Sony’s 2001 offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops | Hacker News Reader

Sony’s 2001 offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops

9to5mac.com

74 pointselectic55 comments

While the story may or may not be true, I cannot believe that Sony would have been able to sell Microsoft on the idea that some of their "PCs" were going to run MacOS. There was a pretty interesting example of how Microsoft responds when ASUS first tried to ship a x86 laptop with Linux as standard. (the EEEPC line) It resulted in a huge flap that spilled out publicly with things like ARM laptops being ordered off the expo floor at CeBIT and Microsoft bringing back a "dead" version of Windows XP for that particular model. But the bottom line was they went all out to keep ASUS from shipping a non-windows Laptop and that was in 2006 or 7. Five years earlier I expect they would have just threatened to pull Sony completely out of the OEM licensing program.

In 2001, Sony had all the leverage.

The Microsoft antitrust case was still open. The DoJ and Microsoft proposed a settlement in Nov 2001 which wasn't accepted by the judge until Nov 2002. The last thing Microsoft needed was a brand-new allegation of anti-competitive conduct to blow all that up.

In 2002 there was still significant leverage being applied by MS to OEMs. There were a lot of interesting OSes at the time that were squashed because they couldn't get any installation footprint - http://slashdot.org/story/02/02/19/2226257/be-sues-microsoft...

Be sued in 2002, but by that point they were a shell of a company that wasn't working with OEMs. The conduct Be sued over goes back to 1998: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3073811

Dell was able to pull it off. The only Dell PC I've ever purchased was an Inspiron 1420n which came bundled with Ubuntu 7.04.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-inspiron-1420n-u...

That's a fair point. It was a bit later, the interesting bit about the anti-trust suit is also good, I could see how Sony could pull it off, but I still don't think they ever seriously considered it.

In February of that year, I bought a Dell Dimension e520n, which came bundled with a copy of FreeDOS. I still own that computer, which has a 1.86ghz Core 2 Duo, and it currrently runs Arch Linux.

Story from 'the wife' seems a bit stretched - especially the part about next morning flight.. but all in all it wouldn't be surprising if there was some truth to it because Jobs was obsessed with Sony since 80s and tried to, basically, build Sony 2. This is well documented and probably the most visible part of it was his turtleneck attire which was modeled after what he saw at Sony (they wore uniforms).

The creative director of Apple's ad agency tells a story that illustrates Jobs's Sony obsession well [1].

In 1998, when Steve Jobs was back as interim CEO at Apple and had a cool new consumer computer nearing completion, he wanted to call it "MacMan", along the lines of Walkman. It was changed to "iMac" at the last minute.

We nearly ended up with PhoneMan 5s running ManOS 7...!

[1] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-...

I would absolutely buy and use any operating system called ManOS.

ManOs X ! The hands of fate log10! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/

What about BroOS?

add an "o" to it : ManOOS i.e. manoos : in marathi language word for a "people"

MacMan… Come on! That's hilarious!

A friend of mine on CompuServe back in the '80s posted a story about running into some Sony execs at CES. He told them he loved the picture quality of Betamax, but he was afraid VHS would win because it could fit most movies on a single tape and people didn't want to switch tapes.

One of the Sony execs looked at him and said, "We think we know what is best."

For a long time, iOS didn't have multitasking. If Steve Jobs heard that complaint from someone and replied, "We think we know what is best", would that person have thrown their hands up exasperated? Sometimes, visionaries are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes, the customer is right, sometimes the customer is wrong. It's sometimes a crapshoot.

"We know what we're doing" basically was Apple's response to multitasking. They said the iPhone worked well enough. Once they figured out a good way to do it, one they were happy with, they released it.

It's not a perfect comparison. The iPhone worked quite well without multi-tasking, I had one. It wasn't a big problem. On the other hand, having to always swap tapes half-way through a movie would be a deal breaker for most people. Sony eventually addressed that, but it was too late.

Of note: the original PowerBook 100 was design by Apple and manufactured by Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100

I've been looking for a new laptop that will build Firefox or FirefoxOS in a reasonable amount of time. Macbook Pros, AFAICT are the only game in town. (Would love to be wrong here)

Perhaps in this alternate universe... Sony, Lenovo and others are producing reasonable high-end laptops.

I'm pretty sure the top-end Dell Precision mobile workstations have more computing power than the top-end Macbook pros, for instance. The same is probably true for the HP Elitebooks.

They may not be as light, though.

Yep if you're willing to trade weight you can easily get a core i7-3840QM which can do 8 threads (4 cores) fairly fast. My current one I've been able to emulate some of the last gen consoles even for fun, compiling Firefox or Firefox OS is largely going to be an issue of disk speed which is fixable with either gobs of ram or and SSD, (preferably both, though overprices the alienware m18x r2 will take multiple drives, an msata ssd, and 32gb of ram and can be upgraded to workstation graphics cards if you have the cash).

Disk i/o is not the bottleneck when compiling an OS.

When i was last using gentoo (which admittidly was a while ago) it was pretty much the bottle neck for most things if you wanted to compile in parallel, largely because intermediate steps are written out to the disk before linking and less so because of reading. That said it is possible to do it all in memory but then you end up memory bound which is also possible to work around by throwing money at your ram (or downloading more off the web).

Could you elaborate on that? I would assume that most compiler steps are linear traversals of graphs and the time comes from lots of small IOs.

If you're looking at an i7 anyway, I'd strongly consider a laptop based on the i7-4950hq with the newest on-board graphics.

Not a bad idea, all of mine is speced from about 1.5 years ago before haswell was publicly available. So while a little dated, certainly more than enough to do pretty much most of what someone wants.

Out of curiosity, what about the Dell Precision M3800 (starting at 4.15 lbs)? At first glance, the specs look pretty comparable to the current Retina MacBook Pro.

You'd also have to go for the 4800MQ CPU to get rMBP 15" performance. You'd be paying $2700 for a 7.8 lbs machine. Why wouldn't you get the Mac?

$1600 actually, I have no idea where you pulled that $2700 number from.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=smp480...

What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

Perhaps it's just that the build process for OS X has been optimized more than other platforms. This would be expected, given that most Mozilla developers seem to be Mac users (bah to non-free software I say).

If that's the case, someone's got to make the jump, right? I assume Firefox/Phoenix/Netscape built quicker on Windows once upon a time.

> What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

I think the Retina MBPs are the only laptops so far that use PCIe SSDs, so they're not limited by SATA's 6Gbps.

> > What makes the Macbook Pros exclusively fast at building Firefox?

> I think the Retina MBPs are the only laptops so far that use PCIe SSDs, so they're not limited by SATA's 6Gbps.

If the bottleneck in your build process is the data transfer speed from your hard drive, props to you.

Well, it doesn't have to be a severe bottleneck in order for faster storage to be an advantage. If you've got two laptops with the same CPU and amount and speed of RAM, but one has a 30% faster SSD, then the latter will do a better job of keeping the CPU fully loaded.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_bound>

Unless the 30% slower SSD can keep the CPU fully loaded since it's not the bottleneck.

some models of the vaio pro come with a pcie based ssd. i don't think they're that rare

I use a Lenovo W530, but it's quite hefty.

I've got a thinkpad w530 too. It's a beast, definitely outperforms my Macbook pro. Not really a fair comparison though, totally different weight class :)

The VAIO Z used to fill those requirements. Looks like the VAIO Pro replacement for the Z now has all ULV processors. :(

Would it have really made a difference? Inter-company collaborations always end up with one company becoming dependent or the other buying them out, or both. Vaio would have become synonymous with Mac OS until Apple ditched them and left them to the same fate as they currently face.

Apple's problem was the other clone manufacturers undercutting them. Sony is a company that is known for being willing to charge premium prices for their premium products. It may have worked out.

I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference though.

I am thinking commoditization of the entire device is flawed while commoditization of parts is not. The way people think they can buy a PC for cheaper than the price of its parts is probably a good example.

It's interesting to see where Apple has done visible product collaborations before. Rarely have they been effective. In the post-clone (Jobs.2) era I can recall the HP-iPod [1], and the Motorola RAZR with iTunes [2]. Both (differently) lopsided in their loyalties. Both failures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod%2BHP [2] http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/12/motorola_razr_with...

In an alternate version of history, It may have been possible for Apple and Sony to seal the relationship and may be co-operate on iPhones and iPad, possibly slowing down Samsung Juggernaut. Well.. you never know...

Originally posted at: http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secre...

Kim replies in the comments there, too. Intriguingly, the post is marked as "Not for Reproduction," whatever that means.

Sounds like Steve was trying to break into the Asian market. Mac OS has always been a mostly North American phenomenon but Steve liked to think big.

Mac OS world marketshare: http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/ap...

Wow, Iceland really likes Macs. Can anyone explain why? I suppose the population is small enough that it only takes a few adopters to drive up the percentage, but still.

It could be due to localization issues. Is Icelandic OS X better than Icelandic Windows? The availability of an Icelandic keyboard?

Could be that pre-OSX was built with very good localization for more obscure* languages and it carried over into today.

*(Icelandic has at most has ~350k speakers)

I really wish Apple would just open this up, or go all out and open source it which I guess may be possible now that they've stopped charging for it.

Looking at the North Korean ripoff version earlier today [1[ it was by far the nicest looking linux desktop I've ever seen heh.

[1] http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/ or on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036

They haven't stopped charging for it, it's not free. It's subsidized by Mac sales.

If they open sourced OS X, they would kill it's funding source and screw themselves.

Actually, that's exactly what happened when they allowed clones.

Sony would have passed because of iTunes, Sony isn't going to sell hardware that plays songs from Sony Music and pays Apple as the middle man.

maybe running the very new (and buggy) Mac OS X version 10.0 (Cheetah) or maybe the later 2001 Mac OS X version 10.1 (Puma) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1

the pairs of ppc and i386 header files

I had heard of Apple internally testing Mac OS or Mac OS X on Intel-based hardware.

Jobs specifically claimed that every version of OS X had been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel processors, though I can't remember if any proof of this was ever given.

NEXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc, Motorola, and I think PA-RISC at various times. No reason to believe they didn't have an Intel build of OS X from day one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com