What the 2010 Mac has in common with the 1984 Apple II
technologizer.com
technologizer.com
I think that's exactly wrong. Macs are already the trucks in his earlier analogy. Apple only sells 5% of computers, but they're the highest-priced 5%, so they make an outsized portion of the market's revenues on them.
The iPad doesn't disrupt high-end notebooks and desktops one bit. It disrupts the low-end, the $600 Dell and HPs that make up the bulk of sales by volume (but which are really little more than loss leaders for the manufacturers).
Even if tablets get to, say, 75% of the market, it will mostly disrupt cheap PCs. If most of those tablets are iPads (debatable, but certainly not impossible) Apple will make a hell of a lot of money.
Apple would seem to think this way as well. Otherwise they wouldn't introduce a $500 product that disrupted their $2,000 products, especially when they think that nobody else will make a compelling tablet if they don't.
This isn't the same as 1984 for one simple reason: Mac apps weren't built in an SDK on Apple IIs. They were built on Macs.
The MacBook and iMac will simply enter the space currently occupied by the Mac Pro.
I've already edited code using my iPod touch, via a SSH client - it was slow because of the small screen and on screen keyboard, but I had to fix an error on the live site and had no computer to hand.
I think you could easily code a whole site with VGA out and keyboard on a iPhone 4. Which could then be used from the device itself.
There was time when Mac and PCs were thought of as junk to most scientists because they'd have a high end Sun or SGI workstation costing 5-10x as much that was a lot more powerful. However that market is gone now and realistically the top end computer is now a Mac Pro. What happened was cheap PCs acquired over time all the features of the Sun and SGI workstations.
Apple doesn't want to do this, but the high end Macs aren't going to last forever as a market (and it's already small) and if they don't do it, someone else will (probably Google).
(But they won’t run “full” Windows or OS X. That has failed every time it has been tried in the last ten years. Ask Microsoft.)
For most of the past ten years, a processor that could run full Windows with reasonable power consumption did not exist. They do now.
Previous tablets were based around handwriting processing, which was also terrible.
The iPad could run those OSes and it's not really down to Apple if you replace the whole OS, though Windows isn't available for ARM and nor is OSX in it's desktop form. Linux could be made to work on it. Android has already been made to work on the iPhone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A
I don't know why that is — could it be that Apple just doesn't have much that's new to present at this time, and/or that many of the engineers are occupied at the moment?
This is my hope, because neglecting to build and maintain a strong developer community would be a grave mistake that I hope Apple's executives aren't actually stupid enough to make.
Boy, you can tell Jobs lives in a bubble, or else he would know this truck metaphor is shaky. Lots of people buy trucks, they just don't live where Jobs lives.
(That quote is missing some context, maybe that’s were the confusion stems from. He was talking about cars in the US being used in predominantly agricultural contexts in the beginning and the change away from those “trucks” to leaner cars. He did not say that nobody buys trucks anymore. In fact, just that was his point.)
First it's clear that lots of people buy trucks. But from my experience only a fraction of the people who buy trucks actual use them to any extent. That is people buy them for commuting and as a status symbol. I rarely see a truck with anything in the bed or with scratches and dirt from being used to do work.
So what's shaky is I took this truck analogy with PCs to mean that PCs will be around and useful but only to "professionals". This may be the case with PCs in the future, I'm not arguing that. But I don't think that's true of people who buy trucks. Yes farmers and construction people use trucks, but they're really in the minority of truck drivers.
And this is not even considering SUVs which are really just trucks without a bed. My understanding is they're manufactured with the same frame and engines, and are considered trucks by regulators (so they have laxer safety regulations).
Also, FWIW, Jobs lives in a bubble in California, but Texas is also a bubble, by choice even (eg. energy grid). It's obvious the guy understands consumers the world over, so it's sort of ridiculous to paint him as some sort of out-of-touch California elitist.
This comparison is false in at least two dimensions: complete death versus relegation to a niche, and a product family versus a form factor. The Apple II brand was being replaced by a new generation of fundamentally similar and fundamentally more advanced products; its death was foreordained by Apple. The devices that will kill desktop computers don't exist yet, nobody is sure how deeply the desktop market will be eroded by tablets, and Apple shows no desire to abandon the Mac's share of the desktop market. What similarity are we supposed to observe here?
This is the power of mindshare. Apple II had a vibrant ecosystem.