Comments on: Missing the forest for the trees

By: Lady Kaede

Lady Kaede — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:26:12 +0000

I can’t believe no one has pointed out the explosion of the Internet and the consequent explosion in viruses and malware of all kinds as a minor contributor to the switch. The safety of Mac as opposed to Windows may be primarily due to the much higher installed base of Windows machines, but whatever. I and the other mid-200′s switchers I know were fianlly pushed over the edge by the anti-virus software being as bad as the viruses it was theoretically supposed to remove and prevent. IE6 stank and the OSX platform was way more secure.

By: dannyo152

dannyo152 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:18:19 +0000

There are a lot of things Apple does right. Not having model numbers is one. Keeping the number of basic configurations per model to 3 is another.

I do know firsthand that BootCamp / Efficient Virtualization matters. My brother, who switched to Macs a few years back primarily for Aperture wanted to stop taking his old Windows laptop and use his MBP on the road. He hears about Parallels, asks me about it, I help him set it up and he’s very happy. I do enough free-lance bookkeeping that QuickBooks on Windows in Parallels smooths many a situation. We paid full fare on our Windows licenses: one would think Redmond would think nicely of us as well.

It doesn’t have to be one thing. I do think, though, having this versatility means when the issue of absolutely-must-run-Windows comes up, there’s a ready and capable solution, and that adds to the satisfaction numbers.

By: John Muir

John Muir — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:17:42 +0000

@TJ

Intel boosted the hell out of the low end Macs. The G4 was stuck for donkeys years, and Apple was stuck on the G4 thanks to IBM’s arrogance about laptop chips. The iBook was doubly hobbled to keep the PowerBook looking good in comparison. But none of them could stack up against the Celeron / Pentium M on performance alone. Those were the ancestors to the Core series.

As for price, the Mac Pro is costlier now than the base model Power Macs were. The Mac Mini went up in price when it moved from a G4 to Intel (didn’t stop me from getting one though, it was a much better computer). PowerPC chips were reportedly cheaper for Apple than Intel processors.

Apple gained compatibility and an eternal equivalence on speed. Plus we never have to hear about delayed chips any more.

By: @TJ

@TJ — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:51:22 +0000

Here’s another big reason that was coincidental with the timing of moving to Intel.

The *price* on the M-F’ing things has come way down.

My first Mac was a Powerbook in 2004. With AppleCare, it cost about $3,000.

Sure, I could have gotten an iBook in 2004 for less money, but it was so woefully under-featured that it felt like a complete waste of money.

You can get a MacBook now for $1000.

The price difference between a *decent* PC and a Mac is now negligible.

By: John Muir

John Muir — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:09:42 +0000

@Richard Stacpoole
If Apple was anyone else, I think they might do just that. But then there other similarly attractive offers. Like:
- Buy Adobe. Kill Flash. Own the creative suite. Make Microsoft reliant on Apple for software the same way Apple is on Microsoft Office for Mac.
- Buy Nvidia. Push OpenCL from the hardware side as well as software. Integrate their graphics expertise in PA Semi’s silicon. Own Tegra, with an option to kill.
- Buy ARM. Make Nokia, HTC and every other iPhone and iPad competitor’s life that much more interesting.
But Apple is Apple. They won’t do any of these. Each is far too messy, bringing in lots of varied talent and likely spilling a lot of it back outside the company.
Apple makes small acquisitions. Strategic ones, certainly, but always small too. That way they can be integrated with comparative ease, and aimed squarely at the particular project Apple has purchased them for. PA Semi and Fingerworks being classic examples of this in action, much to Apple’s success.

By: Richard Stacpoole

Richard Stacpoole — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:55:30 +0000

If Apple were to develop their own chips for theMac line why not buy AMD? Then they would also get ATI . They could buy AMD out of free cash flow without needing to touch their bank account.

They then own a major chip designer and current leader in 3-D graphics in one nice bite size purchase.

By: The Macalope

The Macalope — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:11:17 +0000

This is way out of the Macalope’s area of expertise, but he heard the A4 used the ARM instruction set.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:37:32 +0000

Apple developed a new processor in the A4, not a new instruction set. If Apple were going to switch Macs over, I have to believe it would use the x86 instruction set a la AMD—no recompilation necessary and Boot Camp would still work.

I suppose the benefits that Jobs listed when he announced the switch were too mundane to consider? Faster speeds at lower power so you don’t need massive cooling systems. If Apple can do the same in house, why not?

By: Makepeace

Makepeace — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:16:43 +0000

Disappointed with the Macalope on this one. I was a Mac user from the days of the 128kb dual floppy original Macintosh but defected to the dark side in 2005.
It was absolutely the switch to intel and the ability to run Windows on the side that allowed me to switch back, and even today the ability to run VMWare and Parallels (never Boot Camp) that allows me to stay.
Go back to emulation of Intel (like the old VirtualPC software) and I will be unable to continue to use a Mac. For many others that is not the case, as after they switched they found their safety net unecessary.
However I bet that the safety net of being able to run Windows in a virtual environment, in boot camp, or even as the primary operating system is responsible for about half the switchers.
Second thing – Apple cant just switch chips as easily as some pundits seem to think. iPad A4 cannot be anything but an ARM based CPU because it runs all the iPhone apps without recompiling. Likewise they could not deploy that chip on any form of Mac without having to deploy a complex and probably unreliable Intel emulator (like Rosetta when they went to Intel) and they really dont want to do that again!

By: John Muir

John Muir — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:15:47 +0000

PowerPC was stuck in a dead end, absolutely. (Writing this from my old 12″ PowerBook, admittedly, so definitely no Boot Camp for me.) The Intel switch was a precondition just like you say. Megahertz were really killing the Mac back then.

Seibold has a point that the real growth in the Mac was in laptops. The numbers are patently obvious. I dare say that the wholesale switch from desktop to notebooks in the mainstream overall really played into Apple’s hands, seeing as the MacBooks were perfectly timed for it, and were a high profile advance.

But you have the bigger picture in sight. Boot Camp and Parallels didn’t launch the Mac’s great comeback, still underway. It’s more just one leg of Apple’s overall platform in recent years. They’re taking over the joint.