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bartzilla

macrumors 6502a
Aug 11, 2008
540
0
Žalgiris;13580273 said:
I think it was a no brainer to go with OS X, what's the fuss here all about.

The 'fuss' is about the amount of effort it took to get OSX to the point where people who know nothing about software development would think that using it on a phone was a "no brainer".
 

Evangelion

macrumors 68040
Jan 10, 2005
3,374
147
So the choice between OS X and Linux was Forstall vs. Fadell? I heard years ago that it was Serlet vs. Avie. Avie lost, and that's why he left Apple.
 

Žalgiris

macrumors 6502a
Aug 3, 2010
934
0
Lithuania
The 'fuss' is about the amount of effort it took to get OSX to the point where people who know nothing about software development would think that using it on a phone was a "no brainer".

OS X was designed with that in mind from the start, right, so even taking other options into consideration sounds thin, plus who would want to cut the branch he is sitting on?
 

kockgunner

macrumors 68000
Sep 24, 2007
1,565
22
Vancouver, Canada
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9A334)

I like Forstall's presentations. I had no idea he had been at Apple for that long. I'm glad there is a 'mean' perfectionist guy to keep a tight ship at Apple and hopefully he knows what Steve would do since he was worked with him since NeXT.
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
What are you basing that claim on? Before iPhone, OS X only ran on Macs, and Apple had made no comments about using it elsewhere.

I'm not sure about for phones specifically but definitively for different architectures, with the support for fat binaries for example.
 

Anaemik

macrumors 6502
Feb 25, 2009
289
0
Honestly, every time I've seen him present at a keynote he's always come off as a little too smug. What some people read as charisma in him feels like a veneer to me. Personally, I think he could benefit from turning the volume down on the "personality" a couple of notches - it just feels like he's read Dale Carnegie maybe one too many times.
 

guch20

macrumors 6502
Aug 15, 2011
402
0
Michigan, USA
9to5Mac has a little more from the article about Forstall. Find it here: http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/12/busin...-forstall-heres-the-10-most-interesting-bits/

It seems his relationship with the other executives is so strained that they refuse to meet with him unless Tim Cook is in the meeting (one would imagine the same would go for when Steve Jobs was running the show -- unless things are falling apart fast at Apple).

Also, although he can be an ******, a senior vice-president at Google describes him as "one of the best [he's] seen" at running an operating system team.

Interesting stuff. Hopefully morale doesn't get shot to hell from all the in-fighting and personality clashes with no "father figure" to put it back together now that Steve is gone.
 

mdriftmeyer

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2004
3,792
1,914
Pacific Northwest
As a former colleague of Scotts, Fadell didn't stand a chance.

The first mistake was suggesting Linux.

The second mistake by Fadell thinking Scott whose knowledge of OS X [NeXTStep/Openstep] would be weak against his own. The guy's technical skills were dwarfed by Scott's own.

Hint: Scott has a Masters in CS from Stanford in areas of Symbolic Systems and also areas of AI. Calling Siri. Scott's been wanting to apply that in several areas for a long time. Prototypes of his work goes back to NeXT.

Other than Peter Grafanino, Ali Ozer, Dean Reece, and other geniuses I had the pleasure to make friends, this guy didn't stand a chance.

You have to earn Scott's respect. I got along with him once he knew where I stood and I always knew where he stood. He's a very personable guy away from his work.

He's extremely focused, driven and like most at NeXT everyone of our positions required us to do the work of several people. You didn't have to go far to get an answer to a technical question around NeXT. And once you knew it you added to your own.

I see it as it was a test Steve set up to see if Scott was ready to take the next step and become a Senior VP.

It's no contest here.

Scott had 10 years of sparring with Avie Tevanian, Steve, Grafanino, Ozer Jeff Martin and so many other great devs and colleagues. He was always going to become the position he now holds.

I expected no less.

P.S. During the merger we used mklinux to get Openstep ported onto PowerPC 603 and newer system during the Rhapsody project.

There was never any serious interest in Linux to be part of Apple's ecosystem.

And yes, Steve was never going to not have control over the OS.

In a similar vein, Linus is Linux's dictator.
 
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Evangelion

macrumors 68040
Jan 10, 2005
3,374
147
I'm not sure about for phones specifically but definitively for different architectures, with the support for fat binaries for example.

Yeah, they had a version for x86 and PPC right from the start. But that's not the same thing as having a version of the OS for something as resource-contrained as a smartphone. Having the OS for different architectures doesn't mean that the OS is built from the start to scale down. It just means that it was built from the start to be portable to other architectures.
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
I realize that, and I did not suggest that they had a "version" for it, but that the inclusion of fat binaries shows that some consideration was taken to flexibility of the hardware.
 

Žalgiris

macrumors 6502a
Aug 3, 2010
934
0
Lithuania
What are you basing that claim on? Before iPhone, OS X only ran on Macs, and Apple had made no comments about using it elsewhere.

During transition to Intel cpus Steve said clearly that OS X was designed with easy porting/etc in mind, so Mac or phone it really doesn't matter. Plus it's not whole OS X they obviously had to code many things from scratch, but the foundation was there.
 

Evangelion

macrumors 68040
Jan 10, 2005
3,374
147
During transition to Intel cpus Steve said clearly that OS X was designed with easy porting/etc in mind, so Mac or phone it really doesn't matter. Plus it's not whole OS X they obviously had to code many things from scratch, but the foundation was there.

Porting to other architectures, yes. And move from PPC to x86 was exactly that. But that did not inculde complete retooling of the OS and downsizing it. No, it was the exact same OS. What we are talking about here is a move to different architecture (which OS X was designed to do) AND scaling it down to run on a smartphone. The latter is a totally different task from moving the OS across architectures, and that was not what SJ was talking about back then.
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
What we are talking about here is a move to different architecture (which OS X was designed to do) AND scaling it down to run on a smartphone. The latter is a totally different task from moving the OS across architectures, and that was not what SJ was talking about back then.

To be fair, my first G4 Power Mac was more resource constrained than the iPhone and it ran OS X.
 

Uelogy

macrumors newbie
Oct 24, 2010
16
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Steve said once that around 2000 an engineer brought him an iPad-like device with the scrolling UI to demo.

Steve said he knew it was a winner; however realised he had to market and teach the technology via the iPhone first.

So it's not unreasonable to speculate OS X and iOS go back further then we might imagine.
 

Evangelion

macrumors 68040
Jan 10, 2005
3,374
147
To be fair, my first G4 Power Mac was more resource constrained than the iPhone and it ran OS X.

Sure, and the OS X it ran was a lot simpler than current OS X, and it had no contraints when it came to things like battery-life.
 

subsonix

macrumors 68040
Feb 2, 2008
3,551
79
Sure, and the OS X it ran was a lot simpler than current OS X, and it had no contraints when it came to things like battery-life.

But iPhone does not run OS X, and iOS is a lot simpler than the current OS X. It seems like a logical choice to base it on XNU and Darwin and share a lot of the frameworks and internal knowledge at Apple.
 

derboy

macrumors regular
Feb 25, 2004
117
22
UK
..he routinely takes credit for collaborative successes, deflects blame for mistakes, and is maddeningly political. They say he has such a fraught relationship with other members of the executive team—including lead designer Jony Ive and Mac hardware chief Bob Mansfield—that they avoid meetings with him unless Tim Cook is present.

Extremely concerning. Three people that need to really get on if any decent products are to be created.
 

CrackedButter

macrumors 68040
Jan 15, 2003
3,221
0
51st State of America
Remember, the media can sometimes build these people up. We will never meet these people in real life so we won't know either way whether this is all true and Apple never ever comment directly on these things.

I always like to think of this quote when reading stories: “The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness".

There is some of that in the article, the media might want a polarising figure to better communicate stories to readers later on. Another story might come out that references this one, then we'd believe into their narrative of events. They have the largest audience after all.

The article was interesting enough though.
 
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Slurpy2k8

macrumors 6502
Feb 26, 2008
383
0
This article makes me really uneasy. Steve was the glue that held everything together. Even if there was infighting between different teams/people and personality conflicts, it seems to be they would always put it aside to please Steve, because of respect/fear/loyalty or what have you. Steve commanded loyalty, and every single anecdote I've read reflects that. They would sweat blood for him, but his approval would make it all worth it- completely irrational, but thats the magic SJ had. He kept everything on track and kept the vision clear. He was the head taste-maker and curator, gave the final nod, as well as being involved in everything else. No other company is structured this way. Apple is. It's sobering to think of potential-fallouts and internal conflict now that the dynamic is changed and the visionary is gone.
 

Evangelion

macrumors 68040
Jan 10, 2005
3,374
147
But iPhone does not run OS X, and iOS is a lot simpler than the current OS X.

iOS is a lot simpler than current OS X (in some ways at least, just look at Siri), and the Mac OS X the old G4 ran was a lot simpler than the current OS X.

It seems like a logical choice to base it on XNU and Darwin and share a lot of the frameworks and internal knowledge at Apple.

Yes it is. But it's still not the same thing as porting OS X from PPC to x86.
 

Reason077

macrumors 68040
Aug 14, 2007
3,586
3,531
I highly doubt Apple was ever seriously considering using a Linux-based kernel for the iPhone(they may have been debating extending the iPod kernel, but thats different). The reason is quite simple, if they used Linux they would be forced to distribute a massive amount of the code that they distributed on the phone in order to be in compliance with the GPL.

This is a common misconception about Linux.

Although nervousness about the GPL may well have weighed on Apple's decision, it is not true that using Linux would have compelled Apple to distribute more source code than they already do. Linux specifically permits binary kernel drivers (modules) to be loaded at runtime without them having to be GPL licensed.

Android, for example, is based on Linux yet virtually every Android phone contains a ton of proprietary, non open sourced drivers.

That said, Apple clearly made the right decision here. The commonality between OS X and iOS is a huge advantage and probably allowed them to innovate a lot faster than they could have done on Linux.
 
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