Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Hmm? And what crimes has Apple been convicted of? What SCO equivalent has Apple created to try to destroy Linux? I could go on; I suspect you're astroturfing. I hope it's not successful - there are valid complaints about Apple, but you haven't brought any of them up, merely flamed the fans of paranoia with hyperbole.
Except Apple is increasing market share by producing new products, innovating and taking risks.
Microsoft is only where it is today due to being rather lucky with getting IBM to take their vapour ware OS product DOS. Most of Microsoft's revenue still comes from Windows and Office, in fact they make more from Office than Windows!
There are many big technology companies and nobody was complaining when Sony entered the games console market and dominated it? So why should Apple be prevented from doing well in the consumer electronics market?
Just because they are good at it and other brands release products that are largely inferior doesn't mean Apple should be stopped.
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.
Well they are a lot more innovative than Microsoft are that's for sure.
When Microsoft released a tablet PC it was just a tablet with Windows and some trivial extensions. The head of the Office team wouldn't rework Office to work with the tablet controls as he "doesn't like touch screens".
Hardly the sort of thing you want to buy is it, a tablet running an OS designed for a mouse and keyboard with some hacks on the top to make it try to work with a stylus.
Why is it "drinking koolaid" to want to simply buy a computer and use it? have the hardware and software working in unison to give a good user experience?
I'm well versed with Linux, Windows etc.. I've built up MythTV media centres using Linux (compiling my own kernel and all that). I choose to own a Mac because computers are just a tool to get things done. They shouldn't be like a car requiring lots of maintenance.
That's funny, i only buy apple products because they meet my needs (wants) that other companies seem unwilling to.
Small example. Bought a first gen Zune as it was a little nicer then the iPod 5g that had come out a year before. Problem Is I wanted a video store.
After all what the hell is the point of a nice screen, for um music?. I wanted my tv shows.movies to go and I wanted them now. Microsoft said they were getting a video store so I waited... and waited... and waited. Finally got a iPod instead. It took microsoft till 2008 3 freaking years after apple to get a video store. Apple, funny thing opened their store in 2005.
Let them dominate. Let them make a zillion dollars as long as I get what I want. When they start making what I don't want I will stop buying.
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
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.
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
I'm sorry. I can't swallow this shit. The PC industry owes its existence to Microsoft. While just about every other player in the industry was working on either big iron type systems (IBM, DEC) or absurdly unprofitable business models (Apple, BBC), Microsoft was paving the way with a simplified operating system that was cheap enough to develop that there were no huge R&D costs to recoup and that worked on commodity hardware cheap enough to become the modern day one-in-every-home PC.
Nobody else at the time would have done it, and it possibly would have happened eventually without MS, but give credit where credit is due. That they have become too big for their boots, turning into a bully does not take away from their past achievements. It's like criticizing Mohamed Ali's sporting record on account of his present poor level of physical fitness.
It's easy for us to look at them now and claim to have been all visionary like "oo I never liked them I knew they were bad guys". Bullshit. You had a PC, and you loved it. You played games on it. You did *not* know that in the late 90s MS would become an industrial and political bully.
Kinda like now, really. In 5-10 years all you groupies will be saying the same thing "oo I was never an Apple/Google fan, I always knew they were up to no good!".
I hate printers.