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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.
I wonder how long it'll take the otherwise intelligent geeks at /. to finally figure out that Apple is just as dangerous as Microsoft. They (Apple) just haven't gotten to the market share level they need yet to take over the world as it were.
I know I'll get modded down by all the Jobs Koolaid drinkers, but Apple is every bit as hungry and willing to use any means necessary to dominate as is Microsoft. MS is on the wane while Apple is on the rise. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Ya know, say what you will about Microsoft, Apple, Google etc... they are doing what businesses do and people are willing to pay or sacrifice freedom and/or privacy for what they offer. They got there because of marketing. I don't understand people who gripe about someone or something more successful or powerful than they are and/or what they support. If you're have the energy and insight to gripe, use that energy to find a solution - here's mine! Why not push for hardware manufacturers to not only provide open source drivers, but also put Tux right on the box as Linux compatible? Hell, why not build hardware specifically for Linux that can be used with other operating systems? Maybe I'm too much of a "noob" to really know what I'm talking about here, but it makes sense to me. You build it, they will come.
possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.
It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?
The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I loved my //e
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
MS was dangerous to the competitive Operating System market - and later on, office software.. geeks acknowledged the danger as systems like OS/2 disappeared despite their popularity.
if Apple is a competitive threat, its to the makers of media players and to the producers of content, due to their homogenising influence on the market and their major-media-outlet status. Its less likely to directly affect us....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
OSX will build on ARM without a problem and the ARM CPU would be better than the Intel Atom in a netbook.
However, as the world inside the Reality Distortion Field now knows, netbooks will never sell because no one really wants them and anyway, as a failed product, they have been replaced by the magical iPad.
Ideally, you are reading this post a) on your iPhone or b) while waiting in line to buy your Really Big iPhone.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I wonder who the employees are going to put as their employer on their resumes! This whole "can't name my employer" sounds like a bit of BS to me. Also wouldn't APPLE have to do some filing with the SEC regarding the purchase of a design house? It's not exactly the same as buying a stapler!
Can somebody please explain what is evil about Apple buying Intrinsity?
I see. Anyone at Slashdot that doesn't believe that Apple is the new Microsoft (despite marketshare, history, and product differences) and that doesn't find Apple's products to be mediocre is a Koolaid drinker and fanboi.
Just about the most irrational and blinkered topic on Slashdot in years, this Apple emergence. A broad swath of Slashdotters (presumably the last/youngest wave of those that felt special just for being well-versed in technoesoterics) clearly feels their identities and statuses deeply threatened by the (relative) success of Apple, who is having influence out of all proportion to their marketshare as a result of the fact that much of the public finds them to be a tremendous innovative and specifically NON-Microsoft-alike company.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Please see my post in yesterday's anti-Apple party for a discussion of why your'e wrong.
I owned other phones with touch screens for years before buying an iPhone. The user interface makes it substantively different.
I owned a Creative MuVo2 and a Diamond Rio before an iPod (which I no longer own, replacing it with my iPhone). The user interface made it substantively different.
I keep an installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a ThinkPad partition for cases when I need to run Mac apps for compatibility with someone's files. The user interface makes it substantially different.
I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Vadem Clio, an Asus R2H, and most recently a Toshiba M200, all tablet PCs. Having seen the iPad demoed and used the iPhone for some time, it is clear that the user interface will make the iPad substantively different.
The user interface is perhaps the single most important substantive component of the computing experience, yet posters like you routinely pretend as if it isn't even there.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
1. Regular people like Apple products.
2. But Apple products have nice user interfaces and can be used by most anyone.
3. Therefore they are like a totalitarian dictator marching the unwashed masses to their graves.
4. Plus they're just sexy, not real.
5. Therefore, anything Apple does is evil.
6. And anyone that doesn't think so is a blinded member of the politburo or a metrosexual fashionista.
7. Plus, OSX sucks and is just like Windows, iPod sucks and is just like Zune, iPhone sucks and is just like Blackberry, and iPad sucks and is just like Microsoft tablet PC.
8. 1337 H4x0rs Ru13!
I think I covered everything.
Seriously, the walled garden property sucks and I'd love to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone without unlocking it. But the Apple hate around the online tech world is truly a sphere of irrationality to behold right now, out of any proportion to anything anyone has done; Microsoft and Microsoft users were never even talked about this way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
People, take a quick bunny hop through List of cognitive biases and ask yourself how many of these constitute cognitive feeder arteries for Godwin's law.
Every so often a topic comes up where everyone simultaneously decides to let their amygdalas off the leash in the same dog park, who all quickly pair up for a circular open-jaw square dance. After the dust settles, what do you have? A giant patch of lawn to circumvent until the next heavy rainfall.
I suppose the game is a bit more earnest for the born complainer, who does have to somehow realign the pole of supreme evil with every successive regime change. Those of us with the attention span to get through the first page of Anna Karenina understand that evil has a multitude of poles, any one of which can erupt into the supreme pimple in the rapidly shifting context of real life.
if anybody shakes MS loose from that, my bet would be Google rather than Apple
Apparently, slashdotters don't read Swift, either.
There are at least half a dozen major players tugging on different fingers of the Beast of Redmond. Sony is doing their ineffective best tugging on the pinky finger with their once-powerful PS3 franchise. The unholy alliance Snoracle has a firm but limp-wristed grasp on the middle finger on office suite revenue streams. Linux/Apache/Firefox inflicted a hairline fracture on a wristbone. Google extracted a fingernail from the ring finger when it became the ultimate talent drain. That had to hurt. And now they're proceeding to bend back the index finger by sucking up the air supply in online search. Learn from the best. A horsefly named Gnome Evolution landed on the thumb and carted off the largest divot of flesh it could manage, which considering all the other wounds, is of no real consequence whatsoever, unless horseflies are a vector for Ebola, and so far it appears that they aren't. All things considered, I think that Microsoft can hang there by their relatively undamaged, enterprising thumbs for another thirty years or so.
The biggest risk with Apple is that they manage to leverage their carefully cultivated charisma (if it survives their having become a big enough company to matter in these discussions) to make DRM palatable to the masses.
Sony is far more evil in the DRM department (witness the recent "other OS" rescindment fiasco) but they suffer from a bad case of cartoon evil: whatever their grasping ambition, it's soon equally matched by their incompetence. They managed--on the back of a half billion dollar war chest--to leverage their dominant Play Station franchise into a slow and lukewarm victory in a dying physical media platform.
This rivals anything accomplished by the Hudson Bay Company (oldest corporation in North America) which once laid claim to half the natural resources in Canada, but decided the crown jewel was retailing dress shirts. If Warren Buffett had gained control of HBC in the late 1700s, America might now be the 11'th Canadian province, or an economic protectorate, like Puerto Rico. (If BG gained control of the HBC in the late 1700s, Russia would now be the world's great democracy and white knight of freedom.)
Wish the Sony/HBC disease were true of Apple, but it isn't.
I could continue grave digging in this vein for another day or two, but hey, it's Easter, and whatever your opinion on the back story, there was an important lesson in there about the rush to judgement.
Well, that depends if you mean the personal computer as a generic concept- which existed for a number of years before IBM released theirs- or the later meaning of the term "PC" as "IBM PC compatible".
No, I really specifically meant IBM's PC machine.
But IBM only released *their* PC a number of years after others had done so already, and it was clear that they weren't going away.
Yes. Small machine targeted at individuals have existed before the PC.
The huge difference: all these previous machine were either home-made kits or small proprietary series.
IBM's PC was the first which :
- had a large scale success (thank to the IBM name written on it)
- was opened-up (probably because the initial intent from IBM was to make it easy for 3rd party to create compatible peripherals) and ended up being more a platform than a specific machine from a specific constructor.
- thanks to the 2 above (and efforts from Pheonix BIOS to provide an alternative for the last non-open part), a whole ecosystem of cheap no-name clones arose.
- Thanks to all 3 above, the whole platform met a gigantic success, becoming the "de-facto standard", controlled by no single corporation in particular, to run your softwares on it (and the monopolist role migrated to software thanks to microsoft piggy backing with the whole MS-DOS scam).
There were a lot of other personal machines at the same time. But they were all proprietary and not open.
Sure, as you point out, they were "IBM" and part of their success was due to this.
But in the end, if the PC won against the Amigas and Atari ST, it was not because of superior qualities or capabilities.
It was because Commodore and Atari weren't only battling against IBM, but against Compaq, and countless of other clone makers, all trying to sell their clones cheaper than the concurrence.
And I think too that the whole result were accidental for IBM.
I only suspect different motives: not that IBM was playing catch-up with the other personal computer manufacturer, but that they envisioned their PC as a glorified terminal, a client to connect to the enterprise mainframe (which will definitely happen to have an IBM stamp on it).
That's probably why they chose to go for an inferior architecture (8086 and 8088 at an era when 16/32 processors like the 68k were starting to appear) and a rather limited OS (so the PC doesn't pose a menace to their "big brain" business) designed (stolen) by an idiot who couldn't properly plan memory mapping for the next decade.
And that's why they probably choose to make their architecture more open and were tolerant toward clone : their core business was mainframe and in the end it shouldn't matter that much who produces the terminal, as long as it connects to their big iron. (and why not let the IBM brand associate with the brain and the clone name only with the "glorified terminal" dumb machine ?)
Only the history happened slightly differently.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.
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