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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."
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Apple contracts Dell to build the new x86 Macs, and licenses Dell as a Mac reseller. Everything still has the Apple logo, but Dell gets a cut.
-mkb
The question is who of the big PC manufactures would not offer OSX if givin the opportunity?
You are all a bunch of idots.
"We want Microsoft to provide us with cheaper copies of Windows XP, so we will threaten to switch to OS X but not actually do it."
They've done this before with switching to AMD--they've announced many time that they were "considering" it, but as soon as Intel lowered their prices, Dell backed off.
This is the one part of the story that makes no sense. If Apple outright made part of the contract, written, spoken, or implied, that Dell cannot sell a machine lower than a certain price, they would be jumped upon by the EU and US quicker than you can say "unfair competition".
And you can bet that Apple is aware of this, as they've been creatively circumventing these laws for years. Early ads for the Apple II had an asterisk by the price with a disclaimer "from our lawyers" saying that you might be able to buy it cheaper than that. Later techniques included barring sellers from advertising prices lower than those Apple set, a practice that continues to today. Retailers can sell Apple computers for lower than Apple's declared prices, but if they do, they can't advertise those prices (hence Amazon will regularly have a message in the price box saying "Price too low to display. Add to your shopping card to find out how much it costs."
Dell cannot legally be required by Apple to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple wishes. Dell's retailers cannot legally be required by Apple or Dell to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple and Dell wishes. The best they'll do is continue with the advertising of prices ban. This may mean Dell doesn't get to bite the Apple. Or it may mean Apple has to be more flexible.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, given Dell's past advice to Steve Jobs I somehow don't think he'd go for it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Ok, now I'm just confused...
Reminds me of the news a few weeks ago that Nike is no longer selling shoes to Sears. Why not? Because Sears bought Kmart, and Nike doesn't want to be sold at Kmart.
In this day and age where brand is king and marketing is above all else - that Apple, the BMW of computers, would be sold at Dell? Sorry Dell dude, you're not getting a Mac.
I had mod points and was going to mod you up -- but I decided to post instead.
While Apple may make their money on hardware, one of the struggles that Mac has is a lack of a software base. The emulators have been nice and all, but they are slow. If Apple partners with a couple of vendars, like Dell and HP, then people may start to look at Mac OS X as a viable computing option and then more programs may start to be developed for the Macintel. What I can see happening is that the lower end Mac OS X systems would be sold by Dell, while the real neat toy computers would be sold by Apple. The other thing that would be rather wild would be for Dell to offer a dual boot system, or a bridge system that would use virtualization technology to run both OSX and WinXP at the same time.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
"Chrysler: "We'd love to sell Mercedes".
Mercedes: "We agree."
Mercedes, a division of Daimlier-Chrysler
Sales are up.
And quality is way, way down.
Mercedes used to mean "this car will still be running perfectly long after you're dead of old age."
Now you much are better off buying a Toyota or Nissan. The Japanese cars are nicer to drive, too.
If Dell selling Macs is at all analogous to Chrysler selling Mercedes, then I hope it never happens.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Quote: Couldn't Apple do this building from the 2.0 code base?
The short answer is no. It is a common misconception that the OOo 2.0 codebase eases any transition to a native interface. This is far from the truth. Take the GTK "look" in 2.0. The fact that it looks like GTK does not mean that the interface has been redone in GTK. Rather, the OpenOffice VCL widget set has been enhanced to work similar to the Java heavyweight peer implementation. OOo instructs the platform to draw a button according to its native platform appearance. All of the event handling still uses the abstract OOo toolkit.
Since everything still uses the native toolkit, you still need to port the underlying OOo widget set and toolkit to run on the platform. OOo 2.0 only provides this for X11 and for Win32. NeoOffice/J provides an implementation in a mixture of Java and Carbon (soon to be Java and Cocoa). Getting it right is a nightmare. It's taken three years and thousands of hours of developer time.
And we still don't have the native widget drawing stuff...but it's on the way.
There are other reasons why Apple wouldn't start from OOo 2.0. First off, Microsoft Office is one of the key selling points of the Mac platform that gets reiterated throughout the Mac sales materials and end user testimonials and, I daresay, things like Jobs' keynotes which always have Office demos. It's politics, of course, but Apple will most likely not start any "Office killer" application that may cause Microsoft to stop working on Office.
Secondly, Apple's already got their iWork suite. It's been designed as a consumer level and home office suite. Quite a bit of work has gone into rethinking the traditional office interfaces for Pages and Keynote. Most likely there's a spreadsheet application on the way as well. This engineering effort is not going to be simply discarded in favor of OpenOffice.org. iWork is also better suited towards their consumer-oriented strategy.
Additionally, KHTML is a great example of why Apple would not jump on the OpenOffice.org bandwagon. If you recall, the reason KHTML was chosen over Mozilla was because the engineers thought that the Mozilla codebase was unwieldly. I've programmed both Mozilla and OpenOffice.org for years and the Mozilla code looks easy when compared to OOo. And Mozilla is even commented in English, too. If they didn't want to work with the Mozilla code, you can bet they won't want to touch OOo with a 10 foot pole.
I've toiled on OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J on Mac OS X for nearly four years now. If Apple hasn't helped by now, I doubt they will so in the future.
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