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How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor
smaxp writes In 2007, Sony's supply chain lessons, the network effect from the shift to Intel architecture, and a better OS X for developers combined to renew the Mac's growth. The network effects of the Microsoft Wintel ecosystem that Rappaport explained 20 years ago in the Harvard Business Review are no longer a big advantage. By turning itself into a premium PC company with a proprietary OS, Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
Heavy on words and opinion, light on proof. Mostly just the authors "thoughts" on how Apple's PC growth came to be what it is today...
No idea why this has a Sony image with the post, the article is in large part about Apple and doesn't provide any proof of what exactly Apple consumed in Sony's supply chain.
1 out of 5. Would not read again.
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer
How dare you bring silly things like facts into Apple bashing. Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years. Even Dell's lowest-end desktops only sell for $100 less.
Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599.
...except no one really uses the FreeBSD part.
All of the relevant end user interactions are with the proprietary non-FreeBSD part. MacOS is much like Windows in that it's a proprietary subsystem riding on top of some other core OS. Apple benefits from the generous free work of the FreeBSD developers while presenting what is pretty much a completely proprietary system.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Pay no attention to the fact that Apple has sold an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for the last 9 years.
They have sold the entry-level Mac Mini for $499 for 1 week. Before that, it was $599.
It used to be $499, then went up to $599 for a few years, now back to $499. Which is all beside the original point: there is not a high barrier to entry for the Mac. And it has a lot of additional value to a lot of people: simple for the beginner, and an entire open-source UNIX for the advanced user, combined with high-quality parts and great service, a big ecosystem of software and services, and almost no viruses or threats to worry about, and a lot of folks (me included) think life is too short to deal with Windows at home.
E pluribus unum
There was a time when the PPC was significantly better at multi-media processing tasks than most other processors. And Apple was historically a strong contender in graphic arts and video editing even before the PPC days. Those two things combined are why all those tatooed hippies were willing to pay so much for an Apple machine -- it actually *did* make them much more productive because the PPC hardware was good at media, the media apps were well done, and the connectivity to still and video cameras was much less hassle compared to the baling wire, bubble gum, and prayer it took to get video into a Windows machine.
Eventually Intel added various kinds of SIMD and media instructions to boost media performance, IBM's development tempo on the PPC fell behind and they weren't releasing new chips often enough, and the IBM fab process made the PPC chips rather power hungry. (A friend of mine had a PPC laptop, and has a bad back. One night he tweaked his back, took some gnarly pain meds for it, fell asleep with a PPC laptop on his legs, and ended up in the emergency room for burn treatment. They were that hot.)
Apple put a lot of work into making OS X portable. That went on for a long time and the effort must not be discounted. The first pay-off was being able to switch away from PPC -- to anything they wanted. Intel won that one. But they can build for other chips quite easily, witness tablet/laptops. Apple could decide tomorrow to switch away from Intel, and it would be relatively pain-free. That is the real lesson here -- portability pays dividends. Apple was on PPC in part because they were chasing good media processing -- Apple went to Intel because they were still chasing good media processing. Apple's new A8/M8 chips in the iPhone 6 have good media processing. There's a theme here....
1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.
Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
A brief history of the final days of PPC at Apple:
PPC. Always a day late and a dollar too much. Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify to IBM to spend more on making foundries and there were always supply problems.
IBM was not concerned with power management at the time, and wanted to build bigger and bigger server class hardware. This was before people actually realized one of the huge costs in building an actual large data center was going to be a major cost compared to hardware and flooring (i.e. the 19 inch racks needed to hold the large iron). It wasn't until Enron emerged from bankruptcy in 2004 and started selling off pieces of itself, culminating with the sale of its last real non-debt instrument asset, Prisma, to Ashmore Energy, that the PG&E contract rate handwriting was on the wall, that energy prices were going to be high in California - where most of the data centers live - for the next 10 years to pay for the long term contracts for natural gas, from Texas, for the power generation plants.
By then, it was far too late for IBM to correct its miscalculation and start producing reasonably power efficient chips in time for Apple.
Apple woke up not too coincidentally when PPC had no viable path for mobile and it's probably one of the best moves Jobs ever made, and in hindsight, most common sense. Surprisingly it took him nearly a decade to shed that inherited weight.
I disagree. Apple had already been in talks with P.A. Semi over the PA6T processor to have a G5 class processor without massive liquid cooling requirements for use in mobile.
The G5 processors from IBM were already looking at massive cooling overhead so that they could survive being overclocked to desktop speeds, and P.A. Semi had the answer Apple needed, but the T.I. foundries were unable to accommodate the necessary feature size shrink to get them to where they needed to be in time.
It was either lose a product cycle (or two), while a willing foundry was being searched out and contracted - which likely meant IBM, at a premium cost, or Intel, which does foundries correctly - or jump ship to Intel. This was at a time Steve was in the middle of his Pancreatic cancer, and it looked like he wouldn't be able to push through to a legacy that would survive his death, without a radical change.
It's a testament to the belief of Apple in the P.A. Semi team that they still bought the company, even though the commitment to an Intel switch, meant that the PA6T and the PWRficient were effectively ruled out. At the time, there were massive problems in the memory bandwidth of ARM processors, and the iPhone was being worked on. So they set the P.A. Semi team, as an "acquihire" rather than a "bring the PPC design in house" play to solving that problem. The Apple CPU still beats the Tegra 4, which is the next closest CPU in memory bandwidth, by about a factor of 4 (8, if you count the 64 bit parts).
So it was a chain of events, and Steve's impending mortality, more than anything else, that killed the PPC at Apple, not that there wasn't a path forward into the mobile marketplace (and Apple had in fact built G4-based iPad prototypes, among other things), and not that Intel was a better path forward onto the supply chain. For Intel, it offered a technology demonstrator opportunity that they needed, because no one was pushing their top end tech until one release cycle behind, and for Steve it was a way to ensure his legacy, while getting back at both IBM and Motorola (it's no mistake that the Intel announcement happened so soon after FreeScale divested themselves of the Intel version of their CodeWarrior product), which he took.
Obviously, my view on some of the details is skewed by where I was in the company at the time; I'm certain other people saw other parts of the elephant, so to speak, but that's roughly how I remember the hallway discussion.
One of the great tragedies, I think, is that there was no Official Apple Historian, with Steve's confidence with regard to secrecy of projects, to document the history of Apple so that we could look at it in clear hindsight.
Seriously, Apple sold 5.5 million intel-pc's.... It's nothing on total pc sales. They took a great OS (freebsd) closed it down, put huge payed-garden-walls around it and made it idiot-proof and dumb enough for a 2 button mouse.... Of course there will be a couple million idiots buying it... Even including the apple-tax, for their customers, it's either paying up or learning to handle 3 mouse buttons. I don't think we can expect the intellectual effort of understanding 3 buttons, let alone a terminal, from someone who is paying for this. And that is just fine. It's good to see that the 'special' people also can use a 'computer'. But please... Don't go pretending that apple created something really good or unique with this rebranding of intel cpu's and freebsd.
I'm assuming this was a trolling attempt but I'll take the bait.
OSX is *NOT* rebranded FreeBSD. It's rebranded NeXTStep/OpenStep where they updated the userland w/ the FreeBSD userland to replace the ancient 4.2BSD underpinnings. It is a direct descendent of quite possibly one of the greatest workstation OS's of all time. And your comment on 2 vs. 3 buttons is so retarded I'm not going to even bother. Grow up and actually learn something before you spout off about things you know nothing about.
Iphone development in 2007 driving Mac sales? Probably not. iPhone didn't even get an app store until 2008.
Boot Camp was a feature specific to Intel-based macs. People using Parallels was more common though. Prior to the Intel Mac, nobody in their right mind depended on Virtual PC, it was way too slow.
I think being able to run Windows software at acceptable performance levels was the safety net a lot of people needed to invest in a Mac. That ability was also critical to Mac adoption in the workplace. I also think the increasing prevalence of Windows malware helped convert some folks who were bitten too many times.