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Maclones
- Thread starter koulmj
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By "how many mac clones out there" I assume you mean "not a lot".
Because right now, "hackintosh" are still very very marginal in the big picture. On specialized internet forums it may seem that everybody want to build their own computer and deal with those stuff, but it is a very tiny fraction of users.
About clones and licensing OS X. The thing is, Apple, even with a relatively small fraction of the PC market is in a very desirable position. They don't sell a lot of computers compared to other brand, but they sell a lot of "high end with high margin computers". They are very competitive when you get into the market that sell for 1000$ and more, and this is the market where the margin are very desirables. One big reason for their success is that they offer a "unique" (if not better) experience with OS X. Hardware design is one thing, but OS X is still the thing you use everyday that make people want to move to Mac and pay the price.
Anyway, to make thing simple, they offer with OS X something that nobody else is able to offer in the PC market, so they can remain strong in the medium to high end market segment where the real money is.
Other PC companies (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, ASUS, etc.) all sell almost the same thing, at least in the consumer eyes, which is a machine that run Windows, and they are all able to build relatively good computers hardware. So, in front of relatively similar products, the consumer will most of the time go with the cheapest one. So basically, PC vendors are forced to compete on prices, and competing on price mean leaner margins.
Of course, there are PC that also sell for 1000$ and more, but the problem for any specific vendor is that if you find a good 1500$ ASUS computer, Dell is probably able to build an almost identical product also, Lenovo and others too. So one will cut his margin to sell the same one for 1400$, and the other one for 1380$, etc. Basically, at every level they have to accept smaller margin because they have nothing that differentiate them from the competition.
Apple is the exception, they have OS X. They are different. They can compete on something other than price, and that is gold.
Because right now, "hackintosh" are still very very marginal in the big picture. On specialized internet forums it may seem that everybody want to build their own computer and deal with those stuff, but it is a very tiny fraction of users.
About clones and licensing OS X. The thing is, Apple, even with a relatively small fraction of the PC market is in a very desirable position. They don't sell a lot of computers compared to other brand, but they sell a lot of "high end with high margin computers". They are very competitive when you get into the market that sell for 1000$ and more, and this is the market where the margin are very desirables. One big reason for their success is that they offer a "unique" (if not better) experience with OS X. Hardware design is one thing, but OS X is still the thing you use everyday that make people want to move to Mac and pay the price.
Anyway, to make thing simple, they offer with OS X something that nobody else is able to offer in the PC market, so they can remain strong in the medium to high end market segment where the real money is.
Other PC companies (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, ASUS, etc.) all sell almost the same thing, at least in the consumer eyes, which is a machine that run Windows, and they are all able to build relatively good computers hardware. So, in front of relatively similar products, the consumer will most of the time go with the cheapest one. So basically, PC vendors are forced to compete on prices, and competing on price mean leaner margins.
Of course, there are PC that also sell for 1000$ and more, but the problem for any specific vendor is that if you find a good 1500$ ASUS computer, Dell is probably able to build an almost identical product also, Lenovo and others too. So one will cut his margin to sell the same one for 1400$, and the other one for 1380$, etc. Basically, at every level they have to accept smaller margin because they have nothing that differentiate them from the competition.
Apple is the exception, they have OS X. They are different. They can compete on something other than price, and that is gold.
make it 600 bucks a copy impose a strict hardware compatibility list, no volume licencing deals and good for 3 years of updates
How badly do you think Apple is doing? Mac OS is the main selling point for Macs. They did it then out of shear desperation because bankruptcy was in sight. Not to mention how much they regretted it afterward.
Yes, Apple may be slowly doming themselves with soldered RAM and other stupid moves, but they're not even close to being that desperate for money. OS X shall remain a Mac exclusive (at least from a legal standpoint).
Yes, Apple may be slowly doming themselves with soldered RAM and other stupid moves, but they're not even close to being that desperate for money. OS X shall remain a Mac exclusive (at least from a legal standpoint).
Mark my words - in 10 years no personal computer will have user-replaceable RAM. That has nothing to do with Apple, but the pursuit of reliability and performance demands that RAM is located as closely to the CPU as possible. I expect the vendors to stack the RAM on the same die as the CPU in future designs, same for GPU.
You'll see larger and larger on chip cache, but main memory is not going on chip any time soon. The reason is that although memory density is increasing, demand for memory is increasing faster.
SAP for example, have bet the farm on their HANA product which basically an in-memory compute platform. It's horizontally scalable with each node having 4 x 10-core Xeons and up to 1TB of ram. The last time I looked they had run a 1 Petabyte raw data (100TB compressed) benchmark inconjunction with IBM, spread across 100 x 1TB servers.
My point is that in-memory is the direction things are going. Ram is now being used for what disk was used for in the past. SSD is replacing disk. Disk is increasingly only being used for backup, or for really big data sets in things like Hadoop.
Ram requirements are going up faster than any ability to accommodate it on CPU, and I don't see you being able to get a Terabyte of ram on CPU any time in the next decade.
This is not true for personal computing devices. Not to mention that we have hit a bottleneck of memory speed which can be only solved by stacking designs, increasing the bus, and bringing the CPU closer to the GPU. With your personal computer, you don't need to run a computation on a 2TB dataset. Rather, you want it to be fast and responsive. And with increasing resolutions, among others, the memory speed becomes essential. Faster RAM means I can do my work quicker. More RAM - not really. The 16GB is an overkill for me now. Maybe in 4-5 years I will need 32GB. But I would gladly go back to 8GB if it would mean HMC-like speeds.
For supercomputers, you are surely right. In fact, I have a machine with 4TB RAM practically in my basement. But it was built to solve completely different tasks than a personal computer.
Some main memory is already on chip in certain Haswell CPUs, all main memory is on chip in some embedded controller CPUs, nVidia's Volta GPU will have on-package DRAM.
We are maybe one process shrink away from much wider use of on-chip DRAM in the general microprocessor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDRAM
http://www.chipworks.com/en/technic...urces/blog/intel-e-dram-shows-up-in-the-wild/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6846/nvidia-updates-gpu-roadmap-announces-volta-family-for-beyond-2014
What is that, may I ask? We've seen huge price reductions but a 1TB box is still in the $50,000 to $100,000 ballpark and perhaps more.
50,000$. Lol. I wanna go cheaper. Not expensive. Lol i dont even make 50,000 a year lol