Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

Some people say that the advice is stupid, but there is actually a lot of sensible things that they did at some point or another, some even being distinctly Apple-y:

> 10. Get a great image campaign

> 14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack.

> 18. Stop being buttoned-down corporate and appeal to the fanatic feeling that still exists for the Mac

> 23. Create a new logo

> 25. Portables, portables, portables.

> 31. Build a PDA for less than $250 that actually does something

people usually pay less than $250 upfront for an iPhone

> 34. Port the OS to the Intel platform

(Identical to 76)

> 37. Take advantage of NeXT's easy and powerful OpenStep programming tools to entice a new generation of Mac software developers

Especially true for iOS

> 39. Build a laptop that weighs 2 pounds

> 50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development

> 51. Speak to the consumer.

> 54. Sell off the laser printer business

> 70. Simplify your PC product line

> 72. Try the industry-standard serial port plug.

Apple switched to USB pretty quickly if I remember correctly

> 101. Don't worry. You'll survive

Another interesting one -

> 59. Invest heavily in Newton technology, which is one area where Microsoft can't touch you. Build voice recognition and better gesture recognition into Newton, making a new environment for desktop, laptop, and palmtop Macs. Newton can also be the basis of a new generation of embedded systems, from cash registers to kiosks.

They also suggest dumping Newton, etc., which is what Jobs actually did.

Exactly, which was the smart thing to do. As much as the idea of Newton had a lot of potential, and in as much as we can draw retrospective parallels between Newton's potential and that of iOS, Newton was simply wrong for its era. It was ahead of its time in many respects -- particularly, in that telephony would become the central driver behind the idea of getting everyone on the planet to carry a device around in their pockets. Newton predated ubiquitous cell phone usage (and cellular infrastructure). In other respects, Newton was not necessarily too "late," but perhaps insufficient. It was not a viable alternative to the productivity of laptops, nor could it have been, given the ecosystem that existed at the time. Could it have powered embedded devices? Sure, but to questionable profit-margin potential for Apple. Embedded devices was an extremely fragmented marketplace back in Newton's day. (Still is today, in many respects.)

It's important to keep in mind that the iPhone worked because the world the iPhone depended upon was ready for it. The world that Newton would have depended upon did not exist when Newton debuted, and would not exist for the better part of a decade.

At least Apple didn't divest from ARM after the closure of Newton.

The problem with such advice is that some of it is always right. But you just don't which part. And you can't do it all.

Reminds me of the advertising executive who acknowledged that 50% of his advertising budget was wasted. The trouble was, he added, he didn't know which half.

Most of them are very generic, pragmatic & terse statements. It depends on which side you are looking at.

> 14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack.

99% companies would benefit from this.

> 10. Get a great image campaign

Sure, why not? That's true for every company, Intel, BMW, Microsoft, you name it. All want a great image campaign. Ultimately it's the product that makes the image campaign 'exclusive'

> 34. Port the OS to the Intel platform

That was an obvious one.

>> Apple switched to USB pretty quickly if I remember correctly

The 30-pin dock & then the lightning connector. Not exactly industry standard at both ends

>> The 30-pin dock & then the lightning connector. Not exactly industry standard at both ends

This was before the iPhone. They switched to USB on Macs at least. At that time they were using other proprietary connectors like ADB and Firewire.

Firewire (IEEE 1394) didn't show up on Macs until 1999, well after they had begun to support USB.

>>> 34. Port the OS to the Intel platform >>That was an obvious one.

in hindsight, yes. At the time, many people thought it was crazy.

It was crazy but it was also the right way forward. People speculated & desired this for a long time.

Back in 97 they probably just meant the pre-usb serial plug, that was good for mice and modems.

Did anybody use that old rs232 thing anymore in 1997? I would have guessed the author meant PS2.

People did tend to use those "modem" things back in the days.

Stuff I work with still uses rs232. In fact rs232 is still being used in new systems today :-)

Edit: before anyone thinks I'm stupid: it pays well, I get to work in interesting places and I dont have to wrangle appstore guidelines, java gc, android etc. Have to wrestle some windows systems though.

Macs of that vintage generally came with 9-pin RS-232 serial, SCSI, and Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) ports.

I recall that Mac's had RS-422.

I use old-fashion serial cables for kernel development in 2014. It would be hard to debug without it. Sometimes you have bugs on physical systems that aren't reproducible in a VM and can only get any output via a physical serial cable.

For what it's worth, I also use serial-over-LAN to administer remote machines and virtual serial devices in VMs for security purposes.

Well I was mostly thinking consumer machines, I totally forgot about industrial and lab stuff.

Sorry all.

They probably meant ADB (Apple Desktop Bus)

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

54. never happened. They simple stopped selling laser printers.

72. never happened. Apple instead championed USB.

> 72

The point was "industry standard", and to be pedantic USB is a serial protocol. Also USB wasn't "championed" by Apple, in fact they weren't even in the original group of designers (IBM, Intel and Microsoft were though). It had broad industry support from the start.

USB wasn't industry standard when Apple adopted it, and Apple's adopting it (and going "all in") created a large enough market for USB peripherals that USB took off (it may well have taken off anyway, we'll never know). For a couple of years, most USB products were made of iMac-inspired translucent plastics because it was people with iMacs who bought them.

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