sigamy said:
How is my conclusion erroneous if Apple is now switching to x86? I know hindsight is 20:20 but come on now. You don't think going to the G5 was just plain wrong?
No.
Beating up on your customers would have been wrong.
The point of a transition is to ease people into this. And you seem to like the blunt approach.
Which. Couldn't. Be. Worse.
As we see now it's not about what was available in 2003--it's the roadmap that matters. I know it is easy to see now because in 2003 it seemed that x86 had hit a wall and that the 970 and its pipeline was strong. Steve thought it was strong. He told us it was strong. IBM told us. Steve promised 3ghz. I believed him/Apple/IBM.
It. Didn't. Happen.
Apple went to IBM with hat in hand. Motorola was losing interest in the processor business and IBM and Apple both needed a similar product.
Apple could not have changed at that point as most people were still in Mac OS 9 and were only slowly starting to move to Mac OS X in large numbers.
It was more about finishing one transition before starting another.
That. Is. How. Your. Conclusions. Are. Erroneous.
It is just amazing to me that we have yet another instance of Apple getting something just plain wrong. How could they not see that they wouldn't be able to get faster, cooler mobile chips???
Because there was never any major technical hurdle to this.
The landscape changed. It happens. And it happens a lot in this industry.
More over simplifying of history points you to all of Apple's great business blunders--not licensing Mac OS, proprietary hardware, sticking with Moto/PPC, Pink/Taligent/Copland, OpenDoc, terrible supply chain mgmt, Newton, Spindler, Gil Ameilo, etc.
Tell me you aren't that lost.
I don't have time to talk about how many of those "blunders" were nothing of the sort...
Oh, never mind, I actually do have time.
not licensing Mac OS: Who would they have licensed it to originally? No one was making computers that could do what Macs could. So who? SGI? Definitely not PC makers as no PC could handle the Mac GUI at that point (and wouldn't be up to the task until around 1991).
proprietary hardware: Besides the points above, the software that made Macs Macs was larger that the available media at the time. This problem was solved by moving much of the foundational components into ROM. And as Apple is a hardware maker, propriety hardware is how they make their money. The biggest blunder was licensing the Mac OS, which under cut Apple's chief source of income.
sticking with Moto/PPC: So you don't stick with better processors? The main reason that Apple went with Motorola was that nothing Intel had could run the Mac OS. Both SGI and Sun had there workstations running on Motorola processors in the late 80s because they were the best. When Jobs left Apple and was starting his own computer company, what processor did they pick? Motorola 680x0. Why? It was by far the best. And Apple hedged it's bets with the Power line originally. The 6100/7100/8100 logic boards were able to use either the PowerPC 601 or the 68060 processors. IBM was able to come through when Motorola couldn't, so Apple went with PowerPC. And during the first, second, third and beginning of the fourth generation of PowerPC processors that Apple used the PowerPC was leaps and bounds ahead of anything in the PC industry. The only blunder I see was marginalizing IBMs role by going with the G4. Had Apple stuck with IBM over Motorola, then both companies might have had a better time matching road maps into the future. And no one could have seen that IBM was going to drop AIX this fast (accelerated by the SCO case) and that the 970 wouldn't play as big a role in IBM's plans as had been originally thought.
Pink/Taligent/Copland: Development projects are rarely blunders. The only one that Apple sunk any real amount of money into was Copland. Much of that technology actually ended up in Mac OS 8, 8.5 and 9.0, so that wasn't wasted. And the foundations of Carbon are based on Copland. How was that a blunder? Almost all the parts of Copland have since been used.
OpenDoc, Newton: Much of that R&D set up technologies that we use today... even if Apple wasn't able to capitalize on them. And I still use a Newton, they are great PDAs.
terrible supply chain mgmt, Spindler, Gil Ameilo, etc: None of that has anything to do with technology, so I have no interest in those... and generally agree that they truly were blunders.
If you are going to play with mental models of the past to do "what if" scenarios, it helps to have a better understanding of why things actually happened the way they did.
That. Way. You. Don't. Make. Erroneous. Conclusions.
