Leopard Vs. Vista 420
Rockgod writes to point us to an ongoing series of articles, "Leopard vs. Vista," by Daniel Eran. The latest is part 4, Naked Sales, and it's a meditation on hardware without Windows, Apple's strategy of hardware-software integration, and the dissatisfactions that arise from the creative tension between Microsoft and hardware manufacturers. (The earlier articles in the series are linked form this one.) From the article: "The vast majority of PCs come with Windows pre-installed, and actually can't be sold without it. Leading PC hardware makers can't freely advertise PCs sold without Windows, or with an alternative OS such as Linux, without having to pay Microsoft significantly more for every other OEM license they ship. That's why all name brand PCs prominently repeat their own version of the cult-like phrase 'Dell recommends Windows XP Professional,' as if there were a choice in the matter and they thought it would be helpful to provide some guidance... Apple's current Get a Mac advertising campaign doesn't compare Mac OS X to Windows, it compares the complete experience of a Mac with that of a PC. After all, Windows is only half of what's wrong with the PC as a product."
Integration has always been Apple's differentiator (Score:5, Insightful)
From the original Mac, back in 1984, to the iPod, Apple has always been about integrating hardware and software into one seamless experience. They certainly haven't always hit the mark, but it seems they have an advantage in an era where experience design continues to become more important.
Discussion about whether Apple is a hardware company or a software company has been going on for ages, but Apple has always been a systems company. Microsoft has subordinated hardware to software, and the PC industry has developed according to that dictate. Maybe that is why so many people immersed in the Windows world have a hard time understanding how the Mac is different.
Re:subject (Score:2, Insightful)
Because there is no enforcement. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is still "legal" to pay Dell to be part of your "advertising campaign". Which, in effect, reduces the cost Dell pays Microsoft per license. Those who do not want to be full partners in the campaign will be paid less than those who do.
Logical, isn't it? So if you push Windows instead of Linux, you pay less for Windows than if you did not. And the profit margins are so slim on computers now that the OEM's will take whatever deal is offered in order to increase their profits.
And since Microsoft still has the monopoly on the desktop, all the OEM's have to offer Windows. Even if they don't like the terms of the deal.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it wouldn't be a Mac either.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet the hardware in a Mac is only half of what makes it a Mac. Apple designs products that seamlessly combine hardware that is compatible and optimized to work with the other hardware (i.e. motherboard is completely compatible with processor, etc.) and well-engineered software to effectively work together efficiently as one unit. The hardware that Apple selects alone does not make a Mac, and at the same time Mac OS alone does not make a Mac. It is the seamless integration of the two.
Windows will continue to dominate (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux, Ubuntu is a step in the right direction, but until you no longer need to be an ardent computer hobbyist or know one to set it up, it ain't happening fast either. What Linux really needs is some kind of mature plug and play especially because people keep buying crap to hook up to their computers and they want to use it. There's lots of good software, the hardware link is what's needed if Linux is ever going to have a "Year of the Desktop".
In any event, in terms of manufacturer's offering an OS, it's going to be a Windows world for them for quite a while. There is no incentive for them to upset the apple cart until MS brand recognition go south. Geeks and their friends may think it has, but not enough to make a difference. In the meantime, all people who favour a particular OS or platform can do is enjoy their difference and show their friends. Someday it will make a difference.
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, same difference to me...
jeffk
Vista? No thanks. XP or OSX will do fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Integration has always been Apple's differentia (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem was that those solutions were very expensive, and what MS did was decouple the OS from the machine to create a myth of an equally powerful cheap machine. I say myth because if all the costs were factored in, the savings often were not that great. What was the benefit is that a person could buy a much more flexible machine, and if they were on a budget, but a lower quality machine than would be available from a company that actually cared about reputaion. As time went on, MS forced it's OS onto every machines, and created the monopoly. Any OEM, really system integrator that actually provided support to the end user, was forced to supply only MS OS, while MS could sit there raking in the profits while doing comparatively little.
But the front line is still, and always will be, the system company. These are the people that provide the front line support. The problem with the PC industry is that though they provide the front line support, they do not in fact reap very much of the profit. MS, who does relatively little, get the money, while all the real producers are fighting for the crumbs. But it is thier decision.
The point is that the long term successful companies are system companies that keep attuned to the users needs. IBM is a good example. HP is a good example. Apple is a good example. In fact, when Apple tried to be a hardware company, with spin off of Claris, the Newton that did not integrate, and a failing OS, the company floundered. It bought into the idea that hardware companies were more viable than system integrators. As much as people wish for Apple clones, supporting every cheap piece of trash on the planer comes at too high of a price.
Even MS is going to be a systems company, if it will survive. It will survive on the XBox, which is an intergrated product. It will survive on phones, if it will ever just make one instead of trying to force the phone companies like it did the computer OEM. Otherwise it will just be a speciality shop, serving legacy machines.
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:the silent mac minority (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind you, this is a reasonably expensive camera (Canon Powershot 3IS). Perhaps proper USB support in the peripheral makes more difference than the OS??
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Apple still sells systems (Score:2, Insightful)
They do? Most people buy a PC from Dell or PC World or Currys and it comes with Windows on it. Installed, with a set of recovery disks that reinstall it. PCs bare of an OS seem to me to be a rapidly vanishing breed.
Developing for MacOSX (Score:0, Insightful)
Compare that to Microsoft's approach to developers, which is reflected by Steve Ballmer's comic "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" dance. Eg. Microsoft gives away free versions of Visual Studio.NET, you can downlad all the SDKs for free, etc. Visual Studio is by far the best IDE out there. The other ones don't come close to it in long-term usability (as Carmack said on his blog some years ago).
Right now, the VS/.NET combination is really hard to beat. There is no serious competition to this duo in the MacOSX world. Given that MacOSX is not even a "moral" platform in the Free/Open Source respect, there's really no good reason to develop for it. Thus it will never be a feasable alternative for very many people, or power users / developers like me. It's just not a development platform. Apple is not a software technology company.
Too bad, because their hardware kicks ass. I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro running... XP.
Cheers
Why replace something that works well (PS/2)? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Because there is no enforcement. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yes.
There are enormous economies of scale in building for the Windows market. You do not opt out of a market that has ninety to ninety-five percent of your potential customers.
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like it to me -- remember, the cost of OS X are amortized over all the Macs sold, and possibly by iPods too. It's entirely possible that the fraction represented by a single unit becomes negligable.
That's possible too, if you really do mean "nearly identical." For example, a system supposedly equivalent to an iMac but does not include an iSight is not "nearly identical." Neither is a system supposedly equivalent to a Mac Pro that uses a Core 2 Duo instead of a Xeon or that supports less than 16GB RAM.
In other words, making a system that runs OS X could be cheaper than buying one from Apple, but only by cutting corners (not to imply that that's a bad thing -- there's no real downside if you didn't want the extra stuff anyway).
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:3, Insightful)
As an Apple user, I am guaranteed that OS X will run perfectly on Apple's hardware - you don't have to think about it... it just works. If Apple were to give up control of the hardware spec, they would have an exponentially harder time making changes to the OS without breaking this seamless user experience.
As much as I would like to save some cash on my next computer purchase, I'm not prepared to sacrifice stability to do this.
As for the cases themselves, they're not just good looking, they're well engineered and well constructed. Remember, it wasn't until Apple showed the industry that case design mattered that PCs had anything other than big beige boxes with noisy fans.
Re:Because there is no enforcement. (Score:2, Insightful)
Thought Control (Score:3, Insightful)
MS is almost as bad. They practice economic monopolies. Most Apple fans consider this nothing more than crass capitalism compared to Apple's more artistic monopolistic model.
Linux is the only truly "free" solution. Do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and don't worry about making the wrong choice because the only cost to the consumer is their time.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not this guy again... (Score:3, Insightful)
48.3% MS
15.9% Dell
9.4$ HP
4.6% Apple.....and so on.
Apparently 'other' have 19% of this market.
Now, you just have to ask what the units are to see this is nuts. Suppose there are 100 of these things being shipped. He is saying MS shipped 48, and Dell 16. It must follow that none of the Dell ones were MS ones, whereas in fact we know that all of the Dell ones were ALSO MS ones. However, Eran is not stupid, and knows this as well as everyone here does. But he says it anyway.
Its just cult behaviour. You used to find the same thing in old hardline Communists, who would explain to you how the labour theory of value worked, and that if you just understood correctly you would see that the Soviet economy was far bigger than the US. Or that the Hungarians had invited in the Russians in '56 to support their working class comrades.
Obviously you do not do market share like this. Here's an example. In the lawnmower business, Honda makes lawnmowers and also engines for lawnmowers. Now, what is Honda's market share?
If we add up all LM engines sold, and all LMs sold, and count every Honda LM twice (because its an LM and an engine both), does this give us a better picture of Honda's share than the conventional method? Of course it doesn't, because it mixes up two distinct things of which Honda's shipments can vary independently.
The correct and conventional approach would be to say that there are two markets: LM engines, and LMs. And you can have different and independent shares of each one. And Honda can do great in engines and not so great in LMs. Or it can only ship its engines with its own LMs. None of this makes any difference to the fact that there are two product markets, and that Honda, shipping its own engines in its own LMs, has x% share of the LM market.
The interesting thing about the Apple fanatics is not their arguments on this, which are obviously nuts. The issue is their trustworthiness and credibility, given that they keep trying this stuff, when they must know it is wrong.
Eran and Co are the best reason anyone would want for never having anything to do with Apple.
Re:Shake (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.topshareware.com/Image-Inc.-download-4
Er, yeah, it's kind of like that, except it does movies, CG effects, and is actually used by professionals in the field it was written for. You didn't read GP's link, did you?
Anyway, I use Mac regularly, and I think that Quicksilver [blacktree.com] and Adium [adiumx.com] are the killer apps. iChat AV is pretty nice too if you want to video chat (granted, it sucks for AIM but that's what Adium is for), and the UNIX subsystem is nice for running POSIX-based OSS (I'm a CS student, so I do a lot of work with OSS). I also think that the interface is, on average, more polished than Linux or Windows. Finder looks terrible with brushed metal, but hey, why use Finder when you can use Quicksilver.
I'm not sure it's worth it, though. Those apps are really nice, and Apple's support is really good. On the other hand, their hardware is mediocre (one button, heavy for its size, runs hot and whiny, mediocre battery life) and slightly more expensive than the competition (at least in what I was looking for). For my next laptop, I might just get a Dell/Toshiba/HP/Sony/Lenovo/whatever and slap Linux on it.
Re:Parent is wrong, not insightful (Score:4, Insightful)
But even in that case, saying "Apple is more expensive" is still disingenuous and misleading, because you're still making an unfair comparison. The only thing you could really reasonably say is "Apple doesn't make what I want." They're entirely different statements.
Re:This is getting old... (Score:3, Insightful)
First, you clearly didn't read what I wrote. I made no claims about any software being "bug-free." What I said was that the integrated solution provided a better user experience for the end user, and that was what has apparently been the driving force behind consumers' purchasing decisions in every industry EXCEPT the desktop PC market. I, personally, am happy to pay more money for a better user experience, whether that takes the form of fewer visits to the repair shop because I bought a Honda instead of a Hundai or the form of fewer reboots, crashes, viruses, trojans, and other end user problems because I might choose a computer system that was designed and integrated as a whole rather than a cheap (and badly integrated) operating system and PC hardware combination.
You obviously still ascribe to the "old think" about what constitutes value in a personal computer. I suspect you fall into the hobbyist category of user that enjoys being confronted with some nasty little problem afflicting your computer and derive some sense of accomplishment from solving it. That sort of self-eating watermelon of a computer system is inherently broken. Owning a PC isn't supposed to be about buying into a culture of continually fixing broken stuff. It is about obtaining and using a device that makes you more productive and able to perform tasks you couldn't do without it. In my book, one of those tasks is NOT at-home computer diagnostics, repair, debugging, or any other sort of jacking around under the hood of the machine to make it do what I want. That is what I PAY for when I purchase the machine. I assume someone competent has already handled those issues.
Sadly, 90% of the user base out there doesn't expect that when it comes to PCs. That is the one great disservice Microsoft has done the computer industry and its consumers -- forced lowered expectations on us. Well, sorry if I don't share your lowered expectations.
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you lay down the cash for that shiny new MacBook, you're not just paying for the hardware. You're not just paying for the OS. You're paying for it to Just Work (tm).
Apple has quite the reputation to live up to in the Just Works department. Even if they released a 'generic x86 OSX' with the disclaimer of 'don't expect it to work at all,' people would still expect it to. Apple would still get bad press over it. That's not what they want.
Re:What if Apple had 90% market share... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's never healthy for one company to dominate to this extent, whoever they are. A truly healthy consumer PC market would have at least three equally strong players, with about 33% market share each. Just think of the innovation that would drive. The ironic thing is that computers would by now have considerably exceeded the current abilities they are now endowed with in terms of features and usability, and it's quite likely that the whole market would be larger as a result. Meaning that companies like MS would still be making just as much if not more revenue. It's in nobody's interest to have a stranglehold on the market the way MS do - not even MS's, in the long run. I think they are afraid of innovation because they are in fact pretty bad at it. They should hire better staff, relax and let competition have its way. It will get them in the end anyway, it's just a matter of time. Does anyone here really think we'll still be using any form of Windows in 2106?
Re:Because there is no enforcement. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but we do often Xerox a document, or use a Kleenex after eating Jello. Personally I see nothing wrong with a person Googling a topic of interest. It has become a verb, and the term has appeared in recent pop-culture as such. Often times a word (or new use of a word) becomes acceptable merely due to common usage. In other words, I can google your name because it's "cool" to do so
Now on the other side of the argument, I have read in the past that a trademark owner risks losing the trademark by allowing the term to become common; Xerox in particular is one I read about. If they do nothing to defend the term as their legal trademark, it could eventually become public domain... but Google as a verb has only popped up in recent years (compared to, say, Kleenex)...
Re:Can someone explain this to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Macs are a bit more expensive by design, I believe. Cultural exclusivity plays a small part in the pricing and marketing. But a strong economic reason for Macs being (a) perceivably better and (b) more expensive is that by narrowing their choice of common components down to a single set that they know integrate well, they are opting out of the competitive race that drives the costs and quality of a typical Windows PC down to least-common-denominator.
BTW I've worked for both Apple and Microsoft. Apple's reality distortion field was way nicer.
Re:Thought Control (Score:1, Insightful)
Time being the most expensive of them all.
Re:Because there is no enforcement. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly what happened at the last place I worked. The managers didn't like Linux as it was FREE and they made some statement that they wanted all Linux machines taken off the network. We had to point out that our Network management software was running on a Linux machine, and they'd have to cough up soem cash to replace the machine [plus a few other Linux machines we had around the place].
They decided against us removing the Linux machines, but they made some new rule that we couldn't have any more Linux machines. Their only rational was that FREE = Didn't Work. Needless to say, the mangers were all ex-accountants.
So many Ex-accountant Managers I've met seem to have that rational too. I sometimes wonder how they get to manage IT departments. They have a tendency to overspend on items which are under engineered fo their use.
Re:Integration has always been Apple's differentia (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM licensed PC-DOS from Microsoft for every PC that hit the street. The clone makers licensed MS-DOS because it was compatible with IBM, but not bound to IBM by copyright. Microsoft 'conquered' the desktop because no business would buy anything but IBM because 'nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM'. The clone market took off because now people could buy a cheaper computer for home and take their work home at night.
The killer app for the PC was Lotus. Everybody had it. You could put in your floppy, turn the computer on, it'd come up, you could work all day, save off your work at 5 & just redswitch it. Lotus was an industry standard.
Apple, SGI, and Commodore ended up fighting it out in the graphics arena. When it was all said and done, Apple pretty much killed them all; graphics was the Mac's killer app.
People chose the PC for business reasons, not because it was so much better than anything else. Back in The Day, IBM meant business. And no clone maker would put anything other than DOS on their machines so they'd be compatible with what you used every day at the office.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's talk economies of scale.
Assume you spend 20 million bucks to create an operating system. Remember, this is a thought experiment, the 'real world' costs might be higher. Or lower. But in any case, me & thee will never know. Assume the marketting wanks are lying when they say 'This operating system cost $DOLLARAMOUNT to produce'. Odds are, they are lying.
Your brand spanking new computer is the only computer in the universe that can run this operating system. Thus, its price is 20 million dollars plus the hardware costs.
Assume now that you sell 20 million copies of that computer. Your amortised cost of developing that operating system is now down to 1 dollar per computer. Sell 100 million of those computers and the cost is now down to 5 cents a computer. And the more you sell, the cheaper the operating system becomes. The unit price of the computer stays the same, say 800 dollars retail, Parts would run you maybe 150 in quantity. (Hell, I can build my own machine for under $300) You get half the retail price of the computer from the wholesaler, who jacks up the price to 600 dollars and sells it to the retail outlet who adds 200 dollars to bring it up to the full $800 retail price.
You, as the manufacturer, make $400 for every computer you sell to the wholesaler. If you sell 20 million computers to the wholesaler, your profit margin is $249/machine. You've paid for the $150/machine & amortised the 20 million for the OS. Your total profit on that 20 million unit 'run' is $4,980,000,000. That's right, almost 5 billion dollars. Starting to see why vendor lockin is such a big deal to Microsoft and Apple?
The questions you now need to ask yourself are, 1) How much did Apple spend to develop their OSes? 2) How many units did they actually manufacture and sell? 3) How much did Microsoft spend to develop Vista? 4) How many copies of Vista are going to be shoved down everybody's throat?
It costs me about 50 cents to get a DVD I can write to. How much is Microsoft going to spend per DVD for several MILLION copies of Vista? I'm guessing pennies. And that's just for the home market. OEMs will put Vista on the hard drive with a reinstall partition that's hidden away from Joe Sixpack.
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is nothing stopping you from installing Ubuntu on the Intel macs if you are a masochist. I have Vista RTM installed on the other partition on my MBP.
AFAIK Mac's come with OSX and you can't order them without OSX either.
Sorry to be rude but "no shit sherlock". Macs bought from Apple come with OS X installed for "free". The hardware sales subsidize OS X development. If you really want linux, you could install it yourself or talk to the guys at terrasoft solutions [terrasoftsolutions.com]. MSFt do not make hardware solutions, Apple does. Therein lies the difference.