I guess Apple wants out of the hardware business

[wakeme2008]

Raw Story piece

This story is all over the place. If true Steve Jobs is killing the hardware part of Apple.

IMHO... In my case I was planning to buy of the powermacs with the new two processors on a chip systems. I will not buy that but wait for the Intel version of the Apple operating system. Also in my case I do not buy Intel processors but AMD processors. So I will build my own AMD system for the Apple OSX.


Again IMHO, Jobs is crazy if he thinks people will buy high priced Apple hardware when they can get off the shelf Intel boxes....


This is the worst marketting move Jobs could do, IMHO...

I can just see his Apple store employees now, "Do you want Windows or OSX with that HP computer".

[AlCzervik]

1. we'll have to wait and see until tomorrow

when "an" announcement is made at the Apple WWDC.

[ET Awful]

2. Of course, if Jobs hadn't been such a greedy bastard in the 80's

when people first tried to make a Mac compatible, he'd probably have a majority market share now.

Instead, he sued the company into submission that tried to make a compatible, and never licensed the technology to anyone else.

That's why Mac has such a small market share today.

[MeDeMax]

6. don't know if I'd call it greed...

imo, he is a control freak that failed to recognize his product wasn't price competitive even if it was better than the other in features.

He kept telling himself his product was better and therefore it deserved the higher asking price.

IBM, Compaq, HP and many other leading brands made similar mistakes, they priced their PCs significantly higher than the clones and eventually have had to sell or shutdown their consumer desktop divisions.

DELL is the only one that seems to have understood this principle, they are competitively priced and their systems offer much better value than the competition.

[wtmusic]

3. It doesn't imply Mac OSX will run on PCs

(or Windows will run on Macs) just because they are switching to Intel mps.

[Deja Q]

4. Jobs tried cloning the Apple before... as he's now using a cloned OS...

(FreeBSD), it makes sense to nix the Motorola/IBM PowerPC in favor of something cheap.

The REAL question is: Will consumers see the lower price? Or will Jobs and the board of directors get bigger paychecks?

[LifeDuringWartime]

5. not necessarily true

intel will probably develop a motherboard chipset that only runs OSX, and that OSX would require this chipset to boot.

edit: i doubt apple would lock people out of using the *nix of their choice. this chipset would probably prevent booting to windows.

anyway, these are my guesses

[alfredo]

7. this doesn't seem right. I have never seen such a break down of

security on an announcement. Apple's security is very tight. One of the most popular games in the computer world is to guess what stunt Jobs will pull. Too often they are wrong.

They might be right this time, but let's wait and see.

[AlCzervik]

8. very true, how many apple rumors have been false so far?

many and what you said could be exactly right.

[alfredo]

10. That's what I am thinking. I will do what I always do. Pass the salt.

[alfredo]

9. Will OSX PPC

software run on a virtual machine like OS9 runs on OSX. they did that to ease transition from OS9 to OSX.

Microsoft owns Virtual PC which first started on the PPC platform so Macs could run windows.

Could OSX run on the X86 chips using something like VPC?

[LifeDuringWartime]

11. Transitive

"Transitive Technologies demonstrated its CPU morphing software which allows code written for one CPU to run efficiently on a different CPU, at the Embedded Processor Forum, San Jose, CA. This, in itself, is not new; however, the speed at which Transitive's product, called Dynamite, can run translated applications is far faster than previous translators.

Dynamite works by dynamically translating binaries compiled for one CPU into binaries usable by a different CPU. It is possible to, say, run an application compiled for an X86 processor on a PowerPC processor. But, Dynamite does more than that.

"The word translator does not fully encapsulate what we do," Graham told MacCentral. "We accelerate binaries as well as translate them."

Generally, an application only uses about ten percent of the code that comprises it. Dynamite dynamically translates only what it needs to translate. Then it uses a run-time acceleration of those binaries to make the most efficient use of available hardware."

http://www.macworld.com/news/2001/06/13/morphing/index.php

"Can Macintosh software run on an Intel machine at speeds that approach the same performance as on Apple hardware, or visa versa? Not yet, but that day may be closer if a Los Gatos start-up gets its product off the ground, and it could have implications for chip makers.

Much like the hope of getting any software to run on any chip, Transitive Technologies has had a long incubation. In 1995, company founder Alasdair Rawsthorne began working on software to translate binary code on the fly so that it could run speedily on any chip architecture. He teamed with fellow researchers at England's University of Manchester in 2000 to create Transitive.

Now the company is entering a new stage. It has snared a major customer that sees the strategic value of getting software from one hardware architecture to run on another. It isn't saying who that customer is yet, but it expects to launch products with that company in the second half of this year.

Transitive also has rounded up a new chief executive, Bob Wiederhold, and raised $10 million in additional venture capital in March, bringing its total to $13 million."

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/6280147.htm

[alfredo]

13. Like the code morphing we saw a few years ago?

The name of the company escapes me.

[bullimiami]

12. it would be odd that they would switch to intel now

when the cell is just about to be available.

[alfredo]

15. don't believe it until Jobs says it is so.

This whole thing could be showmanship, misdirection, or just wild speculation on the media's part. Let's hear it from the man.

big question:

What about Altivec?

[Ellipsis]

14. It's branding, branding, branding, lifestyle , branding...

I think (different) you will shortly see some diversification in Apple stores.

With market share, at 2%, opening up the OS to Intel with a fully matured OSX, less vulnerable to virus and security holes etc... Hugh potential, HUGE....at 129.00 per copy of OSX (pure profit except for the shrinkwrap) ....not to mention potential lucrative government contracts too... Al Gore is on the board after all.

The philosophy of the power PC Architecture has been absorbed by the industry and
unfortunately, two years later, IBM is still unable to deliver a 3.0GHz processor for Apple.

Remember Copland? Apple's been running on Intel in back rooms for a while... maybe PIXAR too.

There ain''t no money, no moh, in the slippery slope of hardware sales, tho, Apple might come out with some super fast high, high, end boxes .....much more profitable.

The low end consumer is a nightmare to support as Apple came to find once they cut the resellers out of the game. There's tons of advantages...TODAY... moving to Intel and smart to do it before Microsoft introduces Longhorn.

....branding.

[wakeme2008]

16. Device Drivers Device Drivers

and all the problems that opens up with the Intel box approach...

once Jobs makes this offical, who in their right mind would buy a PowerPC based machine.

[Ellipsis]

17. yup! and not many.

However, Mr. Ives engineering designs are sight to behold... the G5 box...one piece of metal, beautiful. Apple has always spent tons of money on aesthetics. It's their true secret.

Imagine a real time 35000 to 70000 dollar protein folding or 3d workstation. Not to mention the Margin, margin, margin. fewer workstations to support, smaller smarter support teams, less overhead... just like the catholic church... I kid, I kid.

Separate from retail, Apple changed a large part of it's bidness model with the advent of the itunes store... content distribution is where it's at, Internet phones, home entertainment. etc. Reoccurring billing of little ones and zeros.. no ramp up, no initial die costs... no recalls, no politics. just cha ching!

[wakeme2008]

18. I will not go into their packaging of their products

ie my black box my iPod came in. But the numbers on iPods are going down. And more and more ppl (Walmart) is getting into the iTunes business. And in that market it is low price is the winner.

[billbuckhead]

19. Walmart is starting to struggle because price isn't everything

i Movies sold over the internet and put in IPods are on the way and this clears the way for HP, Sony, etc to add OS X to their computers. The reason people become so pro Apple is because they are for technological innovation while Microsoft and Dell are just monopolists that don't care about advancement. It is a lot like foreign cars vs GM.