On Dec 23, 2007, at 7:53 AM, Cory Papenfuss wrote: > On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> The agency I worked at in he eighties had a mix of Macs and Power >> Computing clones. The clones were always problematic, and they >> eventually ended up on the trash heap. it was Apple's idea to license >> the op sys to clones. It didn't work, and they went back to being >> exclusive. Looking at the stock price and the market penetration, I'd >> say it was a very good choice. Paul -------------- Original message >> ---------------------- From: Polyhead <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:07:06 +0000 > > I was a pretty big mac guy at the time of the clones. As I recall > they primarily killed the clones because they were losing their > shirt by > the clones cannibalizing their marketshare. Clones were very > price-competitive with PC's at the time.... especially on the high- > end. > Apple's high-end machines have always been priced very high (and > generally > not perform to match the price). They've always made their money on > hardware, not software.... but their software is what makes them > unique. > > As far as the incompatibilities, that's the way PCs in general are > when you don't have control over both the hardware and software. > Look at > winders. > > I'm still anxiously watching to see how the Hackintosh stuff pans > out. (running MacOS-X on non-Apple PC's).
Since I worked at Apple during the period that the OS/hardware licensing program was created and implemented, and worked extensively with both the Apple engineering/support and third-party manufacturer teams involved, I have a perhaps unique and more knowledgeable perspective on these issues than others on this list. Way way way too much to describe it all here... Succinctly: - Some of the third party manufacturers had some very very good designs in mind, none of which ever went to market although prototypes were made and shown. - Most of what did get to market were OK machines, some with very good performance surpassing what Apple was making at the time. But most often they got their price advantage by using inexpensive components and suffered higher failure rates than what Apple was building. Apple, even in those days at its nadir with profitability and survivability sliding down the tubes faster than you can say "Bankrupt!" with only very rare exception built systems with excellent reliability and quality components. (One of the exceptions was the PowerBook 5300 ... an amazing tool to export profit out of the company through warranty repair...) - The biggest issue with the Apple license and deliverables, technically, was that it constrained the 3rd party developers too much to innovate and build anything that was truly innovative and useful. Mac OS versions prior to the existence of Mac OS X was extremely tightly bound to the specifics of the Apple ROM and Motorola ... there was really no good way to do anything much different from what Apple did and make it compatible. - The Apple Mac OS Licensing program was a failure. It did not expand the market share of Mac OS, it did not improve profits to Apple Computer (it has been estimated that every license-based system sold cost Apple Computer $300-400 in lost revenues ... and that's not accounting for the cost derived from cannibalizing Apple sales!), it did not generate good will in the hardware/software vendor development community, and it ended up stranding a whole lot of Apple customers with dead-end machines that failed rapidly and unrepairably. It ended up costing Apple even more money when SJ correctly killed it, paying the license reimbursement and termination penalty fees in full to the licensees. But killing it was the right thing to do. The subject of OS licensing has a long and bitterly fought history at Apple. I won't articulate my position on it as it doesn't matter at all (of course I have an opinion...), but when all is said and done, they must be doing something right to have gone from less than 6 days of operating capital and $4.32 a share at the bottom in 1997 to having $5 billion plus cash reserve and a thrice-split stock price at $193+ in 10 years. Apple hardware today is the best it's ever been and a good value for dollar. The fact that you can use it to run three operating systems (Mac OS X, Linux and Windows), all with screaming performance and high reliability, makes it unique in todays computer market. Mac OS X today is a very strong, robust, richly featured operating system, designed and implemented for at least a twenty year development life. I see absolutely no point to the "hackintosh" stuff. It was *easy* to run Mac OS X on generic Intel PC boxes when we were building it ... I was directly involved in that project from 1999 to 2004, in various capacities ... and to anyone with good engineering skills it would not be difficult to backwards engineer it and make it run. But why buy into substandard hardware and suffer all the crap that buying cheap-ass PC junk implies? Besides, Apple will fight a commercial effort of this sort tooth and nail, and they have the financial resources to smash it flat. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
