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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.
> Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
This is such a joke. It's simply not true. WinDOS still has the "ecosystem" advantage. It's sad but true. What Apple has is perception driven by good marketing and IGNORANCE.
Macs are a mythical product that most people are unfamiliar with because the whole platform has a high barrier to entry. There are very few people in a good position to comment on Macs. You have to spend a great deal of money and have already swallowed all the Kool-Aid.
I bought into the myth too myself before a had a Mac to play around with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
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.
I kept looking for a "next page" link. That article didn't go into any depth whatsoever.
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.
bla bla bla payed-garden-walls ...plumbing new levels of stupid
bla bla bla apple-tax
bla bla bla rebranding of intel cpu's
bla bla bla I don't even know what i'm talking about.
no webserver in your init process? thats a clear disadvantage, macs are shit.
Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.
* So Apple let me use of the shelves hardware?
Even if you had a x86 Mac Pro before it required special graphics cards. The new Mac Pro is completely different so .. No.
* Is it software compatible?
No.
* Can I build my own one?
Kinda.. But that's not Apples idea. .. and that's kinda the benefits of the PC? No? Good and steady progress because it's what everyone use? Ok, score on that one. But Apple doesn't improve on it.
* Disadvantages of the PC which Apple solve.
Uhm.. What?
Funny how I have never seen anyone hate Apple computers who could afford one.
I don't understand the summary, and so I am scared to read the linked articles.
Can someone please translate the summary so I can make an informed decision whether to read the articles or not.
Not a perfect article on Apple or Intel or Microsoft.
But a filament points to Apple/Aligent/IBM for PowerPC away from Motorola 65K and then to an "Intelish" Intel chip for mid-2003 Macs and beyond.
Strange that. Apple is back again design their own chip architectures and A8X is everything proprietary. Hence Apple today is back-to-the-past with PowerPC and they have to rent a Chip factory to build them for them.
So yes! A8X looses "Home Field Advantage."
Problem!
Apple will not get the previous tax evasions benefits running forward in Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere!
"Bad Bad Amico" as the Iranian "students" chanted outside the USA Embassy in Tehran one eventful day long long ago.
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/
There's no Macintosh 100.
There were two Mac Portables before the MacBook 100/140/170 came out.
Indeed both were enormous, each even had a lead-acid battery! The first one didn't even have a backlight.
The Sony-designed MacBook 100 was actually designed to just be a smaller version of the original Macintosh Portables, which is why it also was based upon the much slower 68000 processor (the 140/170 used 68030 processors).
The Powerbook 100 was well designed and small, but it wasn't really a big seller. The PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170 took most of the sales. The later Powerbooks (145b, 160, 180, etc.) were all nearly identical to the 140/170 and not Sony's 100. This seemed to show that Apple didn't really take all that much from Sony's PowerBook 100.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This is like complaining my Audi costs more to fix than a Camry. What is this nonsense about their laptops being disposable? First of all most laptops have a soldered in CPU/GPU, at the most you can pick between 3 CPU's that are compatible. No laptop is built to be extensively user upgraded, like swapping the CPU. They are all a pain to open, and no where near as organized on the inside as an Apple. Unlike other laptops the Air does has fixed ram, but that is only cause the whole point of the machine is to be as small as possible, same with the SSD. If you wanna upgrade, or need extreme performance, you would buy a Pro which is as upgradeable as any other laptop. Second Apple computers are at the top of every comparison chart. Indeed they are the only computers that stand out. This isn't a budget PC you buy and two years later its worth scrap. Apple computers hold their value better than any other brand. Face it, even if you don't think so, they make a better computer. I feel you're missing the whole point of their products. This is just more Apple hate from someone who can't afford one.
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.
The motherboard in laptops are not like motherboard in desktops. You can't just pop any CPU in there. For one the heat sink is designed for the TDP of the original CPU. Then if you do change to one with a higher operating frequency it's still gonna be the same architecture so now you've greatly reduced your battery life. Now say you do go through all the hassle of upgrading the CPU, probably also gonna do the RAM and SSD. The laptop is what a couple years old, now you've got a newer laptop inside the shell of an old one with all that comes with that; old battery tech, missing newer ports, old screen res...
Want to know a big reason people have been getting Macs, that Apple doesn't like to admit? You can run Windows on them now. The Intel switch made it viable to run Windows on them, natively if you wanted, and good virtualization tech means it runs fast in OS-X. That lets people get their shiny status symbol, but still use the programs they need.
We've seen that at work (an Engineering college). Prior to the Intel conversion, there were almost no Mac users. The thing is engineering software just isn't written for the Mac. There is actually some stuff now, but even so the vast majority is Windows or Linux. Back in the PPC days, there was almost nothing. So we had only really two stubborn faculty that used Macs, one because he did no research and just played around, and one because he wrote his own code and was stubborn. However that was it, you just couldn't do your work on them.
Now? All kinds of faculty and students have Macs. PCs are still dominant, but we see a lot more Macs. However every one has Windows on it. Some it is all they have. Seriously, we have two guys who buy Macs, but have us install Windows on it, they don't use MacOS they just want the shiny toy. A number have bootcamp, and many have VMWare. Regardless, I've yet to see one, faculty, staff, or student, that didn't put Windows on it to be able to do the work they need to.
So that is no small part of how Intel helped Apple gain market share.
Like bullheads to a doughball on a treblehook you come...
OK, let me try...
I can't speak for Macintosh, since I haven't used one in ages, but I've got a fairly new iPad. Let me tell you about it. First of all, it's got a million processes running on it at all times that hog about 95% of the RAM, and that you can't turn off. That makes apps like the web browser and Google Earth terribly crashy, and when they crash they don't say "hey, that app crashed," they just disappear. Google can suck a dick too, because I use Chrome for the browser, and basically all the sites I care about have some issue. Slashdot, for example, hangs for about three minutes when it first loads, and manages to block anything from happening on the device during that time, and god forbid you should lose network connectivity in that three minutes because then you need to reboot it. Google News has this weird jittery thing it does when you try to scroll it, so it just flashes between the bottom and top of the page. (Google Fucking News doesn't render right on Google Chrome on an iPad. WTF?) There's a photoshop forum I go to every once in a while that has animated gif competitions, but more than about five on one page kills the iPad. Both Chrome and Safari gleefully allow banner ads to auto-forward you straight to the 'are you sure you want to buy this?' dialog on the app store. The sound sometimes stops working and the device needs a reboot. The Wi-Fi does the same. Basically what I'm saying is anyone who claims Apple Computer farts rainbows is severely, psychotically delusional. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
Sure, a hammer without a handle can, with enough work, do pretty much any job a proper hammer can do, but it is a pain in the tukis. And, you can always take the time to build a proper handle for the broken hammer, at which point the tool is no longer crippled, but that does not change the fact that you were given the hammer in a crippled state.
OS-X as Unix is a similar situation. Given enough work, you can get tools designed for Unix to run on any system, including Windows. The question is, how much trouble do you want to go through? Compared to Linux, Mac package managers for Unix-like tools are pretty pathetic. They are difficult to install, difficult to use, and even when they do work, they are cumbersome.
Take my experience installing a simple program, the KDE text editor KATE.
KDE provides binary installation packages for Windows. Getting them installed and getting Kate up and running was relatively painless. You did not even need to install a Unix-like environment such as CYGWIN.
On Ubuntu, you can install KATE with a simple "apt-get install" command. All the dependencies are correctly handled and the program just works.
On OS-X, getting FINK running took at least an hour. It took hours to figure out how to properly install KATE (unlike Windows and Linux, the dependencies were not handled automatically). Then, once I finally got everything downloaded, it took hours to build on a 12-core system. After building, it still did not work. After several more hours Googling to figure out why, I just gave up and suggested getting rid of OS-X and installing Linux or Windows.
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.
That is a fact too. Linux also works much better as a *NIX development environment and you can run it on pretty much any hardware you already have.
Also, just as a hardware point of comparison, a Mac Mini is almost 200% more expensive than a compatible Intel NUC and about infinite times less upgradable.
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
That's also a fact.
nuff said
Is touch. All are chasing touch like crazy. To the detriment of people using traditional desktops on machines without touch screens. I understand why -- most of the world when they use a computer will use a cheap phone or tablet, and there touch makes perfect sense.
But for people who use computers to create and analyze -- accountants, lawyers, writers, architects, engineers, statisticians, artists, etc. -- the traditional desktop without touch and with all the things we expect out of Mac OSX or Windows 7, or Gnome 2, just works.
And that is going away as Apple, and Microsoft, and Ubuntu all chase phones and touch and tablets. The Mac OSX desktop is not what it was. I'm sure it is nicely convergent with Ipads and Iphones, but I don't use either and I want my computer to get out of my way as I do work. I don't need touch, I don't need lots of fancy graphics, or tiles, or launching my applications by searching for them. I like the good old Windows/Gnome 2 hierarchical menu, a dockbar for frequently used items (thanks Mac OSX designers!) and the Applications folder or something similar for everything else [I really prefer the Windows/Gnome 2 /XFCE way of listing programs].
Stuff like the Whisker Menu on the latest XFCE is fine, I don't mind that. But the desktop should be a place to manage files, launch and manage programs, connect to networks, and manage disks and media. That's about it.
As a long-time Mac User, I just don't see the value in investing in an ecosystem going down the touch interface for the masses interested in cheap phones or tablets. The same goes for Windows, and yes Ubuntu too. Unity?
That is why my strategy is to buy cheap Windows laptops, replace them as need be, and look at other distros now: Arch, Mint, possibly even PC-BSD if System D takes over. But Mac Laptops? Really? I can get more work done on a cheap Toshiba, themed to look like a Mac, at a fraction of the price. Libreoffice, Gnucash, etc. are "good enough" to work, and R and Ruby (for Monte Carlo simulation) are the same essentially on every platform.
I say this as someone who owned: a Mac SE (I really loved that machine), Mac IIci (I also loved that machine), Quadra 650, Powerbook Duo 250, Powerbook G4 Titanium, Powermac G4, iBook G3, and Macbook Pro 17. For the time, I loved the Mac SE, Mac IIci, and the Powerbook G4, Powermac G4, and Macbook Pro 17 the most. Some of the others were just ... there.
I just don't see the passion from Apple anymore to create computers that are worth paying extra for. And I can get nearly the same by using open source software tuned to my needs. I have an Aqua themed desktop that Apple just won't provide anymore that lets me work the way I like.
Bottom line I can get the best of Apple look and feel at a fraction of the price.
The summary is just tech buzzwords organised into a sentence that means less than nothing.TFA is just crap... describing FreeBSD as UNIX. Can't help but think the first six, or last six paragraphs of TFA are missing? WTF /. ?
[FUCK BETA]
If memory serves me well, the appeal of OS X to unix pros became a selling point quite late in the Apple revival and shift to Intel CPUs. Back then, Windows XP was clearly too old, ugly, clunky and misused to be part of *any* high end PC offering. In my opinion, the OEM attempts to improve the Windows XP experience by way of pre-installed utilities were even worse.
The elegant UI and experience that OS X offered was way ahead of what Windows XP and most contemporary Linux distros could offer and that's what helped today's perception of MacBooks and iMacs are fine for their price, unlike many Lenovo, HP, etc that only sell at £300-£500 and therefore cannot have high end parts.
Now there's a lot of web-developer type of professionals who use OS X, helping sustain the perception that modern, trendy, successful, etc, etc professionals go with Apple, while the bad guys on 24 use matte black Lenovos :)
You can see obviously that the trends that smartphones created, especially iPhone, are stirring the evolution of the PC (and yes mac IS included as a Personal Computer). If Apple manages to keep up with the iPhone sales, they can offer a great sandbox solution to the market, e.g. get those files on all your devices by default, no configuration, everything works out of the box, get discount on those purchases from our company e.t.c. they can force their customers to buy iMacs, Macbooks and so forth. I believe it is not the transition from PPC to x86 that boosted the iMac and macbook sales, although intel had a greater chip in the mobile market, but the fact that the Apple trend rose the same period when they released the iPhone. As a developer, products like the ones from Apple do not cover my needs, I like to tweak around my devices, add features(mPCI-e cards, extra drivers or batteries, or 2nd VGA , I know it sounds crazy but the Ideapad series offer that) and I use exclusively Debian, so there is no reason to get a system that it's h/w locked and it's software is designed for FB and twitter users.
People don't seem to realize that Mac's never made anymore then a niche in the PC market until they could run Windows. If you don't think this was a big deal.
Then why did Apple make Boot Camp in the first place? Intel was simply a means of allowing Windows on a Mac which erased the barrier for people who wanted a elitists computer design but needed Windows. Yes, Apple still has those OS X users for sure. But the majority of the Mac's success lately has been Windows capability.
What did the Apple pay for this "story"? This site is really taking a spiral to the bottom.
if he was still alive would have created a new asshole in this writer. What a load of crap. How do people get paid to write such utter garbage, he makes it sound like Apple is just a Sony drone instead of the world's most valuable company.
I was planing on doing some development with the Unity/Unreal engine and unfortunately it does not support Linux (for development). Since I don't want to replace my (powerful) pc and I would kill myself if I had to develop in windows, I have considered installing a hackintosh. My top priority is getting the video card and wifi supported without any problems.
Also I have never used Mac OSX for more than 5 minutes, the main feature I can not live without is customizability of shortcuts (specially the shortcut to change from one virtual desktop to another), is that possible in Max OSX?
Besides that I have a few Linux visual programs that I like (gnome pie, gnome do, guake, wine/play on linux), any chance I can get those working on Max OSX? I can live without them if there are good alternatives though (guake will be sorely missed though).
Anyone has hackintosh experience to share?
It might be the app but it happens several times a day with my ~2 year old Mac mini when using VLC (pretty much all I use it for). Might very well be the app itself but since it was updated (think when iOS 8 came out it is weird. First off opens up shows that the media library is empty for about 1-2s then "realizes" I always have 5-100 TV show rips in it. Then I can't scroll/interact with the app for about another 5-10s. It seems to remember things I did just doesn't actually start interacting (not responding to the message pump?). Next up I try to increase the speed of playback (1.0X is for suckers ;)): that 50% of the time leads the app to freeze and need to be restarted.
I'm not sure if it is the version of VLC, its interaction with iOS or iOS fault but that is what I've seen. Also about once a month I get a straight up crash of the device: pow black screen and reboots.
The article: Sony's supply chain lessons? Doesn't mention what it means by that I'm assuming it is about the issues with PS3. So let me get this straight: Apple's 2006 switch to intel (which probably was in the works for 1+ years) is due to them learning lessons from Sony's 2007 problems? At least in my opinion Apple probably should have been on Intel or AMD for ages. They picked PowerPC and were on the wrong horse for a long time. PowerPC had some advantages but anyone with half a brain (especially one so good as to learn lessons from 2 years in the future) should have known whatever MS does is going to be the volume market with component costs the lowest and a lot of pressure to meet deadlines. The bonus is your deadlines would also be your competitors: so if Intel delays a CPU release well at least Windows PCs aren't going to come out faster than you are this holiday season: they have the same problem.
Developers like developing for Unix: wow, really? I'd say a lot do. But a lot do just because it is free (Linux, BSD etc) so they can get started as a student when dead broke with a 10yr old computer. Yeah open source helps and has several cool communities. But I can't think of a tool that I use on OSX that I can't find an alternative (and usually just as free) on windows. Given that Java is the number one programming language and .Net pretty popular too I'd say "developers like to develop for windows or really anywhere they can" would have been just as valid.
...any time Microsoft tries to actually advance forward or shrug off the baggage of supporting 15 year old technologies, the entire tech communities whines like little babies.
Can someone explain why Apple stories lately sound very much like obituary?
Something tells me that UNIX compatibility had little to do with Mac OS X's growth in popularity. Most end users simply don't really care about the command line. Instead, I'd consider these to be the primary reasons why people started buying a lot more Mac's around 2007:
1) Windows Vista came out around this time, and many people didn't like it. Mac OS X looked like a good alternative in terms of both ease of use and better stability.
2) People were getting sick of seeing their Windows XP systems getting infected with malware, so they switched to the Mac where drive by malware downloads are less of a problem.
3) A lot of people wanted their computer to "just work" like their iPod did. Mac OS X just seemed easier to use to them.
Kudos for re-iterating this point and not caring about all the passive aggressive (or just straight up aggressive) comments that are going to be hurled at this article by the apple fandom. Apple makes a GREAT PC, the fit and finish can't be beat. Although, asus and some other manufacturers are sure trying to close that gap. Apple ships their awesome PC hardware with their proprietary OS, OSX ... Although OSX has its origins born completely outside of apple by Jobs after he was pushed out of the company in the 80's
Most of that doesn't matter though. Apple's supply/repair chain is setup for replacing big chunks of the computer rather than individual parts. Yes, it's quite a bit more overhead, but Apple is willing to swallow that, so to the end user it doesn't matter.
Ie. web cam:
dell/generic pc: separate monitor half of laptop from body, upen it up, pull out faulty web cam, insert new webcam, close up, test, reconnect to body. done.
apple: separate monitor half of laptop from body, take replacement monitor half and reconnect to body. test. done.
The whole industry is heading this way, Apple just happens to be at the forefront. The modular PC is slowly going away, mostly because things are 'good enough' for the majority of people. Some things have tangible benefits - ie. having the LCD fused to the glass makes the screen much 'nicer' looking (imho).
I remember when every PC component was an separate card - Audio, LAN, Modem - that is long gone and almost everyone is just fine with the built-in options on their motherboards. Where was the outrage when this happened?
This is just silly.
Seems like you have lost control of your iPad. I have been using them since released and have never experienced the problems you claim. Of course, I see no reason to install Chrome on it. And I routinely check to see if some app is getting crazy, very few have. If they do - I delete them. Also, I lock down notification, location tracking and other battery draining solutions to make it a more user friendly solution.
So, don't waste your time. It really doesn't make sense. One leg of this alleged trifecta of supply chain was switching to Intel. Magically than taught them how to use the Wintel supply chain and thus made all their stuff soo much better.
Pure hogwash. If the clown believes this then I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale to him, cheap. Well, cheap-ish.
The big ones I can think of are Cadence SPB, Ansys HFSS, Ansys Fluent, Dassault Solidworks, Dassault Abaqus, Rocscience RS3D, Agilent ADS, Bently Microstation, PTV Vision, Intel Fortran, and Xilinx ISE.
There are more, but those are the ones I can think of we use the most off the top of my head.
Core i5-4260U @ 1.43 GHz (Turbo Boost to 2.7GHz) vs a dual core vs Pentium N3540 @ 2.16 (Turbo Boost to 2.42 GHz), don't let the megahertz myth fool you as to which is the faster CPU.
The Pentium N3540 gets a PassMark CPU Mark of 1887, versus 3659 for the Core i5-4260U. (source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php) So yeah, they're "pretty much the same thing" except for the slower CPU with half the physical cores actually being about twice as fast.
Steve admitted his mistake early: not recognizing OOP. But he learned. Then the plus's went kaboom: Mac OS X on the iPhone. Now Mac OS X on the iPod. Meanwhile MS has a cluster of an OS that is not easy to resize.
Re supply chain, if you watch Steve Jobs' MacWorld addresses (and other product intro keynotes) he repeatedly used Dell's supply chain prowess as a benchmark from which Apple drew inspiration. Sony's industrial design was the benchmark for laptop design and the first Titanium Powerbooks were the result of Jobs' unabashed shout-out to the Sony machines.