Slashdot Mirror
Apple to 'Switch' to Windows?
JFlex writes "PC Mags writer John C. Dvorak discusses the idea that Apple may dump OS X and 'switch' to running Windows in a recent column: "The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing.""
Epstein made four observations. The first was that the Apple Switch ad campaign was over, and nobody switched.
I switched. 3 other people in my office switched. Whats he talking about?
Seriously, in December 2004 there were no Mac owners in my office, then I got an iBook (always wanted to play with OSX), and within a month two other people had purchased various Macs based on my purchase. Then 3 months ago someone else purchase a powerbook, again based on the experiences of us owners in the office.
Let me explain this to you: Dvorak is what's known in the industry as a "Yellow Journalist". Which is to say that he publishes sensationalist articles designed to elicit a reaction in his readership, despite having little to no facts to support his position. These authors are usually frowned upon by any publication with journalistic integrity. Since PC Magazine has none (and needs the readership), they continue to post his foaming-at-the-mouth drivel.
Every once in awhile, Dvorak manages to hit upon a sensationalist story that's true by pure accident. This then convinces his "fans" that he knows what he's talking about. People then latch onto that single instance of "being right" to accept his pathetically low rate of correct predictions.
Stop listening to this guy. Stop posting his articles. Ban PC Magazine for publishing this nonsense. Otherwise Slashdot becomes just as bad as Dvorak himself.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From PC Magazine: The only fly in the ointment will be the strategic difficulty of breaking the news to the fanatical users. Most were not initially pleased by the switch to Intel's architecture, and this will make them crazy.
Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He'll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He'll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds. He'll say this is not your daddy's Windows. He'll cajole and cajole, and still hear a few boos. But those will be the last boos he'll hear, for then the Mac will be mainstream. We will welcome the once-isolated Apple mavens, finally.
The idea is actually plausible; whether there's a shred of truth to it, only Bill Gates and Steve Jobs know. It would not surprise me that there would be some collusion between the two of them, given their long history and the twists and turns the PC industry has undergone.
It's unlikely, but even if true, I think that's a case for Jobs having lost his mind. He won't be able to convince Mac users that this is a good thing and this would lead to a revolt the likes of which has never been seen. Apple would plunge into an abyss while Apple users would covet their old boxes and find new and interesting ways to keep them running and upgrade them. If that were to occur, then the Apple phenomenon would indeed take on a cult-like status, and Steve Jobs would be a pariah.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
To say nothing of the fact that if Apple's secret purpose was to start a switch to Windows, you'd think they'd have at least made it possible to, oh, I don't know, RUN WINDOWS on the Intel-based Macs easily, which isn't possible at this time?
Couldn't this be an intermediate step? Plus, they can get royalties from Microsoft when they release 'Windows Vista for Macintosh' with support for the hardware. That way they don't get stuck having to support BIOS and all that - they get to do it their way.
</devil's advocate>AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
1. No more hardware headaches. Apple users will no longer have to worry about their peripherals not working with their machines. Just about every accessory has Windows drivers. Hardware compatibility problems are one reason why people are afraid to make "the switch."
2. No more software worries. Have you bought a bunch of expensive PC-only software? That makes the switch to Apple's new hardware even more expensive since you have to buy new software. This will make it so that users do not have to worry about Apple inhibiting their work (or play!).
3. Cutting the Mac OS X development budget will save a bunch of money and cause an increase in Apple's profit margin. Since the software is bundled with hardware, and they only sell updates for the OS, not clean installs, OS X drains a lot of money from the company without much in the way of tangible revenue.
4. Apple can now compete directly. Dell, HP, Gateway, and Toshiba will have to watch out now. Apple's cooler designs would surely get people lined up to buy their machines (even including Apple tax). The iPod is a perfect example of this. In a field of functional equals (MP3 players), the coolest, most stylish, most hyped product has a giant market share. Apple needs to make their computer product a functional equal with the rest, and that means changing operating system. This could lead to a significant increase in Apple's market share.
The bottom line is that Apple stands to make some great leaps forward by changning to Windows OS. They can remove the hardware/software incompatibility stigma from their brand, and they can launch into the mainstream computing market and see if they cannot repeat the iPod's success. I am not saying that Dvorak's analysis is correct, but it is worth seriously considering, especially for Apple shareholders.
Of course, since I am an avid Apple fanboy and a rabid Windows hater, I will be forced to kill myself or move to Tibet.
Wouldn't it just be easier to pay different hardware makers to make OS X drivers? OS X, while not as good as Linux IMO, is a hell of a lot better than Windows and I can't see them making the bad decision of killing it off to become just another PC maker. If they were going that far I think they'd get out of the PC business altogether and focus on products like the iPod. That'd be risky though as while more profitable in the short term consumer goods are more prone to suffer at the whims of the consumer than selling a computer. A computer comes with a lot of lock-in investment where as a consumer good that's cool this week might be a lame has been product next week. In other words I think you'd be a lot more likely to see a Mac as a viable product in twenty years than the iPod.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You're ignoring the point here. I'm not saying that Apple would do this, but if Apple were going to switch to Windows, they would switch to Windows in the same way that they switched to BSD. Notice, if you will, the vast difference between MacOS/X and FreeBSD. You would be talking about a hybrid OS that used Cocoa (certainly, since that's Apple's branding, not to mention a develpment platform that all of their best add-on software retailers are writing to) on top of the NT "micro"kernel in the same way that Win32 was slapped on top of NT back in the beginning.
Side note: I went to an NT internals talk at USENIX back just before NT came out, and the guy from MS actually made it sound cool. It was the kind of OS that we'd all wanted to see someone do: a true successor to Unix and VMS. Sadly, it seems that they ran out of time, and instead of the elegant integration of Windows as a multi-subsystem, pluggable userspace suite, they slapped Win32 on top of the increasingly innaccurately named "microkernel" and hosed the whole thing. It was barely possible to tell, when released, that below the layers of caked-on mud was the heart of an interesting OS. I almost cried for as long as it took me ot go back to my little Slackware system.
But, I always remember that, and I always remember that SOMEONE COULD do that work still, and NT could become the heart of a truly interesting OS. Would Apple do it? Almost certainly not, but they COULD, and they are partly owned by MS (am I the only one who remembers that deal?)
Apple used to always insist that they had a superior OS and hardware platform.
Then they dropped the OS they had written in-house for one based on BSD, and they are abandoning Classic support.
And now they have dropped the PPC platform and gone to "what everyone else is using".
So do tell, what is it exactly that "sets Apple apart" now? Aside from the price tag, a particular style of GUI and the big logos on pretty cases?....
I sort of switched. I bought a Mac Mini last week because I'm tired of my wind tunnel of a PC in the living room. The PC is back in the office where it belongs, I still have my Toshiba notebook, but most of my work is done on the Mini. With 1GB of RAM, it's really quite a good performer - not on par with the AMD64 that it "replaced", but fast enough. And small. Very, very small.
Oh, and I have to say that Entourage is aces.
-h-
Fact is, Apples have becoming more and more like standard PCs for the past decade at least. I see no reason not to expect this to continue - it seems to be working, and it almost certainly reduces their cost.
However, I don't see Apple switching to Windows after the big success of the unix-based OSX. Rather, I think it's more likely that over time OSX will become closer and closer to the unicies we're familiar with. It will ultimately be better for Apple to have "unix program" and "mac program" be one and the same - because it will mean more developers, more software for the mac, and ultimately more hardware sales.
I am trolling
Apple primary reason for switching from firewire was that most people don't have it.
Still, irrelevent to the whole switching to the windows OS issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Also... truly, I cannot imagine for even one moment why Apple would want to switch to running Windows. They have no windows software to sell; they have no real hardware advantage to bring to that market. Not even looks. There are plenty of cool looking Intel platforms out there from the nutzo to the trim and stylish and everywhere in between.
I can see why they might consider becoming a software only shop and stop making hardware — there are plenty of nice Intel-based platforms out there, and software margins are far better than hardware margins (speaking as a software vendor myself.) I'd be pretty happy running OSX on a Dell, for instance, and I think the number of people who might try OSX if they could legitimately install it on their PC is probably a very large number. But drop the software and keep the hardware? No. Don't think so. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Now with the x86 chips I think you will see the move to Windows but with Apple selling their own interface to run on top of Windows. The software also no longer be restricted to Apple hardware.
The benefit to users will be that they will have the best of both worlds being able to run MS business applications, PC gaming and MAC gui based applications.
I worked in the HPC area and got sent out to WWDC '04 because we were getting a 512 processor mac cluster (the ink was just drying on the PO when I flew out). I was a complete Mac newbie, but I was very impressed with everything I saw at the developers conference. As soon as the iMac G5s were available for sale I ordered one for my desk at work - that was my first Mac ever. I switched from a linux workstation to an iMac at work. Then I took another job at a large research lab with a good mix of windows and mac. My group was windows, but I was able to convince my manager I would be much more productive with a mac, so when I showed up to work I was the first person in the group with a mac - although I do have a P4 windows box under my desk to run a proprietary windows only managment app - which we are now talking about replacing with something that is cross platform :)
Now I'm a hardcore mac fan.
It's a totally braindead hypothesis.
And at its core is seems to suppose that Apple WANTS to compete with Dell and Compaq. And that's what really strikes me as dumb: nobody in their right mind wants to compete in that arena. It's dead: it's low margin, it's totally saturated, and it's dominated by whoever can make the cheapest box and operate on the slimmest margins, with the most streamlined supply chain.
It's a WalMart market, in other words. That's like the absolute antithesis of everything Apple. Apple does fat profit margins on low-volume niche machines. They're a big fish in a small pond, and they do very well by it. Why they'd want to be the same small fish, in a much bigger, FAR more brutal pond, I cannot possibly understand.
IBM, one of the biggest, longest-time players in the PC arena, dumped it's PC division last year, and sold it to the Chinese. Why? Because margins were too low and demand wasn't strong enough to give them a healthy profit off of what they were selling: high quality laptops and desktops. People aren't willing to pay a premium for PCs anymore, unless you can really do something to distinguish yourself. Alienware manages to do it, but just barely (and you get a lot of people criticizing them for being expensive, too); Apple wouldn't be able to compete as just a hardware company in the commodity arena.
It's stupid to even think it. I knew Devorak was a publicity whore, but this is just retarded. Anyone who's ever taken a single business class in their life, or who even has a basic understanding of the PC market today, knows it would be a suicidal move.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It makes no sense to leave a profitable and comfortable niche and compete in an oversaturated Windows market. It especially makes no sense now that Apple is on an upswing and is being quite successful in increasing their market share and brand name recognition with iPod, selling their laptops to geeks and causal users. And Apple manages to appeal to them both: geeks get a shiny BSD system to play with, and casual users get a system that "just works".
I am no Apple fanboy. In fact I've never owned an Apple system in my life and never had any desire to own one. But if Apple keeps it up, I just might have to reconsider. If Apple could port their Cocoa shell to Linux and to offer a Linux based OS X, in addition to BSD based one, I will definitely switch, considering that their hardware is no longer lagging behind in performance. I may switch for some other reason as well -- for example, if for some reason Window has more Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in it than OS X, and it really starts to step on my toes, then I will also switch.
Dvorak revealed this ridiculous column topic last week on This Week In Tech, and even Leo Laporte turned to him and asked, "Are you nuts?" I knew as soon as Dvorak explained the subject of the column that it would probably get posted to Slashdot even though it's just crazy blather from the misinformed Dvorak. And it was. He's Jon Katz without the Slashdot employment.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Well, the switch to Intel closes that gap significantly. In the notebook area, (and I guess you are talking about notebooks because the desktop G5's were introduced years ago), the gap may even be reversed now.
Apple's standard warranty is one year, not one month. This makes me believe that you're trolling.
(By the way I did switch from Windows to Mac two years ago. My experience has been so positive that four other people have switched after me, and all of them are quite happy. I'm still immersed in an almost 100% Windows environment and have to use Windows frequently, so I still know what it feels to be a Windows user... and I don't think I will ever buy a Windows machine again.)
Do you work in an Apple store? I havn't seen a new computer from a single major manufacturer (Dell & Compaq, for example) that even hints at the possibility that it might support Firewire. Not even mentioned on the website or the documentation. Ever.
Hmm, so the server running Windows can't show me the article about why Apple is about to switch because of an ASP error. Irony or what?
Yeah, I know it's probably operator error, the irony would be stronger if it was ActiveX component can`t create object
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's what I think every time I see a Dvorak article posted here. And the fact that they keep getting posted is my rationale for blocking ads here.
I've switched. Unfortunately, I had to purchase an old candy-colored iMac off eBay for my daughter, but my wife is througholy entrenched in the Mini. My son even wants one now too.
I'm a convicted Linux bigot, but I have seen where OSX would make my life easier if everyone I knew that ran computers would run a Mac. I will never recommend Windows to anyone ever again because of the ease with which OSX works for me.
What a dumbass. First of all, he's about a month and a half early. (check the calendar)
He's basing this on the ideas of someone else who thinks that removing Firewire from iPods means anything about the operating system Apple will use, never mind that Windows supports FireWire just fine, it's just that PCs have been slow to adopt it. And Apple wants to switch to Windows because because they switched CPUs? You mean to one they had already been making sure for years that their own OS would run on? The one with a much faster update schedule than Microsoft could ever dream of?
Wow. He's one of the oldest and biggest trolls out there in the computer-related press, and he's still trolling. Remember, his target audience is PC Magazine, read by the kind of folks who don't want to believe that it's a mistake for them to still be using Windows. So he's just providing more comfort to them that mean ol' Apple won't take their tattered, filthy, stinking, virus-laden security blanket away. Hey, switch my keyboard already, I'm writing just like Dvorak!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sample of Apple customer policies/problems I've run into:
I won't even begin to get into the illegal price fixing and racketeering against independent dealers.
Please help metamoderate.
If your Toshiba fell under a bus tomorrow, and you had the money to replace it, would you buy a Mac or a Windows machine? That is perhaps the true test. (Leave aside issues of waiting for a wider range of Intel MacBooks)
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Dvorak is the Rush Limbaugh of the computer industry. He has made a career out of being controversial, and it doesn't really matter that he is almost always wrong, because he is an entertainer, not a pundit.
But even a stopped clock is on time once in a while. And in this case, he may be close. Of course, there is zero chance that Apple is actually switching to Windows. On the other hand, Apple could do almost the same thing by supporting Windows applications under OS X. At one stroke, the major advantage of Windows--its large software library would be eliminated.
Not only would it be a great strategic move for Apple, but it is hard to see how they could pass up developing such a product, if only because they could give it such a great name.
After all, who could resist a product called AppleWINE?
Have you ever experienced this first hand? At least the telephone support. Sure, they SAY they only give 90 days of telephone support to non-Apple Care customers. But try it sometime, they always say something like, "if it's not something huge, I'll see what I can do." And usually they'll give me a good 15 minutes or so, which is phenominal... have you ever dealt with Dell?
Bullshit. My first PowerBook, I bought from a place that sold both Macs and PCs was one of the unfortunate 2% that, because of a faulty screen, could be pronounced DOA. The thing had been sitting in the store for over a month. The store clerk (not an apple dealer by default), went on and on about how great apple was about returned products. If Apple hadn't been, he probably would have tried to get me to buy a PC instead, or at least told me that they were having problems, since it would be HIS loss.
Okay, now this is ludicrus. I've never heard Apple say ANYTHING about upgrading existing orders, in fact, no company has ever had free upgrades for HARDWARE. Never-the-less, Apple has been known to do it on occation. My parents bought a MacMini a few months back, and Apple had secretly switched up a few, oh, hundred thousand orders with the newer generation, for free, without telling anyone. I saw an article about it, and sure enough, ours had twice the VRAM and a faster processor. Show me the part where Apple makes any claims about doing this on a regular basis. They will sometime do it if they upgrade the product line while you're order is being processing, sure, that makes sense. But after it ships, it's a done deal. I don't understand how you expect to hold any company to that. If done regularly, it's just a bad business practice.
And how is this Apple's fault? So the store clerk didn't live up to your expectations... although I probably would have done the same thing if it had I been in his shoes. Sure, I guess it would have been nice, had he gone the extra mile and actually tightened the bolts himself... wait, how is Apple to blame for this, again?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
In 5-7 years from now Apple will be killing off the Macintosh platform as we know it.
o Apple has been in the process of slowly changing from a strict computer company to a Consumer Electronics company.
o Apple has had ***HUGE*** success and selling more IPODS in one month than all the Macs combined. This really
means that Apple is less dependant on the MAC market and this will increase as time goes on.
o IPOD and ITUNES the service are only the first steps in the process to move the company to a Consumer Electronics
company.
o IPOD, ITUNES, and Quicktime are available on PC's as well as MACS.
o IPOD/ITUNES are moving into video and not just AAC/MP3 audio.
o Microsoft has pulled support for Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger from the MAC platform.
o Microsoft has only given five years of support for the MAC platform using Microsoft Office.
o Apple is switching to standard PC Intel hardware and away from the old proprietary Apple hardware.
Thus making the MAC PC like and making MAC less special. Giving less people a reason to switch
and as you can see the switching ads have stopped.
o Macs are still not going to be able to dual boot Windows out of the box, so I don't expect them to
sell as well now that they are on the same hardware as regular PC's.
o Windows XP was really made to get users off of the DOS Windows such as Windows 98 and ME and on to the
NT platform. Windows 2000 came out February 2000 and then XP came out on October 2001.
o Windows Vista is going to be a very high quality OS from Microsoft and therefore be a lot more secure and stable.
o Windows Vista has technology spanning 5 years partly due to the technology being problematic due to it being very complicated and also due
to issues of using a complicated process. Both of these issues have been solved and this means faster releases of future versions of Windows.
o Microsoft has been more aggressive after fighting with Google and the company has been re-organized
with processes and personnel. Leading the company to be more streamlined and have a quicker turnaround.
o Windows Vista will have all of the MAC features and some that the MAC will not have and along
with better security on the browser and OS and with a better design overall, Mac's will not
be hyped as much.
Not just the search features and GPU type UI effects, but also the ability to have little Gagets that can use
the web, DHTML, or the Windows Presendation Foundation to create multimedia 2D/3D small applications that can
dock to the side bar or just on the desktop. So you can program these and not have to install them either. Think
Utorrent like apps on the desktop or sidebar.
o While Multi-Media in Windows has been mostly an afterthought, this is not going to happen any longer.
Multi-Media takes center-stage in Windows Vista.
A) Microsoft has take out the old audio core and re-written it from the ground up to support
the latest in audio fidelity (7.1 Dolby Surround Sound)
B) Microsoft also has re-written the audio drivers as well. The drivers have been taken out of the Kernel-Mode and put in User-Mode.
C) Microsoft has re-written the graphics drivers and graphics support just like what they did for audio. Now supporting
wide screen monitors, multi-monitor support, and high resolution DPI allowing graphics to be at their best and in user-mode now as well.
Also this allows scheduling to be done on the GPU level which means the GPU can now multi-task.
D) The Network drivers for the NIC and the
Your are just soo right! The guy's not an idiot (common misconception), he's a very clever jounalist. Off course he speaks complete crap, everyone knows he speaks complete crap, but he keeps on doin' his stuff.
However, there is a tiny (tiny) little bit of truth in what he says.... sure at the moment, the Intel Macs can't boot directly into XP... but I'm pretty sure Microsoft will make sure Vista will boot smoothly. Just pop that little sucker DVD in there....
Apple _might_ even offer to sell you Windows pre-installed (doubt it personally), but they're not going to stop anyone buying a Mac just because they want to run Windows on it.
The question is: "Who in thier right mind would do such an insane thing?!" Well, I would. I'm a Mac fanboy and a Windows programmer. I'd lurv to make a nice shiny new Intel Mac on/under my desk rather than my stinky IBM! OK, it's not stinky, but it is noisy.... but then what do you (erm... I) expect it's a flippin' xSeries 206.... Anyhow, I'd much rather have a nice Mac there instead.... then when I'm a bit bored, I could just pop into MacOS X and make a nice little app for doing something and say, "Hey look, we support Macs now!"
Na.... I'm wrong. Dvorak just plain out of his skull again. Oh well.
return 0; }
I agree...the argument falls flat when characterized as "Apple will switch to Windows" because Apple has already switched to 100% Windows-compatible hardware--a fact all too eagerly dismissed by apologists who wish only to see differences between the platforms while ignoring the similarities. With the advent of the MacIntel, the similarities far outweigh the differences.
This has never been true of the Mac hardware environment before. I think the reason traditional Mac users so readily ignore the new status quo is that they are simply creatures of habit--and new habits take time to become ingrained. Plus, the number of Windows-incompatible Macs in play still far outweighs the number of Windows-compatible Macs in use. In the years ahead the dynamics behind the MacIntel will become clear to even the most hardened of today's Mac apologist.
So...the issue isn't what "Apple will do" because Apple's already done it. The question is what Mac *users* will do with Windows now that their hardware platform of choice will run Windows natively.
Just imagine the savings for Apple if and when OSX development dies on the vine due to a simple lack of interest by MacIntel purchasers. Apple could then shift the burden--a considerable burden--of OS development and support to Microsoft--and realize gigantic R&D & support cost savings. Such an eventuality puts an entirely new dynamic on the fateful words Jobs uttered a few years ago, "We're coming for you Michael," in reference to Apple's posture relative to Dell. Doesn't it?
Also, a few years ago Jobs was ready and willing to abandon the Mac clone project, and he stated publicly that the "battle has already been decided" and that "it was too late" and by that he meant that he believed Apple had no chance in trying to foster a Mac standard in the general marketplace to rival or unseat the x86 hardware standard. How much more does he "secretly" think today that the OS battle has already been lost as well?
Best possible posture for observers relative to Apple is "Never say never again"...;) As for Dvorak--my goodness--with each article he proves himself infinitely unqualified to write technology columns. Good grief--he needed a *psychologist* to explain technical matters to him? That's so pathetic that I simply do not believe him. Rather, I think the "psychologist" gambit was merely a device to lend a patina of "credibility" to a set of facts that are as plain and obvious as the nose on his face. He simply lacked the guts to say it himself, more or less, is what I believe.