posted
Then you'll owe me a Coke in about a year's time.
See, while I do think that people will continue to get OS X running on homebrew machines, I don't think it will be widespread outside the geek community. Your average person who buys a computer to use the Internet and play Solitaire isn't going to be interested in trying to run OS X on unsupported hardware any more than he's interested in trying to run Linux on supported hardware. People want their operating systems to work without having to fiddle around; OS X won't work on vanilla hardware without fiddling around.
The fact that a bunch of geeks will run OS X on their homebrew PCs does not in any way imply that Apple will bless this practice with developer effort on their part. There is absolutely no reason for Apple to license the Mac OS to run on vanilla hardware, because, as I and others have been saying, it would be a support nightmare for them. One of the major distinguishing characteristics of what Apple offers is the closed system.
There would have to be a compelling reason for Apple to do this; as long as Mac sales continue to be strong, there is not only no compelling reason, there's no reason at all. Interestingly, Mac sales didn't slump between when the Intel transition was announced and when the hardware went on sale. I'm curious to see if this will translate into significantly increased Mac sales as the transition goes ahead. If Mac sales do increase, the already-weak justification for making OS X available on non-Mac hardware completely evaporates.
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While you're here, could you explain the logic behind your reasoning to me? There's a disconnect between your brain and mine somewhere, because I just don't get why you think this is inevitable. I just don't see "OS X can and will be run on non-Apple hardware" -> "Apple will formally support/encourage this practice" as an intuitive logical step.
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That's the thing -- I don't think there is. Hardware sales make Apple a lot of money, because their hardware sales are very high-margin. Why would they want to jeopardize their principal cash cow?
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I honestly don't understand why they wouldn't? As Kwea said, there's money to be made, is there not?
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There's also a lot of money to be lost, Storm. The Mac OS and attendant bundled software is in a large part simply a vehicle for selling high-priced, high-margin Macintosh hardware, much like iTunes and iTMS for Windows is just a vehicle for selling iPods.
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I see what you're saying, but it just boggles my mind that every other OS on the planet is working to expand its driver database, and to work on as many different kinds of processors as possible, and Apple is still stuck in a thirty year old business model.
*shrug*
I guess if it's working for them, what the hey.
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posted
Well, none of those other desktop OS companies also sell desktop computer hardware. It's to their benefit to get their OSes running on as much hardware as possible.
Apple, on the other hand, has been making money hand over fist for much of the last five years despite spending most of that time well behind the x86 world in the processor game. Part of that is due to the stellar success of the iPod, but Mac sales have also earned them a bundle. If Mac sales were decent when the systems were hobbled by the G4, there must be some potential for significant sales increases now that Apple systems across the board will be performance-competitive for pretty much everything but some server tasks (OS X is a dog on stuff like MySQL).
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quote:While you're here, could you explain the logic behind your reasoning to me? There's a disconnect between your brain and mine somewhere, because I just don't get why you think this is inevitable. I just don't see "OS X can and will be run on non-Apple hardware" -> "Apple will formally support/encourage this practice" as an intuitive logical step.
It's more "If it's going to happen anyway, let's make some money off it."
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See, I just don't think the money they would earn in software sales would be enough to offset the loss of hardware revenue and the support [nightmare]. I think it's very much in Apple's interest to keep the Mac OS tied to their own hardware.
Edit: I originally had "revenue" where "nightmare" is now, by mistake.
quote: Well, none of those other desktop OS companies also sell desktop computer hardware. It's to their benefit to get their OSes running on as much hardware as possible.
Apple, on the other hand, has been making money hand over fist for much of the last five years despite spending most of that time well behind the x86 world in the processor game.
Interesting. I did not know that. I've always thought of Apple as being one step above bankruptcy.
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They were bleeding red ink in the mid-late 90s, but since then things have been pretty good at 1 Infinite Loop. At one point they had upwards of $4 billion in cash on hand, though since then they've spent a chunk of that on acquisitions.
Added: The scenario I see where they might go software and gadget-only, as I noted earlier in this thread, is a case like that of Be, where Mac sales slump steadily toward oblivion and ditching the Mac hardware is a last-ditch attempt to stave off bankruptcy for the company. We'll see how Mac hardware sales are doing in a couple of years.
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quote:See, I just don't think the money they would earn in software sales would be enough to offset the loss of hardware revenue and the support revenue. I think it's very much in Apple's interest to keep the Mac OS tied to their own hardware.
I don't think it's ultimately sustainable.
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What if Apple made available a cheap, unsupported, open source version of its OS and said,"Do what you will." Let's think about this.
*They still make money selling their Apple boxes to people that have the supported OS.
*As you say, they apparently don't make that much money off of their OS anyway.
*They get the free technical output (bug fixes and software) of having a million monkeys banging on keyboards as they play with their OS. To me, this seems huge.
*More people are exposed and become familiar with the Apple OS, so more people will advocate for the machines in business and at home.
*In my extremely unexpert opinion, they might be able to do this by making OS X more compatible with existing BSD kernels?
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(1) OpenDarwin, among (many) other things. Apple is already leveraging open source fairly significantly, and to a certain extent what you're talking about is already available.
(2) In some respects, merely allowing unsupported builds of OS X out into the wild -- which they can't stop anyway -- may well have the sort of effect you're talking about in terms of exposure.
(3) I don't think exposure to the Mac OS would necessarily translate to increased hardware sales. If you could run OS X on a Dell, why buy Apple unless you like swanky cases?
Finally, in terms of exposure, I'd say that the iPod+iTMS has done far more for Apple than allowing their OS to run on generic hardware would. I've heard a lot of geeks say that they'd like to try OS X out on x86, which leads me to believe that the real reason they advocate this is that they want to see it, not that they think it'd be a sound business decision. I don't think it would be a sound business decision unless their situation changes dramatically, so that's why I don't think we'll see it happen.
Added: However, Apple has made decisions that I didn't think were particularly sound; they've also made decisions that turned out to be unsound regardless of what I thought about them. I'd be surprised, though, particularly given their exprience with the hardware licensing fiasco.
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quote: If you could run OS X on a Dell, why buy Apple unless you like swanky cases?
I don't exactly understand why people buy Apple computers now, unless they like swanky cases. Apple people tell me it's because of rock solid dependability and ease of use for novices or something. O.K. Apple still sells to these people because they don't know how to install Apple on a Dell, which is not as dependable, etc.
For those people who do know how to do it, supported software and dependability is a HUGE benefit, Twinky. Many IT departments don't use, or have stopped using, Linux because it's very unsupported and they can't get answers to problems NOW.
quote: Finally, in terms of exposure, I'd say that the iPod+iTMS has done far more for Apple than allowing their OS to run on generic hardware would. I've heard a lot of geeks say that they'd like to try OS X out on x86, which leads me to believe that the real reason they advocate this is that they want to see it, not that they think it'd be a sound business decision. I don't think it would be a sound business decision unless their situation changes dramatically, so that's why I don't think we'll see it happen.
The Ipod and Itunes aren't the OS. Granted, they make money, but they don't make me want to go out and buy an Apple or the OS.
There are things like Pear out there which allow you to run OS X on an x86, but I've heard it's pretty slow and kind of kludgy. You are correct that I would like to play around with the software , however I think giving Apple OS more exposure can't help but be good for the Apple bottom line.
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SS: stopped using Linux? Obviously there are shifts both ways, but Linux has been making huge inroads against (backed by giant companies) Unix for years now. I don't know what you're reading, but the net change in Linux in use is highly in Linux's favor.
Dagonee: there's no particular economic reason it wouldn't be sustainable. Apple does benefit from all those commodity parts -- they select among them themselves -- and their markups aren't particularly large given the feature-sets, particularly on laptops. They're one of the largest computer manufacturers, after all; they're doing just fine. Its a mistake to see their primary competition as MS, since Apple's not an operating system company. That's just value-added for the hardware. They are through and through a computer hardware company, and doing very well at it.
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The political aspects of all this talk fascinate me most.
I think these corporations work a little like political parties. You "leak" parts of your protected sources to the public, and amazingly the public does all your tweaking for free, telling you what works and what doesn't without you having to even admit your asking. Seems the geek community can muster as much of a contribution to the advancement of future computer systems as any corporation, and probably more.
Look at the rash of Wiki-culture spreading across the net in the last few years, there is an army of experts (and teenagers) working for free to expand gigantic databases for public consumption, why not WIKI-OS as well?
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quote:Dagonee: there's no particular economic reason it wouldn't be sustainable. Apple does benefit from all those commodity parts -- they select among them themselves -- and their markups aren't particularly large given the feature-sets, particularly on laptops. They're one of the largest computer manufacturers, after all; they're doing just fine. Its a mistake to see their primary competition as MS, since Apple's not an operating system company. That's just value-added for the hardware. They are through and through a computer hardware company, and doing very well at it.
As the perceived difference in capabilities that matter to most users between cutting edge and one- or two-generation old computers shrinks, desktop hardware will become more and more a commodity business, leaving less room for "premium" brands in the market.
I don't see their primary competition as MS. Rather, the primary advantage their desktop and laptop computers have is in competition with MS.
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posted
Computers have already pretty much reached that point. Many manufacturers have made the last couple of generations of mainstream computers slower than the ones preceding, particularly in laptops. Apple's laptop sales have remained strong.
Keep in mind that Apple computers have always had far longer actual usage (and I would argue, far longer possible usage under the average person's care) than comparable PCs. This is part of what keeps their sales low but their presence felt. Having to compete against older, still very capable computers is nothing new for Apple, and their sales figures have largely adjusted to that cycle.
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quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: I don't exactly understand why people buy Apple computers now, unless they like swanky cases. Apple people tell me it's because of rock solid dependability and ease of use for novices or something. O.K. Apple still sells to these people because they don't know how to install Apple on a Dell, which is not as dependable, etc.
For those people who do know how to do it, supported software and dependability is a HUGE benefit, Twinky. Many IT departments don't use, or have stopped using, Linux because it's very unsupported and they can't get answers to problems NOW.
People who know how to do it are a tiny, tiny minority.
I don't think Apple has any illusions about making serious inroads in the enterprise market. Why should they bother? In many major industries, key applications (MS Access, Lotus Notes, AutoCAD, every engineering software package I'm aware of) are Windows-only. Apple and the various Linux vendors are pretty much SOL here, and I think they know it.
What Apple sells is a complete, packaged user experience. From the moment you open the box to when you turn on your new hardware and start using it, what sets Apple apart from the rest of the industry is that they control every single step of the process. Because of this, they can make the whole experience incredibly slick. With Apple Stores, they're even trying to control the user's purchasing experience. People who like some or all of this "slickness" are willing to pay a price premium for it.
Apple doesn't support skins or many other user interface tweaking options; you can do things their way, do things without their blessing and risk them breaking with the next update, or you can buy your computer from someone else. If Apple could be psychoanalyzed, it would be a control freak.
quote:The Ipod and Itunes aren't the OS. Granted, they make money, but they don't make me want to go out and buy an Apple or the OS.
It's been argued that it does make a significant number of people more interested in Macs -- the so-called "halo effect," where people buy iPods and are impressed by the ease-of-use and slick iTunes/iTMS integration, and so when it comes time to buy a new computer they consider a Mac where they wouldn't have before. There's a strong case to be made for it, though it isn't unquestionably true by any stretch. Either way, though, the iPod and iTMS have definitely gotten them massive brand exposure, far more than a few geeks playing with the Mac OS on their homebrew systems could hope to do -- particularly since those geeks can, as Dagonee's recent link demonstrates, already take OS X for a drive on their machines.
Added: Actually, some guys at another forum I frequent have done just that, to see if they could.
quote:There are things like Pear out there which allow you to run OS X on an x86, but I've heard it's pretty slow and kind of kludgy. You are correct that I would like to play around with the software , however I think giving Apple OS more exposure can't help but be good for the Apple bottom line.
I really think that it just wouldn't be worth their while. No one else would write drivers for them; they'd have to make huge investments in code and support with no net payoff because they'd be cannibalizing their own hardware sales. That's what happened when they allowed Mac clones -- they allowed other companies to make hardware compatible with the Mac OS, so you could buy a computer that wasn't a Mac and still run the Mac OS on it. It was an unmitigated disaster. Apple wound up having to buy back the clone-makers' licences for a pretty penny.
Apple has always been about control -- they want to control every aspect of the user's experience, regardless of whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Allowing their OS to run on non-Apple hardware would be antethical to their philosophy in addition to hurting them financially. For those reasons, I don't think they'll do it, unless they wind up in Be's situation and are forced to.
The desktop operating system market isn't a lucrative place, as the examples of OS/2, AmigaOS, NeXT, and Be have shown. The desktop hardware market, on the other hand, is highly lucrative. Time will certainly tell, but I'm pretty confident in my prediction that Apple will not support running OS X on generic hardware unless Mac sales go down the drain. Even if it would be a good decision for them, I still don't think they would do it.
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posted
twinky: one interesting thing that might happen is Apple making inroads in the enterprise market because their new machines run windows (not practicably, yet, you don't even get graphics, but the barriers will be surmounted).
Apple makes some very nice hardware, after all, and the ability to run Windows, Linux and OS X without emulation will quite possibly appeal in certain segments (for instance, architecture, where they need windows for the CAD software, but a lot of creative work is still done on macs).
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posted
I'm not sure how likely that is, simply because I'm willing to bet that, for companies in that position, the cost of an architect having to reboot his computer to switch operating systems is greater than the cost of simply buying both a Dell and a Mac. However, if virtualization technology becomes common and cheap, all bets on that score are off.
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quote: I don't think Apple has any illusions about making serious inroads in the enterprise market. Why should they bother?
*rubs forehead*
I am going to retire from this conversation and think about some of the things that have been brought up.
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quote:Originally posted by twinky: I don't think Apple has any illusions about making serious inroads in the enterprise market. Why should they bother? In many major industries, key applications (MS Access, Lotus Notes, AutoCAD, every engineering software package I'm aware of) are Windows-only. Apple and the various Linux vendors are pretty much SOL here, and I think they know it.
I happen to work closely with MacEnterprise.org and Apple is not idle. Apple's very competitive products in this market are the Xserve and Xraid. For what they are, their price is screaming deals. Also remember that NeXT was an enterprise company, whose customers were fortune 500 companies. So while old school Apple doesn't have much experience in enterprise, new school Apple does.
quote:Apple doesn't support skins or many other user interface tweaking options; you can do things their way, do things without their blessing and risk them breaking with the next update, or you can buy your computer from someone else. If Apple could be psychoanalyzed, it would be a control freak.
There are so many ways to skin OS X. The most obvious is haxies from http://www.unsanity.com, especially ShapeShifter (there is an XP skin). Naturally, Apple frowns strongly on haxies because it loads a framework that could cause unstableness. But modding Mac OS has been a strong practice since Mac OS 8. The 3rd party market for utilities is amazing. Konfabulator and QuickSilver were 2 utilities that were "added" to 10.4 (to the displeasure of the respective developers). So when you say Apple doesn't support skins, what you mean is that Apple hasn't bought or copied all the 3rd party developers yet.
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SS: I buy Macs because I don't value the skill of being able to build my own CPU. My CPU's just work and I never have to open it unless I feel like upgrading the hard disk, video card, or memory. And I rarely worry about hardware drivers.
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quote:I happen to work closely with MacEnterprise.org and Apple is not idle. Apple's very competitive products in this market are the Xserve and Xraid. For what they are, their price is screaming deals.
I haven't said anything about the quality of their server offerings, beyond the abysmal SQL performance of OS X Server. The Xserves are pretty.
However, if you work for a medium-sized or large company in any manufacturing or processing industry, the computer at your desk at work runs Windows. It has to. Unless AutoDesk, IBM, SAP, and Microsoft itself show any interest in making the relevant apps crossplatform, non-Windows operating systems will continue to be irrelevant in this space.
Apple is capable of making significant inroads in the small business sector by offering an integrated Xserve-workstation solution, and as you say, they're working on that. They're also trying to grow their share in industries that have historically been strong for them (print, graphic design, et cetera), but as far as I'm aware they have expressed no interest whatsoever in the chemical process industry, the plastics manufacturing industry, the automotive industry, or any of the other large industries that are completely dominated by Microsoft on the software side.
quote: Also remember that NeXT was an enterprise company, whose customers were fortune 500 companies. So while old school Apple doesn't have much experience in enterprise, new school Apple does.
NeXT was also a failure. I definitely hope Apple doesn't go the way of NeXT -- going out of the hardware business and being bought up by another company looking for software.
quote:There are so many ways to skin OS X. The most obvious is haxies from http://www.unsanity.com, especially ShapeShifter (there is an XP skin). Naturally, Apple frowns strongly on haxies because it loads a framework that could cause unstableness. But modding Mac OS has been a strong practice since Mac OS 8. The 3rd party market for utilities is amazing. Konfabulator and QuickSilver were 2 utilities that were "added" to 10.4 (to the displeasure of the respective developers). So when you say Apple doesn't support skins, what you mean is that Apple hasn't bought or copied all the 3rd party developers yet.
I'm well aware that there are third-party utilities available to mod OS X; I've been using Macs since the mid-eighties. Also, your examples support my view: there have been skin utilities for the Mac OS for ages, but Apple has steadfastly refused to incorporate any significant skinning functionality into their OS. Apple is all about controlling the user experience. There are many third-party ways to skin OS X because there has been strong demand for skin functionality for years and Apple has always refused to provide it.
The examples of Konfabulator and Quicksilver aren't really analogous, the latter particularly so -- the biggest similarity between Quicksilver and Spotlight is that they both "live" in the top right hand corner of the screen. Under the hood the difference is fundamental -- it's not like Quicksilver automatically indexed your hard drive or provided a developer API for using and altering file metadata.
I'm really not sure how you get from "Apple occasionally buys up and/or copies third-party developer ideas that it likes" to "Apple will provide skin functionality or formal support in a future OS release." I don't see that logical leap.
quote:As far as Windows and Intel Macs go, why would anyone want to dual boot? WINE Arrives for Intel Macs
WINE, contrary to what some Linux advocates would have you believe, is far from a be-all and end-all solution for running Windows applications. Dual-booting is still a necessity for many applications (for instance, in the area of Direct3D).
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Would I like to see the Mac OS on non-Apple hardware for my own nefarious purposes? Yup. I'd build my own homebrew machine in a heartbeat, probably a small form factor box in a Shuttle or Soldam case. I doubt I'd ever buy Apple hardware again if that happened, unless it was a laptop. I've already seriously considered doing that anyway and switching to Windows, but my preference for the Mac OS is strong enough that I haven't done it yet.
At the end of the day, though, all of this is just opinion and speculation about the future of a computer company. Well, that and a Coke for me this time next year. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Now we just have to wait and see if the Intel switch makes their marketshare go up or down. I was very, very skeptical of the transition at first, but I'm moderately impressed with how it has been handled so far. Still, I think it'll be 2008 or even 2009 before we'll be able to really guess at whether they'll eventually go software-only. We could make the bet again then. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Well, I can't manage to reach the article in either Safari or Firefox, but the simple answer is no, and the simple reason is that Dvorak's an idiot. He's paid to essentially make up arguments highly likely to start flame wars.
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posted
Actually, he's using an argument that someone else initially made, and to me it makes a lot of sense. If most of your profit comes from hardware sales, and you're being held back by your OS that no one knows how to use, then get rid of the OS and get into the Windows PC market.
quote: The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing.
Epstein made four observations. The first was that the Apple Switch ad campaign was over, and nobody switched. The second was that the iPod lost its FireWire connector because the PC world was the new target audience. Also, although the iPod was designed to get people to move to the Mac, this didn't happen. And, of course, that Apple had switched to the Intel microprocessor.
Though these points aren't a slam-dunk for Epstein's thesis, other observations support it. The theory explains several odd occurrences, including Apple's freak-out and lawsuits over Macintosh gossip sites that ran stories about a musicians' breakout box that has yet to be shipped. Like, who cares?
But if Apple's saber-rattling was done to scare the community into backing off so it wouldn't discover the Windows stratagem, then the incident makes more sense. As does Bill Gates's onscreen appearance during Apple's turnaround when Jobs was taking a pot of money from Microsoft. The Windows stratagem may have been a done deal by then. This may also explain the odd comment at the Macworld Expo by a Microsoft spokesperson that Microsoft Office will continue to be developed for the Mac for "five years." What happens after that?
This switch to Windows may have originally been planned for this year and may partly explain why Adobe and other high-end apps were not ported to the Apple x86 platform when it was announced in January. At Macworld, most observers said that these new Macs could indeed run Windows now.
That's the first half. He mentions that the only people who would really lose out in all of this in any way would be the die-hard fans of Mac OS, but he further argues that Jobs will win them over.
No idea why the article isn't coming up for you. Comes up just fine for me in Firefox.
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posted
Dvorak has been saying for years that Apple is dead. He kept saying it far longer than most people did too. The guy is an idiot. I couldn't even read his article because his points are based on such bogus assumptions. Reading maliciously constructed business contracts make more sense that Dvorak.
Steve Jobs has invested in Mac OS X clear back to 1985, when it was called NeXT. It is built on his philosophy of what an OS should be like, even down to what programming language should prevail, Objective C. OS X is his baby.
He sells hardware for the money and because it makes the OS simpler to support. Besides the cases, the hardware is mostly made by other companies. So hardware is hardly his "baby".
That is an important thing to realize. Apple is a "case" company. They are a "package" company. They are an "experience" company.
It is the reason they don't offer impossible to get refunds so they can advertise their prices $500 cheaper than retail. They aren't going to lure people into dropping $1000 on a computer and then spend the next 3 months trying to get the $500 off only to realize they did something wrong and don't qualify.
It is the reason iLife exists.
It is the reason .Mac exists.
It is the reason most hardcore PC people hate Apple. They like to be independent of Steve. And that isn't what Apple sells. Apple sells a walk in the park, with Steve as your tour guide.
I view switching to Windows as being stuck in a firey hell, with Bill Gates holding the pitchfork. And I prefer Steve's version of reality than Bill's.
Not that either of them are acurate. But the Apple experience is much more pleasant.
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I was getting server-side errors, I may just have been hitting in the worst of the slashdotting.
Dvorak's point is essentially nonsensical. Apple certainly is a hardware company, but it is only their differentiability from other computers that enables them to make much of a profit. Anything reducing that differentiability (economic differentiability, not technical differentiability; things which people thinking about the systems count as meaningful differences) should be viewed as suspect and almost certainly wrongheaded.
In particular, Dvorak underestimates the particular appeal of assorted non-OS software running on macs, and that most of this software would be prohibitive to port to windows development frameworks.
Apple is a hardware company in the sense that they derive most of their profits from hardware sales, but their value-added, what sells their hardware, is in the software (not just that made by Apple, either, though the iLife stuff is a large part of it). Remove the value-added and they start having to compete on the smaller margins other hardware companies have had to accept, either becoming an even smaller market-share elite b0xx0r company like alienware, or YACCM (Yet Another Commodity Computer Manufacturer).
Oh, and apple's switch campaign was quite successful. Their market share increased steadily throughout the period. They didn't topple Windows, but they weren't trying to. Oh, and Apple has used lawsuits against rumor sites obtaining information illegitimately for ages; that Dvorak attempts to make something of this happening yet again reveals quite well how idiotic he is.
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Apple is already leveraging open source fairly significantly, and to a certain extent what you're talking about is already available.![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
