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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.
Slow news day?
Sorry, cannot understand summary.
They took a great OS (freebsd) closed it down
Last I checked, I could get the FreeBSD source still, has that changed? In fact, last I checked I could even get it from Apple (including a bunch of their modifications), has that changed? In fact last I checked, Apple pay rolled writing an entire new compiler tool chain that is now FreeBSD's default compiler, and opened it under the BSD license.
Why is it that people think Apple is somehow a company set against open source?
While the premise of TFA is incorrect, Apple certainly has created a quality product - at least as good as upper end offerings from most mainstream manufacturers. Yes, it has a marketing cachet that, to most of us, is kind of annoying, but that is the real world.
You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer (remember, the development system is free). No, you cannot scrape the components for a Wintel supercomputer out of a dumpster but there apparently is a large enough population with enough money to actually pay for things they use.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I say this not as a consumer, but a certified Apple technician.
There's no premium in Apple products anymore. Only Ive's obsession with "thin" devices, sacrificing tons of functionality and potential resources at every turn. Case in point, the original iMac G5 machines were wonderfully designed (yes, I'm aware of all the problems they had with the G5 and capacitors) internally. Totally modular, with a great deal being user serviceable. Today's iMac is sealed with foam around the LCD, the same foam you need to cut out and replace every time you open the machine. Likewise, the LCD is now fused to the front glass where before it used to sit just behind it, with the glass being attached to magnets so it was removable with a pair of Apple approved suction cups.
All the laptops are basically disposable now. Soldered in RAM, soldered CPU, soldered GPU, no optical drives, proprietary SSDs. We replace Retina logic boards on a weekly basis now due to failed RAM. A keyboard replacement requires swapping out the entire lower half of the chassis, and a web cam failure means replacing the entire LCD screen.
Apple products are overpriced disposable garbage. The only thing "premium" about them is their insistence on using milled aluminum for their chassis, but even that comes at a huge price- most of the systems aren't very structurally sound, which we've already seen with the iPhone 6 and 6+. They don't even have the "premium" software anymore- I can't tell you how many customers come in here complaining about perpetual updates that change everything (iOS 7), and more recently we've had a ton of complaints and downgrade requests from 10.10 because it's hard to look at.
IMHO; unless Apple smartens the fuck up in the next ~2 years, people are going to start losing interest in their products. This form-over-function thing has gone way too far on the hardware and their recent war on good user interfaces has turned their "premium" experience into a muddled bland mess of white space and blurry fonts.
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end
Amusing goalpost shifting. The claim was that there was a "high barrier to entry" which is plainly false as their entry-level Mac Mini is not much more than the very lowest-end i3 desktops from other companies. Also, the Mac Mini does have an i5 vs i3 which gives you a faster CPU and GPU. So you do get something for the "premium" of a whopping $100.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
Maybe so, but irrelevant to what I was being responded to. $499 is not a high barrier to entry. Unless one is going to claim that Dell's prices are a high barrier to entry when 31 of their 35 current desktops cost $499 or more as well.
Nearly all of the development tools of Linux are available on OSX via ports, brew or simply compiling oneself. Even fairly advanced stuff like valgrind. There is no shortage of cross platform GUI toolkit like Qt.
In what way is OSX crippled as a dev box ?
Reinforcing your point, I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want. Bonus points for being lightweight and high performance with a great battery life, especially compared to the regular (HP, Toshiba, LG) "high performance" employer-issue dev laptops which seem to be either slow or not very portable.
OS-X is a hammer without a handle. It technically still is Unix, just like a hammer-head technically is a hammer. It is just badly crippled and requires inordinate amounts of research, trial and error, or experience to use as a proper Unix box.
So it doesn't act like your favorite pet Linux distro out of the box and you consider it crippled? It's no more crippled than Solaris or Tru64 was out of the box. No, compilers and X11 are not part of the default install. Neither is a package manager 90% of Mac users will never touch. And no, it doesn't come with your favorite package manager out of the box. There's a couple to choose from, both MacPorts and Fink work pretty well.
Personally, I found dealing with OSX much easier from a UNIX standpoint than Solaris. There's differences for certain, but if you're too lazy to learn anything new, go back to installing Ubuntu and living without commercial desktop software.
And if you're wanting to use KATE, why the hell are you using a Mac anyway? There's much better native options that don't require that antiquated stale windowing system.
"It don't werkz lik3 uBuntu or Windows so OSX is teH SuXorz" Chances are you aren't a seasoned Linux admin either, you just got tired of your latest activator for your pirated copy of Windows failing and thought running Linux would make you an er33t H@x0R D00d.
BTW, both FINK *AND* Macports both deal with dependencies. You are trolling. If you don't REALLY know what you're talking about, STFU.
I can't imagine a more vapid and informationless article with no context of history.
That bar graph of a spike starting in 2007 would more likely be related to the release of the iPhone.
Developing for the iPhone required a Mac. That was Apple's "killer app" for the Mac. Anyone wanting to get in to iPhone development had to have a Mac and it started mainstreaming the Mac.
Without the development of the iPhone it is hard to see an particular strong reason for Mac marketshare to start growing (sure you have the characteristic that it is very hard to get malware on a Mac, but that alone doesn't make up for the lack of apps or games, which was more far severe back in 2007 and not quite as bad today. The selection of software on a Mac is okish today, but in 2007 it was downright terrible.)
Pre-Intel (2007 +/-), the Mac did have Bootcamp (the ability to load and boot Windows on the machine) and software development was about the same before Intel and after, it isn't like casual developers are writing in assembly language --- the compiler (usually) takes care of all the fine details and endianess really only enters the equation when reading files with specific byte ordering of values.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory