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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.
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.