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Dell We'd Sell Mac OS X
euphonaesthesia writes "In this article from Fortune, Dell CEO Michael Dell mentions that he would offer OS X to customers if Apple were so willing. The author speculates also that Apple would probably demand certain specifications. Having OS X would probably require a higher price point--this both Apple and Dell would probably like."
They already do in some of their server lines.
Michael Dell is no longer CEO. He's chairman of the board. Kevin Rollins is CEO.
Not what you're missing, but rather what the poster/editor missed.
I imagine it was to read:
Dell: We'd Sell Mac OS X
(and that's in would, as in will if Apple allows)
was that SO hard to figure out?
damn..i think i just bit a troll...strangely bitter it is...
Dell has PRICEY HARDWARE?!?!
You're kidding, right?
If you pay full price for Dell hardware, it's your stupidity, not their price, that makes it "pricey". Just check digitaldeals.net, or go on dell.com and look at Outrageous Deals.
You mean to tell me a P4 2.8Ghz HT, 512 MB Ram, 40gb HD, CD Burner/DVD, + 19inch flat panel is overpriced for $499?!
You're out of your mind.
In my experience, Dell gives my organization hardware lock-in for a specific model - for example, the Dell GX280s we ordered at the beginning of the year were identical to the ones we ordered at the end of the year. The exception would be hard drive brand, but I don't even get the same brand hard drives from one identical model Mac to another.
Besides, I can take a firewire drive with a Tiger install on it and boot everything from a G3 iMac to a DP 2 GHz G5 - OS X only loads the drivers it needs, so a few more wouldn't hurt. -Ryan
This Michael Dell? ("...the best thing that could be done with Apple would be to shut it down, liquidate its assets, and return the money to its shareholders")
It should be observed that Michael Dell has taken pot-shots at, belittle, and marginalize Apple at every turn, in every market, using every bit of FUD he and the top brass at Dell could muster. The rivalry is legendary. At first I thought he was just trying (bitterly) to tout his machines at the expense of another company.
Then Apple makes a significant hit with OS X, talks about running on Intel hardware, and now he's more than willing to swallow a little of his pride and share in Apple's good fortune. This reversal of his stance has opened my eyes. He's not actually bitterly opposed to Apple, he's just bitterly opposed to poverty and obscurity. He's a techno-whore.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
It's been reported here and elsewhere just about a hojillion times, but since you seem to be the last person on earth to get the message you do not need X11 to run OpenOffice on the Mac.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And this is exactly the reason I stopped buying Apple and migrated the entire company where I worked to Windows NT.
Actually, Umax, Power Computing and Motorola all took it in the shorts. I bought a pile of shiny new Power Computing McMacs when OS 8 came out, only to find that Apple declined to license future releases to the clone makers. I guess Power Computing folded, Umax went back to making pretty good scanners and I guess Motorola just walked away disgusted.
Me? I started putting dual processor Pentium boxes in place of the Mac graphics workstations and got higher productivity lower TCO.
It is funny that nobody ever thinks of Apple when they mention questionable business practices - the McMac thing was just one way they stifled the competition.
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted ;-)
I'd probably buy another Mac if I could build it myself. Wonder if that'll ever happen?
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I really like Pages. I have the trial version that came with Tiger and I've been using it for fairly sophisticated documents (16 pages with lots of sections and pictures) and the results are beautiful. I particularly like the ease with which I can put together a style sheet that I like. This can be done with Word but the process is a lot more complex and error prone.
I will be buying iWork before my trial expires, because I really enjoy the program. I think it's too bad more people aren't buying; if you're a Mac user at all curious about it, it's well worth picking up.
At the same time, the lack of a spreadsheet, even a dead-simple one, is a definite problem. If you look at $80 for iWork versus $150 for Office Student & Teacher edition(*), Excel alone is worth the price difference. So it's hard to justify price-wise, but it really is cool and fun to use, and for me that's enough.
At least to me, a GUI that pulls everything together like OpenOffice has is not at all important. I know how to use the Finder and open and save dialogue boxes; no need for a new version of same.
D
(*) As far as I can tell, realistically the Student & Teacher Edition is for anyone outside of a corporation too cheap to blow $400 on the full version.
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted
FAT is copyrighted as well (if only recently). But don't worry, MS offers some great deals for licensing it
I don't need a signature.
That's right for floppies. There actually were some floppies for PCs that would read Mac disks. After they went to the same basic floppy then there were utilities on the PC for reading Mac disks. And, right now, there are several utilities for mounting HFS+ formatted hard drives. (Including the iPod) So the original poster is just misinformed.
I should add that the reason neither Linux nor OSX can write to NTFS disks is due to Microsoft doing what the poster claimed Apple was doing.
(I should add the caveat that I have no idea how legally all these HFS readers work. Possibly the patent just ran out. Possibly Apple doesn't care. Possibly Apple just didn't patent anything at all.)
*sigh*
One would think with all the discussions on this site that people would know the difference between the four types of "intellectual property" protected by the legal system: Copyright, Patent, Trademark, Secret. Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was patented or a trade secret.
If Microsoft wrote their own HFS driver, copyright wouldn't be an issue. If Microsoft couldn't figure out the HFS without illegal corporate espionage, then it's a trade secret. If Microsoft could figure out how it worked, and could write their own, then the only legal protection remaining is a viable patent in force.
Of course, that still leaves the possibility that maybe Microsoft was just apathetic on the issue, or consciously decided to snub the Apple crowd by not bothering with the HFS at all.
[
>I guess Power Computing folded
Power Computing is still around, though they sell x86 boxes now.
Af far as the cloes go, Apple was going to go out of business if they didn't stop licensing the OS under the terms that they used. They were bleeding cash like there was no tomorrow, the clones were killing their hardware sales, while the licensing wasn't bringing in any real revenue. It wasn't a predatory business practice - it was done to save their skin.
>It is funny that nobody ever thinks of Apple when they mention questionable business practices
Apple does get mentioned a lot - their treatemt of VARs, their cannibalizing tools that 3rd parties create (Konfabulator, etc), iTunes license changes, et al. Your example of the clones is ancient history, and not an example of a questionable business practice.
>Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted
There are a number of 3rd party utilities that can be installed on Windows to read HFS. A quick Google of Windows HFS will return a number of tools. Apple has not gone after any of the makers of these tools.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
I could be wrong, but I don't think this is correct. I'd imagine the difference has a lot more to do with NTFS security attributes and journaling than trade secrets, but I'll freely admit that Microsoft isn't sharing anything about how NTFS works with anybody outside the company ;-)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
It's amazing how much misguidedness there is in such a short post.
"I guess Power Computing folded": Actually, Apple bought Power Computing, and their tech docs are still in Apple's Knowledge Base.
"McMac thing was just one way they stifled the competition.": Stifling the competition is when you're Microsoft and you say "if you sell hardware with other operating systems, we won't let you sell ours" or "We're not going to produce Office for Mac if you don't bundle IE on every Mac." That is, exercising market strength to control the actions of independent competitors. What Apple did may have been uncool to Power, UMax, and MOT and their customers, but ultimately that's the chance they took when they tied their business to licensing something from a single source, especially a "beleaguered" one with a known history of proprietary behavior. It's Apple's prerogative, as it is any company's, to license or not license its technologies as it sees fit, when it chooses to, so long as they don't violate whatever licensing agreement was in place.
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted: Give me a break. The copyright is irrelevant. PC's have always been able to read 1.4 MB (and larger) Mac disks with third party software. Windows doesn't build in the ability for the same reason they don't bundle an AppleWorks file importer for Word on Windows. They're the big fish, Apple's the small fish, and the small fish has to cater to the needs of the big fish, not the other way around. And 400K and 800K Mac disks couldn't be read by Windows PC's because Apple used more expensive variable-speed floppy drives and GCR encoding on the disks, making 800K Mac disks physically unreadable by PC drives. By doing that, they squeezed more out of each disk -- remember that PC disks were 720K. They later switched to single-speed and MFM encoding for 1.4 MB disks, same as in the PC world, which is why those disks can be read.
This isn't to say that Apple hasn't been jerks to their customers, distributors, competitors and developers, but your particular examples don't hold water and make you sound pissy rather than well-reasoned.
Power Computing is still around, though they sell x86 boxes now.
This is not the same Power Computing Corp -- they were powercc.com. They had a different logo, and were based near Austin, TX. (Read the About us) I think the old PowerCC is long dead.
PowerCC was in the old Wal-Mart building in Round Rock, across IH35 from the main Dell campus. That building had RPM Speedway in it for many years.
Before Steve pulled the plug, PowerCC was excitedly growing and moving to a larger campus about 15 miles north in Georgetown. The built a conspicuous concrete monolith with their logo, right on the side of the highway. In hindsight, I guess it was their gravestone -- it was around long after they were dead.
My old PowerTower 166 served me admirably.
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
I'm looking to build a system for my computer illiterate girl friend. After meeting her minimum requirements (It runs, has a floppy drive, and can play DVDs and burn CDs) Dell's $300 system costs more than the custom system I'm building her.
DELL upgrades:
256 MB -> 512 MB RAM == $60
CD drive -> DVD drive + CDRW drive == $99
none -> 3.5 floppy drive == $30
Then shipping, handling, and tax adds about $150 for me.
It comes with Corel Word Perfect, but if I'm going to make her learn a new word processor I could just get her Open Office.
Almost anything you buy off of ZipZoomFly has free shipping, and you have more control picking out the parts yourself. Shop by brand if you want. In the end you can build a cheaper, better system with a little time (80GB SATA instead of 40GB ATA, Cheap ATI card instead of onboard graphics, bigger monitor, and a personal preference for AMD instead of Intel).
Yes, the code is ugly. After all, it is over 10 years old now as it was originally written by Star Division. You can still see legacy stuff from StarOffice 4 in the CVS repository including OS/2 code :) It's been a double-edged sword. Because the program is "mature", it's got enough of a feature set that folks can start to consider it on the level of Microsoft Office (well, it's probably more like the old Lotus suite kind of level...ironic since IBM just replaced parts of Workplace with OpenOffice.org). On the other hand, because it's so old the code can get really messy and be a bear to deal with. Ever since 2001 it's been near a full time job just to keep the application compiling, and it's still ongoing with OOo 2.0. Parts of it are wholly undocumented and the original authors are long gone.
The interface itself is a larger issue. It's written in custom tools that are used by no other product, and there are hundreds of dialogs alone (perhaps thousands, I haven't counted). And nearly none of this interface meets Apple HIG since it was designed for Windows and Unix (which, as we know, has nearly no UI guidelines at all). Because of that, and also because of the sheer largesse of the interface itself, the only way I could see Apple using OOo would be through writing a "wrapper", that is, junking the existing interface and writing a new one.
Since Apple already has core rendering engines for word processing documents, presentations, and charts, it seems all they need is a spreadsheet engine and they'd already cover the stock OOo core. It'd probably be easier to just write the new wrapper around their existing components and add in the missing functionality (e.g. database, macros) than to wrestle with OOo. All the better for them, too, since I bet they already have a core that was written with Objective-C in mind...
ed
Power Computing is still around, though they sell x86 boxes now.
I was going to reply that Power Computing Corp. was purchased by Apple when Steve Jobs returned. But it is not that simple. Read about it in Wikipedia. But I don't think the wiki entry is 100% correct. It appears that Power Computing is not completely gone and still has a support line. I found it in this support article on Apple's web site. I called the number and the technician I spoke to said that they never sold PC clones, they no longer have a website, and these days they get relatively few calls anymore because their systems were "a dying breed." It appears that the support line was kept around to comply with outstanding support contract obligations. It is also interesting to note that Apple does provide some hardware related patches for Power Computing clones.
The Power Computing company linked in the parent is not the same company that sold Mac clones. The Mac clone maker was Power Computing Corp , not Ltd. Power Computing was a company in Texas and these folks are in England. Also, their "About Us" page says they sold some Atari and Amiga related products but there is no mention of Apple clones.
...I must not have anything better to do...
It's interesting in that we can assume that Mr. Dell no longer thinks Steve Jobs should (paraphrased) "shut Apple down, sell all its assets, and distribute the proceeds to the shareholders", as I seem to recall him recommending as the best thing that could be done with the company back around the time Jobs took over.
(Certain types of comments stick in Apple fans' memories (even the non-"rabid fanboi" type) and produce a certain desire to gloat at times like this.)
David Gould
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