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Clues That Apple's Bought Another Processor Design House
According to Ars Technica: "Apple's gigantic bankroll may be burning a hole in its pocket. Almost two years after purchasing PowerPC designer P.A. Semi, Apple appears to have snapped up ARM design house Intrinsity. According to a report that first appeared on electronista, a number of engineers at the company have indicated that they are now or soon will be employed by Apple. Some of them have even gone as far as to change their LinkedIn profiles, with one reverting it, possibly out of fear of drawing the wrath of his new, secretive employer." Updated 20100404 1:15 GMT Brian Dipert points out the earlier coverage at EDN, from which both of the above reports draw.
When will most people agree with your silly argument? Never.
Apple isn't Microsoft. Because Microsoft has a monopoly in a few areas of computing and caused great damage doesn't mean that any other company achieving a lot of success in different areas of computing will cause damage. Apple's influence over the industry over the years has been generally a good one.
They (Apple) just haven't gotten to the market share level they need yet to take over the world as it were.
...and its hard to see how they would get to that market share without the massive leg-up that Microsoft and the Wintel platform got from IBM (the big evil monopolist of the day) back in the early days of personal computing. MS managed to inherit IBM's customer base and ride the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme (and eventually left IBM in the dust).
Remember, MS still has a virtual stranglehold on the corporate sector, which Apple hasn't even tried to penetrate - and if anybody shakes MS loose from that, my bet would be Google rather than Apple.
Also, unlike the early 80s, we now have the concept of standards-based computing (and the internet, which is a force for standardization which wasn't relevant to PCs in the 80s), something which only MS are big enough to ignore. Plus, even if the will had been there, 1980s PCs didn't have the horsepower that goes with the extra layers of abstraction required for most standards.
Yes, native apps for Apple are non-standard (although OS X is also POSIX compliant) and the case of the iPod/Phone/Pad (but not their "real" desktop/laptop computers) is locked to Apples "App Store". However, it seems quite probable that as internet connectivity improves, native apps are going to become increasingly irrelevant compared to browser-based applications (for which Apple offer one of the better, more standards-based, platforms, and which can be run without restriction on the iProducts). Aside from the proprietary binary API, Apple's OS is built on open-source projects like Webkit, Apache, PHP/Python, Samba, CUPS the GNU compilers and the BSD toolkits, and can build and run most of the popular FOSS applications.
So, maybe we'll see a competetive market split between (say) MS, Google and Apple. That would be vastly more healthy than the almost complete Wintel monoculture that had developed by the end of the 20th century.
Remember - Apple helps Linux just by existing and having a significant market share: if a Website supports only IE, then only Windows can access it; if it supports Safari then its very likely to work on Linux browsers. If a USB peripheral supports Mac, then it probably uses one of the standard USB protocols (rather than requiring a custom windows-only driver) and will probably work on Linux. As long as there is more than one platform with market share, standards are more likely to be observed. Heck, even MS is now being dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5...
Of course, it pays to be vigilant against a new monopoly and keep half an eye on what MS, Apple, Google are up to (especially if there's any danger of a merger) but if you think what Apple's doing bears any resemblance to the birth of the Wintel monoculture, you presumably weren't paying attention back in the 80s.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Blame Asus for using an obscure Linux distro, doing a half-baked job of optimising the key applications for a small screen and then Osbourning it by announcing a new model every five minutes, or blame MS for reviving XP and dumping it on the netbook market at silly prices...
For the consumer, all Linux distros are obscure. The problem was really that Microsoft rereleased XP for these devices, and suddenly everyone expected to be able to install pirated versions of software on them just like they do on all their other Microsoft-based computers (no, Photoshop will not be useable on a 7" screen even of you didn't pay for it or the copy on your home desktop). The trick with the iPad is it doesn't look like Microsoft Windows. It doesn't act like Microsoft Windows. If it doesn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, people will not expect to be able to steal Photoshop and run it like, uh, a duck.
You may recall that, at one point, NVidia had a neat technology for hardware-accelerated onboard sound called SoundStorm based on technology designed and licensed by an obscure company called Sensaura. Then Sensaura were bought up by the big competitor Creative Audio and NVidia were forced to drop SoundStorm from their next generation of chipsets.
It looks like the purchase of Intrinsity by Apple will have the same effect in the mobile phone system-on-chip market. Currently, anyone can buy the low-power Samsung ARM chips designed by Intrinsity for mobile use, but now they've been swallowed by Apple there won't be an improved version. Any future Intrinsity SOCs will be Apple-only. Do this for a few more companies, and...