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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.
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.
By using the same intel chips as the competition, Apple shed one of it's biggest boat anchors around it's neck. The people who really care about which chips are in it are gamers and they stay with intel/MS since it's what they can play the most games on.
Other than that, the people don't pay attention unless it's a hindrance. Which PPC was but Apple thought it was being different back in the 90s for whatever reason. To the point that there were RISC vs CISC arguments in the 90s directed at end consumers, the last people in the world who should actually give a damn about it.
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.
But please... Don't go pretending that apple created something really good or unique with this rebranding of intel cpu's and freebsd.
Actually, they did -- they created a Unix based OS that I can buy off-the-shelf/mainstream/commercial software for. Previously, I could either use a decent OS (*nix) with very few available applications, or a Godawful OS (Windows) but with lots of applications. With MacOS/X I get the best of both worlds.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Seriously, Apple sold 5.5 million intel-pc's.... It's nothing on total pc sales.
It's enough to put them in the top five PC makers, worldwide. If you count iPads as computers, Apple is the largest computer manufacturer in the world with a 14% share.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
So a 20% premium over a PC at the low end, with the gap widening as you move up the performance curve.
That's a pretty big premium for what seems like an intangible benefit.
I just don't think you're right. I remember as developer about 10 years ago we were given $5000 every two years to buy whatever computer system we wanted. Nearly everyone bought Dell laptops - they had the best power/$ ratio, and when you have a company of 20 developers, 10 of whom are making that decision each year, it is pretty apparent what best laptop to buy was. I've left, but maintained touch with them. When I walk in to their offices now, it is 15" macbook pros that I see everywhere. I just find it unlikely that these guys, who now have 15+ years experience in the industry, have swallowed the Kool-Aid.
High quality parts? Quit swimming in the Kool-Aid.
They use generic PC parts the same as the rest of the industry. Sometimes the same exact quirks exist between Apple's and Dells. They are impacted by the same bad engineering choices.
Except there are more options with PCs. You can avoid an inherently problematic form factor with Dell. There's something else to choose.
Been there. Done that. Not impressed at all.
You're just repeating the same nonsense as the original article which was marketing masquerading as journalism to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://training.apple.com/certification/acmt.html
You need it if you want to work at an AASP. I'm not sure where the "lol" comes from. Apple doesn't publish their service manuals anywhere except on websites private to ACMTs working for an AASP (these days they're all online only via GSX, rather then the PDF files you used to be able to get).
I'm not pretending it's a prestigious certification by any means, however I have been servicing Macintosh products going back to 1991. I still have my original TechStep handheld diagnostics unit, in the original bag, with nearly all the ROM based diagnostic cartridges. The store I work for is actually one of the few locations on the planet that will still actively service older machines (going back to the original Mac). We don't make a ton of money doing this and Apple sure as shit doesn't support us for doing that, but we still get the occasional customer who comes in with an antiquated system in need of new capacitors (which I'm equipped to replace) or a new PRAM battery or a replacement 50-pin SCSI disk drive. We even have our own museum room of past Apple products that are all still operational (it's open to the public) spanning back nearly two decades now. Word of mouth tends to get around so it's great advertising for us.
Anyways, my point is that ACMT isn't worth jack shit, and I'm not pretending it is. Experience matters, and I've had my hands in damned near every Apple computer ever produced (including the ANS and Daystar/Power Computing clones). So I think I'm qualified to make comparisons between their old hardware and their new stuff, and I can come to no other conclusion then that the new stuff is designed to be as utterly disposable as possible with a shiny facade to help it sell well. This is actually one of the reasons why we strongly suggest people buy AppleCare these days- you're basically buying a machine for 3 years, and then you'll be expected to upgrade, lest you be hit with a $1200 replacement cost for a motherboard with a couple of bad bits in the RAM.
If you are just trying to develop the next Unix clone of telenet or ftp, this argument might make some sense. If you are working in any sort of commercial environment, the cost of the PC is just a rounding error.
This entire subthread about the putative costs of a generic x86 box vs. something from Apple is absurd - nobody cares about these sorts of costs except poor hobbyist programmers -- and none of the companies, Apple included, gives a tinker's damn about this demographic.
For mid to upper range laptops*, Apple is very competitive with everybody else. If you like the tight hardware / software integration that MacBooks offer, then great. If you don't care or really want to run Windows, go get something else. I do wish that Apple had a few more choices - I'd love for them to resurrect the 17" MBP, but I'd also like Dell to have English speaking customer facing employees, for HP to make keyboards worth a damn and for Toshiba to simply go away.
But life is hard....
* The Mac Pro, especially the Darth Vader's ashtray version, is really a niche product
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article is as bad as the summary :/
I read the whole thing and can safely say I gained absolutely nothing by reading it.