Look, I'm as strong a Mac advocate as anyone, but OS X on Intel will not kill Apple. 2-3 years ago, it might've ... but not today.
Every self-appointed expert (recycling arguments from years past) says that it would eat into Apple's hardware market but Apple has made its intentions, to migrate its hardware efforts to consumer devices, pretty clear. Even its computer product lines are obviously trending towards more consumer device-like mobility, ubiquity, and specificity. Think of how many iPod-style devices could be placed in a single consumer home. Well, they need to connect to something - a consumer appliance like the "Hub" - occasionally ... to sync up, to do something via the Internet, etc.
But does that Hub have to be a PowerMac? Could Apple be considering the penetration of Intel boxes in the consumer home space and thinking:
1) We want to migrate consumers to our consumer products
2) Joe and Jane Consumer would be hard-pressed to justify, given the likely economic market over the next few years, throwing away their existing Intel systems and migrating to Macs
2a) if they did, they might not be able to copy software from work computers anymore
3) but they might be persuaded to buy these neat, new, functional devices
4) since we want them to do #3, and they need to have a Hub, and market share says they have Intel boxes
5) would it make more sense to
5a) make our devices Win2K/XP and .Net compatible and make our biggest competitor even richer, OR
5b) provide (a limited version of?) OS X on Intel to enable them to use their existing hardware, get exposure to the Mac experience, motivate them to buy these digital devices that take advantage of this Digital Hub and, in a few years, convince them to replace their hubs with our computers (eg, OS XII on a 10 GHz PPC with VirtualPC v10, running Windows eXtraProblematic) for their backwards compatibility)?
Apple has to look to its bottom line and, in the near future, that means selling iPods and the like. It also occurs to me that this August will be the fifth anniversary of the deals that Steve Jobs made with Bill Gates in 1997 to resolve patent issues, infuse Apple with some cash, etc. One of those deals, documented during the Microsoft trial, was that Microsoft would continue to support Office for the Mac for five years. One widely rumored, undocumented deal was that Jobs reciprocally agreed that Apple would not compete directly against Microsoft in the corporate desktop market. If true, then both sides have kept their parts of the deals. Maybe they'll continue to do so (tho they might not ... we'll see what MWNY in July tells us)
just my two euros,
robodweeb
Every self-appointed expert (recycling arguments from years past) says that it would eat into Apple's hardware market but Apple has made its intentions, to migrate its hardware efforts to consumer devices, pretty clear. Even its computer product lines are obviously trending towards more consumer device-like mobility, ubiquity, and specificity. Think of how many iPod-style devices could be placed in a single consumer home. Well, they need to connect to something - a consumer appliance like the "Hub" - occasionally ... to sync up, to do something via the Internet, etc.
But does that Hub have to be a PowerMac? Could Apple be considering the penetration of Intel boxes in the consumer home space and thinking:
1) We want to migrate consumers to our consumer products
2) Joe and Jane Consumer would be hard-pressed to justify, given the likely economic market over the next few years, throwing away their existing Intel systems and migrating to Macs
2a) if they did, they might not be able to copy software from work computers anymore
3) but they might be persuaded to buy these neat, new, functional devices
4) since we want them to do #3, and they need to have a Hub, and market share says they have Intel boxes
5) would it make more sense to
5a) make our devices Win2K/XP and .Net compatible and make our biggest competitor even richer, OR
5b) provide (a limited version of?) OS X on Intel to enable them to use their existing hardware, get exposure to the Mac experience, motivate them to buy these digital devices that take advantage of this Digital Hub and, in a few years, convince them to replace their hubs with our computers (eg, OS XII on a 10 GHz PPC with VirtualPC v10, running Windows eXtraProblematic) for their backwards compatibility)?
Apple has to look to its bottom line and, in the near future, that means selling iPods and the like. It also occurs to me that this August will be the fifth anniversary of the deals that Steve Jobs made with Bill Gates in 1997 to resolve patent issues, infuse Apple with some cash, etc. One of those deals, documented during the Microsoft trial, was that Microsoft would continue to support Office for the Mac for five years. One widely rumored, undocumented deal was that Jobs reciprocally agreed that Apple would not compete directly against Microsoft in the corporate desktop market. If true, then both sides have kept their parts of the deals. Maybe they'll continue to do so (tho they might not ... we'll see what MWNY in July tells us)
just my two euros,
robodweeb
