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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Isn't this the same guy who was trying to argue that there is no vulnerability in running as root all the time? Honestly, his reality distortion talent could give Jobs a run for his money.
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
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
I interpreted it as "I'm very disappointed that OSX won't run on commodity hardware! But, Linspire does, so all you cheap PC users, buy Linspire right now!!!". Of course, Linspire doesn't WANT OSX on generic hardware. But, they won't mind mentioning it if it DOESN'T.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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
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.
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.
Woah, there's a load of difference between developers supporting a platform and developers releasing a bunch of new binaries to existing customers without charge. Sure, Apple developers are going to recompile their apps, and some of them are going to take advantage of the opportunity to add a few features and make your Intel-native version a paid upgrade. Users who find the overhead incurred by Rosetta are going to come up with the extra cash ( or pirate the native version while cursing the developer, or find a cheaper competing product ).
Either way, few, if any, current OS X developers are going to look at the Intel transition and say "this is way too hard to do with my existing code base, I don't see opportunity here, I'm going to go code for ( Windows/Linux/Solaris/BeOS/SCOUnix/etc ) instead."... That's all that matters for Apple in the long term. In the short term, it's a little annoying for users, and it's an opportunity for enterprising developers to snatch business from competing products by offering better product or cheaper prices to users faced with a paid upgrade, and/or gain user loyalty by providing free Intel Native updates, like some are already doing.
NeXT had OpenStep which was originally going to be pushed forward with OS X, as "Yellow Box" - theoretically, a set of runtime DLLs could have been installed on a Windows box, and the same code could run on either platform. (I don't remember if it was a common binary, fat binary, or recompile).
OpenStep is a specification. GNUStep is an implementation of that specification, which works on Intel now- even Windows if you're willing to use Cygwin or MingW and don't mind an app that doesn't look like a windows app. I never got into OpenStep Toolkit for Windows development ( I *think* that was the implementation ), but if there are DLLs involved, they're probably for windowing and other such similar basic functionality that would be used by any app? The app itself would be a binary, 'fat' only if compiled for multiple platforms of course. If you were careful enough not to use Apple-only features, you could do the same thing with GNUStep today.
Certainly code written in Carbon is going to have no common technology with NeXT. Maybe apps written with Cocoa code take advantage of what used to be Yellow Box.
Other than Altivec code ( which, espeically if older, will almost always need a complete rewrite), Carbon code is going to be the toughest to port to Intel, from what I understand. I'm not talking about single-line carbon library calls, those are probably no problem, I'm talking about Carbon windows, controls, and real serious amounts of legacy stuff. On the other hand, if Microsoft can move Office, everyone else can get going and start moving that Carbon code to Cocoa. It's not hard. Hire me to do it for you. Really. What are you waiting for... I don't waste THAT much time posting to /., I swear...
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing fewer apps with weird Carbon behavior that mistakenly claim the computer is out of memory and don't know the right path name. They're actually pretty rare already, and I'm not going to miss them.