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Schiller Says Apple Is the Last PC Maker From the Mac Era, Forgets About HP
An anonymous reader writes "Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, recently claimed that Apple is the only computer company left from the early days of the Mac. Unfortunately for him, HP still exists. "Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone," Schiller told Macworld in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus. 'We're the only one left.' I'm sorry Apple, but when exactly did HP declare bankruptcy? We contacted an HP spokesperson for a statement on Apple's ridiculous claim and were pointed to its timeline history page."
Wow, he really must be the spawn of satan. How dare he make a mistake. We must hate on Apple as hard as we can.
Isn't IBM still around
Comparing today's HP to the HP of the 80s, I'm inclined to side with Schiller.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
The company that started in the garage in the picture is now called Aligent. HP that is in business now was a spin off that has little to do with the company started by the founders of HP
Who do you think manufactures Apple's computers, if not the likes of Foxconn and Pegatron?
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
and they are still making computers...
Michael Dell started assembling and selling PCs from his dorm room in 1984, the same year the first Macintosh was made.
... HP didn't release its first PC until 1980. Apple was releasing computers years earlier. So Apple would have been correct if they said "PCs".
Actually, according to their history page, HP coined the term "Personal Computer" in 1968 for a large programmable desktop calculator (that looks like a prop from the set of Space:1999).
A marketing guy said something untrue? SAY IT ISN'T SO!
I'm guessing the only reason this story is here is so they can rack a couple OMG APPLE IS SO ARROGANT FUCK THEM posts from 7-digit newcomers around here.
God I miss the pre-Dice Slashdot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Ouch, hurts to be reminded that IBM stopped. Or to think back on the short lived but glorious Commodore and Atari. Still have one of each.
01/01/01
They just split the company yet again, and the electronics test/measurement operations (the descendant of the original HP business) got rebranded as "Keysight Technologies":
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...
A company called "Hewlett-Packard" still exists, but they sell printers and PCs. Nothing to do with the company that Bill and Dave started in the Palo Alto garage....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I clicked on that timeline link, using my iPad. Thing is, that page doesn't work well with touch devices. Schiller probably did the same thing I did, and naturally came to the conclusion HP's history ended in 1966.
#DeleteChrome
IBM doesn't make PCs anymore. Sold to Lenovo.
Neither does DEC or Sun. They are dead and sold.
None of these qualify as counter argument.
Foxconn
Megatron
Alpha Trion
Pegatron
Computron
#DeleteChrome
It doesn't matter much what he was talking about because it was incorrect.
Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Panasonic were Japanese electronics manufacturers making MSX-based personal computers in 1983 before the Mac was released and they're still manufacturing PCs today.
I can think of a couple of other manufacturers who are still going, and were producing machines at the the time of original Mac. One of these is a major name, another is obscure, even in it's own country. The first is of course Toshiba, who were producing CP/M systems in 1980, if not earlier. The other is the British manufacturer Research Machines, who produce exclusively for the UK educational sector. Their RM 380Z, another CP/M box, appeared in 1977. RM are still producing PCs for education today, but I believe that they will soon be moving out of hardware whilst continuing with their software and support services.
Well if you think about Apples market that home personal computer. HP claims to have entered the home personal computer market in 1995 with the HP Pavilion PC. So while they did make "computers" before that, if you look at the home PC, it was 1995. So the question begs, when the statement was made, did he mean home PC market?
Does that mean Apple is the next to go?
Granted, it had a name change, but it's been around since "Mac days."
Dell (1984), IBM (1981, now owned by Lenovo), Gateway (1985, now owned by Acer), and Acer (1981).
But go on, tell us more about how you are the only ones left from that time making personal computers. And how you created the GUI. And the portable music player. And the smartphone. And the tablet computer. Oh yes, tell us more...
Cray is still around building computers...
http://www.cray.com/Products/P...
They installed their first system at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976
I thought the story was a reasonable one. While I do miss the pre-Dice days, the days I really miss are the pre-Y2K days. Taco commentary, movie reviews, "quickies," Hemos, Cowboy Neal poll options... I just enjoyed the by-the-seat-of-their-pants feel. And that has been gone for quite some time. Certainly before you registered. ;-)
The quote is
"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone, we're the only one left. We're still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over." said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing
As far as making personal computers before Apple and still doing it, I think it's a stretch to count HP because of a calculator, and I'm not even counting HP's attempt to get out of the PC market recently. The HP-150 that came out after they started working on the Mac... is that even in the same ballgame as the 1984 Mac, I don't think so.
Apple started on the Mac in 1980 from what I can tell.
The nitpicking is really skewing his point - HP is ALSO still around because they've had to reinvent themselves over and over.
And how is this relevant? BTW did you know that PC's way back in the days of Mac used standard components? It is only Mac that uses stupid custom components giving them some of the worst repair ratings in the industry.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"IBM doesn't make PCs anymore."
They still build computers...workstations, servers, business systems...just like they did before Woz cobbled together some Fairchild opAmps around 1974. Which incidentally was a copy of a device from Popular Electronics.
Oh please no, dont tell me that Packard Hell is still around.
It's been years since I saw one of them and the memories still bring on cold sweats.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
HP doesn't have the tradition of a "Computer Company". They make computer hardware, but that doesn't put them in the same league as Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Oracle. Same goes for Dell and Lenovo.
Full disclosure, I've purchased 2 HP laptops in the last two years, so I'm not bashing on HP. They made/make the best calculators and they used to make electronic test equipment. Those were rugged (as much as test equipment can be outside Fluke), accurate and high performance. They also used to make the best laser printers you could buy ( at a reasonable cost). Moving into the commodity PC market and selling off their test equipment branch was a huge mistake. They've had some really bad leadership over the years and they seem to keep killing their best products just at the point when it could really make a positive difference for them.
They're not a computer company, they just happen make computer hardware...this month...next month may be something else.
If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not), then you might as well rule out Apple too.
They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto. Of course that's pretty much true all the way back to the original Mac, except for a brief period when Jobs wasn't around.
Indeed, arguably Apple isn't around either. They got assimilated by Jobs's NeXT which then changed their name, same way Southern Bell is now AT&T. The original AT&T isn't around. (Of course, the Jobs Reality Distortion Field was such that Apple paid him to be assimilated.)
On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day, then add Radio Shack and Texas Instruments. Arguably, TI still does make PCs, given what some of their hand-held calculators are capable of.
-- Alastair
If PC means "Pocket Calculator" :)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Sony Viao L-series all-in-one desktops PCs.
http://www.sony.co.uk/product/...
Fujitsu (no longer Fujitsu-Siemens) Esprimo desktop PCs.
http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/prod...
Panasonic tablet-based PCs running Windows 8.1
http://www.panasonic.com/busin...
I didn't see anything about a personal computer qualifier in the FA. Schiller said "computers".
Wrong. If you go to the ORIGINAL SOURCE of the quote, a story at MacWorld, you find that Schiller is in fact talking about PCs:
"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone," said Philip Schiller, Appleâ(TM)s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus Thursday. "Weâ(TM)re the only one left. We're still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over."
That may or may not be an accurate opinon, none the less, the subject here is PCs.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
HP purchased Compaq and this became their PC line.
Prior to that, they had their own PC line.
> True. But Apple doesn't use standard components except the HDD.
They look standard enough on a PCI bus. They just aren't arranged in a terribly standardized (or maintainable) way.
This is why Linux and Windows have no problem running on Macs.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Vaio's have been around for a while now.
They're still around and own Gatewy as well. While Schiller was probably correct in the sense most of the dozens of PC makers of any size from the early Mac era have come and gone he was not correct in saying none still exist. Of course, what constitutes still existing is a bit vague since many have been acquired or exit but have exited the PC business.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm not defending outsourcing or bad labor practices, but there's a big difference between **assembly** and **design**
Parent is right to say that HP's computers are designed and assembled in China w/ a logo slapped on them. That's different than what Apple does.
As someone else pointed out below, the architecture is designed by Apple's engineers in Cuppertino. They issue *specifications* that manufacturers must meet.
Big difference.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The HP 9830A introduced in 1972 was their first programmable desktop computer with a full keyboard. The programmable 9100 calculator from 1968 was technically a computer too but lacked a full alphanumeric keyboard. Thus predating the Apple I by some years.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
True. But Apple doesn't use standard components except the HDD. And even they are phased out for custom SSDs. All Macs are designed and engineered by Apple in Cupertino, incl the logic board. Quanta and Foxconn assemble them. They don't create them.
HP PCs on the other hand uses standard components like everyone else.
The only non standard part Apple use is the motherboard, everything else is pretty much standard parts, memory, HDD, CPU's, GPU's etc are all stock standard parts available in whatever flavour machine you want Apple or not.
You need to get out more. While the Fujitsu and Panasonic ones can be tough to find, Sony PC's and laptops are in just about every major electronics store.
... so technically dead. From cutting edge, high quality products to scammy consumer crap in 2 decades. It was amazing to watch.
The only non standard part Apple use is the motherboard, everything else is pretty much standard parts, memory, HDD, CPU's, GPU's etc are all stock standard parts available in whatever flavour machine you want Apple or not.
That's not true. They usually use modified versions of standard components. The current MacBook Pro has the RAM and SSD soldered onto the motherboard, and while the CPU is standard it has a custom connector and cooling system that has forced enough physical differences in the chip that it cannot be replaced. Most macs these days don't even have a GPU, they rely on intel's latest integrated ones which are finally pretty decent.
The Mac Pro is the only model Apple sells with fully standard CPU... but the GPU is non-standard, it's made by AMD but is a weird hybrid of two different GPUs that AMD sells, and Apple is the only company who can use it... one of the two GPUs in the mac pro even has a socket on it so you can plug in a bloody PCIe SSD card. On the GPU! They ran out of PCIe lanes on the processor, so the SSD has to share the lane of the second GPU which is actually a sensible choice since it's highly unlikely you will be maxing out the PCIe card (1.5GB/second) at the same time as doing serious computations on the GPU. That definitely is not a standard part.
On iOS apple builds everything themselves, they are famously known to have over 1,000 engineers working on just the CPU for the iPhone. They haven't gone that far with the mac but it's standard procedure to take components from other companies like AMD and Intel and Qualcomm but then modify to suit their own needs.
I *do* think that the content was better back then. I really felt like Rob not only had a vested interest, but really put part of himself into the site. I strongly feel that Roblimo's entrance was a direct correlation with a diminishment in fun. I can't put my finger on it, but something about the guy just rubs me the wrong way -- though if I'm honest, it probably started with the Alex Chiu story (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/06/01/1250257/ask-internet-icon-alex-chiu). And damn, but that was 2001.
Time's flying.
I know I'm showing my age, but when I was little, computers were these huge things that sat in climate-controlled rooms. Unless that kind of hardware is now removed from the definition of "computer", I can think of a few pre-Apple manufacturers that are still around, like IBM, NCR, and Unisys.
I've forgotten about HP too. I think we all should.
ôó
From HP's own timeline: "1995, HP enters the home computing market with the HP Pavilion PC." Which is more than 10 years after the launch of the Macintosh. So, the point is still valid.
Must not be so high up there that the joke goes over your head :).
HP claims that the HP-85 in 1980 was their entry into the "personal computer" market. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/about... . That's two years after the launch of the Macintosh project inside Apple, though four years before the Mac shipped (January 1984). And that "personal computer" was so obscure nobody remembers it other than whoever made that page for HP. HP didn't introduce a personal computer that sold decently well until many years after the Mac shipped.
Remember, Apple's founders left HP because HP didn't want to make personal computers. So I'm pretty sure Apple hasn't forgotten that HP existed - they also remember that HP dropped the ball on personal computers, and didn't enter the market until after they started working on the Mac.
That being said, I think Schiller is referring to the market consolidation (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/10/10/pc-market-consolidating-around-top-3-vendors/) where there aren't any of the old school PC companies.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
After all, Radio Shack introduced its first line of PCs in 1977. Sure, they stopped making their own clones in the mid-90s, but they still kept on selling them.
Don't give a shit if they started making computers in 1822, would still not waste my money on one of their polished, overpriced turds.
And the very best user satisfaction ratings, year after year.
Seriously?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
...if you were to loosely identify video game cabinets and consoles as computers (which of course they are.)
I agree, Schiller's comments were pretty asinine.
He said "Every company that made computers when we started the Mac"
Development of the Mac started long before 1984.
It's not just a different clock speed, it has different memory architecture and so on. It has dual high-end workstation GPUs (which normally cost around $6,000) with some of the more expensive parts of the GPU replaced with cheaper consumer grade gear (bringing the price down to around $1,000 or thereabouts). For example, non-ECC memory. And if you boot the mac pro into windows you can't even use the cards properly, because AMD's drivers are not compatible at all and Apple's drivers for bootcamp only do a half assed job of supporting them. Enough to boot and run windows perfectly but not enough to actually use the GPUs to their full potential.
Wrong. The Pavilion series was introduced in 1995. 11 years after the Macintosh.
The fact that the Pavilion was introduced in 1995 proves the claim, from my posting, that "Prior to [HP's purchase of Compaq], [HP] had their own PC line" false? I don't think so.
(No, I didn't claim, in any posting, that HP was in the PC business when the Mac was introduced.)
HP vectra wasn't until 10/85
Which was even earlier than 1995, so it even further emphasizes that the title of the comment to which I responded, that "HP PCs are from original Compaq", is at best misleading (HP had PCs before the purchase of Compaq).
If you want to say "HP didn't enter the PC market until the Mac came out", mention the HP Vectra, not Compaq; HP's purchase of Compaq is utterly irrelevant to HP's entry into the PC market.
Speaking of SGI, they're still selling hardware (despite being sold and rebranded ... as ... themself?)
I'd count SGI for the sake of this argument.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
And how is this relevant? BTW did you know that PC's way back in the days of Mac used standard components? It is only Mac that uses stupid custom components giving them some of the worst repair ratings in the industry.
I know, I know.
It's terrible that instead of buying a part on some website everyone on Slashdot has ever heard for cheap, and then doing the work myself, I insist on going to a physical store, having them order the part, and then having them install it themselves. It's almost like I don't want to be the computer equivalent of the guy who does his own car repairs.
Back in the real world, while you are arguing with FedEx over the location of some part I don't have to learn the name of; I will be getting work done. I will probably pay for the privilege, but not as much as you think because I;m very good at convincing the Apple Store gurus to throw in the work for free.
1 Soldering something doesn't make it different. 2 Apple does not make or design wafers for the Macintosh. feature request != design
Apples SVP of Marketing indulged in a bit of uninformed hyperbole, surely this means Apple is doomed. DOOMED I tell you!
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Speaking of SGI, they're still selling hardware (despite being sold and rebranded ... as ... themself?)
I'd count SGI for the sake of this argument.
I guess in a lot of these cases we end up on a semantic discussion of what constitutes a 'company.'
Is it the people? Jobs=dead; Wozniak=gone; Wayne=long gone.
Is it their primary business?
In that case, Apple is now a phone company.
http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/...
http://files.shareholder.com/d...
Fujitsu brand is still common in the UK. Possibly related to their relationship to old UK giant ICL- which (I think) used to sell rebadged Fujitsu PCs, and was later taken over by Fujitsu.
In any case, they're still a common enough brand. I have a Vista-era Fujitsu laptop on my desk right now, albeit not in working order.
that Apple Is the Last PC Maker From the Mac Era that is *actually* worth it.
This reminds me of the 90s and 2000s when Apple and Apple fans would incorrectly state how Apple's digital video was the first when http://www.truevision.com/ with their Targa boards, were the true pioneers of digital video.
Well played, sir. Well played.
I use a company Apple laptop, must say it's very solid and robust compared to other leading laptop brands, and I sure appreciate having BSD on there as opposed to the other alternative my employer would have handed me, a windows thing. Don't have to worry about driver configuration issues either, the hardware designed for an OS and driver set. I drive two other screens with it on my desk, nice to have three total screens that work well together. Major softwares in the business/professional world can run on it, for some things there just aren't alternatives yet in the open source world. Now at home I run GNU/Linux, on the two systems under my desk nvidia and radeon driver issues sometimes a pain. But there are things I have to do for work that just can't run on that platform, so I have to fire up windows 7 under vmware workstation. ew.
... of Apple's historical representation patents.
The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer of all time and you can still buy a new model today, so suck it Mac.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
HP took a shitty terminal product, and made it run a DOS, in 1981. It was a PoC and the salesforce blew it off. I know, I was there. Their PCs where nothing more than a collection of off the shelf parts, no innovation. No better than Dell or no-name Asian junk. Nothing innovative has come out of HP computer systems since 1980. Laser printers were OEMed from Canon, PCs were just clones, UNIX stuff was mediocre and overpriced. The great company that I had started with when I graduated from college became a collections of old, bitter men and people who couldn't get a job anywhere else. Good luck, Meg.
That's because the current "HP" company is only the former PC division which doesn't have any heritage before the development of PCs from the original HP, now known as Keysight.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's merged so many times with other corporations that you really can't say it "still exists".
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Write English or stfu&gfto.
Go Fuck The Oatmeal?
HP still exists, but do they still make computers? All their systems that I know about are made by someone else like Quanta or Foxconn and have HP logos slapped on them. Does anyone know of systems HP actually makes?
I'm not sure - do they manufacture their Integrity servers themselves, or are those also made by contract manufacturers?
I would point out that technically Apple doesn't make PC's any more either(and perhaps never did), they are Intel(PC) boxes running a bsdSkin(OSX) rather than Windows.
They only thing that differentiates them from, say, Dell, is that they adopt closed standards and have vertical branding(but certainly not vertical integration)...
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, Intel/IBM/Motorola(the three company's that have supplied them with chips) are essentially the only "PC" makers in the world, and are still going strong.
Apple and almost every other brand just make the boxes containing the said company components.
Compaq computer starts shipping in March 1983.
http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
However, it was started in 1982, after Apple started the Macintosh project.
That's because the current "HP" company is only the former PC division which doesn't have any heritage before the development of PCs from the original HP, now known as Keysight.
Actually, the current "HP" company is "the former PC division" plus "the former printer division" plus "the former server division", and "the former server division" has heritage from the original HP going back at least as far as the HP 9000 workstation/server line from the mid 1980's (the HP 2100/HP 1000 and HP 3000 lines are dead, so I won't count their heritage, going back to 1966 and 1973, respectively).
At some point in the future, the products from the first line of products HP ever had (electronic test and measurement) will be offered by a company named Keysight but, for now, that's still Agilent. However, treating electronic test and measurement equipment as the only think that's "the real HP" is rather arbitrary, given that computers were a significant part of HP's business, as in "about half of their sales", at least as far back as 1980.
(I presume nobody here is so ignorant as to think HP was solely a test and measurement company, with no involvement in the computer business whatsoever, until they started making IBM-compatible PCs.)
did you realize that HP didnt start selling PC's until 1995... over 10 years after the macintosh was released?
I guess the folks who did that timeline didn't consider the HP Vectra, released in 1995, very important, perhaps because it wasn't aimed at "the home computing market", which is what the timeline says HP entered in 1995. (I also guess they didn't consider usability very important, either, unless it works better than it did on Safari.)
And, as long as we're beating up marketoons making misleading claims, HP didn't "create RISC architecture" all by themselves in 1986; the first Berkeley RISC processor and the first Stanford MIPS processors were developed in the early 1980's, and IBM were working on the 801 in the late 1970's. Perhaps the first PA-RISC-based HP 3000 was the first commercial RISC-based machine, but that's a different matter.
This is sad nerd semantics, even for Slashdot. A rational human can tell by the context that Phil Schiller was talking about “personal computers” when he said “computers.” Today, Ford makes “computers” but Ford has never made PC's. Same with HP in 1984.
Further, what was HP in 1984 was sold off around 2000 or so. Trying to say there is continuity between the 1984 HP and today's HP is a real stretch. It's like today's AT&T — same name, totally different company.
And the stupidest part of this is that Steve Wozniak used to work for HP, and offered the Apple II to HP and was turned down. HP took a pass on PC's and that didn't change until the 1990's when HP was just another Mac cloner.