not be happy to do that with a $1000+ computer.

    --
    You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
  18. Re:"Scathing"....good word. by alan_dershowitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's not what he said:

    "Xlr8yourmac provides an account of a mere single processor Pentium 4 running at 3.6GHz outperforming a dual processor G5 running at 2.7GHz:"

    This was an account of an individual claiming to have a development kit, running benchmarks. When he was talking about the 4-cpu pentium 4 (which, as you have stated does not exist) he was referring to the machine at the keynote presentation.

    I don't necessarily think it's that easy to blame him, for two reasons: firstly, OS X on Intel was a giant surprise, who is to say that a 4-cpu system was not possible on their own custom motherboard? There have been SMP motherboards that would work with non-SMP CPUs. It was false information, but it would have been well within the realm of possibility. Besides, "Pentium 4" means whatever Intel wants it to mean.

    Secondly, if he can be blamed for getting information from a mac rumor site, he's not any less of an asshat than any other mac fanatic he rails against. It WAS a MACINTOSH rumor site, if it's full of shit, it's just proving his point. The pot's calling the kettle black, but the kettle is still black.

  19. Re:Outright knock each other based on gut feeling by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Aren't most of those Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes? And aren't they illegal because Watterson never sold the merchandising rights?

  20. Hurt. by supabeast! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform."

    To answer that question, simply look at the extremely slow adoption rate of desktop Linux, which has more crazed zealots than any OS ever has or likely ever will.

  21. Re:You mean like Linux zealots? by Ravnen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You mean like Kruschev? The trouble is Windows is the incumbent leader, like the West was during the Cold War, so it doesn't quite fit. The challenger should be the one banging his shoe on the table and boasting that 'we will bury you!'