How Sun Bought Apple Computer (Almost)

Hugh Pickens writes "There was a time in the 1990s when Sun, at its wealthiest, was poised to buy Apple when it was at the lowest point in its storied history and now eWeek reports on how the deal for Sun to buy Apple fell through. 'Back in late 1995 early '96, when we were at our peak, we were literally hours away from buying Apple for about $5 to $6 a share,' says former Sun CEO Ed Zander. 'I don't know what we were going to do with it, but we were going to buy it.' Sun co-founder Scott McNealy adds that there was an investment banker on the Apple side who basically blocked it. 'He put so many terms into the deal that we couldn't afford to go do it.' Would there be iPhones, iPads and iPods on the market today if Sun Microsystems had been able to close a deal to buy out Apple in the mid-1990s? No, says McNealy. 'If we had bought Apple, there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads ... I'd have screwed that up.'"

Comments

Proof at last!

[Anonymous Coward]

The world does NOT revolve around the Sun!

Re:Proof at last!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor does it revolve around Apple.

Most corporations are evil, irresponsible and unethical.

Re:Proof at last!

[monkyyy]

*insert "capitalism a love story" in a weak argument about the evil of apple*

Re:Proof at last!

[Anonymous Coward]

capitalism my arse, truth is they are a corrupt and tyrannical exploiter, indeed, imho, Apple has rarely ever really made an honest dollar ...

Re:Proof at last!

[DaVince21]

That would be pretty weird, though, seeing earth revolving around a tiny little apple. Makes for some interesting astrological diagrams, though.

Re:Proof at last!

[Anonymous Coward]

They cause cancer too.

He'd have screwed it up.

[Chas]

Well at least he's being honest about it.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[andrea.sartori]

The question remains open whether a world without iPads or iPods would be any different.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[msobkow]

As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market. The only questions are whether they would have been as successful or achieved the brand recognition that Apple has.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[andrea.sartori]

I was trying to make another point, but whatever.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Megane]

Actually, anyone who was Not Steve would have screwed it up. What Woz had in technical savvy, Jobs had in product savvy. Apple would have been long gone if NeXT hadn't bought them for negative 400 million dollars.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Arancaytar]

Perhaps not, but one can dream.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Megane]

But would a world without the Newton have been any different?

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[betterunixthanunix]

Probably not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[flaming error]

> whether a world without iPads or iPods would be any different.
I never would have succeeded as a supplier of feminine hygiene products if it weren't for pad casting.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Penguinisto]

Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.

I think that, while many like to deride Apple for many reasons, there is one thing that, at least IMHO, commands respect: Apple has a knack for producing products that folks like to use, in forms that make it drop-easy to do so... and in turn they do revolutionize the industry in question, forcing competitors to adopt, adapt, or perish.

Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.

Almost immediately, and like *every other Apple product*, competitors (including Microsoft) begin aping the thing... and in a repeatable progression: First we see a ton of vaporware and 'concept' demos, then massive promises (most of which fall short), then out comes the blatant (and undeniably crap) imitators, and finally, a long time later, some competitors begin trickling in with a few halfway decent competitors... af first falling well short of the mark, in spite of being somewhat decent products in their own right. Eventually the competition becomes almost as capable, perhaps surpassing the Apple product - but by then Apple has the market pretty much sewn up - if not in marketshare, then in profit share. The iPod was like this. Even the iPhone is like this.

I think OTOH that Sun would have dickered around, then come out with a few enterprise-oriented versions, then let them each die, while more consumer-oriented competitors would have picked up the torch and limped along.

I do have to give props to Apple for one thing - without them, most consumer-oriented tech would have likely progressed a whole lot slower than it has. I also think that a lot of corollary bits (e.g. digital music licensing, apps, mobile smartphones, etc) would have been slowed down, if not stalled completely. I say this because Microsoft would have just sat around for the most part, and Linux would have had a much harder time getting anywhere (esp. w/o Google jump-starting things). I mean, sure, there are things that have moved along and disrupted tech nicely w/o Apple, but when you examine them (netbooks for instance), they're not much more than incremental iterations of existing products... not complete disruptors.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[XxtraLarGe]

I was trying to make another point, but whatever.

You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot, the internet's center for pedantry.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[dadioflex]

Scott McNealy is an epic dude. He's never been afraid to speak his mind even when the rest of the world thinks he's crazy.

Shine on.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[BlueStraggler]

Actually, Apple did invent the idea of Pad computing, back in 1987. The iPad is their 2nd Generation tablet computer.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[dadioflex]

So how do you explain the NeXT's failure to deliver a popular product? Jobs is lucky and Jonathan Ives is the real genius behind Apple, or some lucky combination of the two. Jobs didn't even want an App Store. He gets credited with too much that went right, when it went right despite him, not because of him.

I do want to say I hope he beats the cancer again. He's proven himself a real fighter there, so I'll gratefully respect that. You can't take that away from him.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical "Apple invented everything" fanboy retardation with no basis in reality.

There were several "pad computers" on the market prior to Newton, but the idea itself goes back to the 50s or 60s (and is seen on old episodes of Star Trek for example).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[the agent man]

As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market.

Real invention includes the combination of getting an idea AND implementing it. Others may have had similar ideas but they did not create truly usable implementations. Many people, including Leonardo da Vinci, invented the airplane but in the end the real credit, and deservedly so, got to the people who made the airplane actually FLY. Similarly, Apple really DID invent Pad computing.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[iluvcapra]

NeXT wasn't a "popular" computing company, it built high-end workstations and an object-oriented OS for the scientific and government markets, actually a lot like Sun. NeXT actually did pretty well at this, which is why NeXT was able to buy Apple -- they'd have you believe it was the other way around, but don't be fooled. NeXT, unlike Sun, actually had an exit strategy for the dot-com bust, and exercised it before the music stopped playing.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[betterunixthanunix]

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/gridpad/index.html

That was ready for use in 1989. Not "still in the development phase" the way the Newton was.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[betterunixthanunix]

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/gridpad/index.html

That was in 1989, ready to use, years before the Newton was ready for use.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[monoqlith]

It's more like the epicenter for pedantry.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[voidptr]

NeXT has evolved into one of the top two mobile OSes on the planet. It's also one of the few desktop UNIX OSes left on the market, and probably the largest in terms of current sales volume in recent quarters. Most companies would love to have failures like that.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Spy Handler]

...and nothing of value was lost

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[the agent man]

This was as ready to use as some of the early gliders "flying" for about 20 feet and then breaking into pieces. Pad computing is not about hardware alone. It is about the whole user experience including useful and meaningful activities. Remember, before the Web, computers were not that useful to many people. However, this as well as the Newton were important milestones heading in the right direction.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[hedwards]

Back in college I happened upon some NeXT hardware and it was nice. It was fairly old at that point, but the stuff that still ran was quite nice indeed. The monitors were high res albeit black and white, but the interface was quite responsive and the experience was quite a bit more positive than I would've expected out of such old equipment.

I think that they probably could have taken NeXT equipment mainstream had they wanted to, although one might say that that's what OSX was.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[the linux geek]

By your standards, DEC must be one of the most successful computer companies in the world - its operating system evolved into the top desktop and server operating system on the planet, after all.

Oh, and the top two mobile OS's are Symbian and Android.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[guruevi]

You're talking about VMS? That wouldn't be quite the same. You see VMS' ideas were used in the Windows NT Kernel but I don't think that VMS was used directly in the development of Windows NT. That's like saying AT&T's Unix became one of the most popular open source operating systems. If Windows NT would've been based on VMS however and we wouldn't have Win16/32 now then you could say that.

However Mac OS X is NeXTStep. The same kernel, the same way the interface is drawn (PostScript), the same object oriented model. Basically when Steve Jobs went to work back at Apple, they bought NeXTStep (or the other way around), polished and branded it (although Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 weren't great yet) and further developed it (with products like AppleScript, WebObjects, Objective-C etc. eventually directly evolving from this).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're real genius was in seeing the ability's of smartphones and being able to harness the power. If anyone can remember the days before Iphone, Smartphones were available but they were as difficult to use as a linux command line. Then whammo! the Iphone came out, and some analysts reported that they expected to capture a large percentage of the market. Oh, How we laughed, a computer company ? being a leader in smartphones?? Biggest joke in history. And now the transition of Apple from computer company to general, nay, premier, CE brand is almost complete. It will be complete when they bring out their own TV, very soon selling for $3000 dollars for a 24" inch screen? wtf but it'll be oled, nothing else will suit SteveJobs.
**They will have fully gone over to the Dark Side.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Solandri]

Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.

Microsoft and Intel saw tablets as a way to expand sales of x86 processors and Windows OSes. Consequently, they encouraged tablet makers to produce what were basically oversized laptops with high-end x86 processors and Windows. Because the laptops had to be oversized (to accommodate the swivel display and digitizer), the only really viable laptop platform was the ultralight category, which drove prices even higher. All this might have made sense in the early 2000s when laptops were less capable, but by 2005 it should've been obvious to them that there wasn't really a tablet market at above-premium-laptop price and performance levels. That if there was a market for this, it was at a level below laptops. But then they wouldn't get to sell their x86 processors and copies of Windows, so they kept plugging the supra-laptop tablet. They weren't letting the market decide what the devices should be like, they were dictating to the market what it should like. This never works.

Many people, including myself, saw tablets as being viable at a lower price point and reduced functionality. But the Wintel duopoly kept steering any lower-functionality device upward towards x86 and Windows. Take netbooks as an example. First the derided the concept. Then when they saw the things were actually selling enough to threaten their other sales, they gussied up the Atom processor and extended the life of Windows XP to compete. If you look today, about the only distinguishing factor between netbooks and notebooks is whether they use an Atom processor or a Core processor. The category has pretty much been successfully integrated into the x68/Windows sales structure.

The tablet market, without a well-established OS to drive smaller, lighter, cheaper tablets, stagnated. That's why Apple, not beholden to Microsoft nor Intel and no stranger to rolling its own OS, was able to do what other manufacturers couldn't. Apple succeeded with the iPad not so much because it was innovative, but because Intel and Microsoft had steered companies away from that market sector for so long that it opened up a huge opportunity for anyone capable and willing to put together the hardware and OS for it. If you want to give Apple props for innovation in this category, it should be for making the Newton, not the iPad. The iPad just happened to fill a hole Intel and Microsoft created, a hole that likely would have been filled a lot sooner if those two weren't so intent on protecting their x86 and Windows sales.

The iPad is still not right IMHO. Apple's sales are in the millions. I see tablets as a replacement for the clipboard - the pen and paper used in businesses everywhere. All those forms people fill out only for someone to type it into a computer later? Tablet. All those notes people take on paper only to type it into a computer later? Tablet. That sheaf of papers you carry around work? Tablet. Those reference books on your bookshelf at work? Tablet. Think of the tablet-like device UPS custom-made for its delivery people. Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[larry bagina]

AppleScript was part of MacOS System 7 (1993).
NeXTApple pretty much abandoned WebObjects (which was unfortunate because it is really cool) but at least they dropped the price from $50,000 to $0.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[salesgeek]

The fatal flaw in Microsoft's "tablet" PC was that it was designed around the pen based computing concept. The GUI was optimized for stylus, and most input was done using handwriting recognition that didn't work that well. The result was a miserable user experience and carts at your local hospital that turned a tablet into a desktop, complete with keyboard and mouse.

The current iteration of touch screen designs are vastly easier to work with, but still have some fairly serious limitations... particularly around input. As for the $250 tablet, there are a ton of Android 2.2 based devices that hit your pricepoint and desired features. Oh, and if a smartphone has a camera, it can scan barcodes.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Culture20]

He's just speaking well of the dead.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[node 3]

Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

iPad is all those things, except for $250, including already in the "tens of millions" in sales.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[node 3]

So how do you explain the NeXT's failure to deliver a popular product?

iOS and Mac OS X. The reason they failed until Apple bought them is their computers cost *way* too much. They were truly desirable at the time, just too expensive for most people outside of workstation applications, like scientific research and finance. The WWW was created on NeXT hardware.

Jobs is lucky and Jonathan Ives is the real genius behind Apple, or some lucky combination of the two.

Jobs ia a genius, as are Woz and Ives. Each in their own way. Woz is a low level technological/hardware hacker genius. Ives is a design genius, and Jobs is a high level "technology for people" genius. Ives was at Apple before Jobs' return, but it was only when the two combined that they truly shined, just like before it was only when Jobs and Woz worked together that Apple was initially successful (and later Jobs and Raskin, among others, with the Mac).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[aristotle-dude]

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/gridpad/index.html

That was ready for use in 1989. Not "still in the development phase" the way the Newton was.

You might be technically correct but the Newton is more well known than that device despite being a failure in the marketplace.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[drsmithy]

So how do you explain the NeXT's failure to deliver a popular product?

Stratospheric cost and a lack of software.

As strange as it might sound, Apple made NeXT's products affordable.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[netsharc]

I agree with the first half of your post, but "before the web, the computers were not that useful to many people"? For FSM's sake...

The web arrived in people's consciousness in about 1995. At that time computers have been around 30-40-odd years, desktop computers maybe 15. And you really saying corporations didn't use IBM XTs in the 80's as productivity-improving tools?

Fucking kids... Heck, I remember banks getting worried about the Michelangelo virus, and that was 1992!

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[netsharc]

Incredibly, the iPhone and iPad would've probably came along anyway, made by an Orange Inc. (or some other name), whose CEO is... Steve Jobs.

Call me a fanboy, but Steve did bring about the revolutions.. even when they ousted him out of his own company, he made NeXTStep, and look what happened to that OS (hint, it's now an OS with the letter X on it).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[jo_ham]

Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.

The product you are looking for is the iPad, which does absolutely every single thing in that list *except* the price. For that, you have to pay $499 for the base one with no 3G.

Other than the price, you have described the iPad perfectly, including the tens of millions of sales.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

and if we take off the rose coloured glasses, what actually happened was that microsoft were focusing on the tablet as a laptop with no keyboard.

after not getting picked up as people found it annoying to use to run their full blown apps, netbooks eventually came out with the realisation that people generally went for websites rather than running proper apps. apple seeing this decides they can do 'tablet as a laptop with no keyboard' if they focus on everything being primarily web based like their iphone / ipod touch (seriously, how many 'apps' in their store are either ebooks, flash ports, or mobile versions of websites).

in general apple products have always been an evolution, not a revolution. but for the majority of people out there anything with an apple logo on the back is a revolution (i say this while listening through my 'iconic' white earphones i picked up in 1993).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

He have an history of big time screw up. The heart of Mac OS X and IOS is OpenStep (aka the spec of OPENSTEP, the NeXTstep successor). That specification was developped by Sun and NeXT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep).

Sun had all the tech that is now OSX, and they just stopped using it in favor of java.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[kwolf22]

What Apple has done with iOS based devices has little to do with the actual hardware - it's all about the "walled garden". While I agree that Apple innovations with these products shouldn't be ignored, the real success that Apple has seen is due to the fact that no other hardware manufacturer has been as successful at making entire product ecosystems. That's what Apple's all about these days: Don't just sell an mp3 player, but sell the player, the software for the home computer *and* the music! Oh, and make everything works together seamlessly and don't be afraid to think outside the box when it comes to providing the highest quality user interface possible. This has been so successful with the iPod/Pad/Phone, they're even doing it with Macs now. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the rumors of a gaming app store for the Apple TV turn out to be true.

The "walled garden" concept is what has led Apple to dominate in most (if not all) of the areas of consumer electronics that they've chosen to compete in. I'd guess that's also the reason that they seem to be pulling out of other, more traditional markets.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[RogerWilco]

I think the really important thing that Apple does differently, is put the user in the center.

A lot of companies either try to open up new markets for existing products, have some new cool hardware they try to sell, or mainly cater to the OEMs and large business needs.

Apple specifically seems to start with the question of what does the user want?

Sometimes this means they end up with something that is very expensive, as usually the user wants a lot.

But the key point is that they start with a desire, and then try and find the technology and software to fill that desire. And they try not to compromise along the way because something "can't be done" or is "to expensive".

And they must have some very good industrial designers and user interface experts, usually things that tech oriented companies lack.

This coupled with Steve Jobs' taste and minimalist approach is what leads to the unique Apple style of products and why the users they design for buy their products, if they can afford them.

What does amaze me, is how they are sometimes so much ahead of the competition, both in thinking and in execution. I still remember when they made the new iMac and only supported USB and everyone laughed at them for not supporting PS/2, RS232, Centronics, floppies, Zipdrives and all the other ports and peripherals that we use to have. In retrospect the message was "Steve is back, the future is simple and minimalist and user centric". Even more then ten years later their competition seems to have a hard time adapting. Over the past decade they have been such a game changer, not just the major stories like the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iPad, but also in a lot of smaller things, though the innovation in OSX, multi-touch, magnetic power cord connection, and early adoption of technologies like USB, DVI, displayport, LCDs for desktops. I'm struggling to come up with innovations from most of their competitors. What has MS done in the last 10 years? Google has done some real innovation on search, maps, google earth. TomTom, Wikipedia, Amazon, the various social media, those have been game changers. But a lot of the existing tech companies have only been regurgitating the same old stuff in slightly new looks. Anybody knows any other big innovations that have happened since the last years of the nineties?

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[buravirgil]

The WWW was created on NeXT hardware.

citation needed

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Apple/Steve Jobs/g

Steve did all of that, not Apple. He had the vision and you can see it in the stuff he was doing with NeXT prior to going back to Apple.

Hard to say what would have happened if Sun bought them. Jobs probably would not have gone back to Apple and without their manufacturing resources and trust it would have been a lot harder for him to accomplish his vision. NeXT was dead and I'm sure his resources were running short (relatively speaking).

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[petsounds]

While I agree with you that they've pushed forward several markets with genuine innovation and concern for user experience, the flip side is the abridgement of consumer rights that they've pushed forward along side these innovations. These two things aren't directly linked, as the latter is mostly due to the warped philosophy Jobs has been tainting the Apple culture with since he came back as CEO. But Jobs is moving the industry at an alarming rate towards computing devices that are completely locked down, the same way that the Playstation 3 is locked down. Jobs packages these rights violations in a package that is too tempting for the average consumer to resist. Without the innovations you spoke of, Jobs would not be able to fulfill his vision of tech products, a vision in which he truly believes that his customers are stupid and that he can make better decisions than they. He really does have the mindset of an Arab dictator.

So, with Sun in charge who knows? We wouldn't have the iDevices. Apple might or might not still be making computers. It's possible that they might have gone down a more Be kind of computing path, which wouldn't have been a bad thing. But whatever the outcome, this anti-consumer lockdown of devices probably would not be happening now unless Jobs had been able to find investors to start a purely iDevices company.

By the way, I guarantee you that in 2012 we will see a completely-redesigned Macbook Pro. It will not have a DVD drive. This will push all software sales towards the Mac App Store and its 30% revenue grab. Jobs will herald it as breaking the chains of physical media. But between the lines you will find the words, "I now own you".

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[node 3]

The WWW was created on NeXT hardware.

citation needed

Learn to google. This isn't some well-guarded secret.

keywords: tim berners-lee cern html next

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[MichaelSmith]

Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked.

I bought a second hand pen based tablet PC. It runs windows 3.1 and seems loaded with software for a telecommunications repair tech.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[pandrijeczko]

Apple are able to do what they are doing now because of three things that happened in the past:

1. Around 1983, BSD UNIX came out with the TCP/IP suite of utilities that meant it was possible to step away from propriety mainframe network protocols to open networking standards that anyone could build into their operating systems - thus was the Internet born.

2. Much as I hate to admit it, it was clever Microsoft marketing that made a "PC in every home" viable with Windows - they alone are responsible for transforming the business PC into a home multimedia, gaming & application platform. Plus Windows was open enough such that anybody who wanted to write a commercial or free application on it could do so.

3. Whilst there may never ever be a "victory" for Linux on the desktop, when Linus Torvalds released it in 1991 he showed that a single kernel combined with a suite of free software could be made to work on anything from big server platforms to small embedded devices - it was that fact alone that opened the world to the concept of small but powerful computing platforms, before that it was a world of propriety embedded operating systems that didn't work together.

At some point in the near future it may be possible to add a step 4. to the above and credit Apple with something innovative but all they've really done so far is taked ideas from all of the above and packaged it in neat little devices that a lot of people seem to like. Unfortunately, unlike the three above (TCP/IP as an suite of open network utilities, Windows on a PC as a relatively open development platform, and Linux as a very open scaleable development platform) Apple is tying in its locked-down products with its paid for or subscription services, and already the number of Android devices out there exceeds the number running IOS.

Yes, the iPad maybe the first *USABLE* tablet but its biggest downfall may well be the fact that most people don't care about what operating systems a platform runs, only what it can do for them - and the fact is that if you put a locked-down platform against an open one, then fairly rapidly the number of applications on the open one is going to exceed the number on the closed one.

The fact is that people with lots of money can go out and buy any gadget they want but most of the world is going to stick with a single PC in their home until something else comes out that can do all a PC does for a similar price as what a PC does - and even iPad users admit that an iPad is not a PC replacement.

The tablet and smartphone war is really just in its opening salvos today - Apple may have got there first but for the same reason that Windows has never been technically the best operating system, it was cheap and it did most things that most people wanted.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Dogtanian]

As strange as it might sound, Apple made NeXT's products affordable.

I doubt that they could have done NeXT-style products at anything like that price at the time that NeXT were originally making them, though. The power to price ratio was vastly higher between the late 80s and the late 90s (when OS X came out). To have made them back then, I doubt Apple could have done it much cheaper.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Jeremi]

So how do you explain the NeXT's failure to deliver a popular product?

NeXT made great products... but almost nobody was willing to pay $10,000+ for a computer, no matter how awesome it was.

Jobs knew what he wanted to sell, but (in hindsight) that product wasn't viable until the technology got cheap enough that the people who would want to use it, could afford to buy it.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Jeremi]

I agree with the first half of your post, but "before the web, the computers were not that useful to many people"? For FSM's sake...

Parent poster was correct. Before the web, computers were used mainly for business, and for games. Computers were useful for many people, but there were whole classes of people (e.g. parents, grandparents, non-geeky kids) who had little interest in using a computer, simply because the computer didn't solve any problems that they needed solved.

Compare to today, where everybody and their dog has an email address and a Facebook account, and a computer without a working Internet connection is only good for... well, only video games (even businesses now rely on the web to get things done). There are very few people left who do not find a computer useful.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[netsharc]

I agree with the first half of your post, but "before the web, the computers were not that useful to many people"? For FSM's sake...

Parent poster was correct. Before the web, computers were used mainly for business, and for games. Computers were useful for many people [...]

So you agree with me?

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[tragedy]

Yeah netsharc. Before all the cool kids started using them, computers were just your nerdy hobby. Nerd! Who cares that, technically speaking, everyone depended on computers well before the world wide web and even the Internet came along.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

That BS. Apple products are difficult as hell to you. Have you ever tried to train a typical user? I have no issues getting people up and running on GNU/Linux. Apple's products on the other hand are a night mare. It doesn't matter if we are talking the iPod or the Mac. Anybody over 25 can't figure it out. Not because they are stupid. Apple just changes things in ways that makes life harder. For instance no physical buttons. The Palm m500 was great. It has easy access PHYSICAL buttons. The iPod has unusable directional buttons and nothing else (this makes it hard to use). The iPhone has no buttons and like everything else is impossible to get working right. Same with the iPad. People are buying Apple products and then NOT using them. They are toys for anybody who does over 25 years of age. The younger generation is good at adapting to hard to use products. If it wasn't for Apple's fanboys and "marketing" abilities it wouldn't be where it is. Apple never succeeded in CompUSA and until they had chain you didn't get the fanboys who then easily convinced you to buy. Had anybody else released any of Apple's products each and every one would have failed in the market place. Just look at Apple's products when they were available through third parties (pre-2000). All failures. Before this the last Apple success was in the late 80s with the Apple 2e and Apple never succeeded in the market with the Mac until after it had acquired the Apple store.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[blarkon]

I dunno what Windows Tablet you use, but the handwriting recognition on Vista and Windows 7 is awesome. My handwriting has always been bad, but for the last 4 years I've been using it on Vista and now 7 and the number of corrections I have to make is minimal. Way more reliable than Dragon for input.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[evilviper]

NeXT, unlike Sun, actually had an exit strategy for the dot-com bust, and exercised it before the music stopped playing.

No. NeXT is unbelievably lucky that Be Inc. was asking too much for Apple to buy them. Otherwise, it would have gone quite differently.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[osu-neko]

So you agree with me?

If your point was that computers were useful to many people, then yes, but you seemed to be objecting to the person above you's point that computers were not useful to many people, which is also true. To the extent you seemed to be implying that it's false that computers were not useful to many people, you were definitely wrong, and he's not agreeing with you.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[osu-neko]

...and rereading, I just realized the source of your confusion. You were probably parsing the original statement as (using parenthesis to indicating precedence as you would in math) "computers were not (useful to many people)", which is certainly false and contradicted by the statement "computers were useful to many people". However, what was meant was almost certainly "computers were (not useful) to many people", which is certainly true and does not contradict the statement "computers were useful to many people", since many people can find computers useful and many people find computers not useful at the same time, as long as they're different people.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[osu-neko]

Who cares that, technically speaking, everyone depended on computers well before the world wide web and even the Internet came along.

This statement is, technically speaking, false.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Deadguy2322]

Go back to slurping Stallman's filthy ballsack and spare us your moronic concern-trolling, you pea-brained cousin-fucker.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[DeathElk]

Well, inadvertently admitting your own shortcomings are we? In a public forum no less. How embarrassing! Any wonder you ticked the anonymous box.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Peil]

So you admit you were wrong and he was right, but still try and make it seem the other way around?

are you my ex-wife?

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful and straight as an arrow.

No lover of Apple ever; I received for my birthday [doesn't matter WHICH birthday] a brand new iPad after asking the rhetorical question in front of my wife if the brand new Kindle [ 3G] I received for Christmas would come out with a back-lit screen soon.

This the first and only Apple product I have even owned, and while quirky and frustrating for a pc/linux/win guy, is the cat's meow.
I must confess that, say what you will about Jobs , WOZ and the Appleheads; they gave the non-tech public-at-large exact what they were wanting even if they didn't know it before hand.

  This has been, in retrospect, from their very first product to their latest.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[t2t10]

Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.

No, it wouldn't have taken much longer: everybody's developments is driven by hardware availability. Once screens, processors, and batteries become cheap and small enough, these devices happen.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[t2t10]

They're real genius was in seeing the ability's of smartphones and being able to harness the power. If anyone can remember the days before Iphone, Smartphones were available but they were as difficult to use as a linux command line.

Palms were as easy to use as iPhones. The Danger Hiptop was even easier to use than the Palm or the iPhone, cheaper, and, incidentally, the predecessor of Android. It also had an app store.

Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to cash in on other people's ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Tokerat]

Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to fix other people's broken and half-completed ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.

FTFY. Apple doesn't usually completely think of something out of the blue. However, Apple does think of all the reasons no one wants a product, why the market isn't flocking to something. They get it. Then, they create something that doesn't have any of the issues that caused the previous attempts to fail. As stated in an earlier post, the iPad: No pen, great battery, UI is appropriate and responsible. It just comes naturally to everyone, you don't have to think about using it when you're using it (for most things, anyway). Perhaps if Palm had been just a little better, if Microsoft had actually designed a proper interface for a tablet, etc. then Apple wouldn't have gained any ground in the markets they're in. Apple is great at cashing in on all the mistakes their competitors inevitably make due to incompetence, marketing/corporate trying to do the designing and/or insisting on sub-par component suppliers. Stop making mistakes and you'll stop Apple.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Tokerat]

Ironic troll is ironic.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Tokerat]

Taken from http://info.cern.ch/:

The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links. The first examples were developed on NeXT computers.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[dwightk]

Steve Jobs, and Jonny Ive, and Tim Cook, and ..., and ...

plus some luck

plus some other things.

It's not nearly as simple as just about everyone seems to present it.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[dwightk]

ha ha ha
NASA didn't innovate anything (take old episodes of Star Trek for example)

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[mattack2]

However Mac OS X is NeXTStep. The same kernel, the same way the interface is drawn (PostScript)

Wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript#Modern_Derivatives
says:

Apple's Mac OS X operating system uses a central window server (created entirely by Apple) that caches window graphics as PDF, instead of storing and executing PostScript code.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

ha ha ha NASA didn't innovate anything (take old episodes of Star Trek for example)

The 'idea' of space travel was pre-star trek and certainly pre-NASA.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[exomondo]

You might be technically correct but the Newton is more well known than that device despite being a failure in the marketplace.

It's well-known for being a monumental failure though, that's not a good thing.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol wut

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[jbolden]

Microsoft: .NET compiler with an intermediate form. For decades there had been a desire to create a "p-code" machine that could run a theoretical optimized assembly which came from higher level languages at the same speed as actual assembly on the same hardware. They built it. No one has a compiler that sophisticated.

If you mean hardware.... the invention of SSD and Intel's work on bringing down the price of multicore.

If you mean PC manufacturers.... you are right none of the rest do anything.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[dwightk]

oh yeah, I misread that the first time.

"idea of Pad computing" is an overstatement

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

"little to do with actual hardware".... Seriously? Before the iPad, who made a tablet that lasts 10 hours on a single charge?

Who makes one now? Motorola.

What took so damn long?

Let's try this again...
When it was the iPod launch... who made an mp3 player with more than a gig of space? Apple. Who else? No one.

What took so damn long?

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Here's the funny thing, after watching the guy for so long, I've noticed something interesting.
Yeah, Jobs is into the walled-garden approach right now.
But it's weird. It's NOT to own people in a Microsoft-esque way.
It's because people CAN'T SEEM TO TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN SHIT.

Fundamental reason why the App Store is locked the way it is? Because too many people try to fuck it up. Sure, it's inconvenient to not have full control of your hardware. But most people can't handle it. See Google's Market? See Google's Market's malware recalls?
Yeah, the App Store has had some malicious software too, but it's so much more limited.
My Nexus S has shit battery life because something keeps my radios running all the time. This wouldn't be a problem if Google restricted how much resources apps can take in the background.

We're talking about Steve Jobs here.
The guy who released a MP3 player with no lockdown or walled-garden and made it a success.
And when he wanted to make it easier to get music, managed to gnaw at the RIAA to finally allow removal of DRM despite the piracy boogieman.
The guy who helped create a phone which is relatively easy to maintain, relatively easy to develop on, and relatively easy to use without knowing what the word "rootkit" means.

Abridgment of consumer rights isn't the issue, it's protecting the user from themselves.
If you're smart enough to not need the digital handholding, you can buy something else. But for my parents, it's iPad all the way.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[kwolf22]

Yes, seriously. Little to do with hardware... Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that Apple's hasn't led the industry with innovative hardware (they always have and continue to), but where did all the cool hardware get them before the iPod? At best, only some marginal share of the consumer PC market.

There've been plenty of cool devices that have come & gone over the years (some were even Apple products). So, it's certainly not the hardware alone that makes great product, or makes a product great.

No, the success of the iPod & later iOS devices wasn't the hardware (not that having great hardware didn't help). It was Apple's ability to control the whole ecosystem: hardware, software *and services*. Love it or hate it, it's the success of the "walled garden" approach that's given these products such a lead on the competitors. Moreover, this strategy has been able to either create the entire market for these products, or at least redefine it to the point where everyone else is forced to play catch up.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[t2t10]

Apple's real genius was, as usual, to figure out how to fix other people's broken and half-completed ideas, put it into a pretty box, and market it up the wazoo.

Stop misquoting people; it's dishonest.

And, no, Apple usually doesn't "fix" other people's ideas, they usually just package and market them better (and then try to take credit for them). Often, they just do a death-march and beat other people to market with some new product category by a few months. Or they cut corners on the software and hardware until they undercut other people's prices (that hasn't happened recently, but it was true on the original Mac, for example). Apple has great execution, they just lack innovation and honesty.

It just comes naturally to everyone, you don't have to think about using it when you're using it (for most things, anyway).

And in what way is the Apple UI more intuitive than the Palm or Hiptop UI was?

Apple is great at cashing in on all the mistakes their competitors inevitably make due to incompetence, marketing/corporate trying to do the designing and/or insisting on sub-par component suppliers. Stop making mistakes and you'll stop Apple.

Yes, that we can agree on; note how "better technology" and "innovation" are not on your list.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Failure in the PC marketspace doesn't mean that having great hardware gets you nowhere. It simply means that the Mac wasn't better than a Wintel PC by a large enough margin for people to consider switching.

The way you say that it has little to do with hardware implies that you think that if their hardware sucked more, they'd still be successful. This is absolutely not true. You're right in that what makes them successful is the ecosystem. But from their ecosystem, it is the end to end integration on the focus of the user experience that makes them successful, not from the consumer lockdown.

Why do I say that?

Because when the iPod came out of nowhere and took over the market, there were three parts: The Mac (desktop), iTunes (the app), and the iPod (device).
There was no walled-garden. There was no lockdown. There was no iTunes Music Store. There was no DRM.
There was only the bare necessities: A host with music, a program to arrange/sync your music, a device that plays your music on the go.
In fact, it was so tuned to working with Macs that it only had Firewire, and no USB (because USB would have been an awful sync experience with 5GB at 1.5MB/sec).

What did it compete against? The Rio and the Creative Nomad.
The Rio was over parallel port and limited to around 32MB. The Nomad devices were mostly USB1 and limited to around 256MB.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[Megane]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Technical_foundations

PDF is based on a subset of Postscript, missing the control flow constructs that make Postscript into a full programming language, and making it better suited for displays.

PDF also has a royalty-free specification, allowing Apple to make its own DPS clone using a PDF model (Quartz), and DPS was apparently not cheap to license.

So guruevi was both wrong and right.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[kwolf22]

Failure in the PC marketspace doesn't mean that having great hardware gets you nowhere. It simply means that the Mac wasn't better than a Wintel PC by a large enough margin for people to consider switching.

Exactly! And the same was true of the iPod in the beginning... There just wasn't enough of a compelling reason to really separate it from the pack; at least until the iTunes Music Store - this was the true innovation of the iPod something that nobody else had been able to pull of (legally)

You're right in that what makes them successful is the ecosystem. But from their ecosystem, it is the end to end integration on the focus of the user experience that makes them successful, not from the consumer lockdown.

The way I see it, the "consumer lockdown" is responsible for the successful user experience. This is nothing new for Apple, of course. The've been doing business this way for a long time, providing locked down hardware that has really tightly integrated software - and in my opinion, a whole lot less bloatware.

Why do I say that?

Because when the iPod came out of nowhere and took over the market, there were three parts: The Mac (desktop), iTunes (the app), and the iPod (device).

Not exactly the way I remember it... iTunes was introduced for Mac OS 9, then The iPod came out later that year. Originally, the iPod only worked on Macs, it wasn't until the second generation iPod that Windows support was added (through third party software). Even then, the iPod was far from taking over the market. This didn't happen until iTunes 4 (with the iTunes Music Store) was released for Windows. This was when the rules of the game changed, and the iPod + iTunes Music Store created an entirely new market - an all-in-one ecosystem where for the first time buying, building and playing back your music library became a seamless experience.

What did it compete against? The Rio and the Creative Nomad. The Rio was over parallel port and limited to around 32MB. The Nomad devices were mostly USB1 and limited to around 256MB.

When I first tried iTunes, I used it on OS 9 with a portable CD player that could play MP3s - a great little gadget that allowed me to hold hundreds of songs on one CD. I later bought a Rio that did integrate nicely with iTunes on OS 9 (even had a custom icon in iTunes when you plugged it in). My Rio used USB 1 to connect. The slow transfer rate wasn't very noticeable because the Rio's memory modules were so small. I basically used it like a cassette player; keeping different songs on different memory modules. Still, the Rio memory was expensive and I eventually got rid of it in favor of some off-brand mp3 player that used standard flash memory and connected with USB 1.1. Although iTunes didn't recognize it, it wasn't to hard to drag & drop mp3s into it. This was the last stand alone mp3 player that I bought. To tell the truth, out of all of them, I liked the CD player the best - sure it was a little bit more bulky, but I could use those CD in just about any CD player or computer - even in my car.

The Rio had a great user interface and it was integrated with iTunes. Although the iPod promised "1000 songs in your pocked", I didn't like the fact that you couldn't upgrade the memory or change out the battery. I also avoided the Firewire interface - which was pretty much exclusive to Macs at that time

Thanks for the fun chat. I've enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

My recollection of the "rise of iPod" is a bit different.

Yes, the actual release events are as you said. The significant rise in sales did happen in 2004. But I don't see it being because of the iTunes Music Store. All the signs pointing to success came much earlier.

But by the 2nd Gen release in 2002, it was already beating out most other MP3 players in popularity. Not in sales, but popularity. People talked about it much as people talked about the iPhone being locked to AT&T, when no SDK was available.

In fact, as an early firewire advocate, I was already amazed at the effect the firewire-only iPods had on the market.
I started seeing Dell, Gateway, HP, and Toshiba laptops with firewire in 2002, which is completely unexpected in the PC market because of the costs associated with adding the chipsets and in buying the products that use it. Most people who wanted firewire weren't using it for hard drives, but video editing. And many of those back then would use cardbus cards. It was rare, unless you had a Sony, to see an integrated Firewire port on a PC.

You'd see in the comments in the Apple Store that some people even went out of the way to buy a cheap iMac/eMac in order to run iTunes for their iPod. It was bizarre. MusicMatch and various open source clients for Linux and Windows were out.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2002123002126PSHLSW

Napster had risen as the king and fallen as it got hit by legality issues; people had relatively massive repositories of music. Gnutella/Limewire was the next place. Direct Connect networks were popular in colleges.

Stories of people getting mugged for white earphones already hit the news.

All of this was well before the iTunes Music Store. All of this was well before the iPod had USB2.0 as an option.

You're right that sales didn't really take off until the release of the music store. But I'm inclined to believe that it wasn't the music store that was compelling. It was that the iPod got USB2.0 and that Windows got iTunes. To me, it was more likely that the Music Store was helped by the iPod than the iPod helped by the Music Store.

(In 2001-2003, I was enrolled in a university, working part time for the university to help people fix their computers and obtain an internet connection. In appointments in August 2002, I'd see ~80 computers per day for the first 2 weeks of school (weekend overtime pay was awesome), many of them laptops. There exists a picture from that week where you'd see my coworkers and I running antivirus scans or windows installers on about 18 laptops in one room. So my sample size is small on the grand scheme of things, but unusually large for a single person's experience. I purchased my 1st iPod, a 2nd Gen 10GB, exactly 2 weeks after launch, on the last day of my internship at Apple, and the first day it was available for employee discount. It replaced my MiniDisc player.)

Re:He'd have screwed it up.

[badkarmadayaccount]

PDF includes a non-Turing complete PS implementation.

On the other hand ...

[damn_registrars]

It could have resulted in Apple retaining unique hardware, rather than moving to Intel CPUs. Of course, whether that would be for the better or the worse is an open question.

Re:On the other hand ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple Sparc's? Solaris on ppc? OS/Xaris? Yes, whether better or worse remains very hard to say ;)

Re:On the other hand ...

[betterunixthanunix]

Or Macs would have used Sparc CPUs, and run a preemptive multitasking OS years earlier.

Re:On the other hand ...

[Anonymous Coward]

McNealy also conceded that one of his biggest mistakes was that Sun waited too long to move to the Intel processor architecture for its servers.

Somehow I think that Apple hardware via Sun would have moved to x86 sooner.

the 'i' does not matter

[halfey]

we'd have Javapods & Javapads instead

Re:the 'i' does not matter

[Megane]

...and they would have been slow as molasses and died faster than the Zune.

Re:the 'i' does not matter

[tomhudson]

we'd have Javapods & Javapads instead

...and they would have been slow as molasses and died faster than the Zune.

Being Java, I would expect even dying to take longer ... seriously, Java in the browser in the mid '90s was painful. Even today, you don't see it much.

Re:the 'i' does not matter

[Dogtanian]

seriously, Java in the browser in the mid '90s was painful. Even today, you don't see it much

That's because Applets (ironically the early Java's most-hyped aspect) flopped, probably for the reason you gave. While it might be more workable today, if you think about it, the niche doesn't exist any more- Flash now does pretty much what Java Applets were originally going to do.

Though it wouldn't really be accurate to say that Flash beat Applets- IIRC by the time Flash had evolved beyond its animation origins enough to seriously compete with Applets on functionality, Applets had already flopped on their own (lack of) merit.

In other news...

[CriminalNerd]

In other news, a few years ago, Microsoft was poised to buy Yahoo!'s search engine but didn't. Would there be Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Bing, and Yahoo! Mail if Microsoft had been able to close a deal to buy out Yahoo! in the mid-2000s? No, says Balmer. "If we had bought Yahoo!, there wouldn't have been Yahoo! Search or Yahoo! Bing ... I'd have screwed that up."

We'll have more on that story and other past attempted company takeover news at '11.

Re:In other news...

[Opportunist]

I call this a hoax. Ballmer would never admit he's a screwup. He'd rather throw a chair at you.

THAT FUCKING INVESTMENT BANKER

[Anonymous Coward]

DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT

Re:THAT FUCKING INVESTMENT BANKER

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I know how Stauffenberg must have felt.

"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[John Hasler]

Because of course without Jobs and Apple the world would be utterly bereft of "innovation".

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

iNnovation

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Penguinisto]

It would have been there, but it would have been a whole lot slower. Way slower, IMHO.

Imagine something like the iPod coming out just this year, instead of 10 years ago. Imagine the RIAA going even more apeshit (yeah, I know) and keeping the music biz locked down to where digital music was either illegal, or locked down under so much DRM that it would have been nearly impossible to use. Imagine smartphones still being over-priced and slow piles of crap, with the useful models being hella expensive, and apps being distributed (if at all) under carrier lockdown. Imagine still having to use tablets with a stylus, crap specs, crappier battery life, and all of them still running Windows.

I know full well that others would have filled the void, certainly. Problem is, they would have been very slow about it, and innovation would come in fits and starts, with Microsoft running the show (that, or doing its best to ruin the show if it couldn't get a piece of the action - see also netbooks when those all first came out running Linux - notice how all the sudden Microsoft got all wonky with the licensing all the sudden, sometimes threatening vendors outright?).

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[betterunixthanunix]

Imagine portable digital music players coming out this year? As opposed to when the first MP3 player came out?

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=4667088

Or maybe you meant something more like this:

http://www.techpin.com/the-first-mp3-player/

Oh yeah, we really needed Apple to get portable music.

Let's get real here. Apple's strength is not in creating new technologies, but in making new technologies look pretty and in marketing those technologies. If Apple had not stepped in with the iPod, we would probably have seen a market with a lot of competing companies, making uglier products.

Innovation is a continuous process, with or without Apple. Where is Apple's research division? How does it compare with universities, or MSR, or IBM research? I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[iluvcapra]

Imagine portable digital music players coming out this year?

He didn't say "portable music player," he said "the iPod." iPods are, granted, a kind of portable music player, but they are also different from all other portable music players in that it's an actual mass consumer product instead of some hobbyist thing. Without iPod's we'd still have portable music players, but they'd all play ATRACS off of Memory Sticks...

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[betterunixthanunix]

There were mass market portable music players before the iPod. Apple did not invent that idea, and it predates the first MP3 players.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's get real: There were mp3 players before the iPod, and they didn't stay market leaders after the iPod because they weren't nearly as good. Your choices were either get something too bulky to fit in your pocket or with so little storage (memory stick-based) as to be useless to most consumers. The makers were simply either blind to the needs of the consumers or too technically inept to be able to pull off those two key features. Not to mention that at the time, the GUIs for the players themselves were awkward and managing songs on them were usually only considered easy if you loved handling directories (i.e., you're a command line-using nerd.)

The iPod was the first iPod player capable of wide appeal because it was the first to actually fit what the market wanted. People want mp3 players to be easy to use, portable, and able to hold several albums, and no other manufacturer bothered to do that. As the previous example of tablets points out, it's not that there wouldn't have been mp3 players out there, they just wouldn't have caught on as quickly -- and probably not as widely -- because no one else was meeting a sweet spot for consumers. If you can look at the iPod's original success, the iPhone's influence on mobile phone design (both cosmetic and OS), and the iPad's success and simply dismiss all of it as marketing, the only one around here being blinded by marketing is you by your internal campaign of Apple-bashing. You also really need to open your eyes and realize that usability is not a thing to be looked at with derision.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[sydneyfong]

I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).

Just like how Chess AI is relevant to consumers now.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[narratorDan]

I don't think the argument about who invented the portable(personal) digital media player is relevant to the question of why Apple (who was several years late) dominates the market. The next tech company that correctly answers that question will dominate the rest of the market and challenge Apple.

In an analogy: Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did he invent assembly line production, and his first product was limited in capability and appearance but the price was such that almost anyone could buy it.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[painandgreed]

... in making new technologies look pretty...

If by "look pretty" you mean "functionally usable", then yes. Before iTunes would take multiple apps to rip, organize, and play your mp3s. Even then you'd still probably be moving them all about manually file by file. Before the iPhone, phones could view webpages and probably better in bullet points, but were practically useless. You could get more information out of 5 minutes on the iPhone's safari and an hour on most phone browsers. Even what you probably mean in the physical appearance of the products, that's called industrial design. It's what makes things like the Mac Book Pro lighter, smaller, and more efficient than other laptops with similar bullet point specs. It's because too many people seem to think that good design is just making things pretty and use the term marketing as a synonym of advertising is why Apple is that the top and the rest are just copying.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

This term, "mass market". I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is Apple's research division?

They used to have a large one, but cut it when they were struggling in the mid 90s. It pains me to say it, but they did the right thing. In the early nineties Apple was coming out with a research-inspired technology every few months: OpenDoc, PowerTalk, Speech input, Quicktime VR, Quickdraw GX, Dylan, and so on. Most of them never went anywhere. "Cool" research is easy compared to making products that solve real problems at a sane cost.

How does it compare with universities, or MSR, or IBM research?

Having worked in IBM research, I would say the difference between it and Apple is that Apple works on innovation for which there is a market. Of the dozen projects I knew about at IBM's Yorktown lab (directly or by eating lunch with those working on them), all but one were canceled because it became clear that there was no market.

The one that survived is EinStat, the statistical timing engine for their microprocessor and ASIC design flow. Very cool stuff, but it is far too technical even for slashdot.

The project they should have commercialized was basically an ipod, two years before Apple coined the term. Being a research project, they loaded it up with so many features that it could not be produced at a cost any sane person would pay, or used by a normal human. There was no plan to build an iTunes equivalent, so a normal person would have no way to get music on it. As is common with research projects, there was no product plan, and it was axed.

I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).

In an industry where no product being sold today was introduced more then nine months ago, doing AI research with no clear product plan is not smart. Back when Apple had a research lab in Cambridge MA, NLP was a major focus area. The argument you make applied then too. Google for "time value of money" to learn why spending research dollars today for a technology that might come in handy in 20 years is probably a bad investment for a company.

A former coworker of mine moved to the technical sales side of IBM. In 1999, she told me about a customer at a bank who was very proud that his database now ran on RS/6000 machines, the same kinds of computers that just beat Garry Kasparov in chess. This is why IBM pays for research into Watson, and why they moved from x86 servers to POWER7 machines before going on Jeopardy. Glad to hear that they are still doing pie-in-the-sky research, but putting Watson on TV was a marketing stunt. And you fell for it :)

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Weedhopper]

iluvcapra isn't the one who's being dense here. Everyone gets that MP3 players were out before the iPod. No shit. No one's arguing that.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Remember that?

Like Apple or not, like Apple's walled garden approach or not, for the past ten years, when Apple enters a market, they radically change the game. There's no shame in admitting that, even if you hate Apple. Stephen Elop can admit it.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[RogerWilco]

Apple doesn't invent, it innovates. It takes existing technologies and uses them in an innovative way.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Smauler]

In an analogy: Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did he invent assembly line production, and his first product was limited in capability and appearance but the price was such that almost anyone could buy it.

Massive analogy fail. Apple's products have consistently been more expensive than similarly specified competitors. The attraction of Apple's products is _not_ the low price.

Anyone who can buy an iPad, iPod, or iPhone can buy similar products cheaper elsewhere. I'm not denigrating Apple's marketing and/or software here, I'm just pointing out that their products are entirely dependent upon marketing/software (though some could argue aesthetics play a part, I'd throw that under marketing).

The Ford Model T, which I assume you were referring to, succeeded because it was cheap. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't fashionable, it was about the worst car anyone could have. But it worked, and it was the only car many people could have. It filled an entirely different market sector.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Smauler]

Before iTunes would take multiple apps to rip, organize, and play your mp3s. Even then you'd still probably be moving them all about manually file by file.

iTunes is crap for ripping, organising and playing mp3's. Especially if you (god forbid) want to transfer your purchased music about to other devices. There are big players in the market now selling unencumbered mp3's (amazon, for one), which you can do with as you will. I'm happy having a seperate ripper and seperate player - having all the functionality tied badly to one DRM riddled program strikes me as idiotic.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

There were mass market portable music players before the iPod. Apple did not invent that idea, and it predates the first MP3 players.

Yes, there were mass market cassette players and even portable CD-Players. So without Apple we'd all be using Mini-Disk players, is that your point?

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Uberbah]

Why don't you whine about the one button mouse and lack of multitasking while you're at it? Purchased iTunes music is unencumbered aac files, and has been for years.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Uberbah]

Marketing canard fail. If it all boiled down to advertising, why didn't Sony (a FAR larger company at the time) higher the same ad companies making slick ads for the Playstation make some slick ads for their portable music players, and drive Apple out of the market?

Just because Apple had some good marketing doesn't mean that they didn't have a superior product. Between using a microdrive (instead of a laptop or desktop drive), 400 Mbps Firewire (when everything else was using 11 Mpbs USB 1.0 or even parallel) and a unified interface that didn't suck, they were able to take over the market with a superior product.

Superior. Product. Not just "marketing".

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the iPod, which was limited in capability and priced above the existing market, but won through marketing and appearance. So not really such a good analogy.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Anonymous Coward]

1. No

2. Many single solution apps existed before I itunes to rip/tag/organize/play

3. I'm sorry you used the wrong mobile touchscreen device before iphone. ebook reading/web browsing on palms was (and still is) fine long before iphone

4. Industrial design. LOL. OK I'll cede you this point

5. In terms of 'copying' iProducts. That's a very funny and clouded attribution. This is simply false. The shear number of competitors makes your statement absurd (unless, like i suspect, your fanboyism assumes that i* product is "new" and all products there after are derivatives). Between each i* product revision, 50-100 competing devices are coming out with new technology, components, software, gui, etc... All contribute to the advancement of consumer technologies. Get real. Apple popularizes products and technologies through marketing and design. GET OVER IT.
 

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[paimin]

You drag the songs out of iTunes and into the software that interfaces with the other device. Yeah, that's rocket science alright.

Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads"

[Pieroxy]

So to you the iPhone was just marketing and design? You should have tried one before everyone else copied it. It was leaps ahead of anything else, and the rest could barely be called "competition" since their product were so far behind. Sure, they've caught up, but please point me to a product that would offer comparable experience in june 2007.

And by "experience", I mean: browsing capabilities, voicemail handling, SMS handling, email handling, maps, upgrade procedure, firmware upgrade support (3 years on iPhones), music+video capabilities, lack of carrier crap drowning the phone, etc. Please include everything in your comparison.

grr

[FuckingNickName]

Sun was what was right about the '90s. They produced top-end stuff for producers. But at least that created an environment for...

Apple is what was wrong about the last decade. They produced mass-marketed shiny for consumers. And that's creating an environment for...

The next decade of unemployment and engineered debt recovery.

Re:grr

[flaming error]

I'm not sure I follow your logic, but

ooh look, something shiny

Re:grr

[Anonymous Coward]

It was in the 90's that Sun lost all it's intellectual capital and replaced it with marketing fucks, who cheapened the hardware and sent the company to it's doom, flatlining it's stock prices. It was in the last 10 years that Apple's stock went from around $7 to around $350. I think you are not exactly seeing clearly. If you are annoyed, that is your emotion, and you are responsible for it.

Re:grr

[Opportunist]

Apple stuff isn't just "shiny". Apple wins customers by "shiny", but retains them by "just works". And, bluntly, as much as I hate it as much as the next geek, that's what the consumers want: Just working stuff.

Say what you want about Apple, but one thing they managed to do: Make stuff work. They streamlined everything, tucked everything remotely 'technical' away from the user, gives him only what he 'needs' and most people don't bother to ask for more.

I wouldn't want one, since I want to own my hardware and use it as I deem fit, not its maker. But apparently what the majority of users want is what Apple produces. Sad, but true.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

True re Sun by the late '90s - concision led to imprecision, sorry.

As to Apple's stock price, I couldn't give two hoots. That's determined by the demand of shares on the secondary market, in turn determined by nothing much since they don't pay dividends. In particular, it's not determined by whether they're producing high quality products to help people produce. They are not.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

It just works at being shiny, i.e. at providing minimal features for a lazy consumer to entertain himself with. Neither the iPhone nor the iPad provide anything new which makes them realistic tools for productive work. Put another way, I've not found any work application where the iPhone or iPad is in some way the best choice.

Re:grr

[abigor]

Actually, geeks with actual jobs as engineers and programmers love OS X. But carry on.

Re:grr

[Anubis350]

Agreed. I always wonder about comments to the opposite effect on /.

A good example is the Supercomputing conference. I go every year, and while obviously the clusters on the floor have 0 Apple representation there are tons of Mac Pros and Minis driving visualization displays (or even iMacs acting as vis boxes) and, most importantly, the laptops people are using are roughly 30% Thinkpads, 30% Dell, 35% Apple, and 5% everything else (and I'm probably overstating Dell at the cost of Thinkpads and Apple machines).

Re:grr

[Anubis350]

Oh, and the number of iPhones is staggering

Re:grr

[Kenshin]

Apple is what was wrong about the last decade. They produced mass-marketed shiny for consumers.

Putting aside the decades-old "Apple makes products for morons" talking point, god forbid a company produce something consumers want.

Your type would probably be happy living on an isolated planet where everything is Linux-based and only runs on a command line, every function requires ten steps to perform, and all your MP3 players have tiny one-line LCDs and songs are navigated by repeatedly clicking on a d-pad.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

Nope. Microsoft provides a reasonable balance for the average user. A good 90% of the computing world agree.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

So what's you're saying is that a Mac makes a shiny Unix terminal, being a commoditised NeXT box. And that you're likely to find them on the laps of attendees at wankfests, but not doing the interesting work.

I agree.

You could credit NeXT for building a userfriendly Unix desktop with a poor man's Smalltalk, and say that this makes for a reasonable workstation.

But Apple isn't producing anything new and interesting for producers, is it? Really, I've tried to take an interest in Grand Central, in OpenCL, but it's just... nothing which hasn't been done better elsewhere. Apple just don't do research and they don't implement for researchers or other producers. Hell, it's a common complaint. When you contrast with MS or IBM's research output, it's fairly easy to see the difference in culture. Apple's had this perpetual thing of wanting to be cool, but it's never matured to saying, "I want to create something substantially new."

Have you ever used Microsoft Bob? The experience just reminds me of an Apple iDevice.

Re:grr

[aristotle-dude]

True re Sun by the late '90s - concision led to imprecision, sorry.

As to Apple's stock price, I couldn't give two hoots. That's determined by the demand of shares on the secondary market, in turn determined by nothing much since they don't pay dividends. In particular, it's not determined by whether they're producing high quality products to help people produce. They are not.

Dividends are paid out to keep a stock from tanking. If you think MSFT is a good investment because it pays dividends then I have a bridge to sell you. Dividends cannot makeup for a stock like MSFT which has been either flat or in decline.

If you bought AAPL stock a year ago and sold it right now, you would earn $143.54 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with a $2.12 per share loss (before trading fees) for MSFT stock purchased a year ago and sold today. Offsetting that loss, you would have earned a measly 58 cents per share in dividends.

For a five year investment in AAPl, you would earn 276.70 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with an 8 cent loss per share of MSFT (before trading fees). Offsetting that loss, you would have earned $2.38 per share in dividend. That does not even keep up with inflation.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

That's all very interesting, and I'm glad that you take 2 years of steep AAPL increase as indicative of the last 30 years, but it's not addressing my point: I stated that Apple produces consumer shiny, and does not innovate useful tools for producers. The counterargument was "Apple's share price has gone up". So what?

For a company which doesn't pay dividends, "share price has gone up" is not necessarily related to Apple's performance. And even if it were, it wouldn't necessarily be related to its ability to innovate useful tools for producers.

Re:grr

[Anubis350]

So what's you're saying is that a Mac makes a shiny Unix terminal, being a commoditised NeXT box.

A shiny unix terminal on top of a nicer mobile OS than windows or linux often are, certainly easier to take it out of the box and get straight to getting work done. A shiny unix terminal on a nice laptop that lasts longer than any in its weight class on battery. A shiny unix terminal that gives people both unix underpinnings and better commercial support for day-to-day applications.

And that you're likely to find them on the laps of attendees at wankfests, but not doing the interesting work.

Supercomputing is an industry trade conference, not merely an expo. It's not much of a wankfest. We're not talking about CES here, a very large percentage of the people there are attending the technical program, not just window shopping on the floor (and even if you were just shopping, you're shopping for clusters, storage, and visualization equipment - not a show for the general public). There is a *very* high number of scientists and engineers present, and their laptops have a distinct bias towards Apple. The usage of Apple laptops is actually higher at booths than it is among attendees as well, I've found. For that matter apparently you also missed my comment about vis boxes.

I agree.

You could credit NeXT for building a userfriendly Unix desktop with a poor man's Smalltalk, and say that this makes for a reasonable workstation.

But Apple isn't producing anything new and interesting for producers, is it? Really, I've tried to take an interest in Grand Central, in OpenCL, but it's just... nothing which hasn't been done better elsewhere.

In scientific computing, which os what I was referencing above, these days chances are you're not using your local system for much of that anyway, it's why we have clusters. A reasonable workstation is what scientists and engineers need: for local testing though the machines are plenty powerful, and on Apple hardware with nvidia cards you have CUDA support. OpenCL will surpass CUDA I expect at some point though, since it's similar calls and more cross-platform.

Apple just don't do research and they don't implement for researchers or other producers. Hell, it's a common complaint. When you contrast with MS or IBM's research output, it's fairly easy to see the difference in culture. Apple's had this perpetual thing of wanting to be cool, but it's never matured to saying, "I want to create something substantially new."

Have you ever used Microsoft Bob? The experience just reminds me of an Apple iDevice.

That doesn't make their hardware and software crap, it means they're a consumer focused company. I wish they did more basic research because I wish I wish every company did, but they don't *have* to. They do contribute a great deal to open source, FWIW.

Re:grr

[RogerWilco]

All the managers here I work are no longer carrying around their laptops and power chords. They have ipads now.

But in general Apple doesn't make devices for work applications. Just look at it's business support options and how limited they are.
Unlike MicroSoft, Dell, HP, etc. it makes what consumers want, not what OEM and large business want.

And it's very good at figuring out what users want and then finding the technology to make it happen. It doesn't invent the technology, but it puts it to very innovative use.

And most people are indeed lazy, in the sense that they want to get things done and not worry about first having to read a manual. It's why RTFM is such a bad answer.

Re:grr

[RogerWilco]

I'm not sure what you mean by producers? programmers will just use existing tools from unix/linux for the most part.

What makes Apple nice is that it gives you most of the advantages of Linux, but a nicer GUI, very good hardware, and MS Office and some other stuff that doesn't exist on the free OS'ses.

Nowadays a lot of development needs to be mobile. Either conferences, having to go to customers, working while commuting, working from home, presentations at meetings, flexible workspaces, etc. Apple happens to make some of the nicest laptops in the world, and has a Unix OS, so you don't have to pay the MS tax, remove Windows and then hope you can get Linux working.

Where I work used to be largely a unix and linux shop, now it's all Apple, with Linux on the servers/clusters/supercomputers/embedded hardware. Except for accounting, HR and such, they use Windows. But with MS Office for Mac we can read their stuff and communicate.

But the R&D and operations departments are almost entirely Apple, with a few Dells and Lenovo's running Linux.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

All the managers here I work are no longer carrying around their laptops and power chords. They have ipads now.

Can I ask what work managers do on their iPads? I have had periods of wandering around with a tablet, but that had a stylus and a detachable lightweight keyboard - even my 2003 Compaq TC1000 felt more usable than fat-fingering a tiny iPad.

And it's very good at figuring out what users want and then finding the technology to make it happen. It doesn't invent the technology, but it puts it to very innovative use.

Well, Apple's a fantastic integrator. No question there.

And, yes, most people are lazy. But most people learnt to read. If they can learn to read when they're young, they can learn to use a computer when they're young. People have been brought up on the Windows-style interface (the Mac-style interface not being that dissimilar), so they think it's natural - but it really isn't, and we've been through two decades of training up older people. Any worthwhile tool involves a small amount of learning. The solution is not to dumb things down so saving 5 minutes today means a lifetime of inefficiency, any more than the solution to the difficulty of learning to read and write is to pass information down by word of mouth.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

If I want the best of a regular GUI with lots of commercial software and the flexibility and developer-friendliness of Unix - and I have for a good 12 years - I'll choose Windows and Linux with one in a VM. In the NT4 and brief W2K days, Linux was the more stable host. Since XP, XP has been the host - Windows takes good advantage of the hardware and I want the better graphical client experience.

I tried OS X for a couple years but it's just compromise after compromise: Mac Office doesn't quite render everything correctly and any neat Windows tool is likely to either not exist or have only a half-hearted Mac version; OS X isn't nearly as well supported for development as, say, Debian. And if I'm deploying to Linux I might as well develop on Linux.

Re:grr

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Have you ever used Microsoft Bob? The experience just reminds me of an Apple iDevice.

Figures that you have used the former but probably not the latter.

Re:grr

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way, keep those blinkers on nice and tight. Does the word "delusional" mean anything to you?

Re:grr

[DeathElk]

Mate, get over the hate. Seriously, you're so blinded by your hate of Apple that you've closed your mind to what potentially millions of power users in need of a reliable, flexible Unix desktop operating system need. And it's making you look like a narrow minded idiot.

Re:grr

[DeathElk]

90% and rapidly declining.

Re:grr

[Rakarra]

That's all very interesting, and I'm glad that you take 2 years of steep AAPL increase as indicative of the last 30 years, but it's not addressing my point: I stated that Apple produces consumer shiny, and does not innovate useful tools for producers.

The problem is you're not really defining what "producer" means. What is your definition? The literal definition could mean movie producer, in which case Apple's done pretty well for them.

Re:grr

[Rakarra]

And, yes, most people are lazy. But most people learnt to read.

If you could not learn to read until you were were 30 or 40, I wonder what the literacy rate of the over-30 or over-40 crowd would be. My guess is not very high. Kids learn to read when they're developmentally suited for it.

Re:grr

[FuckingNickName]

A producer is someone who produces useful output. Contrast someone jacking about in a gaggle of hipsters or a seat-warming middle manager.

Movie producers are probably the only group of producers who have a serious reason for considering Apple, because Apple bought just-as-good-as-Avid(-well-almost) Final Cut. Oh, and bought and extinguished Skake, so it ended up having to play catch-up with itself on Motion. Embrace, extend, indeed.

Re:grr

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Nope. Microsoft provides a reasonable balance for the average user. A good 90% of the computing world agree.

So you're of the type that would be happy living on an isolated planet where everything is DOS-based and only runs on a crippled command line, every function requires fifteen steps to perform, and all your WMA players have tiny one-line LCDs and songs are navigated by repeatedly clicking on a d-pad.

Re:grr

[jbolden]

but it really isn't, and we've been through two decades of training up older people.

No we haven't. There is very little training and very little focus on training. You see training at the low end, cashiers and hair dressers get training, but very little extensive training in offices.

Re:grr

[jbolden]

Nowhere near 90% agree. Even the Microsoft commercials basically conceded that many of their users would take an Apple over their system if they weren't so price sensitive.

And the computing world is not just desktop / laptop systems it includes: servers, embedded, supercomputing, mainframes... where Windows is less of a player. And even on desktop its below 90% now.

Apples need Sun to grow

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples do need Sun to grow.

I think Apple needed Sun in order to properly grow as a company.

and nothing of value...

[Mr. Slippery]

No, says McNealy. 'If we had bought Apple, there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads ... I'd have screwed that up.'"

And nothing of value would have been lost. Perhaps, even, actual useful computing devices would have been developed, instead of shiny geegaws. Perhaps the Apple of Woz would have won out over the Apple of Jobs.

Re:and nothing of value...

[MysteriousPreacher]

Hankering for the days when computers came in kit form and a portable music player mean using granddad's wheelchair to ferry around the phonograph? Yup, that's certainly a demographic upon which one could build a business.

Re:and nothing of value...

[nOw2]

Yeah, and everyone should build their own computer before being qualified to use one. If you can't solder capacitors, you're not going on WoW!

Re:and nothing of value...

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

I'll choose you amongst the hordes to respond to. Feel flattered ;) iPads are finding huge traction amongst medical and flight and construction and education and science visualization and you name it, all because there is FINALLY a low cost, Stable, robust, and well implemented platform for data interchange in the field as a comoditized thick-or-thin client. Are you telling me palm or windows phone 7 was what you saw driving the future of these industries and programmer growth because companies were invest in a platform that might actually mature? Sometimes I swear, android was only meant to give out of work java programmers something to do ;) How's windows doing with that low power thing? How's sony doing with releasing, improving, and using free OSS software? Yeah, right.

Re:and nothing of value...

[betterunixthanunix]

How about the days when people did not have to worry about breaking the law just to the software they wanted to run on the computers they legally purchased?

Re:and nothing of value...

[betterunixthanunix]

How is Apple doing with respecting the intelligence level and freedoms of their customers? Oh, right, Steve Jobs does not care about those things, and his vision of computing is that users should be clueless about everything works (unless they do have a clue; then they should pay him so they can write software).

/flame

Re:and nothing of value...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel, and don't be afraid of getting all emo on us.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Opportunist]

Don't bash Steve for something Bill started. The "clueless, tech-illiterate" user is a result of Windows more than any Apple product. The only difference is that Windows taught people that they can be illiterates and still use a tool, while Apple finally actually delivered to that promise. What Apple did was simply to go all the way and not only give people an easy approach to whatever they want to do but also disable them from fucking things up.

This is mainly the reason why I have not and will not ever own an Apple product (for very, very lenient definitions of "own", if you catch my drift), but this is what the people were promised by Windows and what they now expect from their gadgets: Stuff that just works and can be used without even reading the manual, let alone learn anything about it. That's what is wanted by the consuming masses and this is what Apple delivers.

I'd rather blame the idiots who refuse to know what they're using than a company delivering them gadgets that allow them to actually remain ignorant and illiterate.

Re:and nothing of value...

[XxtraLarGe]

How about the days when people did not have to worry about breaking the law just to the software they wanted to run on the computers they legally purchased?

I think you a word.

Re:and nothing of value...

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

Did you enjoy your 500 page manual with your nipple when you were 0? Some people have better things to do, snd your condescension about being tech illiterate is great.... So don't drive over a bridge until you're an engineer, huh?

Re:and nothing of value...

[betterunixthanunix]

I seem to remember the "computer as an appliance" concept being something Steve Jobs wanted to push all the way back in the 1980s. What do you think "computer as an appliance" means, if not "computer for hopelessly clueless users who should remain clueless?"

Re:and nothing of value...

[MysteriousPreacher]

Are you writing from the future? If so, in what year did this become the norm for computers? Are Twinkies still available, or did the health mafia finally outlaw them?

Re:and nothing of value...

[iluvcapra]

How is Apple doing with respecting the intelligence level and freedoms of their customers?

Apple does a lot better respecting the intelligence and freedoms of their customers than the average Apple-trolling slashdotter.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Draek]

Isn't it wonderful? that we, in today's age, have people actually proud of their own ignorance. Simply magnificent.

But I guess you're one of those that views driver's licenses as an useless invasion of privacy because if I paid for it I'm obviously able to use it, right?

Re:and nothing of value...

[hedwards]

I had one of these bad boys years before the iPod first appeared. Rio PMP300 And my PMP500 was really a great player. Even at the time that Apple first released their players, Creative amongst others had already created their Nomad line.

It might be that we wouldn't have players like the iPod without Apple, but let's be honest, the iPods were never the best players out, the sound quality wasn't ever as good as the competition and the feature list somewhat anemic compared to other lines of players.

Re:and nothing of value...

[hedwards]

Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 and Mac OS came out in 1984. I'm not sure how exactly that makes MS first to dumb down the interface for the benefit of people lacking technical proficiency. And don't count those earlier revisions of Windows, they were complete unusable crap also they were after Mac OS was released anyways.

Re:and nothing of value...

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

The days of all science being knowable in one life time are quite over. Stargate characters aside, of course. If you only used that which you'd been tested on to understand you wouldnt have airbags in your car, numb nuts. You conflate the ability to retrieve information (the point of the computer!) with the ability to create the retrieval of that informtion -- all abstracted away. Just how it is.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Guy Harris]

How about the days when people did not have to worry about breaking the law just to the software they wanted to run on the computers they legally purchased?

I don't have to break the law to run the software I want to run on the computer I legally purchased - and I purchased it from Apple and and running an OS from Apple. I just happened to buy the right computer for that purpose - one of the computers running Mac OS X, rather than one of the computers running iOS.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Guy Harris]

I seem to remember the "computer as an appliance" concept being something Steve Jobs wanted to push all the way back in the 1980s. What do you think "computer as an appliance" means, if not "computer for hopelessly clueless users who should remain clueless?"

"Computer for somebody who has better things to do with his or her time than tweak stuff to make it work"?

Re:and nothing of value...

[Weedhopper]

I'm starting to come around to the conclusion that it's not Apple or Steve Jobs that wannabe techies really hate.

They really hate it that their role as the interpreter and guide to the tech is being obsoleted. It's a dying priesthood and the writing on the wall doesn't look good for them. Thus the hate.

In this case, it's the tech literate who are most vested in the cathedral and it's priestly trappings, not Apple that's actually managing to bring usable tech access to the masses.

Re:and nothing of value...

[WaffleMonster]

I'll choose you amongst the hordes to respond to. Feel flattered ;) iPads are finding huge traction amongst medical and flight and construction and education and science visualization and you name it, all because there is FINALLY a low cost, Stable, robust, and well implemented platform for data interchange in the field as a comoditized thick-or-thin client. Are you telling me palm or windows phone 7 was what you saw driving the future of these industries and programmer growth because companies were invest in a platform that might actually mature? Sometimes I swear, android was only meant to give out of work java programmers something to do ;) How's windows doing with that low power thing? How's sony doing with releasing, improving, and using free OSS software? Yeah, right.

Are you seriously arguing for objective C over .NET... as a basis for a comoditized client? Really?

Re:and nothing of value...

[jo_ham]

No, they weren't - the audio quality was worse, and they didn't even have as much storage space but they were easy to use, had an awesome UI and the integration with iTunes on the computer side (including ripping CDs) was easy and smooth, and *fast* since it used a firewire port. It's why they sold so many.

The competing mp3 players of the time were just blown out of the water by the iPod - the player that wasn't technically the best, but was far and away the easiest and best to use day to day.

Re:and nothing of value...

[jo_ham]

You only have to pay the $99 if you want to publish your iOS app on the store - ie, all that hosting, distribution and payment processing.

The developer tools are *totally free*. You get everything you need for free to build apps for iOS and OS X. You never have to pay a single cent to develop apps on OS X (other than buying the OS and hardware to run it on, but if you're developing on that platform, why wouldn't you already have this?)

As far as the dev tools go, though, they are free. Totally free.

If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.

I fail to see how this is "paying Steve to write software" when for a sizeable life of the OS X developer tools, the equivalent on the Windows side were certainly *not* free, far from it. As far as I remember, even the free developer tools that MS supplies now are not the whole deal (and why do you think they had to scramble to release a free set of tools eh?)

Of all the criticisms you can level at Apple, and there are many, the cost of the developer tools is laughably off the mark. If you mean "you have to buy an OS X machine to develop Mac OS X software then, *forehead smack*, what did you expect? I really hope you're not writing software for a platform you can't test on!

Re:and nothing of value...

[jo_ham]

Computer that I pay as little attention to as my fridge or microwave?

I know how a microwave works. I could even build you one. That doesn't mean I want to do so every time I want a new one in my kitchen. I just want to buy one that will work for me.

The benefit of OS X though, is that you can dig into the guts of it if you want (just as you can self repair the hardware), but by default it was designed without the need to do that.

Re:and nothing of value...

[RogerWilco]

It would be interesting to hear our definition of a "useful computing device".

I personally find my Macbook Pro, even though it's 4 years old, one of the most useful computing devices I could think of. Another one would be my iPhone.

So much that I find it hard to come up with a use that isn't covered by those two devices, unless it's heavy duty number crunching or high volume data handling, but my company has a IBM BlueGene/P, several Linux clusters and high end servers for that.

As a user and consumer I have a hard time coming up with something useful I can't do with my MBP and iPhone. Maybe you can enlighten me?

Re:and nothing of value...

[RogerWilco]

Then why did Creative and friends have such a hard time competing with the iPod? Where are the Rio's of 2011?

I think the reason Apple does so well, is because they really focus on what users want. not just a few geeks. Something you can use without every reading the manual.

People don't care about features, and not about quality, as long as it's "good enough", does what they want, looks nice and can be used for the task at hand with as little hassle as possible.

The last thing is key. People are goal oriented. Most people get into their car to get to some place, not because they want to fiddle with their engine settings or see if today it might be fun to use the wheel to change gears and a joystick to steer. Apple is a master at designing things so it's easy to do the things you want in the most efficient way.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Smauler]

Isn't it wonderful? that we, in today's age, have people actually proud of their own ignorance. Simply magnificent.

Isn't it wonderful? That we, in today's age have people who actually assume that ignorance is not inevitable. Ok... I'll put it like this : there is nothing that you know about of significance that someone else doesn't know a lot more about unless you've spent your life on the subject (and even then others will have probably done the same). Knowing your ignorance is essential before knowing your knowledge.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Smauler]

If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.

This. Any company that wants to charge me for running something I've written on my phone is a company I'm wary of.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Jeremi]

How is Apple doing with respecting the intelligence level and freedoms of their customers?

It seems to be doing okay ... at least, people keep buying Apple products. Perhaps those people are using their intelligence to freely make that choice?

Re:and nothing of value...

[Draek]

Your point being? there's a difference between recognizing your own ignorance and being actively proud of it, and if you wish to do something for which your knowledge is lacking, the wise response is to *study* and *learn*, not say "to hell with it" and pay somebody else to dumb it down to the press of a single button, until you wish to do something else and must pay all over again.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow dude. There should be an icon for your posts which shows you chugging on Steve Job's cock. All up and down this thread. Nom Nom Nom.

Re:and nothing of value...

[jo_ham]

If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.

This. Any company that wants to charge me for running something I've written on my phone is a company I'm wary of.

You don't write it "on your phone" though. You write it (and test it) using the totally free Dev tools, and if you're getting to the stage where you want to deploy it onto phones, then that's when the fee comes in - it's all rolled into the app store.

Perhaps they could have enabled the on-phone deployment (with no app store deployment) outside of the $99 dev fee, but it's almost immaterial, since the number of people wanting to write apps that they *only* run on their own phone vs writing apps they want to distribute is so small. For that market, a developer would be better served by Android.

Re:and nothing of value...

[blarkon]

And when did the Xerox Alto come out?

Re:and nothing of value...

[Rakarra]

Time is valuable. Time is precious. Time is best spent on the things you need to do and the things you want to do.

Having to read a 100-page manual on a device that shouldn't need one doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't really even make you a smarter person since all you've learned is how to operate that poorly-made device. But it has wasted your valuable time.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Rakarra]

I'm starting to come around to the conclusion that it's not Apple or Steve Jobs that wannabe techies really hate.

They really hate it that their role as the interpreter and guide to the tech is being obsoleted. It's a dying priesthood and the writing on the wall doesn't look good for them. Thus the hate.

In this case, it's the tech literate who are most vested in the cathedral and it's priestly trappings, not Apple that's actually managing to bring usable tech access to the masses.

I would say no, no, that's not it.

What the techies really worry about is their dwindling amount of options. I don't really care if people enjoy their iPads. That's their choice and if they're happy with them, that's all right by me. But I wouldn't be happy with one, but I need more options, more control, over my devices and over my programs. But if the iPad is the way things are going, it will begin to crowd out general computing completely, and techies who want that greater freedom will soon find it gone, as everyone else willingly surrenders freedoms they never knew they had or really wanted to companies that act like control-freaks*. That's what the techies fear the most.

* We could certainly argue that they're benevolent control freaks, and that the solitary choice they offer was really the best option anyway, but the point remains.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Rakarra]

If you want to push an app onto the store though,

Not interested, though that's always nice to have.

or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval),

Yup, that's what I'd be looking for..

then it is $99 per year.

Geez, just $99? How fucking generous of them.
That doesn't strike you as even a little bit outrageous?

Re:and nothing of value...

[jo_ham]

Why would it? The iPhone wasn't marketed as a homebrew device - they give away all the developer tools for free (and the OS X dev side is utterly free - no fees for creating apps) and give away the iPhone SDK for free along with it on the condition that if you want to get into the store you need to pay all the associated maintenance costs ($99 per year).

The reason they don't enable the on-phone ability from the tools is to eliminate a path to apps from non-verified sources (ie, not through the store) since a developer could just release the source or and other people could install the dev tools and put it on their phone. Fine in most cases, but the first rogue app to make it onto phones that way would cause a sensation. "so much for app store security". Apple has been clear they don't want sideloading of apps and while the blocking of homebrew apps onto your own phone is a casualty of that (it's the only thing you can't do in the development chain for free), in the long run they obviously think it's only going to affect a small number of people - the genuine homebrew developers are going to be using Android handsets.

Re:and nothing of value...

[Opportunist]

Huh? I love people who know what they're doing!

I hate people who don't know what they're doing but insist in doing it! Even though my job depends on them, if it wasn't for dancing bunny clickers I would not have a job. I don't mind people praying without asking me first, the problem is just that our god is real and he can be quite vengeful if you anger him by praying wrongly.

Re:and nothing of value...

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Problem is, many of the other options suck balls.

When I worked as the sole IT guy for a small flash memory design firm, they wanted more computers for workstations.
They went out and bought a bunch of piece of shit Dells and then asked me for help. So I asked them why they bought it and their reasons were the following:
1) It had a decent sized clock speed.
2) There's too many options, so I sorted by price on their web site, and picked the cheapest one with a decent clock speed.

So I asked, why Dell?
Response: Too much trouble to compare other vendors.

In other words, people want the best, but it takes too fucking long to figure out what's the best. Choice is good. Researching amongst an assload of choices is a waste of time. Nobody wants to do it. They want to get back to doing whatever they want to do.

If us techies keep trying to preserve the multitude of options, we're directly working against what the rest of the people in the world actually want: something that does the job and does it well.

(Story continuation: I ended up building the next machine they wanted in 2002, with RAID-0 and linked to the company backup server. The engineer who got it was amazed at how much faster it was, while the manager who had to pay for the parts was amazed at how cheap it cost, not thinking about how much time the company had to pay me to actually spec it out and put it together.)

Honest and true

[mseeger]

I'd have screwed that up.

2 Points awarded for being honest and being right....

CU, Martin

That was the first time, there were more

[catmistake]

Happened at least three times

Re:That was the first time, there were more

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more interesting is that the article, ostensibly written in early 2006, predicts the coming of the iPhone at its conclusion...

Well, sure. Unless your iPod is your cell phone. ®

Unix powered Newton II

[Anonymous Coward]

While interesting and fun Apple products are frequently overhyped and under perform. I perfer my gen II Ipod to the much fancier ipod touch I received as a gift. Why? becuase the iPod Gen II actually does it's primary job very well (playing music) the Ipod touch is just a toy. The same can be said of the iphone - it is a crappy phone and an ok PDA. Nearly any blackberry device is a more fuctional phone and PDA (esp using a corp groupwise server). Most Apple true believers are simply people who hate MS and Intel and are making a politcal point as opposed to a logical shopping decision. The prime exsample of how poorrly most apple products function is iTunes - the single most bloated, resource hogging application on the planet. iTunes crashes any computer it is put on and is roundly cursed - but it "looks good" so apple is happy with it. Style over substance with an outragous price tag = Apple.

Re:Unix powered Newton II

[Megane]

Except that the Newton didn't happen until 1987, two years after this incident, and would probably have never happened at all.

And using Unix for low-power applications? That's a good one. That didn't happen until Linux became popular for embedded use. Even the iPod was around for years before Apple decided to port Darwin to it.

Also, obviously you are a Windows user. iTunes isn't nearly as bloated on Mac; it's that Carbon compatibility layer stuff and Quicktime that bloat it on Windows.

Re:Unix powered Newton II

[Wumpus]

It think you got your dates wrong. The acquisition attempt was in late 1995 or early 1996.

Re:Unix powered Newton II

[grouchomarxist]

This incident happened in 1995.

Re:Unix powered Newton II

[iluvcapra]

Most Apple true believers are simply people who hate MS and Intel and are making a politcal point as opposed to a logical shopping decision.

Well, at least her on the 'dot we have communities of WebOS, Windows, Android, Emacs, Java, and Linux consumers to offset this with their stern rationality and scrupulous abstention from any appearance of advocacy...

Re:Unix powered Newton II

[Guy Harris]

Most Apple true believers are simply people who hate MS and Intel

Any Apple true believer who currently hates Intel is only going to be buying iPhones, iPods (touch or non-touch), iPads, or the current flavor of Apple TV. Anything else from Apple (other than keyboards and mice and AirPort base stations and other accessories) has Intel Inside(TM) (and, for all I know, the keyboard has Intel Inside(TM) in the form of an 8052 or whatever the controller chip is).

Similar story about Commodore?

[toejam13]

I recall a rumor that Sun Microsystems was once interested in purchasing Commodore. Sun was supposedly interested in the home and entry workstation marketplace, and wanted the Amiga line for themselves. I wonder if there was any truth to it.

Just imagine a SPARC based Amiga. That would have been interesting.

Re:Similar story about Commodore?

[tarzeau]

they had OPENSTEP, the father of Mac OS X (Cocoa). but they stomped it for Java.... FAIL!

Re:Similar story about Commodore?

[znark]

I recall a rumor that Sun Microsystems was once interested in purchasing Commodore. Sun was supposedly interested in the home and entry workstation marketplace, and wanted the Amiga line for themselves. I wonder if there was any truth to it.

Just to complete the circle, according to Brian Bagnall’s book On The Edge – The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore , Jobs and Wozniak were, at one point in 1976, negotiating with Jack Tramiel about Commodore buying out Apple (and the Apple I design) to serve as the technological basis for what would later become the Commodore PET; Commodore’s first foray on the personal computer market. But the deal fell through because Tramiel wanted a bargain and he felt Jobs was asking way too much money for his garage company. At the same time, Mike Markkula started investing to Apple so things never got any further on that front.

Chuck Peddle and his team were already working on the PET at that time but Commodore wanted to have something to show on the January 1977 CES so they were short on time. Hacking their vision of a personal computer on top of a pre-existing 6502-based design, such as Wozniak’s Apple I kit, would have bought them some more time. In the end, Peddle’s team managed to put together a working prototype for the CES and Commodore was the first company to announce a personal computer for the mass-market. This created tremendous interest in the field and it was quite a breakthrough for personal computing, but according to the book, the January 1977 CES prototype was barely working and they only got it boot up properly on the very last day of the show. They still had a lot to do before it morphed into the actual production model for which they would start taking in orders later that year.

McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[QuincyDurant]

Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations. Ease of use promotes productivity among users at all skill levels. Good hardware engineers, for example, are generally interested in design of good hardware, not screwing around with command-line UNIX. Bad designers, of course, love to do everything except design.

Steve Jobs would have still been around to develop new consumer markets for another company.

Or perhaps the acquisition would have been disaster all around. We'll never know, of course, unless Apple unveils a programmable wayback machine next month.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[Penguinisto]

Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations.

...which would have done bupkis for the consumer side, and would have cost a mint.

I think that was the whole genius of how Apple did it - they have an almost slavish devotion to how the consumer uses their products, and pretty much gave up on the business/enterprise side of things, outside of a few feints and probes here and there (e.g. XServe). They found a whole side of computing and electronics that most OEMs only half-assed paid attention to, and leveraged it to rather enormous success.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[IntlHarvester]

I think you have to look at the situation during the timeframe this merger was being discussed. At the time, Apple was almost entirely dependent on creative workstations and high-end desktop PCs. The few consumer devices they produced had bombed, and there was almost no indication that Apple could be successful as a consumer electronics brand other than their high name recognition.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[hedwards]

And that explains the pathological hatred of buttons? Simplifying is good, but there's a reason why Apple is the only company to use a 1 button mouse, and why the early mouses all had 3 buttons. Single button mouses suck.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[emt377]

And that explains the pathological hatred of buttons? Simplifying is good, but there's a reason why Apple is the only company to use a 1 button mouse, and why the early mouses all had 3 buttons. Single button mouses suck.

There are good reasons for a single-button mouse. The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses. I should click the icon? The normal button or the menu button? How many times? Why do I sometimes use one button and at other times the other? There's also a menu up top already with all the same things and more... when should I use which? The second reason is that Apple selling a single-button mouse (not sure if they still do though) forces UI designers to make their products single-button navigable. This has a great simplifying effect and removes the ability to do things like different menus in different places, and puts all commands in a single unified menu - making the product more discoverable. Finally, people who want multibutton mice generally have a strong brand preference anyway; I like my Razers while you might order a Logitech the first thing you do. So the Apple mouse mainly ends up in the hands of a novice with no existing preference and likely limited experience with computers.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[Guy Harris]

The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses.

I'd phrase that as "less sophisticated users"; I suspect many of the more sophisticated users who are "non-technical" understand context menus.

There's also a menu up top already with all the same things and more... when should I use which?

Use the menu button if 1) the thing you want to do is, or might be, on the context menu and 2) you don't want to have to move the mouse to get a menu.

The second reason is that Apple selling a single-button mouse (not sure if they still do though)

That depends on what you call a "button"; the only mouse I see is the Magic Mouse.

forces UI designers to make their products single-button navigable.

No, because Command+Click pops up a contextual menu, just as right-click does in several other GUIs. Yes, they say "Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.", which I agree with - on any GUI, even those used on systems with multi-button mice. The GNOME people agree with that ("Since the user may not be aware of their presence, do not provide functions that are only accessible from popup menus unless you are confident that your target users will know how to use popup menus."), and so does Microsoft ("Don't make commands only available through context menus. Like shortcut keys, context menus are alternative means of performing commands and choosing options. For example, a Properties command is also available through the menu bar or the Alt+Enter access key.").

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[node 3]

And that explains the pathological hatred of buttons? Simplifying is good, but there's a reason why Apple is the only company to use a 1 button mouse, and why the early mouses all had 3 buttons. Single button mouses suck.

At the time, single button mice were far superior for normal people (Apple did extensive studies on this. And, anecdotally, how many times (even nowadays) do you hear someone ask "left or right" when you ask someone over 50 to click on something?), and multi-button mice were better for professionals and enthusiasts. Apple has supported multi-button mice for well over a decade now, and shipped multi-button mice for over five years.

I can't believe in this day and age there are still "one button mice" Apple trolls.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[emt377]

I'm not disagreeing with anything you say; I'm just pointing out that Apple making single-button mice has had a disciplining effect on UI design. Control-clicking isn't discoverable (just the way keyboard command shortcuts without menu equivalents aren't) so isn't something that can relied on for prominent functionality. Say spell checking a document. If you had to control click to bring up a menu to spell check, and couldn't find it in the main menu, then a LOT of users would never find it and would assume spell checking didn't exist. If that's a prominent, advertised feature of the program then this would be problematic and a huge call generator. So the UI design needs to be adjusted accordingly - most obviously by putting all prominent features in the main menu, or a button on a toolbar, or equivalent, or all of the above. You frequently actually see Windows software that *doesn't* adhere to such obvious basic principles of design; the people who complain about the single-button mouse on the Mac are very frequently exactly the people who would create such seven-headed UI horrors in the first place.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[node 3]

forces UI designers to make their products single-button navigable.

No, because Command+Click pops up a contextual menu, just as right-click does in several other GUIs. Yes, they say "Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature."

You completely missed his point, and simply reiterated it.

[GNOME and MS with similar HIG's]

The difference is by having only one button, and instead only offering control-click, it provides further pressure for the developer to make sure nothing is only in a contextual menu, because it's much more difficult to discover control-click than it is to discover right-click. Most Mac users don't even know there *is* such as thing as control-click, but everyone can see the right mouse button.

The evidence for this is that there are so many things in Windows itself (let alone third-party apps, some of which actually *require* two or more button mice) that you know how to do with with a right-click, but probably aren't even sure how to find with just using the left mouse button (although it's probably *somewhere*, in the Control Panel, or somewhere deep in the Start menu). GNOME is in a better position in terms of the GNOME desktop environment itself, but apps are in an even worse position than Windows, since GNOME runs any X app, of which there are a *lot* that are essentially unusable without three mouse buttons, since they all assume three button mice (xterm is a perfect example).

MS, GNOME, and Apple has similar *guidelines*, but only Apple's guidelines had the added motivation of users having only a one-button mouse. Windows developers could always assume a two-button mouse, and X developers could assume three (even when it was ported to PCs which only had two buttons, X had an option for "click both buttons to emulate the middle button").

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[TeknoHog]

There are good reasons for a single-button mouse. The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking,

Are you saying that non-technical users don't know left from right? I hope none of these non-technical users ever get a driving license.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[Guy Harris]

I'm not disagreeing with anything you say; I'm just pointing out that Apple making single-button mice has had a disciplining effect on UI design.

Is it, in fact, the case that Windows/Motif/Qt/GTK+/whatever apps - or maybe we should limit it to Windows apps, so we're not dealing with stuff written by nerds who are proud of being nerds for nerds who are proud of being nerds :-) - have more context{ual} menu items that aren't also available from the menu bar than Mac OS apps? There's some random company in Cupertino that makes a Web browser for OS X where, if you've downloaded a PDF, the menu item to open the PDF in Preview is, unless I've missed something, only available as a context menu; perhaps Apple should send those people a copy of their Human Interface Guide?

Control-clicking isn't discoverable

Yes, just as Microsoft and the GNOME folks, like the Apple folks, point out, as I noted in the posting to which you replied.

You frequently actually see Windows software that *doesn't* adhere to such obvious basic principles of design; the people who complain about the single-button mouse on the Mac are very frequently exactly the people who would create such seven-headed UI horrors in the first place.

Again, is it, in fact, the case that you don't see that with Mac applications? If so, is that because:

• the Mac developers didn't know about Control-click and thus didn't know that context{ual} menus exist in Mac OS, unlike Windows developers who know about the right button;
• a lot of the Mac user base doesn't know about Control-click and thus doesn't know that context{ual} menus exist in Mac OS, so developers can't rely on users knowing about it, unlike Windows users who are more likely to know about the right mouse button;
• the community of Mac app developers cares more about UI design, for whatever reason, than the community of Windows app developers (either because of the "Mac cult", or because the market for Mac apps is smaller and doesn't attract the, err, umm, less talented UI developers);
• some other reason;
• some combination of reasons.

I suspect the third of those might contribute, and that has nothing to do with the single mouse button.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[hedwards]

I'm not trolling, the one button mouse was a stupid invention. You're substituting command + click for right click, if you honestly think that's easier to comprehend you ought to really think about how a person identifies left and right and how they know what button the command key is.

Additionally, a mouse is supposed to have three buttons one for context one for selection and one for execution. Any mouse which requires double clicking is fail, going from three buttons down to one does precisely zero for usability, in fact it makes it less usable because now all of a sudden you have to use multiple hands.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[Smauler]

The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking

This takes literally 1/2 an hour to learn at most. I've taught this to people I've introduced to computers. The thing that confuses new users IMO is where to double click, and where to single click. I've seen people who've used computers for years not know this, because there is no consistent application of double/single click in Windows.

Finally, people who want multibutton mice generally have a strong brand preference anyway

No.... basic buttons across all windows mice are standard - left click, right click, wheel (most of the time). I've got a few other buttons on my mouse, but the standards mean I can use someone else's mouse very easily. Like I said before, left/right click is not difficult to learn in the slightest and it adds functionality.

ps. I'll give you my Logitech MX518 when you prise it from my cold, dead hands (yes, I know it's oldish)

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[node 3]

You're trolling.

First off, "one button mouse" no longer applies to Macs, and hasn't for a decade.

Second, one button is measurably superior for some people, especially during the time when that was the case with Macs.

Last, your assertion that "a mouse is supposed to have three buttons one for context one for selection and one for execution. Any mouse which requires double clicking is fail" is complete and utter bullshit. It's one way to do it, but most certainly not the best way.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[MichaelSmith]

Apple are quite big businesses which use their workstations. Architects and other design oriented businesses. They sell a lot of servers there.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[Culture20]

There are good reasons for a single-button mouse. The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses.

BS. I taught a "beginning computer" course in college and had 18-70 age ranges. The only people that had problems were the people that were unwilling to play. Once I convinced those people that nothing they did in the lab could hurt the computers unless they physically damaged them, they were willing to play too. The "should I click X or Y?" questions end quickly when people learn by just clicking willy nilly.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[mattack2]

No, control-click brings up a contextual menu, not command-click.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[mattack2]

Control-click, not command-click.

You can do things without double-click, e.g. opening an app in the Finder. Select it (via clicking or type-selecting), and choose Open or cmd-O or cmd-downarrow.

Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything

[jbolden]

the community of Mac app developers cares more about UI design, for whatever reason, than the community of Windows app developers (either because of the "Mac cult", or because the market for Mac apps is smaller and doesn't attract the, err, umm, less talented UI developers);

I think it comes down to core market. For windows the core market is corporate software designed in house. For Mac the core market is commercial shareware / low priced applications.

The first group cares a great deal more about a feature complete system that can be rolled out. The second group cares a great deal more about user experience.

that would've been awful

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun obviously regarded Apple as a value play, and as the business client for client/server computing, in competition with Microsoft and IBM. They would've moved Mac to SPARC, ported Solaris and tried to meld Mac Finder with OpenLook, trying to bridge the consumer and business markets but satisfying neither. Since they've always a B-to-B company, not B-to-C, there would've been endless dithering, bureaucratic fuckups, and diva-like incidents involving Apple staff. They would've spun off or sold the carcass for pennies on the dollar shortly after the dotcom boom ended and Sun's core server business hit the skids.

Then maybe Larry Ellison would've ruled Apple....

Re:that would've been awful

[wsxyz]

Sun obviously regarded Apple as a value play, and as the business client for client/server computing, in competition with Microsoft and IBM.

It's interesting that you find that "obvious" when Scott McNealey states int he article that "we had no idea why, but we were going to buy Apple".

Total Perspective Vortex

[Matey-O]

I love the trolls' complete and total lack of objectivity. Hundreds of millions of iDevices sold, arguably the first economically successful tablet, a company that could turn on a dime and recreate their hardware jumping from PPC to Intel, and OS 9 to OS X in a seamless fashion, and gain enough financial success to ecplipse Microsoft...and yet 'nothing of value is lost'.

Here's a hint for the younguns: There's room for more than one successful company in the world, and one being successful doesn't mean no others will be. If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em...but to ignore their success is foolhardy. It's what makes people like Nokia lose their position in the economy.

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[sco08y]

There's room for more than one successful company in the world, and one being successful doesn't mean no others will be.

If it weren't for the belief that the amount of wealth is fixed and you can only benefit at the expense of others, there wouldn't be a political left-wing. In spite of the fact that it's the economic equivalent of believing in a flat earth, it is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[Anonymous Coward]

And none of it would be possible without BSD which already and always did compile and multiple processors. None of it was originally developed by Apple at all.

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[Anonymous Coward]

"and yet 'nothing of value is lost'. [...] If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em...but to ignore their success is foolhardy."

If value is defined as something that has *good* value, then surely the undoing of an evil anti-freedom behemoth could accurately be described as "and nothing of value was lost".

Just because the big guys that are out to destroy your freedom are big and rich, doesn't mean they are of value.

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If it weren't for the belief that the amount of wealth is fixed and you can only benefit at the expense of others, there wouldn't be a political left-wing. In spite of the fact that it's the economic equivalent of believing in a flat earth, it is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I could say "Eating live puppies for breakfast is a fundamental tenet of modern conservatism" and it would make just as much sense as your post.

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you stop for a moment and think that some people simply do not value the consumer economy? Some people, may in fact, consider Apple's size as a symptom of more deep-seeded problems. Yeah, so I'm sorry you are burdened with such a small minded, half-educated, middle-management perspective that values unsustainable systems with broken values. Good luck with that.

I remember them

[thefixer(tm)]

Sun execs came through our building for a walk through, and they were wearing ties! We were terrified the deal might go through.

major 'epoch' occurring almost world wide

[Anonymous Coward]

it's being blacked out in the US so far, as our keepers (very wise guys) may have determined we're 'not ready' to be free/independent just yet. meanwhile, back in epoch control, the conscience is that we could make further efforts to care for each other/our young, while we're waiting for the veil of the deception to be completely neutralized. see you there?

SUN already messed up NeXT/OPENSTEP Software

[tarzeau]

Luckily there's GNUstep, however it could be where GNOME/KDE are now. If SUN would have released the Lighthouse Applications: http://www.noodlesoft.com/blog/2007/01/23/the-sun-also-sets/ http://talblog.info/archives/2007/01/sundown.html http://livecd.gnustep.org/ Scott McNealy unfortunately failed to find theses sources... saying he can't find it. I hope Java dies soon. And Sony SNAP gets born... but I doubt, it's SONY.

PC hardware key to Apple's success

[perpenso]

It could have resulted in Apple retaining unique hardware, rather than moving to Intel CPUs. Of course, whether that would be for the better or the worse is an open question.

Apple's move to PC hardware was key to its success. They basically doubled their market share after moving from PPC to x86. The consumer no longer had to choose Mac OS or Windows, they could have both(*). This made the decision to buy a Mac much easier for many.

(*) Yes there was emulation under PPC but it was far less practical, especially for games.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[MBCook]

The G5s were nice, but they weren't going to keep up with Intel for long. The G4s in the laptops were very power efficient, but dog slow at the end.

Apple HAD to move off PPC, it was unsustainable. x86 was the only option. Cheap, easily sourced, constantly speeding up.

If Apple went to something else, they'd still have to keep up with Intel. Only the x86 has enough volume that the processor makers can afford to keep doing that.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[the linux geek]

The G5's sucked. They did great at the specfp benchmark, but in real world usage, they were a lot like the Pentium 4 - never lived up to anything close to the hype. The G4 actually had superior IPC at everything except floating point, and if they had been clocked as high as the G5, they would have been generally faster for consumer usage. Apple should have done a higher-clocked G4 for consumer systems, and licensed straight Power4 for Xserve.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[Anonymous Coward]

It could have resulted in Apple retaining unique hardware, rather than moving to Intel CPUs. Of course, whether that would be for the better or the worse is an open question.

Apple's move to PC hardware was key to its success. They basically doubled their market share after moving from PPC to x86. The consumer no longer had to choose Mac OS or Windows, they could have both(*). This made the decision to buy a Mac much easier for many.

(*) Yes there was emulation under PPC but it was far less practical, especially for games.

Run both Unix (or a Unix-like OS) and Windowws on the same computer?

Welcome to Sun in the 1990s.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[node 3]

You've got this completely backwards. G4's were notably slower than the CoreDuos that Apple went with. In terms of apparent speed to the user, it was night-and-day. The dual G5's remained similar in performance (both benchmarks and apparent responsiveness) for quite some time. A dual 2.xGHz G4 system would have been trounced by a 1.8GHz Core2Duo.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[RogerWilco]

A really nice advantage of the move to x86 has been that it has become much easier to port all kinds of FOSS programs to the Mac, especially since it comes with X.

With the Unix underpinnings and the x86 hardware, a lot of stuff written for Unix or Linux will work with very little tweaking.

This has had a big effect on the available software for the Mac. Something I think people underestimate. What I've seen, is that is has allowed Apple to basically consume the whole market for desktop unix. It wasn't very big, but it expanded their core base of users beyond the creative/pubishing markets into an area that had a lot of existing software that was easy to port and people skilled in writing software. Where Linux ended most Unices on the server end of things, OSX on Intel was a major blow to the other Unices on desktops/workstations, including Linux for the desktop.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[perpenso]

It could have resulted in Apple retaining unique hardware, rather than moving to Intel CPUs. Of course, whether that would be for the better or the worse is an open question.

Apple's move to PC hardware was key to its success. They basically doubled their market share after moving from PPC to x86. The consumer no longer had to choose Mac OS or Windows, they could have both(*). This made the decision to buy a Mac much easier for many.

(*) Yes there was emulation under PPC but it was far less practical, especially for games.

Run both Unix (or a Unix-like OS) and Windowws on the same computer?

Welcome to Sun in the 1990s.

(1) It's not on the same computer. You put a second computer in the same box via an expansion slot.
(2) Mid 90's Mac running the legacy (classic) Mac OS did the same thing, a PC on a card.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[Dogtanian]

(2) Mid 90's Mac running the legacy (classic) Mac OS did the same thing, a PC on a card.

The original Commodore Amiga 1000 did something similar in the mid-80s- basically a PC on a card.

I had a software-based PC emulator on my low-end Amiga 500 (same CPU as the Amiga 1000) just to see what it was like. It was *unbelievably* slow- you could often see individual letters appear on-screen in response to typed commands.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[Dogtanian]

A really nice advantage of the move to x86 has been that it has become much easier to port all kinds of FOSS programs to the Mac, especially since it comes with X.

Surely the latter- and the fact that OS X is BSD-like- is more important than the Intel-based CPU, since I assume you could recompile it for PowerPC anyway, being FOSS and all that?...!

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[Guy Harris]

With the Unix underpinnings and the x86 hardware, a lot of stuff written for Unix or Linux will work with very little tweaking.

Well, "for Linux", maybe, as there's probably a lot of Linux developers who have never programmed for anything other than an x86-based personal computer and have never learned how to avoid writing non-portable code (which probably means, in this context, "how to avoid writing code that only works on little-endian processors").

"For Unix" is another matter, depending on what you mean by "Unix"; if you mean "commercial Unixes other than Mac OS X", which, these days, largely means "Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX", one of those (AIX) only runs on big-endian processors (Power Architecture and its variants), one of them (Solaris) runs on both x86 and a big-endian processor line that's still around (SPARC), and one of them (HP-UX) used to run on big-endian processors (PA-RISC) and might still run on one if the processor can run big-endian and is run that way (Itanium), so I doubt that the x86 hardware makes much of a difference for "stuff written for Unix".

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[jbolden]

The G5s were nice, but they weren't going to keep up with Intel for long

They were well ahead of Intel. As for the G5, the G6 is out: 4.2-4.7 ghz, Altivec is faster and now has a decimal high speed math unit. The chips have L2 (4m/8m) and L3 (32m) caches on board crushing even the Xeons. They also have a 4 core model. Ram is accessible ram is 2.7t (not a typo). The chips have built in support for running hypervisor functions. They are still well ahead of Intel.

Re:PC hardware key to Apple's success

[jbolden]

What packages were having trouble during the PPC days? I would argue Fink was a lot richer then and much more up to date. How many packages have any assembly where you would notice PPC vs. X86?

Sun would have pre-empted iphone

[Eravnrekaree]

I doubt there would be iphones if this had happened. Sun seems to suffer from the lack of marketing skill and understanding of how average users operates and developing an environment that is suitable for them.

One of the reasons Sun has been doing so poorly as well, and why their business model is wrong and failing, is that the market for supercomputers and mainframes is shrinking. Businesses realise now that you can completely replace millions of dollars computer complexes of 30 years ago with a few $500 consumer PCs, that you dont need that high end expensive, premium hardware anymore. While computing power has increased, business activities have often stayed the same, the payroll, accounting, inventory control, mailing lists, accounts and transaction code takes the same amount of resources it did 30 years ago, but computers today are massively more powerful. With cloud computing, since the computers are far more poweful,fewer computers are needed, as well, in those data centers, to service the same load. All of this means a shrinking market for mainframes, fewer of them needed to do the same things and consumer computers having replaced a large part of that market.

Sun had made themselves dependant on a shrinking business computer market as businesses began to realise they no longer needed this very expernsive, premium top of the line hardware, so it had a shrinking market. They were totally ignorant of how to market or develop products for consumers. In many ways, Sun is similar to Linux, it is completely inept to understand why Microsoft is dominate and what needs to be done to make consumer friendly devices (hint: It is not really GUI design that is the primary reason, it is hardware support: it is engaging hardware vendors and making it so the OS has a stable binary interface for hardware drivers and excellent documentation and SDKs that makes it easy for hardware vendors to support the OS). That Linux does not understand this is one reason it is not widely adopted, in addition to many of its developers being downright arrogant, assuming that people should rearrange their lives around the OS, rather than the OS suit their needs, learn cryptic commands, or write their won device driver to use a piece of hardware. Obviously had Apple had made its main user front end anything like how linux hackers think it should be and requried users to write device drivers it would have been a miserable failure. With Sun it was likely the same problems that Linux has that would have precluded any sort of development of a consumer device.

Interestingly, one of the areas where the demand for computing power at the application level has been increasing is desktop consumer computers! This is due to 3D gaming and other entertainment activity that is still today stressing current CPUs and is gauranteed to consume all of the computing power of the top of the line cutting edge CPUs for some time to come. There is still a massive amount of room for growth in virtual reality gaming resource usage that it is gauranteed to be able to utilise all of the resources of the fastest CPUs yet to come. While daily business operation computing remains more static in resource use, gaming, 3D, virtual reality in consumer computers is where real growth in computer power consumption has been occuring for some time.

Re:Sun would have pre-empted iphone

[Anonymous Coward]

In many ways, Sun is similar to Linux, it is completely inept to understand why Microsoft is dominate and what needs to be done to make consumer friendly devices (hint: It is not really GUI design that is the primary reason, it is hardware support: it is engaging hardware vendors and making it so the OS has a stable binary interface for hardware drivers and excellent documentation and SDKs that makes it easy for hardware vendors to support the OS). That Linux does not understand this is one reason it is not widely adopted, in addition to many of its developers being downright arrogant, assuming that people should rearrange their lives around the OS, rather than the OS suit their needs, learn cryptic commands, or write their won device driver to use a piece of hardware.

Linux is currently very widely adopted. Its closest closest competitor is another *Nix Operating system. I think it is Microsoft who is inept in the ways of Sun. Oh, you were only thinking about the PC market? Why? That is the kind of thinking that brought down Sun. Mobile devices will largely replace PCs. In the same way that PCs made high-end servers a shrinking market, smart phones have made PCs a shrinking market. Smart phone sales will exceed PC sales this year. http://blogs.totalpda.co.uk/2009/08/smartphone-sales-set-to-exceed-pc-sales-by-2011/ and the majority of them will be running Linux (in the form of Android.) Even the second place OS (iOS) is also *NIX. In terms of tablets, it appears that two *NIX operating systems will also dominate the market (though which will be in first place and which will be in second is an open question.)

As our productivity applications (e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, etc) move into the could, the drivers for the hardware you use to run a web browser becomes largely irrelevant.

Almost bought Vmware....

[Yo Grark]

Have the same thoughts as Zander.

Back in 1998 (I think) the company I work for was recommended/poised to buy this little company that was making 6 meg virtual environments called Vmware.

Coolest shit I had ever seen up to that point, blew away Qview. Had we bought it, I have no doubt we would have screwed it up and set the whole world back by 5 years.

Not to say anything negative about the company I work for, just that I doubt they would have had the dedicated vision and creativity to develop them into the company they are today.

I Chuckle every time I see how much my company now pays them.

Funny little world we live in.

Yo Grark

Re:Almost bought Vmware....

[betterunixthanunix]

...of course, virtualization predated VMWare by two decades, and there were plenty of other people doing work on virtualization, at least in the research world. I doubt the world would have been set back 5 seconds if your company had purchased VMWare.

Re:Almost bought Vmware....

[robotandrew]

...of course, the discovery of steam power predated James Watt by 1700 years, and there have been plenty of people who worked on steam engines, at least doing research. I doubt the world would have been set back by two millenia if no one realized the implications of Hero's invention.

Re:Almost bought Vmware....

[betterunixthanunix]

That would be a good comparison...if IBM's virtualization technology was primitive compared to VMWare's. The only disadvantage to IBM's technology is that it runs on IBM's mainframes, rather than on commodity PCs. VMWare did not invent virtualization, nor did they advanced virtualization; they just made it available to users of lower end hardware.

What I will grant is that VMWare (and the related virtualization technologies for commodity hardware) provided a nice push for Intel and AMD to fix some of the issues that make virtualization on x86 difficult. However, this is not exactly a breakthrough; it just means that x86 is not as bad as it used to be, for that particular application.

Would have happened anyway.

[Animats]

MP3 players predated the iPod, and someone else, probably Sony, would have owned that market. The iPod wasn't the innovation. The iTunes store was the innovation. Jobs' contribution was making micropayments work.

Tablet computers had been tried many times before Apple. The hardware, and the wireless networking, weren't ready. Nor was the entertainment market. Early tablets were intended as general-purpose computers. Modern tablets are output-mostly devices, for which a touch screen is good enough.

Re:Would have happened anyway.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

iPod + iTunes integration was the innovation, plus the pretty slick and easy to use UI. I've seen people puzzled by iRiver and Archos devices have no problems with iPods.

Re:Would have happened anyway.

[Smauler]

The Archos I owned I was only puzzled by the idiotic touchscreen wheel scrolling. Everything else was ok - it would have been a good device if it had a semi-decent way to navigate directories and files. Seriously, whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot. In my opinion, a good UI for a mp3 player is one you can use without looking at it - the Archos required you to use both hands (for those who can use one one handed I salute you), and look at the device.

Re:Would have happened anyway.

[evilviper]

Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.

The only real competitor to apple was rio. They could well have become the dominant platform, but it seems more likely the market would just have remained fragmented, until smartphone came along and made them obsolete.

Re:Would have happened anyway.

[Rakarra]

Sony was far too dedicated to their own in house audio codec to make the mp3 players people wanted. Year after year of failures, and they didn't figure out out. Sony couldn't possibly have dominated.

And this is why Sony so often loses -- because it's so scared of competing against itself that over and over again it lets markets slip away to other companies.

Re:Would have happened anyway.

[evilviper]

Using something other than ATRAC wouldn't have been "competing against itself" at all (you make be thinking of the lack of copy protection, ala SCMS), it would just have been offering an non-Sony-developed alternative (eg. MP3). They could easily have allowed MP3s to go on, without allowing them to be copied back off. It would have been stupid, but that apparently wasn't Sony's problem.

I really haven't figured out the root of Sony's problem. I think they're too big of a company to have just one...

With ATRAC you see them scared to death of paying out fees to license technology from others. But with their PCs, they keep going along with Windows, even though there was a time when they could have MADE some other OS (eg. Linux, MacOS) a viable competitor. Instead, they wouldn't even port their own software to other OSes, despite how much they HATED Microsoft.

Wow! An honest investment banker!?!

[EaglesNest]

When two companies begin negotiations for one to buy the other, each has its own investment banker. The bankers only make money if the deal goes through. Even if the bankers know that the deal is stupid (like Time-Warner and AOL), they'll push it no matter how much value they know they'll destroy because otherwise, they get nothing. Even companies themselves will sometimes go through with a transaction that everyone begins to realize is bad the deeper they get into it, if only because they already put so much time and sunk costs into it. They ignore the rule: "if you're in a hole, stop digging" because they protest, "but we've already dug so much, let's dig ourselves a little deeper!"

Who was Apple's investment banker who effectively killed the deal? That's who I'd want to hire as my own banker if I ever had to sell my company or buy another one.

I always thought SGI should have bought them

[swb]

At the time in the mid 90s, SGI was still something of a leader in high end visualization, graphics, animation, 3D. Apple was a leader in easy-to-use GUI and pretty much the only game in town for 2D graphics and publishing.

I always saw it as a good fit, with SGI providing the datacenter/high end technology Apple lacked while Apple could provide SGI with the end-user interface they lacked and the desktop-type end users.

The OS merger would have been OS X before OS X -- IRIX back end with the Mac OS GUI.

Re:I always thought SGI should have bought them

[jbolden]

I agree with you. OSX early on could be seen as being "SGI technologies at a price point and interface for consumers". A lot of the ideas in sound and video in things like quicktime and final cut were variants of where SGI had been going, or had gone.

By the time Apple was stable enough to buy SGI, SGI was gutted and there wasn't as much to buy. Still XFS would be a technology which Apple could use today.

Re:I always thought SGI should have bought them

[swb]

I worked at a print prepress business for a while in the mid 90s and while Macs got used for Quark page layout, all the "high end" graphics where real magic needed to happen were done on a quad-processor SGI workstation with a massive display and Barco software.

Anyway, the real time it should have happened was the late 1990s when Mac OS couldn't do SMP or real pre-emptive multitasking and PowerPC wasn't keeping up with Intel CPUs.

The open question is whether the software heavy lifting for putting the Mac OS GUI as it was then would have gotten done well (or at all).

Re:I always thought SGI should have bought them

[jbolden]

I worked in prepress too. We used a lot of Sun and Ultra and specialized Alpha based RIPs. I didn't have to do a lot of high end color it was volume more than quality.

Eh, no Sony failed

[SmallFurryCreature]

ANYONE could have produced the iPod but NOBODY did. MS failed, Sony failed, Philips failed, Samsung failed, Sharp failed. EVERYONE failed. Apple with the iPod took an extremely fragmented industry and took the vast majority of the market share because they simply saw a market and ordered a million units so they got discounts nobody else could get and had high capacity for a reasonable price.

Sony was far to busy worrying about its music sales to pick up the billions in sales for a quality MP3 player they certainly could have made based on their Walkman brand name alone.

Same with the iPhone and the iPad. Everyone else tried, Apple achieved. Don't discount their achievement if you ever want to understand how to be half as successful as them.

You claim that the iPad came at the right time doesn't explain why almost a year later NOBODY else has come out with a competitor. Why not? If the time is now finally right surely it must be right for everyone else as well?

But nobody else got the balls of Jobs, to simply order a huge amount of iPads so you can get the quality hardware needed at a low price and be confident it will simply sell. THAT is why the Samsung Galaxy Tab is so small, they didn't have the balls to order large screens in volume DESPITE making those screens themselves.

The combined company

[christurkel]

could have been called Snapple.

Re:The combined company

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah thats exactly what they called it 16 years ago. sun has a very bad track record for acquiring and integrating companies. they kill most of them. the infighting at sun once they broke into divisions (planets) in 1991 was fierce. sun had a unique environment of talented people that could execute and also go at each other like mortal enemies. most of the top talent had left in the early 90's. when you trace the executives that made a mark in the industry you see that came from the execs pre 1995, the B-Team came in around the same time

Re:The combined company

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it would just've crackled and popped.

Re:The combined company

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Supple

Ahem...

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot, the internet's center for pedantry.

Internet is a proper noun.

(See what I did there?)

Sensational title, cheap trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Even for /. this title is a stretch considering it really should read:

How Sun Almost Bought Apple Computer

Same words, less characters, not misleading, factually correct, makes sense in the context of the summary, and doesn't insult the intelligence of all /. readers just to garner eyeballs.

Consider what else was happening in this timeframe

[billybob_jcv]

The Newton was failing to do what the iPhone and iPad later accomplished. If Apple had been sold, would they have continued to invest in a concept that had already disappointed Apple? I think McNealy is right - Sun was focused on Java and building the best platforms to run Oracle databases. Slashdot always thinks it's only about the PCs & consumer devices - but that was not where Sun ever focused their energy. Apple's market would have been very strange territory for Sun.

Eh, not really

[DesScorp]

""NeXT wasn't a "popular" computing company, it built high-end workstations and an object-oriented OS for the scientific and government markets, actually a lot like Sun. NeXT actually did pretty well at this"

Did pretty well? Not exactly. People loved the OS. The hardware, with that expensive-yet-trouble-prone combo optical drive... eh, not so much. Even if the hardware was beloved, there simply wasn't enough of a market in terms of total sales to support what NeXT was spending. They burned through cash at a mind-boggling rate. Jobs spent much of his fortune from Apple on NeXT, and didn't have much to show for it near the end. Eventually the company downsized radically, becoming essentially a small software tools shop, selling off their expensive-yet-stylish factory facilities. There have been entire chapters written about how Jobs was at his most obsessive over things like how the furniture looked at the factory during the period. NeXT, where Jobs was totally in charge of a company for the first time, was essentially a learning experience in how NOT to run a company for him. Considering what was invested and lost in it, NeXT was considered to mostly be a failure. This is why there was such a loud "WTF?" when the public found out just how much Apple paid for NeXT. Buying NeXT? Sure. Buying NeXT for $400 million? At the time it looked insane. People generally thought "Wow, Jobs sure conned them, didn't he?".You're right in that NeXT had an "exit strategy"; having Jobs talk (sucker?) a bigger company into buying them

I use OS X and love it, so you can argue that buying NeXT was great because it gave Apple a foundation for a post-Classic operating system, but let's be honest here. Apple wasn't buying NeXT or an operating system or software tools. In retrospect, Apple was buying Steve Jobs. And it was the best investment they ever made.

Re:Eh, not really

[iluvcapra]

Did pretty well? Not exactly.

Yeah you're right, but then again when you're comparing people to a crowd the likes of Sun, SGI, Sperry, Symbolic, and Wang... :)

I'm reminded of the old Keynes line: "In the long run everybody dies." If I were a C-level exec at NeXT in 1996 and a C-level exec at Sun in 2009 (or an SGI exec in 2006) came back in a time machine and asked to switch, I definitely wouldn't take that offer. Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.

Re:Eh, not really

[Raenex]

Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.

Doesn't add up to me. What did NeXT have, in the final analysis? What does it preside over?

Also, love it, hate it, or "meh", Java is still very big today.

Re:Eh, not really

[aristotle-dude]

Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.

Doesn't add up to me. What did NeXT have, in the final analysis? What does it preside over?

Also, love it, hate it, or "meh", Java is still very big today.

Are you kidding me? You are serious? Let's see. NeXT brought us Open Step which was the first attempt a cross platform Object oriented spec for writing GUI applications but Sun and HP unfortunately abandoned it leaving NeXt Inc in the lurch. Open Step evolved into the Cocoa frameworks which is now used on OS X and iOS. NeXT Step evolved into OS X and iOS. Project Builder evolved into X-Code and Interface builder came over from NeXtStep/Open Steps developer tools.

I would argue that Webobjects has been influential on both .NET ASP and the various Java web development stacks that have come along since. I would also argue that Interface builder and many concepts from Cocoa have inspired VS.NET and .NET functionality.

If not for the Apple/NeXtStep merger, we would all be stuck on windows 2000 UIs running VB and C/C++ applications that crashed often with memory leaks all over the place.

Re:Eh, not really

[Raenex]

If not for the Apple/NeXtStep merger, we would all be stuck on windows 2000 UIs running VB and C/C++ applications that crashed often with memory leaks all over the place.

Oh please. First of all, you can go back to Smalltalk for object-oriented, garbage collected GUIs, and it pulled object-orientation from Simula, garbage collection from Lisp, and GUIs from Doug Engelbart. Variations on these ideas have been "in the air" for a long time.

Anyways, dismissing a company like Sun in favor of NeXT is rather dubious.

Re:Eh, not really

[Jeremi]

First of all, you can go back to Smalltalk for object-oriented, garbage collected GUIs, and it pulled object-orientation from Simula, garbage collection from Lisp, and GUIs from Doug Engelbart. Variations on these ideas have been "in the air" for a long time.

The parent poster wasn't talking about what we "could have been doing", but rather what we "would have been doing". There are always lots of good ideas "in the air", but they don't do any good for anyone unless and until they are successfully brought to market.

And let's face it, without Apple's GUI progress with OS/X, how much motivation would Microsoft have had to improve their own OS? Without OS/X, Microsoft would have just coasted on their monopoly, and 2011's Microsoft OS would probably still look and act very much like Windows 2000.

Re:Eh, not really

[mattack2]

If I were a C-level exec at NeXT in 1996

There wouldn't be a C-level exec at NeXT, only an Objective-C level one.

[rimshot]

Re:Eh, not really

[georgesdev]

Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis.

Look at what Sgi machines helped accomplish, in movies, in petrol research, in car and plane designs, 3D processors, Open Gl, etc ... Sure, you don't see "Sgi technology inside" stickers, but that does not mean it's not present!

Re:Eh, not really

[badkarmadayaccount]

ObjC didn't have GC until recently, still doesn't have compiler memory protection. Oh, and, what do you mean by win2k? The look? Sorry, themes have been invented for a long time, and frankly I (and many others) don't mind the look. You thin Python would have never taken off if it hadn't been for Apple.

McNealy's a friggin' moron.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

"If we had just grabbed the Intel Pentium chip and done a one-way and two-way pizza box with Solaris on it, Linux never would have happened. And we would have hit that whole next wave that was post-2000 and we would have had all the little startups.

McNealy forgets that Linux was a labor of love. If Solaris had shipped on commodity x86 hardware from Sun, that wouldn't have changed the game. The initial userbase behind Linux were the hackers who had been doing work on it in university and in their spare time. When it came for dot-coms to hit the web, everyone already knew Linux. Even if Sun hardware was cheap, no one knew Solaris.

Re:McNealy's a friggin' moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

When it came for dot-coms to hit the web, everyone already knew Linux. Even if Sun hardware was cheap, no one knew Solaris.

Are you out of your fucking mind? Were you even working during the dot.com boom? Sun was ubiquitous. We had hundreds of millions worth of Sun hardware floating around in the environment in which I worked during that era. If anything, it was the old school UNIX admins that architected the infrastructure of the initial boom, not a bunch of wet behind the ears young pricks. Linux in 1999 was still a cosmic fucking joke; THE answer to free *NIX like OS at that point was BSD, most notably FreeBSD and NetBSD.

Re:McNealy's a friggin' moron.

[Rakarra]

While the AC is flat-out wrong about the only free UNIX option in the late 90s being BSD (no, BSD was on very few peoples' radar), non-windows web startups were ALL about Solaris.

Database backend? Solaris, often paired with Oracle. Oracle was overkill for a startup? Doesn't matter, most startups were not wise with how they spent their money and had visions of making it big overnight, so they designed big.
Java-based middleware? Solaris.
Web front-end? Usually still Solaris, occasionally Linux (it was starting to get the reputation that that was what it could be good at).

"Screwed it up"?

[CAIMLAS]

Who's to say that Sun wouldn't have come out with something functionally similar but less-Apple? That's not a bad thing: Sun technology has always been awesome and useful.

I feel assured by Sun's awesomeness at the time that, if they'd bought Apple, they'd have taken the Newton concept and turned it into something incredible and usable. Sun was/is great at hardware design, hardware utilization, and simplified user interfaces. The Palm hegemony of the time wasn't really so awesome that Sun couldn't have taken them on, I don't think.

Re:"Screwed it up"?

[JSBiff]

If Sun was so awesome, and run so well, why do they no longer exist?

Re:"Screwed it up"?

[CAIMLAS]

Bad marketing and poor vision. Had they put focus behind certain projects (OpenSolaris, VirtualBox) they could easily be competing with both the bigger SAN providers and Citrix/VMware on the virtualization fronts.

Apple prices would've fit well into their portfolio, though.

Re:"Screwed it up"?

[thogard]

Sun thought they could sell large systems yet they never made one. The E10k was from Cray, other large systems were from SGI. Their current high end systems are from Fujitsu. Sun makes cool low end systems but they lost the plot. They decided any idiot could manage solaris 10 and built in stupidity that allows hacks on the startup and port listening code and ran off lots of their core supporters who are still asking for new hardware to run Solaris 9. They got ignored and most sold their stock and that killed sun. Maybe Oracle will see the light but they can't even sell basic software only support contracts to allow access to the downloads that used to be included in the cost of buying the over priced hardware.

jPads anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today we would have jPods and jPads and be surfing the web with HotJava. I guess an iMac25K would have been interesting to see. I wonder if they would have come in five colours?

technological masturbation

[Kenshin]

Isn't it wonderful? that we, in today's age, have people actually proud of their own ignorance. Simply magnificent.

There's a vast difference between "being proud of one's own ignorance" and "understanding what one's needs are".

I have a MacBook Pro. I love it. I just want to get down to business, not masturbate with shell scripts and config files to boost my sense of self worth. That's not saying that I don't understand how a computer functions, far from it, but rather that I don't feel the need to incorporate needlessly complex things into my daily life.

But anyway, when the time comes to fuck around, I can open-up the terminal on here and access a certified UNIX environment...

Re:technological masturbation

[Draek]

Technological masturbation is feeling content with having the ability to do something while lacking the knowledge to take advantage of it, since at that point features stop being such and start being nothing more than bulletpoints in a brochure.

Otherway round

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point, around 2004-2005, I thought it would have made lot of sense Apple to buy Sun.

That would have been extremely good thing from servers and Sun software sides, true winners would have been both companies owners, employees and customers. It's a shame Apple did not see the opportunity. Sun would have darn good servers they didnt (good for implementing those server farms for mobile stuff they now build) both using it themselves and providing it to customers like telcos etc. This Oracle deal is real sour, only winner is Larry and his investors.

How about if Apple had bought Sun recently

[southlander]

... thus giving Apple the *control*. Ironically, Oracle seems to be proving that what Apple has done on the consumer side (closed platform resulting in better end user experience), might also be possible in the enterprise by tight integration of enterprise software and hardware. So maybe Apple should have bought Sun at some point here recently and got a leg up in the enterprise as well.

Everyone...

[Anonymous Coward]

...be sure to thank MS for keeping Apple around back then.

No really, he would've have.

[Anonymous Coward]

As with most mergers of companies with radically different culture, there would've been a massive exodus following the merger. If there was someone leading the exodus, they would've form a new company called Orang... no, that was taken at the time; (Orange Micro) maybe Pineapple, or something. Jobs would not have had his second coming, Woz would not have remained an Apple employee (to this date.) iPot.. iPod, iPorn... iPhone would not have been.

Steve's reality distortion field?

[Weedhopper]

Jobs' has nothing on McNealy. Sun came up with TCP/IP? Sun open sourced it? Sun invented open source? Linux wouldn't have happened if they 1U'd Solaris on Pentiums?

WTF was McNealy smoking? He's got a completely warped understanding of his own company's history. If this is what he truly believes, then I'm starting to come around to those who have been saying that McNealy and co were just lucky - bystanders who happened to be at the right place at the right time and not really the pioneers they'd like to think they are.

Mod +5 Insightful.

[scrimmer]

I wish I had mod points. Catchy metaphors aside, what you say is interestingly prophetic, and given the lack of moderation so far, it is difficult for many to view as a valid point.

We'd be all actually using thin clients by now.

[moxsam]

Oh, just wait a minute there? Aren't we?

Lesson learnt

[RewriteQuran]

US must break big companies into smaller companies.

How I bought Sun (...

[blibbo]

...and why I love parenthetical asides that contradict the main title. PS I didn't really buy Sun)

Lets see.......

[DSP-9]

No iPods - (slightly) lesser digital music penetration No iPhone - No app craziness, maybe no Android (I think Google bought Android just to compete with Apple). iTunes - Record labels largely sticking to physical media Of course, none of that multi-touch hype would have happened. MacOS - Windows would have been uglier, because MS tried to go the X way by beffing up Vista's eye candy.

OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse: Without the return of Jobs, I suspect there would have been no NeXT, I mean OS X, on Apple hardware.

Scenario 1: People like me who use OS X because it's UNIX would have gone to linux and linux would have finally really turned the corner. (Unlikely)
Scenario 2: With absolutely no competition Windows becomes even worse than it is today.
Scenario 3: With absolutely no competition, the federal antitrust laws finally get enforced, MS gets broken up, and there are several decent OSes to choose from on open hardware today.

wouldn't we just have NeXTphones and NeXTPads

[dwightk]

or whatever the name would be based on who Jobs could convince to buy NeXT?

you know, assuming all sorts of variables

Creativity is as creativity does

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think that Jobs alone came up with this stuff? Jobs and Woz helped to create a company where creativity flourishes. Jobs served as a conduit. In all likelihood, Sun would have eventually brought Jobs back because I think that's what Jobs wanted all along. And the same products would have been produced regardless. The internal culture and ideas that it produces are not greatly affected by upper management. I think the Apple culture would be hard to destroy.

How about Motorola?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Sun bought Apple, maybe Ed Zander wouldn't have taken over at Motorola and done damage that we still haven't recovered from...