Lessons from Apple

economist.com

6 points·orlick··3 comments

I bought a 512 Mac for $3K in the 80's. And I'll buy an iPhone. The lesson from Apple for me... create what you want to use yourself. I bet Bill rather use a Mac ....what about you?

I'll never understand the appeal of apple. Compare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000

1985, Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz, $1595

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II

1987, Motorola 68020, 16 MHz, $5500 (!!!)

To anyone who has ever used both, the superiority of the Amiga was absolutely unmistakable. But what are you going to do when apparently-sane journalists write things like this:

_...and now the iPhone, which goes on sale in America this month, Apple has prospered by keeping just ahead of the times_

Umm..? Ahead of the times? With a cellphone? I mean, they're about a decade too late to be consider "with the times" much less "ahead of the times". Oh, well.

The Amiga was ahead of its time. Amiga people tended to migrate toward Linux, trading superiority of hardware for superiority of philosophy. I personally don't miss the proprietary days.

Consider the Mac is popular now when it's using the same hardware as PCs (Intel, NVidia/ATI) and runs on UNIX. Essentially Apple is based around a highly polished FreeBSD distro!

With some more resources, Ubuntu could do the same thing, selling tightly integrated machines where everything "just works".

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