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."

Comments

Re:Apple isn't stupid

[falconwolf]

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.

Falcon

Re:Apple isn't stupid

[Fareq]

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!

Re:Apple isn't stupid

[RatPh!nk]

You should learn about .NET 2.0, Avalon and XAML

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:

Examined superficially, XAML tags have many of the features of traditional Web standards like HTML, as well as those of newer Web approaches like Mozilla's XUL. Alas, it lacks proper CSS stylesheet support. Examined more deeply, however, XAML tags reuse, reinvent, and renew many standard idioms from the software development world in a highly integrated way.

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:

Will my PC run Vista? That depends on how recently you bought it. Microsoft Allchin said in an April interview that he expects Vista will need about 512MB of memory and "today's level" of processor. The ability to display all the fancy new graphics will depend on what type of graphics card one has. On some older machines, the graphics may look similar to today's Windows.

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