A practical problem is their almost invisible server marketshare. But you're right, it works, well enough for a consumer/desktop OS, much better than OS 9, and therefore it's probably good enough.
But the late-model Next strategy still rules -- what sells the Mac nowdays is the dev frameworks, not the OS or hardware.
Licencing Solaris and NT were both on the table with BeOS. It didn't have to be And/Or -- it could have been both.
Regardless, Intel kept AMD on lifesupport for so long that eventually AMD came up with a product that is widely considered better for more reasons that simply being cheaper. And, surprise, their margins are up and they're making a profit. I rather agree with Intel's anti-trust response that AMD enjoyed being Intel's bitch for all too long.
Oh and, Capitalism has never been about "honest commerce", so you're misinformed. Don't like it? Vote Communist.
I think Jobs summed it up best when he stated that Intel is the computer company and Dell and HP just manages the retail for them. (Draw obvious conclusions based on later decisions...)
Intel designs and build the bulk of the system, and therefore makes the bulk of the money.
Apple's VP of Software is the guy who came up with BSD/Mach ("Darwin") in college, so yeah, I do think that. Apple bought Next for the UI frameworks, not the OS. Sun is right down the road, you know. Apple were totally desperate for anything half-way modern, much less competitive. And meanwhile you have absolutely zero reasons why Darwin is a good base, in practice not theory, so the zealot jackass here is you.
Blah blah blah. Bottom line: Is Darwin better than the competition at anything? Not really, no. Why does Apple use it then? Probably because it's cheap to maintain, but I figure mostly because Jobs & Next sold Apple on it and have to save face.
> launchd Trivial, if you want it. > netinfo Apple/Next-specific. Nobody else cares. > HFS+ Shite filesystem. Only useful to Mac users > I/O Kit Better than WinNT's driver model? Again, only useful to people writing drivers for OSX. > streaming server Third place even though competitors cost money.
Yeah, unfortunately for GM they can't just fly their product in from Malaysia, and now they actually have to pay the price from running all those overtime shifts for the last couple decades.
> I would actually think that their margins are lower than AMD's,
And from what defective braincell did that thought come from?
It's always been assumed that Intel's manufacturing is MUCH better than AMD's, meaning the actual product is much cheaper to make. And traditionally AMD could only sell chips by discounting them significantly below the Intel equivalent. And the result is that, financially, AMD's has been on life-support for years. The numbers are right out in the open -- AMD makes diddly/squat per chip sold compared to Intel.
Frankly, Intel could have crushed AMD like the bug they are many times (now may not one of them), but hasn't primarily because they want to stay on the right side of anti-trust law.
I can understand why everyone likes AMD's chips, but are you buying their stock?
Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing"....
Why is this surprising? I mean, you might be sitting there going LOL!! WORD SUXORS!1 LOL!, but did you ever come up with a reproducible test case and contact Microsoft?
I say this slightly indignent because I did report a fully reproducible problem with Windows 95 password changing when on a NT Domain, and the developer actually lived up to his mythological proportions and said right out that having your account locked out really was a feature.
You are certainly looking at history through rose-colored glasses.
Old Unix ran RSH by default. It ran NFS (look ma, no passwords!), it ran sendmail which came with a rootshell feature by design. Every single protocol sent passwords in cleartext (even WFW and Novell attempted some crypto). Old Unix certainly was not at all designed for untrusted networks.
The WinNT idea of authenticated RPC was a gazillion time better than what Unix was offering -- if your network was closed. And if you're talking about buffer-overflow network attacks and the like, Unix's record is only *slightly* less pathetic than MS's.
Having used Macs so long, you probably remember the days when Apple actually sold the OS and the hardware and not just the looks and the image. I think they should go back to that too, but they sort of tried with the "switcher" thing and it apparently didn't work.
they should let people know what it can do and that though Macs are cost more they are typically in service longer than PCs.
Why would Apple see this as a feature? They want you to upgrade just as quickly as Dell does, they've just been unable to get their processor suppliers to deliver the goods.
I think you full well that NeXT never made a dime selling the operating system -- the product made that million was OpenStep for Win32. And a lousy million bucks, after how many hundreds of millions of investement? Geez.
BTW, I'm not a Linux advocate, only pointing out that Apple's kernel has probably recieved the least amount of developer attention of any major OS on the market today, and it sometimes shows.
You might be right, but citing a bunch of crapo game industry propganda statistics doesn't make your point.
+ "Actual purchase" -- obviously counts parents buying games for kids. Duh. + "18-49" is a television demographic. Irrelvant, especially if there's a big falloff after age 25. + "Plays Games" is nicey broad enough so that we can include grandma and windows solatare in with the kids who get 10 PS2 games a year.
If they're looking to convince people that games aren't just a kiddie market, they some numbers that are not so obviously stupid.
Unfortunately, one quarter is not a trend... yet. Especially when the wintel market has been growing robustly for three years now. They have tons of catching up to do to even get back to where they were in 1999.
That would be impressive if anyone was buying that $800 OS. But they weren't and NeXT had essentially pulled all marketing and development support years eariler and was only milking the tiny installed base.
Nobody in the open source community really asked for any of those things, Apple just opened them.
Nobody was asking for them because, frankly, Apple's kernel is an obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance. Since Darwin was released, it has attracted almost no outside interest, although it might be useful if you're writing a Mac driver. As you point out, where Apple has competitive technology, it's not open source.
> Then why does Apple rate high in customer satisfaction surveys?
Because a significant portion of their customer base are insane zealots?
Seriously, Apple's marketing over the last 20 years has had one consistant message -- "Apple is cool". They sell themselves more than the computers. That's why you have people, like one guy I know, who has sent his iBook back three times but still bleeds seven colors.
As to the GPs poing, Apple did lose a ton of customers in the mid-to-late-90s. They never shrunk, but their sales have been essentially flat for many years now, primarily because they only sell to that aforementioned group of zealots.
The mainstream press seemed to emphasize the ROKR much more than the Nano.
I suppose a phone designed for music is "news" (not really, I know), but there's not much a journalistic outlet can say about the Nano without just becoming a free Apple advertisement.
Yelling makes you sound off-your-rocker, you know.
I can't even think of an electronic device - any electronic device, ever - that has taken the existing functions of two devices,
Obviously, the PC.
And already the "SmartPhone" has basically killed the Palm/PocketPC.
The thing is, pocket-sized cell phones are only about 10 years old. You don't have a long history to draw from. And what you can learn from that history is that Size Is King -- smaller is better. That's exactly why every new iPod is so successful, and exactly why the Phone will supplant all flash-based miniplayers.
Will the Phone kill the high-end classic disk-based iPod? Probably not. Will it kill things like the iPod nano/shuffle? Certainly, I think.
The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence.
A trend towards carrying more and more things in your pockets? I think not.
Yeah, I don't think either phone hardware or phone software fits within Apple's business approach. Even if they did make a SmartPhone OS, it would get covered with Motorola and Cingular logos and Apple would end up with very little control over it.
Microsoft will sell software to anyone who wants it and makes it their responsibility. You never hear anyone saying "The Motorola 1234 is such a piece of crap... why would Microsoft put their name on it?"
I'm agreeing with the premise that the only reason Apple got into this ROKR thing to begin with was just to stall the MP3 Phone market by a few months.
1) Apple comes out with a phone 2) It plays music and is a phone 3) Cingular and Verizon refuses to deal with Apple 4) Apple is stuck selling a $600 GSM-Only Phone from their website 5) Most people buy the subsidized music phones with 2 year contract. 6) The low-end flash MP3 player market evaporates. 7) Cingluar and Verizon introduce their own music stores, incompatible with iTMS. 8) iTMS customers are pissed because their DRM music is incompatible with everything except a $600 phone. 9) Apple goes back to selling computers.
And why would Steve Jobs try? How much money does Apple make from a ROKR versus a Nano or even a Shuffle? I thinking it's either $0, or close to it. The whole thing is probably just an experiment to see what the wireless providers would let them get away with.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
"Buy iPods, not Phones".
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market. Just expect Apple to do as little as possible to help this along.
Not only were they powered up, they were running Windows 2000. It looked like completely stock 440BX stuff to me, but somehow those penguin stickers were causing network anomalies.
Well don't even pretend that most people compiling Apache are trying to support an obscure or extreme configuration. Usually they are simply installing PHP or Perl, which really ought to be just plug-n-play.
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A practical problem is their almost invisible server marketshare. But you're right, it works, well enough for a consumer/desktop OS, much better than OS 9, and therefore it's probably good enough.
But the late-model Next strategy still rules -- what sells the Mac nowdays is the dev frameworks, not the OS or hardware.
Licencing Solaris and NT were both on the table with BeOS. It didn't have to be And/Or -- it could have been both.
Regardless, Intel kept AMD on lifesupport for so long that eventually AMD came up with a product that is widely considered better for more reasons that simply being cheaper. And, surprise, their margins are up and they're making a profit. I rather agree with Intel's anti-trust response that AMD enjoyed being Intel's bitch for all too long.
Oh and, Capitalism has never been about "honest commerce", so you're misinformed. Don't like it? Vote Communist.
I think Jobs summed it up best when he stated that Intel is the computer company and Dell and HP just manages the retail for them. (Draw obvious conclusions based on later decisions...)
Intel designs and build the bulk of the system, and therefore makes the bulk of the money.
Apple's VP of Software is the guy who came up with BSD/Mach ("Darwin") in college, so yeah, I do think that. Apple bought Next for the UI frameworks, not the OS. Sun is right down the road, you know. Apple were totally desperate for anything half-way modern, much less competitive. And meanwhile you have absolutely zero reasons why Darwin is a good base, in practice not theory, so the zealot jackass here is you.
Blah blah blah. Bottom line: Is Darwin better than the competition at anything? Not really, no. Why does Apple use it then? Probably because it's cheap to maintain, but I figure mostly because Jobs & Next sold Apple on it and have to save face.
> launchd
Trivial, if you want it.
> netinfo
Apple/Next-specific. Nobody else cares.
> HFS+
Shite filesystem. Only useful to Mac users
> I/O Kit
Better than WinNT's driver model? Again, only useful to people writing drivers for OSX.
> streaming server
Third place even though competitors cost money.
Yeah, unfortunately for GM they can't just fly their product in from Malaysia, and now they actually have to pay the price from running all those overtime shifts for the last couple decades.
And Sun is selling an entire Opteron server for only $745.*
* Note that retail OEM CPU price can be radically different than retail, and for all we know AMD may be giving away the chips to Sun for free.
> I would actually think that their margins are lower than AMD's,
And from what defective braincell did that thought come from?
It's always been assumed that Intel's manufacturing is MUCH better than AMD's, meaning the actual product is much cheaper to make. And traditionally AMD could only sell chips by discounting them significantly below the Intel equivalent. And the result is that, financially, AMD's has been on life-support for years. The numbers are right out in the open -- AMD makes diddly/squat per chip sold compared to Intel.
Frankly, Intel could have crushed AMD like the bug they are many times (now may not one of them), but hasn't primarily because they want to stay on the right side of anti-trust law.
I can understand why everyone likes AMD's chips, but are you buying their stock?
Since (presumably) Intel can produce chips significantly more cheaply than AMD can, the price drops to AMD's cost of production, not Intel's.
That way, AMD is a perpetual break-even operation, and Intel rakes in the cash without worrying too much about the Justice Dept.
Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing". ...
Why is this surprising? I mean, you might be sitting there going LOL!! WORD SUXORS!1 LOL!, but did you ever come up with a reproducible test case and contact Microsoft?
I say this slightly indignent because I did report a fully reproducible problem with Windows 95 password changing when on a NT Domain, and the developer actually lived up to his mythological proportions and said right out that having your account locked out really was a feature.
You are certainly looking at history through rose-colored glasses.
Old Unix ran RSH by default. It ran NFS (look ma, no passwords!), it ran sendmail which came with a rootshell feature by design. Every single protocol sent passwords in cleartext (even WFW and Novell attempted some crypto). Old Unix certainly was not at all designed for untrusted networks.
The WinNT idea of authenticated RPC was a gazillion time better than what Unix was offering -- if your network was closed. And if you're talking about buffer-overflow network attacks and the like, Unix's record is only *slightly* less pathetic than MS's.
Having used Macs so long, you probably remember the days when Apple actually sold the OS and the hardware and not just the looks and the image. I think they should go back to that too, but they sort of tried with the "switcher" thing and it apparently didn't work.
they should let people know what it can do and that though Macs are cost more they are typically in service longer than PCs.
Why would Apple see this as a feature? They want you to upgrade just as quickly as Dell does, they've just been unable to get their processor suppliers to deliver the goods.
I think you full well that NeXT never made a dime selling the operating system -- the product made that million was OpenStep for Win32. And a lousy million bucks, after how many hundreds of millions of investement? Geez.
BTW, I'm not a Linux advocate, only pointing out that Apple's kernel has probably recieved the least amount of developer attention of any major OS on the market today, and it sometimes shows.
You might be right, but citing a bunch of crapo game industry propganda statistics doesn't make your point.
+ "Actual purchase" -- obviously counts parents buying games for kids. Duh.
+ "18-49" is a television demographic. Irrelvant, especially if there's a big falloff after age 25.
+ "Plays Games" is nicey broad enough so that we can include grandma and windows solatare in with the kids who get 10 PS2 games a year.
If they're looking to convince people that games aren't just a kiddie market, they some numbers that are not so obviously stupid.
Unfortunately, one quarter is not a trend ... yet. Especially when the wintel market has been growing robustly for three years now. They have tons of catching up to do to even get back to where they were in 1999.
Apple took a $795 user operating system
That would be impressive if anyone was buying that $800 OS. But they weren't and NeXT had essentially pulled all marketing and development support years eariler and was only milking the tiny installed base.
Nobody in the open source community really asked for any of those things, Apple just opened them.
Nobody was asking for them because, frankly, Apple's kernel is an obsolete 1980s academia design with poor performance. Since Darwin was released, it has attracted almost no outside interest, although it might be useful if you're writing a Mac driver. As you point out, where Apple has competitive technology, it's not open source.
> Then why does Apple rate high in customer satisfaction surveys?
Because a significant portion of their customer base are insane zealots?
Seriously, Apple's marketing over the last 20 years has had one consistant message -- "Apple is cool". They sell themselves more than the computers. That's why you have people, like one guy I know, who has sent his iBook back three times but still bleeds seven colors.
As to the GPs poing, Apple did lose a ton of customers in the mid-to-late-90s. They never shrunk, but their sales have been essentially flat for many years now, primarily because they only sell to that aforementioned group of zealots.
Ah yes, a sunny day in the park with no phone. Just what every kid wants. I will agree that (camera) phones are just plain banned at some gyms.
Come to think of it, flash players will be the size of a pair of earbuds sooner or later, so they'll probably live.
The mainstream press seemed to emphasize the ROKR much more than the Nano.
I suppose a phone designed for music is "news" (not really, I know), but there's not much a journalistic outlet can say about the Nano without just becoming a free Apple advertisement.
Yelling makes you sound off-your-rocker, you know.
I can't even think of an electronic device - any electronic device, ever - that has taken the existing functions of two devices,
Obviously, the PC.
And already the "SmartPhone" has basically killed the Palm/PocketPC.
The thing is, pocket-sized cell phones are only about 10 years old. You don't have a long history to draw from. And what you can learn from that history is that Size Is King -- smaller is better. That's exactly why every new iPod is so successful, and exactly why the Phone will supplant all flash-based miniplayers.
Will the Phone kill the high-end classic disk-based iPod? Probably not. Will it kill things like the iPod nano/shuffle? Certainly, I think.
The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence.
A trend towards carrying more and more things in your pockets? I think not.
Yeah, I don't think either phone hardware or phone software fits within Apple's business approach. Even if they did make a SmartPhone OS, it would get covered with Motorola and Cingular logos and Apple would end up with very little control over it.
... why would Microsoft put their name on it?"
Microsoft will sell software to anyone who wants it and makes it their responsibility. You never hear anyone saying "The Motorola 1234 is such a piece of crap
I'm agreeing with the premise that the only reason Apple got into this ROKR thing to begin with was just to stall the MP3 Phone market by a few months.
1) Apple comes out with a phone
2) It plays music and is a phone
3) Cingular and Verizon refuses to deal with Apple
4) Apple is stuck selling a $600 GSM-Only Phone from their website
5) Most people buy the subsidized music phones with 2 year contract.
6) The low-end flash MP3 player market evaporates.
7) Cingluar and Verizon introduce their own music stores, incompatible with iTMS.
8) iTMS customers are pissed because their DRM music is incompatible with everything except a $600 phone.
9) Apple goes back to selling computers.
And why would Steve Jobs try? How much money does Apple make from a ROKR versus a Nano or even a Shuffle? I thinking it's either $0, or close to it. The whole thing is probably just an experiment to see what the wireless providers would let them get away with.
For steve to accept something like the ROKR makes me suspect he has a point to make, but I'm not sure just what it is yet.
"Buy iPods, not Phones".
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market. Just expect Apple to do as little as possible to help this along.
Not only were they powered up, they were running Windows 2000. It looked like completely stock 440BX stuff to me, but somehow those penguin stickers were causing network anomalies.
Well don't even pretend that most people compiling Apache are trying to support an obscure or extreme configuration. Usually they are simply installing PHP or Perl, which really ought to be just plug-n-play.