Originally posted by jamdr
Admittedly, the post was a bit rash, but I was only reacting to a very disappointing Macworld keynote. Now for my defense...
Disappointing for you, perhaps. For some of us, it was a sign of a healthy, forward-looking Apple.
Apple sells many, many more PowerBooks, iMacs, and PowerMacs than it does XServes. Their most important product is the personal computer. Period.
Perhaps, and perhaps not.
Let's spin out a scenario, shall we? Take the unprecedented success of Big Mac, the attention paid to it, and the sudden appearance of a
cluster node at the Apple store, add a dash of institutional behavior, season with increasingly compatible xserve RAID, and allow to simmer. What you might have at the end is the rise of Apple-powered clusters at large bodies (universities, corporations, national laboratories, etc.), where they'll be hiring/training IT people to support OS X. These IT people will probably want to standardize, won't they?
Glory of glories, that 30,000 student university now needs laptops /desktopsfor incoming freshmen (my first university did this)! Who do the techs turn to but the same company they already have powering their big, shiny cluster... Apple then sells 8000 ibook/imac units to this place
a year.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Apple's PowerBooks have sold extremely well in the last year, so why not eke out a little more performance, possibly a 1.25/1.4 for the low/high end, to put them back in the spotlight?
Pardon me while I laugh!
You want Apple, who has just been thoroughly screwed for years by Motorola, to rely on them for a hihg-profile event? What, exactly, is in it for them, when there's IBM and the 970/980, 750vx, 300-derived portable chip, and other actually exciting possibilities?
A bump of 100mhz in the G4 laptop? Ho-hum. Making a portalbe player that's the size of a thin stack of business cards, market-competitive, and as stylish and simple as any Apple product? I think we see who's missed the boat here...
As for GarageBand, I don't see how the few users on this forum that say "I want to buy it, so that makes it worthwhile for Apple" are any different than me saying that it was a waste of development resources.
How does it make it the opposite of waste? They're paying money for it, or will be, and they know other people who'll be sheling out, too. That's the definition of a good use of resources, since people are actually buying it.
I'm sure a few musicians out there are happy, but only a very specific audience will buy this app. True, as Jobs said, there are many musicians out there. But how many of them use Macs?
Well, that's it, guys! Someone call Apple and tell them to sell off Logic, FinalCut, Shake, DVD Studio, and anything else even vaguely related to content creation... While you're at it, get Adobe, Quark, and all the others on the line. Macs aren't insanely strong in design shops, production houses, advertising, and music, after all.
And how many of them are at the level that GB appeals to? And of those, how many are going to spend $50 on it?
This is the one place you have a solid point, and that's only because of all the whiners who won't drop $50 for an ipod that costs $249 instead of $199.
🙄
