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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.
Sorry, cannot understand summary.
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.
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.
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?
Well, OS X gives you a UNIX of which desktop has much better QA than the Linux alternatives.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ?
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/
Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.
It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as low a barrier to entry there is.
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
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.
My wife's daily driver is a MacBook Pro. All the stuff she needs for home is readily available on OSX as easily as on Windows, e.g., Quicken; work is a non-issue because the products she supports are on iOS. Even if the vendors sometimes treat their OSX ports as second-class citizens, it's rare that any basic feature we care about is missing. It's just the latest bling that's usually not ported right away.
OTOH, I wouldn't be able to use a Mac for my job, because my employer requires us to use things including custom in-house apps, that are only available on Windows. Likewise some of the apps our kids use for school. The stuff I do at home beyond web surfing and such, I do on Linux.
Viva ecumenism!
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.
$500 is a lot of money just to try some other OS out.
People don't try OSes out. People buy a computer and the OS is incidental. The end result is you either use the OS you have or install another one. Nothing is forcing you to use OSX once you buy a Mac.
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.
If you want to tinker with the hardware... well Apple hasn't produced a "tinker-ready" mac since the last Mac Pro tower.
True, but since 10.4 you've been able to build a hackintosh with slots quite cheap. So the people whining about Macs costing to much while posting from their pirated copy of Windows could just as easily have a Mac clone if they learned how to read.
Nobody, zero people out there... runs Linux as a desktop.
Not quite true but close. I ran FreeBSD on my primary desktop for years until OSX 10.6 was released. Was actually quite capable and did what I needed it to do. Eventually I got more heavily into audio recording and Ardour doesn't compare to Logic. I also got sick of jumping through severe hoops to exchange data with people running PhotoShop or InDesign. OSX gives me the wonderful FreeBSD userland with a GUI layer that doesn't suck. Win-Win
AC's seem to have the worst luck with computers. Maybe you should log in and see if things change.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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!
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.
That amount of money would have brought some pretty beastly desktop PCs. Any reason they all chose laptops instead of a PC with a large hi res CRT?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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 ?
Well, obviously the lack of systemd.
A "girly" UI? What, are you eight and stuck in a playground where that's actually a cutting insult? Grow up.
You're looking at it from a very technical perspective, which is valid for the few who have the time and knowledge to dick around with a UNIX system to make it things. Apple's user-base isn't that sector, despite the fanboi protests (cue accusations of trolling). Apple shines brightest for people who want to get other things done without worrying about how they get done. For someone in the humanities, there's no better machine for putting together a fast, smooth workflow with an amazingly small learning curve. [....]
I'm regularly attending conferences in the field of theoretical computer science and AI, and about 70% of laptops there are MacBooks. 25% are Linux, and then there are a few researchers paid by Microsoft Research ;-). But Macs are not just for humanities people - a significant draw is "a UNIX box that just works". With Fink or MacPorts, package management is nearly as good as on the best Linux distributions, and the hardware integration is totally trouble-free. And the hardware is nice from a purely physical point of view - smooth, quite, compact, with decent performance and reliability. Of course, most of the people with Mac laptops use Linux servers for nearly everything else.
Another thing that Apple has going for it is consistency. The PC market is gigantic, and if you want to get a good deal, you must spend a lot of time investigating and usually also get lucky. With Apple, the chances of getting a complete lemon are very low, and the choices are limited enough that it's easy to get an overview.
Stephan
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.