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Apple's Colossal Disappointment?
Mudzy writes "Michael Roberson, founder of Linspire, has an article at The TechZone talking about Apple's 'Colossal Disappointment' for not porting Mac OS X to PC after they announced the move to Intel processors. He discuss why this could be a mistake." From the article: "Instead of a brilliant strategic maneuver, it's a step necessitated by IBM's inability to keep pace with Intel. It seems Apple was tired of losing the gigahertz competition to the PC world. Apple had been promising faster computers for some time and had not been able to deliver them. In addition, they were frustrated at IBM's inability to produce a fast low-powered chip for laptops."
Bottom line: Apple makes money from hardware. Looses money or breaks even with System software. Plain and simple.
There's no other real consideration. Everything else is reality distortion.
How many people do you think would like to run Windows or Linux on a cool looking mac?
...and probably more, with even more distros likely working once the move to Intel is completed.
These already all run on current (ie PPC) Macs:
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
http://debian.org/
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
I also seem to recall that Apple mentioned that Windows would run on the Intel-based Macs.
Remember, this is coming from the same man who thought it was a smart idea to make a catalog of mp3s from thousands of CDs and make them available online for free without consulting the RIAA.
I mean how many people do you think would like to run OSX on a cheap Dell pc? How many people do you think would like to run Windows or Linux on a cool looking mac? Of course the Apple fanboys would still run OSX on the mac, but could they be getting more market by offering choices?
You can run Windows and Linux on Macs. While Linux can be installed directly on a Mac Windows has to be installed in a virtual machine such as Virtual PC. As for MacOS on PCs, most PCs use Intel and Apple is switching to Intels. Now if you mean sale MacOS so Dell and others can build Macs, Apple tried that. For a short period Apple allowed other manufactures to clone Macs but Apple lost more in Mac sales than they made in licensing MacOS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
if they could produce enough stable drivers to support a wide range of hardware, i think it would be very good for them in terms of profit. in fact i don't see why they aren't going for this option... maybe they're afraid that their hardware will cease to have a following if people can run os x on cheaper but still capable machines. maybe they're afraid of what direct competition with microsoft could do to them. whatever it is i hope they get over it and release os x for non apple hardware. windows is begging for more competition
Already tried. Apple didn't make enough licensing MacOS to replace their lost hardware sales.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Apple hasn't been maligning IBM's chip-building technology. It merely stated the facts: that IBM isn't delivering what Apple needs.
First, IBM failed to deliver on their roadmap. The PowerPC 970 roadmap circa 2003 called for 3.0GHz, 90nm CPUs shipping in volume by mid-2004. The 90nm transition was harder than expected, so Apple was left without chips (which made it less competitive, which impeded sales volume, which meant IBM sold fewer chips.)
IBM also has no significant low-power CPUs for mobile applications. The mobile PPC970s were late, and are currently clocked lower than the G4, and would not offer any real performance advantage if crammed into a Mac portable. (Whcih means Freescale gets all of Apple's mobile CPU business, and IBM gets none.)
Perhaps if IBM had made the necessary investments, Apple would have been more competitive in the market, and IBM would have sold more CPUs. As it is, IBM wasn't interested in supporting Apple. Business relationships work both ways: both customer and supplier have to be committed to one another.. Capabilities are irrelevant: IBM didn't deliver what Apple wanted, so Apple left. Maybe IBM could have, but it didn't, and that's all anyone has complained about.
It was there originally, and if I recall correctly, most of the votes were of disagreement (which I found rather interesting, since he normally has a significant majority agree with him). Then it mysteriously disappeared a couple days later. Maybe he felt he was victim of ballot stuffing on the part of Apple fans.
Curious to say the least.
Microsoft does not write drivers, generally speaking.
Microsoft *does* offer hardware companies access to Microsoft engineers on a contract basis for writing, testing, and debugging drivers. They charge [some unknown amount] for those services.
Microsoft also [probably for a fee, I don't know] offer a driver certification program.
If you can make your driver pass their driver certification, you are allowed to put the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on your product. If it does not, you may not.
If your driver does not pass the certification, then it will be an "unsigned" driver (like almost all nVidia and AIi drivers), and users will get a warning when installing it.
Installing an unsigned driver automatically sets a system restore point if you have system restore enabled and it is functioning properly.
Microsoft does provide some basic drivers, such as the drivers for a generic USB Mass Storage device, or for a generic USB Human Interface Device, and a few other items.
In the case of both ATi and nVidia, the last time I checked, they had employees that worked full-time inside the Microsoft facility so that they could have access to all the testing & driver development resources.
If you're really in to it, go get some/all of the Windows XP DDK (Driver Development Kit) and... erm... have fun!
I owned a Supermac 180, and I gotta say, that thing had serious stability issues while running Mac OS 9 that I never ran into using the iMacs at school. It was better than Windows was at the time (around 1999) but that's not setting the bar very high.
There is something to be said for the marriage of hardware and software design.
Why's this even a big deal?
Firstly, they simply don't need to support every piece of hardware out there, just the most popular current stuff... The reality is that most folks are using components from a small number of vendors, eg, Nvidia, ATI, Intel, AMD, Via, SiS, Realtek. Most of the rest adhears to one standard or another.
OK, you *need* good 3D on MacOS X, so let Nvidia and ATI do video drivers, give Via and Intel interface specs for any tricky northbridges or whatever, spec a couple of common network drivers, say Intel, Realtek, 3Com, and you're done. Much will already be handled by the kernel anyway.
Look at Solaris x86 or Be. They're not mass marketed, and they're not trying to be all things to all men (like Linux does) but on the limited "official" hardware they work just fine. As long as people accept they're taking their chances with non-spec or out-dated hardware, it's all good. And if people want they security of *knowing* it'll Just Work, they can pay for it.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Don't blame Apple for that one, buddy. Apple's been telling people not to use raw altivec instruction codes for years. Since 10.1, they've had hand tuned vector and LAPACK libraries, along with a bunch of other stuff, in Accelerate.framework. They even have a fast C structure over BLAS (called cblas).
The only reason the app wouldn't run passably under the dynamic translation is because they chose to use Altivec codes directly, which they were told not to do.
That's suicide for the vendor. Apple is moving away from PPC, not straddling the line. Besides, 90% of the time, the feature sets will be identical. Maybe you haven't noticed, but the fat binary is just a checkbox click away.
Crappy software is crappy software. Apple's software community really prides itself on quality releases (outside of the wonderful world of RB, of course). While this is possible, I doubt the mac developer community will allow it.
That's a problem even if you don't switch. Does being on PPC or Intel really change this potential gotcha in all software licensing? Even libraries currently under the GPL can suffer this fate.
Except for altivec stuff, the mixed plugin scheme works. Rosetta does the translation transparently. But upgrade purchases are the bread and butter of the mac software community. How exactly is this any worse than normal?
That is regrettable. My dual G4 has lasted 5 years now, and I still don't feel terribly outdated using it. But, we're spoiled. Look at it this way... your next mac is likely to be more upgradeable, because you can use more mainstream hardware. Intel and the PC hardware world are way more into incremental enhancement than IBM/Motorolla ever was.
You should. It is really That Easy(tm) for most developers. If they Broke The Rules, when they come back into Following The Rules, they naturally embrace PPC compatibility along with Intel compatibility.
Could we please wait and see more about the rumored SIMD enhancements in Yonah before we ring the bell on this one? The Altivec is fast, man, but it's murderous to work with. If Intel can get close to the same speed with their existing setup, I'd actually like it more than the altivec. Some of intels floating point and SIMD features are really neat, they just suffer on speed when compared.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Lots of these posts show that people simply don't understand what Steve Jobs is trying to achieve with the Apple corporation and its products. Everything about the Apple "experience" is thought out in rather minute detail. Even the packaging of an Apple product, the design, color, even smell of the box the product comes in is carefully thought out. If you really think that Steve Jobs will let OS X run on any crappy generic box you really haven't paid attention. Apple the corporation and Apple's products are a direct extension of the vision of the CEO. Jobs wants excellence and pursues it the way a great artist pursues perfection. I think some economic realities prevent him from achieving perfection sometimes (outsourcing hardware manufacturing to Taiwanese manufacturers to keep products relatively price competitive). Apple is what it is today (a multi-billion dollar boutique Hardware/Software integrator ) by choice not because of stupidity.
Steve Jobs did this exact thing once before. I think he'd rather catch pancreatic cancer again before repeating that playbook.
My humble opinion is that Apple should create a HCL (Hardware Compatability List) like Sun does for Solaris and say if your box has X in it we support it. If it doesn't your SOL. There is WAAAAY to much shit hardware out there that they don't need to support.
That precisely describes OPENSTEP. When Steve Jobs ported his OS to generic PC's and tried to have a hardware-compatibility list of sane perepherials and cards. When were "fat binaries" invented? Yes, about 1993, by NeXT, for this very purpose, to go from motorola 68040 to generic PC's.
And that was back when OPENSTEP was zillions of times better than Windows, rather than OPENSTEP-based MacOS X being only just significantly better than Windows.
The result was that it sucked really hard as hardware manufacturers never bothered for a millisecond to make an OPENSTEP driver, and there's no way that NeXT could have even remotely kept up with all the crappy hardware being churned out all the time.
With this market move Apple has to become a software / services company. They can no longer be a hardware company as their primary focus.
And what reputation does Apple have for software services? Will they start somehwere down well below job-jettisoning Fiorinized HP?
Or maybe it will go exactly the same way as NeXT as they they had to jettison their OS and start making Objective-C development environments and "custom programming" services and Web Objects for Windows. And even though the technology was zillions of times better than standard Windows crap at the time and all the other crappy web services, how well did that work? Answer: very horribly, until they were bought by Apple to fix Apple's OS problems.
Why can't Apple be a hardware company as their primary focus? They do have some significant ability in hardware engineering.
Heard of Powerbook? iPod?
Oh by the way, how well is Solaris x86 doing on generic PCs at Fry's? What, you say the guys working there think it sounds like an Xbox game?
In truth, Solaris x86 is being used nearly exclusively by paying customers on Sun's own Opteron-based hardware.
There's another major strategic consideration.
If, as they are doing, they switch to Intel based CPU's for their own hardware: they gain a powerful best new buddy in Intel. Microsoft doesn't care too much yet they're not directly trying to steal away their prime customers.
If Apple gives up hardware and sells only OS to generic PC makers what happens?
They compete against Microsoft in Microsoft's prime business model. They have no powerful friends like Intel or IBM to shield them from Microsoft's wrath.
Remember, there is a 100% Republican US government now. You think anti-trust actions will be successful at restraining Microsoft's vengance?
Apple is much safer on the friendly side of a powerful monopoly like Intel instead of being scheduled for termination by Microsoft.
It is neither expensive nor difficult to get all the info a developer might need from Apple (and if you are just coding Darwin you may share this info without asking for permission).
I could however not find a lot of the same info for windows. Even though my company paid loads of money for thier stupid visual studio. There is develloper documentation, yes. But try to find something without already being an expert. Besides which company has the most undocuemn ted features?
I think its not as easy when it comes to hardware. Even Linux-drivers sometimes come as "binary only".
Ive never met a single Windows user whos computer wasn't plagued with tons of spy/malware.
Nice to meet you. I'm a Windows user who doesn't have any trouble with spyware / malware at all and never has. It's not really that hard for a competent computer user.
I've also never known anybody who ever bought a new Mac that worked out of the box and didn't need to be immediately returned as DOA or returned for repair. I guess everybody has different experiences.
If I am not mistaken, I think .NET 2.0 was pulled (or at least significantly scaled back)and would be included as a later stand alone addition/download (a la WinFS).
XAML, if you want to do a little reading for fun, there is a good review of it that concludes:
There are also people out there who see XAML as just a proprietary XML and MS will try to do to XML what they did with JScript/JavaScript
That doesn't count loads of other features, like the explorer, IE 7, a ton of security features, better search, better web services through Indigo (try doing web services with PHP now - I've done it, and it's such a pain that it's not really worth it. Microsoft nailed web services in 2002, and the new stuff is even better!).
I have alway been happy with SOAP/XML and it seems like they are doing pretty well Also, it seems like Indigo isn't what it used to be, or at least not yet. We also do not know how these new services will affect other internet users, presumably they will be a Vista only feature and in that case, how many developers will fully embrace them with MS's current adoption rate for XP. Will the Vista adoption rate be better or worse? One could argue not as good due to the increased system requirements for the "full" Vista experience, compared to the 98/2000 upgrade path. We went from 66MHz/16MB/225MB to 133MHz/64MB/2GB to "current processor, current computer". From that I guess 2GHz/512MB-1GB/64MB-128MB-256 VRAM, (hard drive space is not an issue anymore) That is quite an increase in specs, though I admit that is extrapolation from this:
Apple is doing the slapdash hacks, and Microsoft leads the way in beautifully architected software.
Now you are just tossing out some flamebait. "Slapdash hacks" is a disservice to the wonderful integretion of OOS into OS X. Also OS X has been lauded by many (I hate to do this, but this was the best all-in-one collection I could find without searching/cutting/pasting all night. This is only slightly bigger than the attention Apple was given for Panther.
Also, MS has been accused of many, many things, but has never been accused of creating "beautifully architected software". Seriously, XP SP2 took some important steps, but I am not going to say any such words until I see a final p
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
That would be because the clones were never supported to run OS 9. Hmm... now that I think back, I *think* the last supported software for the clones was 8.5 and yes, you may be thinking, what about 8.6? Not supported officially either, but we helped out when we could. The 9 line was hard and firm, for solid technical reasons, the 8.6 line, was slightly less so. It worked well for some clones, and terrible for others.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Also, lots of 'drivers' are merely filter drivers; the standard Microsoft driver does everything it needs to to support the device, and the filter sits on top (or underneath it) to modify its behavior slightly (probably for performance/extra features). For example, VIA's USB controller 'driver' is just a filter for Microsoft's standard UHCI USB driver (which operates fine by itself). VIA's IDE 'driver' (viaide.sys) is also just a filter on top of microsoft's standard pciidex.sys and atapi.sys. The disk controller still works without VIA's software help (albeit slower).
Drivers Microsoft does provide:
- Standard PS2 stuff (COM, LPT, game port, floppy)
- Standard IDE controller and ATAPI devices
- OHCI, UHCI, EHCI USB hubs
- Lots of USB HID stuff
- Standard 1394
- ACPI, PCI, DMA, standard busses and bridges
- A standard processor driver
- External modems
- Filesystems (these are a pain to write anyways)
Devices Microsoft provides class/port drivers for, but not usually full drivers:- SCSI controllers
- 'Hardware' RAID controllers
- Video *
- Sound (although the SB16/AWE32 compat drivers are MS)
- Smart cards
- Video decoders/encoders
- Network cards
- Specialized USB devices
- AGP busses
Devices that I've found that Microsoft doesn't provide any drivers for:- My Winbond SD/MMC card reader
Looking at the loaded kernel modules on my computer using Process Explorer, there are 126 loaded, 100 of which are Microsoft. On my laptop, 102/132 are MS. On both of them, I could use only MS drivers and still have a usable system.* MS has a generic VGA video driver (sloww) and usually ships a stripped down (for stability) version of the vendor's normal driver on the install CD. (doesn't Apple have nVidia/ATI write their own drivers for the most part too?)
Well, long before he was the head of an MP3 or major Linux company, he ran a software and systems consulting business called "Mr. Mac". Troll the wayback machine for mrmac.com.
Also in that time frame (early 90s) he started, and stopped, and started again the mac-mgrs mailing list. I know this because I took over that list from C. Gary in 1995, who took it over from Michael a few months before that. The list is still going fine, and after TidBITs (whose server is two racks over from the mac-mgrs.org list server ironically), is probably one of the longest running Mac-oriented mailing lists on the 'Net.
If you are out there Michael, give me a holler sometime... almost 10 years since we last spoke. =)
--chuck