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.""

Comments

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Yellow Journalist

[AKAImBatman]

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.

This is beyond stupid

[Nice2Cats]

Two things are beyond me: How any sane person who has been following the history of Apple and knows about how they make money could assume this, and why Slashdot keeps putting this guy's stuff on the front page. I'm going to leave this to other people to tear up but not without pointing out one thing: Currently, that is OS X 10.4.5 vs. Windows XP, Apple kicks Microsoft's ass so bad it isn't even funny. Maybe Vista can catch up a little -- looks like a "Tiger" clone to me anyway -- but right now, no way. Apple can only charge their prices for top quality. Intel chips and OS X yes, but Intel chips and Windows, well, nobody fights Dell on their own ground and survives. Apple is very, very good at surviving.

Re:I don't agree at all

[ajs]

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?)

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[HardCase]

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-

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[fyngyrz]

I switched too. Also, I was a (fairly) happy Windows and Linux user, the Mini was so cheap I thought I'd take a look at the machine, and OSX itself won me over. Then I bought a Mac for my sweetheart, and another for my youngest son. So that's three more new Mac owners in total here in my household. This had zero to do with the iPod and everything to do with the Mac Mini. I don't own an iPod; although I am a musician, I'm not fond of running about with earbuds or headphones.

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. :)

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[Overly Critical Guy]

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.

Re:Dvorak: wrong, again.

[Hal_Porter]

I clicked on the link and I got this

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126'

Include file not found /article2/0,1895,1923151,00.asp, line 377

The include file '/component/util_generate_article_discussion_info/ 0,1460,a=171069,00.asp' was not found.

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

a sample of apple policies and experiences

[SuperBanana]

Apple's standard warranty is one year, not one month. This makes me believe that you're trolling.

Sample of Apple customer policies/problems I've run into:

• After 90 days, no telephone support. If you post into the web forums about a problem Apple doesn't like to "discuss", expect it to be silently removed.
• As a friend discovered, Apple's return policy is 14 days AFTER DATE OF SHIPMENT, not DATE OF RECIEPT, despite this being VERY clearly outlined on their store policies page. Her iBook took 7 days to arrive via UPS ground, and 4 days later called Apple to return it. No go. I even found the URL of the webpage on the store.apple.com website which reads "from date of reciept", and they refused to adhere to it. Slimy doesn't begin to cover it.
• You know that friendly bit about upgrading existing orders? Guess why she wanted to return her iBook? Answer: they started shipping iBooks with better processors and GPUs (or more VRAM, I forget) while her iBook was in transit. Her order certainly wasn't held or upgraded for free.
• The display on my $3k, 17-inch powerbook was very wobbly 9 months in, so I took it to the store. "Huh", says the genius. Walks over to the display model, which has been on the floor for over a year (and shows it.) That's 12 hours a day of geting wobbled, poked, prodded...whereas mine sat mostly on my desk and was closed+opened once a day on average. "Ours does the same thing. It's normal." Uh...what? So, I took it home, popped it open, tightened the bolts for the clutch mounts, and problem solved. Jerks.
• No reserving a spot via the web for the 'genius bar' unless you're a ProCare customer. At the local Apple store, that typically means a 30+ minute wait, and there's nowhere to sit.
• Various parts are not "covered" by Apple. For example- the "duckbill" on the power adapters for powerbooks? Not covered. Mind you, it doesn't SAY this anywhere in the warranty. A $3k laptop, and they wanted $30 to replace the thing. The rubber feet were "covered", but I had to wait for fifteen minutes for the paperwork to be filled out.
• Parts are not available. Period. End of discussion. Unless you're an authorized reseller, which has a laundry list of requirements. The only parts you can find on the web are almost always used- ripped out of machines bought on ebay or whatnot by parts recyclers, who charge virtually the same price for used parts as Apple charges you if you ship your unit to Texas.
• There's only one place to get your Powerbook repaired. Not the local store, nope! Has to go to Texas. And if it's not under warranty, you get charged a $200+ "diagnostic" fee. What the fuck? At a place I worked at, our Dell Latitudes had on-site-next-day service included. Nice guy showed up, took him 20 minutes to swap the entire motherboard (bad mouse buttons, which are on the motherboard, doh!). A signature, shake of the hand, and 30 minutes later we had a working laptop.
• If you go through Apple's technician training program, you loose all access to their internal support database (not a thing to submit cases- a knowledgebase for "cool people") after a couple months, and you can't order parts period, unless you work for an Apple authorized reseller. It is essentially impossible to be an independent technician.

I won't even begin to get into the illegal price fixing and racketeering against independent dealers.

Re:a sample of apple policies and experiences

[Anubis350]

To give you anecdotal vs. anecdotal

My experiance on the phone with apple (given, I have applecare) was very positive. They have friendly, knowledgeable people who *speak english*. More knowledgeable than in the store I've found btw.

I had a similar problem with the screen (also had the infamous problem with the latch) on my 15inch alBook when I first got it, I called apple up and they repaired it free of charge. Sent me a box, sent it to them in a box, they sent it back fixed. Took a grand total of a week all told.

You can make apointments on their website in advance for the "genius bar" btw, no waiting on line at the store, just show up when your apointment time is. Never had any probs with this.

What parts? I have a mac laptop, not much I'm going to be upgrading on it. The stuff I will be, hard-disk and ram, are standard parts found anywhere.

As for repair, that's warranty/applecare is *for*. If you buy a dell, you want to get the three year warranty for extra $$$ too, or they'll do the same thing to you. That is unless you want to a) repair it yourself or b) go to a non-authorized repairer (both of which you can do with macs too).

While I havent gone through apple's repair training program, there's a hell of a lot of technical info on macs/osx on the web, much of it offered up free by Apple (and plenty not offered up by apple, but easily findable).

Lastly, how can it be illegal price-fixing, Apple does not have a monopoly on the computer market by a long shot. If you want a mac, you pay Apple's prices. If you just want a cheap computer, go somewhere else. You are not *entitled* to a cheap mac, whatever you may think.

~Anub