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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
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.
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!