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Apple Maintains Third Place Ranking with 11.6% of U.S. PC Shipments in 4Q 2011
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You draw the line - as Apple has done - when a competitor blatantly copies your Intellectual Property such as software and hardware patents, or copyrighted material, such as the Operating System.
And for that reason, I think its going to be very unlikely that any of these ultra books are going to be subject of infringement suits from Apple. Many of them may take design elements or cues from the MacBook Air, but not in a way that infringes upon Apple's designs or patents.
In many respects, I think the way in which so many competitors have struggled to meet Apple's pricing on the "ultrabook" is a vindication of Apple's business model. That by concentrating on just a few products, using a highly vertically integrated business model, and striving for best-in-class industrial design, engineering, purchasing, and manufacturing Apple has been able to become the high-quality, low-cost, high-margin producer. This despite the very high costs associated with bearing all the costs of developing and supporting their own Operating System.
Its significant, I think, that Intel has taken the lead in promoting the Ultrabook concept. I think they recognized that laptops (which had previously been the bright spark in the PC hardware business) were in danger of becoming "commoditized" to the point that the business was at risk of stagnating the way desktop boxes have. And a stagnating hardware business means less and less reason for people to upgrade their hardware every two or three years.
So we basically agree which is what I was sarcastically pointing out, everyone is about copy, copy, copy(Check the quote from Linux above) without regards that the very company they may be defending is copying also "to some degree." Just pointing out the hypocracy and lack of logic in this thread and most other "polarizing" threads on MR.
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There are tradeoff nerdal, the thinner you get the less stuff you can put inside. Less ports, less external connections. Then you have to worry about the heat(CPU and GPU)! Then you have to worry about the weight and balance of such a thin laptop!
There are a lot of tradeoffs!
We don't agree at all on that point. There is no hypocrisy because the situations are different.
The only thing we may agree on is that most posters in this forum make no distinction between legal copying and IP theft.
Maybe he can laugh because Mac sales may mean more Windows installations? Heck, Apple themselves advertise installing Windows on a Mac (see "Why You'll Love a Mac"). Also there is the entire business line of applications that Microsoft continues to grow in (Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio). Microsoft is obviously more interested in the corporate market, which is legitimate business that most likely makes far more money than consumer sales. Speaking of consumer products, Microsoft has the Xbox.
SandynJosh, are you actually calling me out over my punctuation? For a throw away post that I typed on a mobile phone? Let's see how skilled you are in the rest of your post:
Hmm. You appear to have stolen my apostrophe and flung it randomly into your own post. I wouldn't go there.
i think you will find that half of those inventions are licenced from other companies. Intel made thunderbolt actually not apple. Was called lightpeak.
App store? apple put a store on a mobile device. thats not inventing it. Supermarkets didnt invent the Pharmacy just because they put some in Tesco.
OSX Lion is the WORST OSX ever. i have memory leaks in every program and Safari now acts like internet explorer 6. i had to go to 8gb of memory to fix this even though its not technically fixed. Lion is worse than snow leopard by far. And if you can see the differences between Leopard and Lion then congrats. seems the same to me.
Multitouch is licensed from another company.
Apple didnt invent the tablet either!
Apple are good at taking other peoples ideas and making them work as they should have in the first place. They also have the financial clout to make things happen others cant and thus can take risks which obviously pay off. Also without Johny Ive they basically dont have a company.
You only have to look at Mobile Me to see how wrong apple can go without interference from Steve Jobs who is now brown bread.
Also the Ultrabook is the natural evolution of the Laptop. There is no money in the bottom end of the market and everyone knows that. Asus has already said its going to only focus on Ultrabooks.
Intel has helped them financially because they know Apple will one day screw them over and leave so intel wants more partners in the market than just Apple and a bunch of economy notebook makers.
Also last time i checked Samsung is going pretty well in everything.
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App store...Ubuntu had one before.
Thunderbolt. Apple didn't make it.
Multitouch gestures. Apple didn't invent multitouch.
Same with the tablet. They only popularized tablets again.
Not from Gartner, since they only publish the top five in unit sales. But read my posts about revenue (from various sources; Apple's PC revenue is about 60% higher than Acer's company revenue world wide, and Acer was #4 in world wide unit sales). Apart from that, Apple had 5.2% of unit sales world wide in the previous quarter (comparing Apple's reported numbers for their sales with Gartner's estimate for world wide PC sales); their results come out on the 24th or so.
Let's face it, if you mistake any non-Apple product for an Apple product, you really need to get your eyes tested.
That depends. First, it happened to a Samsung lawyer in court who couldn't spot which one was a Samsung tablet and which one an iPad (and we can probably agree that this shouldn't happen to a lawyer in a court case about similarities between products. Obviously it would be Ok for Apple's lawyers because that would prove his point). Second, my daughter's Samsung phone looks so similar to an iPhone that you have to get close to see the difference. Third, if you are quite clueless (like many people are), and you don't know that "iPad" is the name of an Apple product but you think it's the name of a product category, and you ask for an iPad in a store that doesn't sell Apple products, you might quite easily be sold a different product.
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No ****. How is it any different for other PC vendors?
Apple has introduced/popularized:
Made mice and GUI mainstream (using Xerox's ideas they paid for instead of stealing)
Keyboards place further on laptops to allow palmrests
Backlit keyboards
All-in-one computers
Mini computers
Ultra-thin laptop with custom internals
Magnetic power cords
New high-speed I/O (FireWire, Thunderbolt with Intel)
Multi-touch trackpad gestures
Unibody construction
Large button-less trackpads
Screen behind glass
External trackpad for desktops
Now what about the others?
GRiD made the first laptop
IBM brought the trackpoint (aka clit mouse)
Microsoft invented the scroll wheel
Fujitsu started laptops with touch screens
Sony came with chiclet keyboards
Asus brought the netbooks
What else?
There are far more recent innovation made by Apple than anyone else, unless I forgot some really important things.
There is a difference between 'innovation' and 'invention'.
Just sayin'
(or just read what pgiguere1 wrote above this, for more details)
I'm done with this thread. But before I leave, a quote from Dan Eran Dilger
Just sayin'
(or just read what pgiguere1 wrote above this, for more details)
I'm done with this thread. But before I leave, a quote from Dan Eran Dilger
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I like how you had to change what he said with every response. Talk about shifting goalposts!
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/thunderbolt/thunderbolt-technology-developer.html
"Developed by Intel (under the code name Light Peak), and brought to market with technical collaboration from Apple."
Innovation means something new. Apple didn't innovate the Mouse. The first mouse was invented in 1963. When Steve Jobs was 8...
Keyboards were already like that before Macbooks existed.
Commodore PET was an All-in-one Computer that came out before the original Macintosh.
PDP-8 was the first successful Minicomputer.
Never knew Apple did custom computers.
Magnetic powercords were probably Apple's idea, but the quality of it sucks. Not a good innovation: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC461LL/A Look at the reviews.
Yes, Apple made Firewire, which failed to succeed. Apple didn't make Thunderbolt. Intel did.
Apple did not invent machining from a block of aluminum, the same way it did not invent multi-touch.
An HP Pavillion had glass in front of the screen before Apple did it.
Wacom tablets been out before the Magic Trackpad did.
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Read the bold. Apple helped a bit, but to market it with Apple products.
Read the post that you responded to. "Thunderbolt ports." Which is where, to my understanding, the "technical collaboration" came into play.
So what you're saying is that Apple helped make the port only?
Pretty sure Intel made that too.
So what you're saying is that Apple helped make the port only?
I have no idea the full extent of their involvement. But reports were that they were involved in the port and connector. (Compatible with Mini-displayport if I remember correctly).
Not sure why you are confused, when you deliberately changed everything that the poster you replied to said in your rebuttal of his points. He was simply refuting the claim that "Apple hasnt innovated in the PC space for Years." He provided straightforward examples to contradict this claim.
I don't remember where I initially saw it, but here is some information about some Apple patents involving thunderbolt.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...al-thunderbolt-is-headed-for-ios-devices.html
In the early days...
I do remember Apple being at about 15% market share. More importantly, in the late 80s/early 90s Apple was like HP is now - Apple sold significantly more computers than any one PC vendor, and the real focus was on whether or not Apple could sell more computers than all PC companies combined.
Personally, I love a multicultural environment like the 80s, and if Apple can get up to 30%, we'll be there again, where no platform can really be thought of as the dominant one.
I do remember Apple being at about 15% market share. More importantly, in the late 80s/early 90s Apple was like HP is now - Apple sold significantly more computers than any one PC vendor, and the real focus was on whether or not Apple could sell more computers than all PC companies combined.
Personally, I love a multicultural environment like the 80s, and if Apple can get up to 30%, we'll be there again, where no platform can really be thought of as the dominant one.
See, I used the terms "introduce/popularized", not invented. They made it mainstream. It was something new for the industry, even if it theoretically existed before.
I'm talking about the Apple PowerBook 100, which was indeed released before MacBooks. It was the first one.
I'm talking about the concept of integrating laptop parts inside a desktop computer to give the appearance that it's just a screen with no tower. I'm not just talking about fixing the tower to the screen.
Perhaps I wasn't clear by "Mini computer", but I was referring to a full computer as small as the Mac mini.
Custom internals. As in "adjusted to the form factor of the computer they're within". Apple made the smallest motherboard, managed to remove the cooling system, collaborated with Intel to reduce their chip size for the MBA, they put 1.8" HDDs in it at first and later new blade-type SSD.Never knew Apple did custom computers.
Their innovation was the magnetic tip. The power supply failing has nothing to do with the magnetic connection.
Did it really need to surpass USB to be considered successful? It was successful, and certainly still has advantages over USB for professionals, notably latency time. I use FireWire for real-time audio work, milliseconds matter.
Again, for the Thunderbolt part, read my first terms: "introduced/popularized", I didn't say invent.
Again, it was new for the computer industry. By your logic you could extrapolate and say nobody invented nothing, cause basically every innovation uses another innovation in the process.
Apple bought the company that invented Multi-touch before any commercial product was made out of it. They paid intellectual properties and innovated by seing potential in a technology that was not yet commercially available and introduced it.
You may be right, I didn't know. What's the model exactly?
Wacoms are made for drawing, they're not pointing devices. You could use it as one but it sucks and it's definitely not made for that. It's not a trackpad, my point remains.
And their port placement is somewhat atrocious. But nowhere near as bad as the port placement on the new dell laptops. AYFKME? almost all the useful ports are on the back in an ugly protrusion that sticks out behind the display.
According to Wikipedia, Apple sold a total of somewhere between five and six million Apple II computers in total, including the Apple II GS. That would be about four to 4 1/2 months of unit sales at the current rate. Apple's PC revenue per year is about the same as the total company revenue up to 1991. So I don't really care what Apple's market share was back then; they are selling a lot more today.
You apparently don't remember what powerbooks used to cost with mediocre GPU's etc.