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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.
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.
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
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.