Woz On Apple's Success

Frankenbuffer writes "The Globe and Mail today has a short interview with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Steve muses on spinning off iPod as a separate division. He also questions the move to Intel." From the article: "Microsoft wants to get out of the whole image of the big, black Darth Vader evil guy ... Innovation is probably going on within the company, because any time you put smart engineers in places eventually they wind up talking and innovating no matter how much you try to hold them back. I hope Microsoft improves and becomes more like Apple."

Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, next paragraph:

Engineering related considerations aside, he still seems reluctant about joining the Intel camp. "If it wasn't needed, I would say we shouldn't do it. And I still have some questions as to how much it's needed."

"I still have some questions ..." sounds like *questioning* to me.

Re:IPods are the only reason why Apple still exist

[AnonymousPrick]

Apple Results:

Industry Comparison: Apple doing better than Dell in terms of operating margin. MS still better 40+% [yahoo.com]

ROE very nice! [yahoo.com]

I mention this because a couple of years ago I was once with a bunch of mgt types and they were saying that Apple should get out of the PC business because they were an industry laggard. It looks like things have changed.

Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?

[Golias]

People forget that Woz originally chose Motorola over Intel for the first Apple computers because of cost more than any other factor. Motorola had a chip available which was a fraction of the price of most other options at the time.

Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?

[Electric Eye]

How the f*ck can he even question this move??? Is he smoking too much weed? Motorola COULD NOT come up with a G5 (or better) that could power a notebook. They hit a wall with this processor. End of story. The Powerbooks have had G4s in the for more than two years now. The best thing Apple could do to "update" them was to add small gizmos or slightly improve the displays. That was it. Apple is now finally able to move forward with its notebooks again.

I guess it's good he's no longer with the company. We might still be using Performas....

Re:Calling BS

[vuzman]

Yes, performance per watt is exactly what Apple needed to improve. For notebooks this is a crucial factor; it determines how much power the notebook uses to provide a certain performance. This power usage is directly related to battery usage and notebook-heating - which is where Apple's notebooks had issues.

As for performance in general, well that always needs to be improved, this is a given.

Intel's Pentium M (and successor Core) has in just a couple of years become the de facto standard for notebook processors - a testament to the fact that performance per watt is a crucial factor for notebooks. Of course performance as a factor on its own is also important. Create a processor that strikes a good balance between these two factors and you have a winner.
Enter the Core.

Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?

[Bazzalisk]

[freebsd.org] OS X without the flashy graphics and the DRM. Try it. You might love it

Beg to differ. That would be Darwin [apple.com] or OpenDarwin [opendarwin.org] - the resemblence to BSD exists, but is generaly overstated.

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Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?

[tigersha]

Woz picked the 6502 because he bought some chips at an exhibition or something as far as I recall. The 6502 was waaay cheaper than any other CPU and it was pretty much the only thing WOZ could afford for his homebrew project.