Apple Joins BAPCo

DigitalDame2 writes to tell us Gearlog is reporting that Apple has joined up with Windows benchmarking consortium BAPCo as a full blown member. From the article: "This is significant because it means that Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing, and it will influence industry-standard testing methodologies going forward, possibly including Mac OS X testing."

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Vista Graphics could be an issue

[cyberjessy]

Vista requires _really_ powerful graphics capabilities to display its higher end Aero Glass interface. This relies on DirectX 10. Older cards will have downgraded UI. But, Apple does not need to incorporate these $-sucking monsters into its machines, as they are not required by OS X (which uses OpenGL).

This means the Apple machines will not be the ideal machines to run Vista.

Re:Does MS have a say?

[rolfwind]

Is there any way MS could pull the rug out from under Apple if Apple goes further than MS likes? You know, oops, Windows won't activate on Macs anymore. I'm sure the EULA retains MS's right to revoke a license any time they see fit.

Eula's also can claim the right to have your spouse and first born child - doesn't mean it's legally binding. "Right to revoke?" How about right to what I paid for?

Besides, if Apple were to have a contract with MS (as if), it would not be a one sided EULA.

You're Dumped!

[jtcedinburgh]

"2) IBM dumping Apple as a customer"

I'm sure you meant that in jest, as we all know Apple hedged their bets and essentially two-timed IBM by keeping a fancy woman in Intel as a bit on the side. I guess if IBM claimed to have 'dumped' Apple at any point, it'd be more the actions of a 'spurned lover' trying to save face ;-)

"You aren't going to recognize Apple a year from now. And I sure as hell wouldn't be so foolish as to buy an Intel based Mac unless you plan on selling it on eBay a few years down the line as a novelty item"

Hmmmm... is your surname Dvorak by any chance? :-)

To be fair, computer users generally fall into two camps regarding upgrades - the ones who do (and want to keep 'up with the Jones's') and those who don't (and will keep the machine until it breaks).

If you fall into the 'do' camp, whether you'll end up with a machine which is obselete in 2009 is a moot point - you'll have moved onto something else long before then. If you're a 'don't' type, then you'll be happily using the computer with whatever OS it came with (probably) rather than lusting after whatever's shiniest.

"If you're a Mac user you better start getting over your hate for Microsoft and Windows..."

I don't have hatred for MS or Windows. I just choose the best product for me at a given time (which happens to be OSX for everything except my legacy and web dev work, which requires a PC on which I run XP). Hate's a bad thing, but recognising the flakiness of products such as Windows and the general sloppiness of MS' approach to security, etc., is just being prudent. I choose to avoid that grief as much as possible, and I voted OSX. YMMV.

Re:Vista Graphics could be an issue

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Because the customers might use the capability.

Even if a customer bought a Mac, uninstalled OS X and ran Windows on the Mac until it died, Apple still got a sale out of the deal.

And if being Windows-compatible attracts Windows users to buy a Mac and switch completely, that's even better.

What's with the "dump OSX" theme?

[localman]

I've come across several comments that predict that Apple is planning to dump OSX in favor of Windows as their OS. I'm no Nostradamus, but this seems ludicrously unlikely while Steve Jobs is alive. And no, it's nothing like the switch to intel... processor flamewars were always foolishness: who really cares what processor architecture is underneath? Ask NetBSD... if it can run the OS that's what matters.

It's all about the user experience, and OSX is the experience Apple wants to deliver.

Big surprise... having used nearly every OS known to man, I can say that OSX is certainly one of the greatest ever. And it's already well past the bootsrapping stage that kills most young OSs. Ditching it now would be completely insane.

Cheers.

Re:For the switch to windows

[tm2b]

Do you realize that Steve Jobs already tried this once, and it nearly destroyed NeXT?

Re:You're Dumped!

[Weedlekin]

In any case, OS X is extremely profitable for Apple:

1) it lets them charge a premium for what is now essentially the same hardware that others have to sell for a lower price, part of which goes to MS.

2) They sell a _lot_ of OS X upgrades to existing Mac users, which gives them a post-sales income stream that would otherwise go into Microsoft's coffers.

3) Apple also sell a lot of Mac software ranging from iLife upgrades to high-priced professional applications. These sales would dwindle if they were forced to compete with entrenched ISVs on Windows.

4) Ditto for high-priced Apple hardware such as Airport. These things sell for a premium because they are part of the "Apple life style", and that would not exist if Apple became yet another Windows box maker (the fact that Apple are associated with a life style is indicative of how strategically important OS X is. One does not for example hear people talk about a "Dell life-style" or a "Gateway life-style").

5) All of the above would also mean a massive diminution of income from AppleCare, because existing Wintel support companies would offer better contracts at more attractive prices.

And if the above financial reasons weren't more than enough for Apple to continue developing OS X, there is also a strategic factor that comes from having the freedom to set their own agenda, a freedom that many consumer-oriented computer manufacturers would love to have. Apple is a company that likes to have complete control, and switching to Windows would mean ceding virtually all of that control to Microsoft. And as many others have found to their cost, letting Microsoft have control over one's destiny can be very dangerous indeed.
 

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Death of Mac OS predicted, pictures at 11

[simong]

I remember the first time that I saw suggestions that Mac OS had had its day. It was when the first news that Copland [wikipedia.org] was struggling made its way out of Infinite Loop. A fairly well known and respected member of the UK computer journalism world suggested that as Apple were trying to port to PowerPC permanently, why not build the Copland architecture on Windows NT, whose kernel was fairly mature at the time and available for the PPC chipset. At the time it was fairly radical thinking but MS was in a far better technical position then that it is now. Of course, MS binned their PPC and Alpha support not long afterwards, NextStep became Rhapsody became Mac OS X, Linux matured to become a genuine alternative to big iron Unix and Windows found competition both on the desktop and in the datacentre again.
In 2005 Steve Jobs announces that the next generation of Macs will run on Intel processors and almost immediately everyone assumes that this will mean Windows in some way. But with the apparent dissatisfaction within Microsoft over the progress of Vista [slashdot.org], against the almost inevitable success of getting Windows XP to work on the Macintel platform, who is going to be the winner? OS X is far ahead of XP in usability, incorporated apps and security. Gnome has a better unified API, even if it struggles to create blue water between it and Windows and for me at least, consequently limits itself on the user experience. So why even consider Windows? Just because it works on Intel doesn't mean that is has to be the de facto OS for Intel machines. That's been broken all ready.
Remember that the migration to Intel was based on the phrase 'just in case'. So what are Pages, Keynote, Aperture and the other Apple workflow apps for? The day that Mac OS 10.5 appears in a box for Intel PCs? That's a good 'just in case' scenario - just in case Microsoft take their ball home completely and don't release a Universal version of Office perhaps? Apple isn't down, and anyone who assumes that doesn't remember its history.

Re:Wha...?

[soft_guy]

Then you recollect incorrectly. The proprietary BIOS wasn't enough to keep the crooks out. IBM would have known that if they had bothered to do any due diligence on their design. Instead, they let a small group have "free reign" to do whatever they wanted. Which was a good move in the sense that they got a product to market, but a bad move in that they were not able to establish a sustainable business for themselves.

If you look at how the IBM PC affected IBM, it basically caused them to have to lay off a third of their workers. They should have owned that market. Instead, they were so afraid of Apple that they lost all common sense and made a stupid mistake.

If you are IBM, what does it matter that your product became the basis for all PCs when the result to your bottom line is a fucking disaster.

Yet idiots like you keep claiming that Apple is somehow stupid for not making the same idiotic mistake that IBM made. (Actually they did make that mistake - when they tried to clone the Mac. And it had predictable results.) Historically, cloning does not help the company that developed the architecture.

Re:What's with the "dump OSX" theme?

[CottonEyedJoe]

A move from OSX to Windows would be a sign that Apple really is dying. Think of it as equivalent to a company producing cheap garbage buying an established company to leverage the name selling cheap garbage. I cant think of any computer examples off hand (lenovo seems to be making good laptops) but in the 70's and 80's boys everywhere dreamed of owning a GT bicycle.. A few years ago Pacific Cycles purchased GT and you can now buy cheap GT's in Wal Mart.

If Apple switches to building commodity PC hardware running windows they will simply be leveraging the Apple and Macintosh name (one of the most recognized brands in the world) to stave off the inevitable end.

Personally, I hope this is a sign that Apple is taking performance VERY seriously. Apple needs to be able to show the mac creative community that they can produce hardware which makes sticking with Apple worthwhile. Apple actually has some economy of scale advantage in the high performance graphics workstation arena. Most Windows PC's sold are of the cheap variety. Apple's high end machines sell as fast they can produce them and they are the ONLY OSX high end workstation producer. I'm sure MORE Windows high end graphics workstations are sold overall, but no one company has huge production. Dont be surprised to see Apple produce an incredible high end machine CHEAPER than the competition.

Re:Apple surrenders

[Anonymous Coward]

They lied before when they claimed G5 is the fastest CPU on Earth, they lied when they said the Intel chips are 2x faster than the G5 (I mean they lied at least one of the times, right)

I'm not going to get into whether either of the claims were true, but the fact that the claims were made at different times means that they could both have been true.

Re:For the switch to windows

[Shuh]

I think Apple is considering moving out of the computer manufacturing business entirely... I was telling my friends years ago when the ipod accounted for over 50% of Apple's profits that they would shift their strategy to focus on their more profitable businesses.

If their current focus on the "more profitable" business has netted them >80% market-share, how much more of their focus is needed?

A year after that, I was talking about how they would move away from the RISC architecture, and adopt an Intel architecture.. which would give them an opportunity to make their barely profitable computer manufacturing business profitable.

What an "opportunity!"

Apple has always had the highest margins in the personal computing industry, and the have turned hundreds of millions in profit for years now. Additionally, Intel parts cost more than PPC chips, as evidenced by the $100 price increase in the Mac Mini.

Next would be porting OSX to run on competitor's hardware, sidestepping IBM's fatal proprietary model, and opening up their software development segments to a broader market, and giving them better opportunity to be profitable.

As I recall, IBM's "fatal" mistake in the P.C. biz was OS/2, which ran on the "competitor's hardware." There's a reason Apple waited for Intel's built-in DRM chips before moving to x86. Truth be told, the so-called "open" x86 architecture is Microsoft's personal fiefdom, and any proprietary OS besides Windows is suffocated within a few years. Linux gets by because, as an open-source project, there is no traditional way to cut off its "air supply."

At which point, Apple could seriously consider the profitibility of manufacturing computers all togeather.

Yeah. This way they can concentrate on competing with Windows! Imagine how many more copies of OSX will get sold when no consumer-box OEM will install the software on the threat of losing price-breaks on their Windows liscenses.

Apple has potential to grow tremendously, and make a great comeback from near bankruptcy.. once again.

They already did that -- years ago. The potential now is to to make a great comeback to near bankruptcy, once again.

It will need to reduce propreitary business models, increase open market comeptitveness, shed unprofitable revenues sources, and focus thier resources on high profit sections. To me this means, focus on software and peripherals.

This is obviously coming from someone who hasn't taken note of all the wrecked companies in both the peripheral and software markets while companies like Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel live on.

Re:fact or fiction?

[Al Dimond]

What really seems silly about this whole thing is all the speculation about Macs and Windows compatibility. TFA was very eager to call BAPCo a leader in "Windows benchmarking", but nowhere on BAPCo's website is it mentioned that they're a specifically Windows-only company, even if all their current products target Windows. Couldn't it simply be that Apple is joining them to help develop hardware benchmarks that could compare a machine running OSX86 to one running Windows?