Well, I will grant you part of this argument and concede that Apple products do have an inherent yet unquantifiable coolness factor that makes them hard to resist.
I think that Apple is wise to preserve their advantages in the market by remaining with their own hardware to ensure a synergistic user experience. Besides, consumers who are willing to jump on the Apple bandwagon aren't going to just settle for some rebranding and partial aesthetic experiences--as is evidenced by the lackluster sales of HP branded iPods.
I think that the HP iPod was a true market test for whether or not Apple needed to outsource their marketing, warehouse, and sales departments to someone else to handle the demand. I believe this question was answered with a resounding negative: Apple can more than handle its tidy 4.5% of the market and no low-priced ugly Dell-esque bohemoth is necessary for the careful pruning, petting, and codling of the 4.5% of computer users who actually are okay with Apple's solution.
You're right. Apple isn't going to go with commodity hardware--but the answer to bringing people over to the Apple platform isn't selling OS X for PC boxen, but rather baiting Windows users to shiny Macintosh computers with the lure of being able to run Vista...
Consumers could buy minimalist mac minis with built in wifi and bluetooth for 600$ flat and still have a tasty decision between Windows, Linux, and OS X on the same machine.
I am not sure if investing in Blue Gene is such a wise idea. Though Pixar does have software running on linux x86 clusters and has experience running off of sparco systems, Pixar is best versed in using their own programs and development systems based upon xserve render platforms. These were the very platforms that were used to render amazingly vivid water scenes in Finding Nemo for less than a million dollars a second (which in the industry is an unheard of level of render efficiency).
In fact, the render farm that Pixar used for The Incredibles, known in German as Die Unglaublichen, was an amazing tool in allowing the translation of passive elements of the film into 33 different languages for localized distribution. I discuss on my site here: http://www.dadgev.org/, that the German version of Pixar's The Incredibles actually converted the text in everything from Stock Tickers to Newspaper Articles into German so that the central european audiences would gain as much from the movie as others.
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Well, I will grant you part of this argument and concede that Apple products do have an inherent yet unquantifiable coolness factor that makes them hard to resist. I think that Apple is wise to preserve their advantages in the market by remaining with their own hardware to ensure a synergistic user experience. Besides, consumers who are willing to jump on the Apple bandwagon aren't going to just settle for some rebranding and partial aesthetic experiences--as is evidenced by the lackluster sales of HP branded iPods. I think that the HP iPod was a true market test for whether or not Apple needed to outsource their marketing, warehouse, and sales departments to someone else to handle the demand. I believe this question was answered with a resounding negative: Apple can more than handle its tidy 4.5% of the market and no low-priced ugly Dell-esque bohemoth is necessary for the careful pruning, petting, and codling of the 4.5% of computer users who actually are okay with Apple's solution. You're right. Apple isn't going to go with commodity hardware--but the answer to bringing people over to the Apple platform isn't selling OS X for PC boxen, but rather baiting Windows users to shiny Macintosh computers with the lure of being able to run Vista... Consumers could buy minimalist mac minis with built in wifi and bluetooth for 600$ flat and still have a tasty decision between Windows, Linux, and OS X on the same machine.
I am not sure if investing in Blue Gene is such a wise idea. Though Pixar does have software running on linux x86 clusters and has experience running off of sparco systems, Pixar is best versed in using their own programs and development systems based upon xserve render platforms. These were the very platforms that were used to render amazingly vivid water scenes in Finding Nemo for less than a million dollars a second (which in the industry is an unheard of level of render efficiency). In fact, the render farm that Pixar used for The Incredibles, known in German as Die Unglaublichen, was an amazing tool in allowing the translation of passive elements of the film into 33 different languages for localized distribution. I discuss on my site here: http://www.dadgev.org/, that the German version of Pixar's The Incredibles actually converted the text in everything from Stock Tickers to Newspaper Articles into German so that the central european audiences would gain as much from the movie as others.