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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

The irony of this post is so hilarious to me, this is Apple coming full circle from its clone wars days.

Man, those were some shitty experiences.

Apple is an hardware company. They make money off the nuts and bolts pieced together with premium markup, software is but icing on top. They practically give away the results of their development costs on OSX.

You're encountering the cognitive dissonance as experienced in the 90's. Why, oh, why is Apple not courting customers that don't care about shiny enclosures and slick packaging?

Because that's not the Apple way.

I'm just waiting for Mac Pros to go the way of Xserves (which the group was ran for years just to break-even for the sake of pretension)

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I agree with all you said except the software being the icing on the top part.

Apple knows its the end to end experience (software to hardware).

Apple is just fortunate to be in the very small category (if not the singular player) of companies that have great depth of talent in both the hardware and software realms.

This and the market they cater too (those with the money to spend) allow them to pick either pushing the hardware or the software forward and make a killing not having to move on the other end.

I say this as a person who hasn't bought an Apple product in 10 years in protest of some of their business practices:

- draconian App Store developer policies,

- 1984- esq lockdown on their platform and employees,

- the ridiculous markup on their devices, etc.

but who isn't dumb enough to not pay attention to them because they are some of the sharpest folks in the industry.

People bring up the "ridiculous markup", but when you compare the MacBook Air vs. the ASUS Zenbook, Apple really is competing on price in the "Ultrabook" market. When the form factor and construction are similar, the Apple version only adds about $150.

The problem with the early attempt Apple made at inviting the clone market is that they didn't give it time to evolve. The first wave or two of IBM clones were a mess. A disaster. Compatibility problems galore. People who buy crap don't continue to buy it and they sure as hell don't recommend it. The crap PC clones died a quick death.

It didn't take long for the market to evolve and "grow up". Companies like Compaq surfaced. Very soon you had a million hardware ideas iterating from every angle trying to do it better and for less.

Today you can buy a PC notebook for a fraction of the cost of a Mac notebook --maybe a third or less. And, frankly, quality is excellent. Today you can walk into a place like Walmart and quite-literally grab almost any notebook computer and walk out with a quality product.

That's what Apple missed out on. Everyone got spooked as they watched the evolution begin and they pulled the plug.

Also, evolutionary forces are interesting. They naturally select product that people want. Perhaps Apple was afraid that they'd loose a lot more than the hardware war if they let go of the hardware. I don't know.

Barring a few details, today a PC and Mac notebook are basically the same machine. Same processor, memory, graphics, etc. Yet Apple isn't iterating the hardware as quickly and efficiently as the PC market continues to.

It'll be interesting to read what will be written in business books about this in twenty years.

Apple isn't successful because of Macbooks, Mac minis or iMacs.

Bulk of Apple's success is from their iDevices and its surrounding ecosystem. iPod, iPod touch, iPhone and iTunes app/music sharing infrastructure.

So in many ways Apple isn't a computer company anymore. Its more like Sony nowadays. What you will see in the future might be computers dying a slow death in the Apple ecosystem. Expect things like TV, Stereo and other entertainment stuff like Gaming consoles gaining more traction.

Slowly but steadily Apple is transforming itself into a consumer electronics company like Samsung.

Actually, Samsung sells pretty much everything a company could possibly sell, even weapons. I know you mean Samsung Consumer Electronics, but it's a tricky example because the network effects (or lack thereof) between all of Samsung's subsidiaries are not obvious.

Also unlike Samsung, Apple depends on OS X as their developer OS. The whole WWDC was praising developers for helping iOS take off, and I think rightly so.

Of course, Apple does not depend on the Mac Pro.

That is certainly where their money is, however they built a lot of their existing consumer business on the goodwill from people who were loyal Apple computer users. All of the original iPod users that I knew where loyal Mac computer users (partly because the software didn't run on anything else at the time).

I wonder what would happen if they decided to abandon their Laptop/Desktop business and go purely for consumer electronics? This would certainly piss off many of their loyal fans such as graphic designers/musicians who aren't exactly going to be looking to go back to Windows based PCs for their work and could damage their brand.

Perhaps they will launch some sort of "Post PC" device intended for serious work, for that I am thinking something along the lines of the chromebox.

Maybe they should bundle Mac OS with their iDevices. Running as a VM stored on the device.

You're not remembering silicon history well.

The 90's Apple clones didn't collapse itself because they were bad, Steve Jobs tried negotiating software licensing with manufacturers and Apple opted not to renew.

You're also rehashing some old point about Apple missing the boat on low end devices. Why does that matter? Apple sells millions of computers every quarter year over year. They have excessive cash holdings. What would be the point of chasing after some mythical unicorn low end cheap device that has no margins?

Evolutionary forces are indeed interesting. They do silly things like insisting on floppy disks, VGA ports, CD-ROMs, and other vestigial residues that hinders progress.

He said IBM clones (eighties PCs) not Mac clones (nineties). If you read further he mentions Compaq which has never built a Mac clone.

Where did I say that Apple clones where bad? All I said was that the model was not allowed to evolve and gave, as an example, the crap-to-good evolution of PC's.

There is nothing wrong with floppy disks, VGA ports and CD-ROMs. These and other technologies still have a place in the right context and they tend to die off in an organic manner as industry can justify transitions.

Progress? A quick Google search finds estimates that say that there will be about two billion PC's world-wide by 2015. That's progress, not coming up with a new port that nobody really cares for outside markets that can afford expensive new hardware on a regular diet. I think you are confusing progress with innovation. Testing new ideas is commendable. Apple has always been on the forefront of that in some ways.

Progress is a different story altogether. One measure, as I am suggesting above, might be just how accessible a technology is to the masses (not just wealthy countries). World-wide Macs only represent 5 to 10% of the installed base. By this measure Apple has failed to deliver progress.

If you look at smart phones, then, yes, Apple hit it out of the park.

>Man, those were some shitty experiences.

I did IT at the time for a Mac-friendly company and had no issues with the clones of the day.

The problem with them was that they were better than the Apple products of the time, thus killing Apple's margins.

(although, really, most Apple products of the mid 1990s were abortions of various kinds -- Performa and Centris especially, and the weird education-channel-specific stuff. Good Macs stopped with the IIfx and IIci and began again with something around 1998)

In any batch of Apple products from the pre-Tim Cook days there were always a few solid products and a whole bunch to pad out the channel. They were junk that was simply intended to clutter up shelves and take up space in retail stores to command more presence.

I know people that ran their Quadra into the ground and only gave up on them, reluctantly, when the PowerMac equivalents became embarrassingly faster. Expensive, as was everything in that time, but irreplaceable.

I disagree. Apple is both a hardware and software company, and I would argue that most of the decision to buy a Mac lies in software, not hardware. People don't say "I need this computer because it has an aluminum case"; they say "I need a Mac because it's easier to use."

Not charging for minor updates doesn't mean they're giving them away. It means they've already rolled the cost into the original sale price.

Let's be honest with ourselves here. True, it's not the aluminum case they're after. But it also isn't the ease of use; The ease of use paradigm is yet another clever Apple marketing tactic to give people something to talk about when trying to explain to their friends why they made the decision to buy. The real reasons people buy Macintosh (and I'm talking about the general public here, because admittedly, the personal preferences on this board are likely to be skewed) are subconscious: People's brains notice that Apple products don't make the typical creaking/squeaking sound typical of tightly screwed together plastic parts when you touch them / pick them up. People notice things like magnetic power cords on laptops and cases and accessories designed to flawlessly fit their products without a centimeter to spare. People are influenced by what they see around them. People want to fit in, and do what's relevant. But most of all--and this is the one that a lot of us have trouble accepting--people care about style EVEN MORE than they do about function. Don't believe me? Take a look at how people dress. If people cared most about function, every single person on this planet would be walking around in New Balance trainers (or maybe Crocs), basketball shorts/track pants, and a Wallmart t-shirt. But instead, people pay hundreds of dollars for jeans that are far from functional. And sure, you might argue that not everyone does that, but a lot of the people who are buying Apple's products do.

My theory on why they don't care about the Mac Pro? They're phasing it out because Apple as a company is sustained by sexy, identifiable gadgets that are fun to flash and look at, and no matter what you do to the Mac Pro, it's still a computer tower. You're never going to bring it on vacation. You're never going to see it at a party. You can't even take it out into your living room to show your friends when they come over. The Mac Pro is a purely functional product, and Apple is about as much a functional company as C is a functional language.

" If people cared most about function, every single person on this planet would be walking around in New Balance trainers (or maybe Crocs), basketball shorts/track pants, and a Wallmart t-shirt. But instead, people pay hundreds of dollars for jeans that are far from functional. "

I think your argument is salient, but for the opposite reason. Everybody on the planet does wear these things. It's a very small majority of the population, usually urban and with money to spend, that dresses in hundred(s) dollars jeans. Walmart pulls down half a trillion per year on cheap schlock with hundreds of millions of happy customers.

Most people actually do dress like the Mac Guy

http://www.dailysloth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/mac.jpg

Paradoxically, in terms of computer fashion, Apple doesn't sell to these people.

I'm not sure about jeans, I think they are quite practical as they are comfortable , warm , durable and provide basic protection if your leg touches something sharp etc.

One thing larger Apple computers have provided them is exposure, it's difficult to walk into a primarily Mac office and not notice the giant Apple logo staring at you from everywhere. I guess it also helps that people are able to use Apple products for basically everything, as somebody who has a MPB , an iMac as well as an iPad etc is good marketing to other people who may just be interested in buying an iPhone or whatever.

It's also very rare to see a computer used in a movie or TV show now that isn't a Macbook.

>But it also isn't the ease of use;

That's not strictly true. Perhaps for the fanboy. I got Mac because I just don't have time to admin windows anymore. When I realized how much time I was spending on this and how many times cheap hardware had failed me I made the switch. I didn't want to because I didn't care to learn a new OS but at some point I decided the potential savings were worth the risk.

Let's be honest with ourselves here. This is a tired, tired, worn cliche about Apple, as well as a misunderstanding of fashion for real people. Top it off with rhetorical tricks that don't do your argument justice; "And sure, you might argue that not everyone does that..."

This is just a variation on the "Apple only succeeds because of marketing, or shiny iObjects, or consumer stupidity." That if consumers were only intelligently informed, they'd all run either Linux on home built desktops or something other than what is currently popular.

Why is it so hard to accept that sometimes things become popular because they are good?

Actually, the first argument I hear from everybody is "Apple has the nicest hardware".

Funny, I remember the Mac clones being quite nice machines.

Shitty experiences? Apple made some really, really awful computers during the clone era.

They practically give away the results of their development costs on OSX.

Most of the development was already done for them in the development of Open-BSD.

I really wish people would get over this meme.

(1) You're thinking of FreeBSD. Not OpenBSD. A lot of the command line utilities Unix nerds would use in the terminal are ported from FreeBSD.

(2) The kernel, Darwin, is NOT based on FreeBSD. Darwin is a direct descendant of NextStep, based on the Mach microkernel.

(3) And pretty much all of the GUI and indeed the whole Cocoa API are also from Apple/Next. Not FreeBSD. Essentially, everything that isn't what Unix nerds interact with? That's pretty much all Apple. (Except for Apache if they turn on personal web serving, but that's not FreeBSD. And Webkit started as a fork of KHTML, but, y'know, not FreeBSD again.)

(4) For that matter, even a fair amount of the Unix nerd stuff is specific to OS X, like launchd, or has tweaks to support OS X-specific nerdosity.

So, vain hope, could we _please_ knock this sort of nonsense off? For both better and worse, OS X is very much its own animal, and whether or not you like it, it's ridiculous to claim that Apple doesn't put a hell of a lot of development work into it.

(1) you are probably right.

(2) the Mach kernel was originally developed for BSD.

(3) true, they did make a shiny wimp variant.

(4) is that why stuff like rename is not there? The man page for rename is there, but rename isn't for some reason though. I had to rename lots of things and I had to write a script and everything.

(5) an apple is a fruit, not an animal.

(2) The kernel, Darwin, is NOT based on FreeBSD. Darwin is a direct descendant of NextStep, based on the Mach microkernel.

Darwin[1] is not the kernel, is the operating system. The kernel is called XNU[2] which was a combitation of a non microkernel version of Match with the 4.3BSD unix kernel interface. Apple remplaced the 4.3 BSD code with FreeBSD code[3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU#BSD

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