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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."
Why the heck would they? If they did they most certainly would no longer be a hardware company.
Bogus. What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed. The reality is much more complicated than that and encompasses reasons of yes, CPU speed, but also platform flexibility, heat, management of media rights and others. I covered some of these reasons here back on June 9th, but the future of media management is central to their strategy and was one of the driving forces behind the move. Additionally, Michael goes on to state that Macintosh users will "first have to suffer through a period of uncertainty and forced upgrades.". I also talked about this in my article, but to summarize, there really is no uncertainty about this process. It is going forward and most users will not notice or care about whether their Macintosh has an Intel or a PPC inside of it. They just want their computers to work as seamlessly as they have before and help them manage their lives and be more productive. Users will not have to be making any tough decisions as both platforms will be supported for years and years to come. Apple has proven this ability by maintaining parity between the PPC and Intel codebases already since the beginning of OS X and is showing the industry how to proceed when it comes to backwards and forwards compatibility.
.......yeah. As we used to say when we were kids, "No Duh". Why would Apple want to get into the game of supporting literally millions of combinations of hardware compatibility issues and troubleshooting? Why? Where is the income from that going to come from? They already make available (and will continue to) make Darwin available for PPC and Intel, so if you want to swing that way, go for it.
Any other objection that Michael has to this switch has to do with OS X not being able to run on commodity PC hardware. Well,
Don't get me wrong. I really do appreciate what he has done with Linspire, but it is not OS X and I cannot imagine that Apple will simply hand over their technologies.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Not sure I understand this, and it seems to be a relatively old story (last month already)...it seems to be more Michael Robertson's disappointment rather than Apple, with a tinge of sour grapes in the air. Anyway, the world is rapidly changing to make the whole Windows vs. Mac box competition to be relatively less interesting. With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online. Apple has already leveraged this move by becoming the number four vendor of personal computers, right behind Gateway on the recent numbers. Now they just need to start to race Microsoft to making more of their applications web-optimized and OS-agnostic. iTunes is a basic step in that direction. The portals are not standing still though...Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator is in my view a move toward making this new reality happen faster. More on that here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_acquis.htm l
Apple is in the business of selling computers, not OSses. They're not going to support computers they didn't make themselves.
But who the hell is Michael Roberson, founder of Linspire to tell Apple's Steve Jobs how to run a successful computer company? Linspire has how much revenue/profit and how many users?
An operating system build around Unix that provides some elements of Unix but keeps everything incredibly simple? I'd love it. I want something simple these days. Let my servers be their usual basic selves. Let my computer be simple!
It honestly would be the answer to a lot of problems with PC's. People don't want to be arsed with learning everything, they just want to use it, and forget it. Apple does a good job of being almost sickly simple on most tasks.
And in style.
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
Ohh how quickly we forget about Power Computing, Power Max, Windows, and why this a bad idea.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I'm incredibly dissapointed that Linspire will not run on my 1982 vintage casio wristwatch, but I sure hope they're working on it, I mean, wow! just think of how much marketshare they'd get if their OS could run on such inexpensive commodity hardware!
Starsucks
there is nothing at all stopping apple from doing exactly what this guy says...
When the conditions are most ripe...
when Apple is ready to face that challenge from a support perspective...
when Microsoft becomes more loathed with the release of Vista which will have 8,000 viruses out for it BEFORE its released...
you don't walk into a saloon and just start shooting up the place even if you're packing a big-ass gun. You wait to size up the situation, you make sure that you're transition to Intel is complete and solid, and you make your move when you want to.
Hell, just that very THREAT should be enough to keep Microsoft awake, pissing their pants at night. That's what the US military did to the Iraqi's the first Gulf War... we kept them awake for a whole 36 hours waiting for them to be so tired of staying awake, anticipating the strike that we did far more damage than if we had attacked at zero hour.
Don't be stupid and confuse shrewd business timing tactics for making bad decisions. This linspire guy has his head shoved up his ass if he thinks Jobs isn't interested in beating the stuffing out of Microsoft.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
After reading through the article, I'm not sure that I was convinced that it was in Apple's best interests to allow clones.
Look at it from Apple's point of view, the things he points out as negatives work more like positives:
1. Forced upgrades. Apple has announced "dual binary" support for their applications for an unspecified length of time, but either way the company has to be salivating at how many people will be buying new machines in 10 more months. And as recent reports show, they're selling more machine now than ever, so it would appear that the "halo effect" is greater than the "Osborne effect".
2. If Apple sales continue to do well after the final shift to Intel, then Apple can keep on their plans: make money off of computer and iPod sales (and whatever other new devices they come up with). Right now, they have a good line of movie editing software which only works on their software set (and they control the hardware to run it), they are developing other business tools (Pages and the like). So as long as people keep buying their machines and their market share is growing with the company making good profits, why change?
3. If, in some future, Apple decides to do cloning, it is in their best interest to do it later than sooner. My reasoning? They can use the next 10-36 months to iron out all of the issues dealing with the Intel transfer, see how the market reacts, how things like an "OS X WINE" works out, and so on. Then, with this expertise, they will be in a perfect position to dictate to cloners how things will work so the "Mac Experience" will be maintained, rather than just throwing the OS to the winds and hoping for the best.
Would I like it if Apple just let OS X free? Sure - but that's not in Apple's best interest. So, as long as they show a steady rise in profit and sales, I don't see them changing their minds any time soon. They seem to be doing what works, which probably makes them and their investors happy.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Jesus, cool your jets! Just like you, Mr. Roberson is entitled to his opinion. He makes some interesting points. It's something educated people do, have discussions of ideas.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I think we're all well beyond that, what with AMD and Intel now successfully battling each other on chip features far more important than clockspeed (e.g., dual core, specialized instruction sets, heat generation, power use, etc.). It just doesn't seem that too many people are making PC purchase decisions based mostly, or even partly, on clockspeeds. Thankfully, we now have a much richer assortment of attributes upon which to base our selections.
Maybe Apple just wanted to tap into a better (i.e., cheaper and more rapidly innovating) market for important parts. Can't blame 'em...same thing drove me to Firefox. ;-)
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.
Do we have to have this explained to us in almost exactly the same words in every single fucking article that mentions Apple's switch?
Now imagine how much control Apple has, knowing exactly what hardware their OS will be running on. They can do any number of things to optimize their OS and software to the hardware, and still keep their high level of stability.
Porting OSX out to everything would have also gotten rid of the sexy mac machines vs. the ugly beige PCs. And I am sure the MBAs out there will tell me that there are all kinds of money reasons that Apple wants to control their own hardware.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
If OSX was allowed to run on just any PC hardware, Quality Control would go through the floor (as it has with Windows). Ant QC is somthing Linspire really doesn't know that much about...
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
I believe the above poster has it right. Apple has proven they can sell 99c songs, but the media companies want to feel a little more secure about movies they could sell for $10, $15, $20 (or whatever they decide to charge). Being a Mac user, I'm not so happy about it, but oh well...
The Mothership
This quote from him "I would love to see Apple's PC market share reverse its downward trend". Is pure FUD being sown by the Linspire folks. I think Linspire should focus on competing with the other Linux distros out there. For the last six months report after report has been showing Apple increasing their sales. i.e. PC units sold (+35% from the same quarter last year) and profitability primarily due to the iPod.
This is actually old news, as documented in Michael's Minute.
I'm sure Michael is bluffing. He knows that if Apple allowed OS X to run on commodity hardware Linspire's potential market would be marginalized even further... it could be devastating to the Linux desktop push. Why would he want such competition from Apple?
It's rather curious that a week after that, Michael stepped down from CEO of Linspire (check the Michael's Minute entitled "What's Our Purpose in Life") Cause-and-effect? Maybe. Correlation? Definitely.
Michael's not dumb. He feigned disappointment at the Apple on Intel announcement, but my guess is that it was a carefully orchestrated bluff to allow him to distance himself from Linspire in the weeks after.
Any company investing in LOTD with the hopes of profitability had better hope to god that Apple does not allow OS X to run on commodity hardware. It's just common sense.
Okay, let's look at this:
:)
;-)
1) Robertson criticizes Apple for not porting OS X to work on stock PCs.
2) Robertson happens to be the head of a company competing for those very desktops.
Why would he really want Apple to step into the market he himself is trying to gain market share in? Maybe, just maybe, he's riding on Apple's popularity as an opportunity to promote his own solutions?
Nah. That's just crazy.
(On a side note, I saw him give a presentation once, and before he started the presentation he asked how many people owned/used iPods. Only a few hands went up. Then, during his presentation where he spoke about their "LTunes" and their iTMS clone, he criticized iPod for being hard to use, saying thigns like "how do you turn this thing off? This thing is hard to use. We practiced turning it on, but we didn't practice turning it off..." I'm sorry, he's either so brain-dead he can't use a consumer electronics device with clearly labeled play and stop buttons on it, or he's playing to the ignorance of the crowd. The former makes him stupid, the latter makes him dishonest. And I don't think he's THAT stupid.
Apple's reason for switching to intel has nothing to do with more megahertz, better heat dissapation, DRM issues or any of the other crap that people have been spouting.
It comes down to one thing, they want to take on microsoft for control of the desktop. The way they are doing it is brilliant. They will switch to Intel based hardware made by Apple for the first year or so. They will then announce a deal with the HP and/or Dell allowing them to sell OSX with their hardware. After a year or so of that they will open up the floodgates and sell OSX to anyone and everyone.
What this means is that in 2 or 3 years time microsoft will have some real competition on the desktop (maybe even sooner, who knows). This also means the end of the line for linux on the desktop (linspire especially).
The reason they are implementing in these stages is simple - to keep attention on themselves. Apple will be in the news constantly the next 2 or 3 years, their stock price will continue to rise with all this attention, especially when wall street sees that each subsequent step apple takes leads to more more profit. Brilliant.
-ec
Hilarious! Perhaps when he can make his own products work in a successful way, he and Steve can talk over these issues.
He doesn't even understand the reasons Apple made this decision.
Nothing to see here, move along...
It was the Apple/IBM alliance's inability to agree on a mutually profitable path that would allow Apple to keep up. The PPC 970, based on POWER4, is a generation behind IBM's POWER5. IBM *can* put together a roadmap that will keep the PowerPC competitive with Intel. The question is whether Apple would buy enough of them to allow IBM to leverage economies of scale.
Why do people keep thinking Apple is a software company. Just because you want OS X on your PC doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to port it. A lot of what makes Apple Apple is the fact that they operate on a small range of rigorously controlled hardware.
There will *never* be a general PC release for OS X, their profit margin is just too good on their own hardware, why would they want to spawn a bunch of cheap competitors?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The point of having a Mac with OSX, for Apple, is that they have *one*, very well defined platform to support, therefore they can concentrate on supporting it well. I don't own a Mac (well, a Mac 128 in my collection :-) but I understand that's how they define their business.
Now if they ported OSX so it could run on every PC, that means supporting a billion devices, or letting a billion drivers do who-knows-what and it would be a mess, just like Linux and Windows are (yes, I'm a Linux fan, don't give me shit I'm just being realistic here...)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Some guy writes "Man Apple made a mistake and should have made their OS generic to PCs" and we treat it like its a new proposition. Welcome to 1990.
My initial reaction to this posting was "Wow, why did they not release it for the PC? I would love to have OS X as the OS for my box, including other PC users. What are they thinking?"
Then emotions settled down, and I realized that Macs/OS X is the way they are, because of Apple's thinking. When you have a hardware and configuration that are somewhat common, you lower the chance of having problems.
If it was released to the masses of PC users and a ton of problems began popping up (as they most likely would). The rumors of "Apple isn't as solid as they say", etc, etc. And could really hurt Apple.
Then the company would be forced to release patch, after patch to accommodate for various hardware. This could then lead to creating a bloated OS and inviting virus writers to focus on OS X as much as they do with Windows.
Josh
I'm not sure that the head of a major Linux company would be an apple "fanboy".
But hey, ignorance about who wrote the article for the win.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Look IBM has world class fabs for SoC's, can do low power, high performance computing and have major mind share in the ASIC world. Their high volume/high profit market is not what Apple is selling. They did the PowerPC 970 for Apple and d they are the highest volume runner, which for IBM is the proverbial drop in the bucket. It adds more visibility but not revenue.
If Apple delivered more product or *gasp* payed IBM to develop low power processors for the laptop market, they couldn't complain. Should Apple have paid IBM for development when getting it from AMD/Intel in the x86 world would be free? No, but people should believe that it was because their vendor was incapable. It was just the Apple itself isn't significant enough to justify chip development with low payoff for IBM.
-Ho
You seem to misunderstand the razor-blade (and printing cartridge) business model: sell a razor for little or no profit *once*, sell razor blades for said razor at a profit *many times*. Now tell me, how does that fit with Apple? How many times a year to you buy replacement computers to go with your cheap OS?
Gilette should learn from Apple.
You should learn basic economics.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Or Apple could just not want to write all those drivers for random hardware that might possibly be in your DIY beigebox...
Only having to deal with the high-quality hardware they stick in their own boxes makes Apple's job much easier.
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
Most copies of Windows come with a brand new computer. Dell probably pays less than $25 a pop for these, which is not a ton of revenue. When you factor in the costs of R&D, it's a shitty profit margin. They make their big bucks from applications like Office.
No, it really wouldn't. Microsoft only works because they're a monopoly. If Apple were to start behaving like a monopoly with 15% market share, they would die.
After all, Apple have significantly less resources to test OS X with the wide range of x86 hardware out there than Microsoft does, and even Microsoft can't get it right half the time. If they were to dedicate the required time and energy to making sure it worked on as many configurations as reasonable, OS X for x86 would put Longhorn to shame in the "RSN" department with all the delays it'd experience.
This is why geeks aren't in charge of companies. If I were to speculate, I'd say this is Apple's strategy.
By keeping the hardware Apple-only, they can *require* the latest hardware technologies instead of having software work on the lowest common denominators.
For example, they can get away with having their compiler build for SSE3 by default so that the OS as well as most commercial software are leveraging the latest CPU features.
One advantage is that Intel-based Apples will appear to be 'snappier' when running OS X compared to Windows software on the same machine.
"Apple was tired of losing the gigahertz competition to the PC world."
I think we're all well beyond that
Us, on Slashdot, sure. Just an hour ago I was talking to a well-educated guy (college student working at NASA) and he was astonished to hear that there wasn't a huge difference between 2 GHz and 3 GHz, and that clock speeds weren't really being focused on these days, and has plateaued in the last few years and isn't expected to climb much in the near future.
And if he doesn't know, your Joe Sizpack1 sure doesn't. People love having any kind of number to use for comparisons, so they're gonna keep thinking GHz are really really important until it's beaten into them.
I know you're talking about the people involved in the debate. But the OP wasn't wrong to suggest that Apple hates looking worse in GHz comparisons, because though you and he may know to look past that, the aforementioned Mr. Sixpack doesn't.
1What a weird last name.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
You've asserted this, but I see absolutely nothing to back up this statement- including in your blog entry to linked to. I haven't been able to think of a single reason myself- any media rights management technology, including hardware-based, would be equally easily introduced in both platforms.
What Michael (the author of the linked article) seems to think is that Apple made the switch for entirely reasons of CPU speed.
It is simplistic but correct. IBM couldn't deliver fast enough chips, and what they did make, they couldn't supply reliably enough. They've caused numerous embarassing product delays over the years. Apple most likely said "do something about it", IBM said "you're 2% of our PPC production, have a nice day", and Apple rang up Intel and AMD. Intel pretty clearly offered a better package- AMD doesn't have supply issues Apple would be concerned about, but doesn't have as deep pockets as AMD.
Please help metamoderate.
to quote somebody who once had a one-shot success, "that is the stupidest idea I have ever heard of."
you think apple wants to enter the creaky world of "mad dog" peripherals and dock sweepings network cards, PCs with pushed speeds, and all sorts of marginal parts from mysterious outfits that come and go in the night? why in hell would anybody wish that support hell on them?
you control your hardware environment, you control the number of crash-and-burn intersices between hardware misbehaviors.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
"Hey, if Mercedes starts making really cheap cars, and sells them at a low enough price to compete with Ford Focuses and Honda Civics, they could have a shot at taking over the car market!"
Granted, this is _never_ going to happen, because Mercedes-Benz is in the business of selling LUXURY cars - not muscle cars, not economy cars.
Similar for Apple - their business model is obviously not centered around allowing people to have just about any hardware combination possible, nor is it centered around allowing them to get the cheapest computer they can get, nor is it centered around having the fastest computers on the market. If you want any of these, you are not in Apple's target market. Live with it.
The day that Apple starts allowing MacOS to run on any old computer with the right CPU is the day that I stop buying Apple products, because it is the day that the one advantage Apple has over its competition disappears.
If you want OS X, shut up, quit praying for Hell to freeze over and fork out the $500 for a Mac Mini.
If you want an OS that is hacked together so that it can run (after a fashion) on any old hardware you might care to have, quit being an idiot and realize that what you really want is a computer you assembled from parts you got off of eBay or out of the dumpster of a CompUSA that is running some version of Windows or Linux with the GUI skinned with a mostly-white color scheme, all crammed inside a spiffy brushed aluminum case. You'll hardly know the difference, but you'll sure be a lot happier!
To me the most salient benefit of owning an Apple to the vast majority of users (like my parents), is that they just work better than commodity hardware pcs. If you look at Consumer Reports' data for pc reliability you see that Apple kills the pc manufacturers with less than half the reliability problems of even the 2nd best (Dell) out there.
This of course is the result of the fact that as a software maker they know the exact hardware that product will be running on and also seem to be much better than MS at making the applications that people use all the time (iphoto, itunes, imovie, iwork, etc.) which reduces conflicts and problems with/among 3rd party apps.
All this would be out the window if they went to offering OSX on commodity hardware. I consider the cost savings of commodity hardware to be at least offset for the average user by the above benefits.
If you're smart, you'll arrive at the Best of Both Worlds solution. Make MacOS X 100% compatible with off-the-shelf PC hardware...as long as you have the $300 Macintosh Compatibility PCI Card. What the card actually does is almost inconsequential, though such a design would actually offer some technical advantages, in addition to the more obvious and important business advantages.
The typical Apple customer wants an innovatively designed system with good performance and top reliability. He or she wants computer that is ergonomically superior to the competition. You become an Apple customer because because bolting together your own PC and installing Linux on it with all the resulting annoyances due to hardware problems or having to get some software component to work gets in they way of you doing sensible work. Yes, all the annoyances you get with Linux can be solved if you just spend a few hours pouring over man pages and howto files but you simply don't want to spend your time on such things, you want something that works out of the box and keeps working and.... *** gasp *** you are willing to pay for it. There is the perception that Mac users are people who don't want to deal with the "under the hood" part of the operating system but this is crap. It is true that alot of Mac users are quite happy not knowing that the commandline even exists but I know alot of geeks/nerds/hackers (pick your favorite) who like myself use OS.X because it offers most of the advantages of Linux with none of the latters annoyances and imperfections. The whole charm of Apple products is precisely the fact that Apple computers are a tightly controlled hardware platform and that OS.X does NOT run on every random homebuilt PC or Dell box in existance. It never ceases to amaze me why that is so hard for some people to understand that.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Instead of a brilliant strategic maneuver, it's a step necessitated by IBM's inability to keep pace with Intel. Now if only Intel could keep pace with AMD :)
Could have been a good, useful desktop OS.
But its just a shitty, unpolished Linux distro.
Oh well.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
The thing we need to be watching is not if Apple ports OSX to work on non-Apple hardware. We need to be watching how well the intel macs run Windows. If Apple does this - they win. Seriously, they win. Why? Every single person I know who has a mac and a windows machine ends up using OS X at every turn except when they have to use a Windows box. I have a PC and a Mac and I only use the mac for games and 3dsmax. If you can run windows dual booting on a powerbook you will see a corporate invasion of macs like nothing you've ever seen. Then, over time, you'll slowly see more and more native support of OS X apps while people look for any excuse to stop booting into windows.
-_-
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.
The problem is that OS X would be in direct competition with Microsoft at that point. Selling OS X to run only on Apple Intel powered PCs is one thing, but full scale OEM licensing to any x86 manufacturer is a totally different ball-game.
While MS has been having a bit of trouble executing in the last couple of years, I wouldn't want to be Apple in a direct OS competition war. MS has massive (un-ending?) resources, and many of the smartest people in the world working for them.
I believe that for the next couple of years, Apple is going to carve small pieces of MS customers base away, moving them to Apple built Intel hardware. Once Longhorn and its predecessors finally ship, the situation will change somewhat.
Any way you look at it, Apple has a very wide road ahead of them for the next few years, and they are going to grow the platform. Will that make them strong enough to compete head to head with MS by 2010? Who knows.
Apple discovered that dealing with IBM eventually ends in failure. There simply isn't enough time nor enough conference rooms to sufficiently capture all of the billions of passive-agressive do nothing opinions the naysayers at IBM have to throw at you. Ultimtately the basic truth of dealing with IBM is that success doesn't matter, sales don't matter, nothing matters except slavish compliance with the PROCESS.
Let's see how well that worked before for anybody except Microsoft.
Palm spins off PalmOS and licenses OS here and their hardware. Result: Palm corp gets nearly destroyed, Handspring merges back, and Windows Pocket takes off.
And then there's the fact that Steve Jobs tried exactly the same thing before, with nearly the same operating system back when it was grey instead of lickable: OPENSTEP.
How well were they able to keep up with drivers for modern hardware? Very poorly.
How well were they able to convince major PC makers to include OPENSTEP as pre-built option, at a competitive price? Not one bit.
Did this make NeXT Inc, stronger or weaker compared to when NeXT made hardware? Much weaker.
Jobs had a near-death experience doing exactly this strategy.
There's also the fact that this puts them in direct competition with Microsoft, attempting to copy Microsoft's business model, and competing with Microsoft for clients.
How well has this worked for IBM {OS/2}? Not very well at all.
How well does this work for Linux, which is even free and has zillions of people trying to write drivers? Only marginally, after 10 years. You can't easily click a button and get a Linux based Dell (especially a laptop) with everything pre-loaded, supported, and with all features working. After 10 years.
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.
OS X changes *nothing*.
Microsoft would call up Dell and say, "ship MacOS X on one single box and your price on Windows will triple."
And that will be the end of OS X on PCs. They killed Be in this manner and they can and will do it again.
The average user isn't going to care about OS X any more than they did about MacOS. I doubt that most non Mac users have any idea what the difference is between MacOS and MacOS X.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They should not decide, they should divide. One high class PC/iPod/etc company, and one software company to develop and publish OS X ++ That would leave the hardware part to blossom if it is worth it, or die if its not.
Been there, done that. They tried allowing Mac clones and it hurt them badly. And that was when they had some control and a royalty. Shipping Mac OS X on generic PC hardware would kill their Mac hardware sales. It would be suicidal.
One of the various facts that you are ignoring is that MacOS X's stability is in part due to limited hardware options, drivers generally come from Apple or other relatively reliable sources. Part of the instability of Windows is the various pieces of cheap-a** low-budget hardware and their questionable drivers.
I don't think that IBM's lagging in the almighty speed department had much to do with Apple's decision. I think it had much more to do with IBM telling Apple that it would have to play 2nd. fiddle to both of the upcoming game consoles (in terms of fabrication share).
That, coupled with an already "checkered" relationship, pushed Apple to look elsewhere.
Cheers,
- slacker
"...The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." - Erwin Rommel
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.
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
Shortly after that last argument was generally accepted (internally) they went broke.
Most of the arguments about freeing X are in this category. The most striking example is people who claim that Apple is not competing with Dell or Microsoft, because it is offering tightly coupled hardware and software in a controlled experience for the user.
What is wrong with this argument is that it confuses a strategy with a market segment. Consider the argument on e-world. e-world was in a different market segment from the ISPs, because it offered a tightly controlled environment of bundled content and commications. Wrong. That was the strategy it was pursuing. Similarly, Apple is pursuing a strategy of competing with MS, Dell and the other hardware vendors by offering its tightly controlled whatever. But it is in the same market. Its just that its offerings and this strategy appeal to a very small proportion of the market, which explains why share has falled from 10% or so 10 years ago to 2% last year.
The problem it has is not justifying the strategy that produced this decline, but changing that strategy to one that will allow them to compete better. If something fails for 10 years in a row, it is probably not going to turn around with more of the same.
Now, there will be those who will say that market share doesn't matter, our strategy is to be a niche player. Yes, this is another argument which failing management teams commonly use. It is the tactic of claiming that the undesired outcome of a strategy is the new purpose of it.
The capacity for self deception among people in charge of a failing business is enormous, and their inertia is probably the greatest threat. What you have to do is not accept and justify what the market does to your strategy, but plan, act and change it. Otherwise, what are you paid for? Administration?
I think it would be more of a mistake to release a generic x86 install of OSX. Its not ready to compete against MS yet. The only reason OSX has stayed as efficient as it has been is because of the closed hardware environment of macs. The main reason Windows is so sluggish effeciency wise is because of its years and years of backwards support. Not to mention that most of the problems that users encounter with XP are hardware related (yeay for bad drivers). Forcing OSX to run generic x86 hardware would cripple Apple's support and give OSX a black eye it doesn't deserve. I think this will change though. As OSX-86 gets through some more revisions, I could see Apple releasing it as a standalone install, but probably limiting it to certain hardware to begin with and building from there.
And yes, I do some Windows stuff but gradually making a transition to Apache-based development. To have one box that could run a Unix-based environment easily and a Windows-based environment to allow for transition would be wonderful.
The author seems to assume that Mac hardware is proprietary still. Yes, in yesteryear Apple was very proprietary, but they had to be to be the performance king of the time (NuBus far outshined 8-bit ISA, ADB was better than serial keyboard/mouse, etc) but with the maturation of the consumer PC market, Apple has embraced openness in its hardware.
.) but the average consumer doesn't care what their computer is as long as it runs their software. And, as anyone who's installed Windows on hardware OTHER than what a PC it was shipped with will attest, driver/hardware compatability can be quite a pain. And even with the hardware Windows ships on, Blue Screens are often the result of drivers being updated, something outside Microsoft's control.
No longer to Apple computers require specialized ROM code to run. No longer are there custom backplanes or peripheral cards. If you look at the Macintosh motherboard now and compare it to a PC's, you'll see it uses the same industry standards: PCI, SATA (or SCSI), ZIF sockets, DIMMs, etc. Apple isn't stupid, it costs more to develop hardware in house and to maintain their profit margins it makes sense to use standard parts these days.
The only remaining differences between the platforms is mostly CPU and BIOS/Firmware implementations. Change those and you HAVE "ported OS X to the PC". In fact, Apple's developer Intel boxes do boot Windows XP.
It sounds like his major beef is that OS X won't be supported on GENERIC PCs . . . I.e. you can't buy a Dell with OS X on it.
I don't think that's a dissapointment, it's good business sense. The geeks who want OS X on Dell's will of course find a way to boot strap the OS (intercept the DRM calls and make OS X think it has the right DRM chip . .
Apple sticking to their hardware platform will ensure they can have 100% compatability and avoid being derided for lockups the same as Windows has.
The real key is if they can offer Macs at the same price points as vendors like Dell. If they can, I doubt anyone other than geeks will care. If they can't, they'll likely continue to lose market share as the end consumer cares more about price and compatability than the look of the machine.
I take a iBook G3, load up 10.3.9 on it with all the software we use. I can then take this to an emac, imac (Tray load, slot load, Bouncy head), iBook G4, Powerbook, G3 G4 G5 PowerMac and start any of these into FireWire 'Target Disk Mode' and clone the drive to any of these machines. No additional installation neccessary. No driver conflict. Just works.
I look over to our MPC (formerly Micron PC). We have to make sure that we order the same exact PC in order to Ghost. If we have one change, we'll have some diffuculty. Especially if it has a different NIC card because that is an entirely different ghost boot image. If one of our departments are forced by the vendor to use Dell or another PC vendor. Ghost won't work. Ghosting desktops to laptops? Haven't even thought about it.
It's easy to take a look at two machines that are separated by six years. A tray load iMac can have the same image build as our iBook G4. Take any vendor and use a 6 year old desktop build an image to use in their newest Centrino machine and make sure that wireless card works without having to load any software. Now try it with Linux.
The idea that Apple built one printer driver that works and the other vendors just create a defenition file that describes what the printer is capable of is great. You still have options and it still works.
The only disapointment I have right now is the possibility of loosing the 'Target Disk Mode' because of the BIOS.