6 ms·

By the same token, Microsoft capitalised on the void left by Sculley-era Apple. While Apple was charging thousands of dollars for underpowered Macs with 9" scre

by bonaldi 16y ago

By the same token, Microsoft capitalised on the void left by Sculley-era Apple. While Apple was charging thousands of dollars for underpowered Macs with 9" screens, Windows PCs could leap into the bottom end. They weren't really good: users actually wanted Macs, but couldn't afford them at home, and businesses wouldn't pay the premium at work, except where absolutely necessary (publishing and design, mostly). Software and "closedness" had nothing to do with it. The Mac had much better software -- Word and Excel were born on the Mac, as was Photoshop, Quark, Postscript, Hypercard. The question isn't "is Jobs making the same mistake?" it is "is Jobs making Sculley's mistakes?". And the answer is "no". The iPhone and iPad are aggressively priced, ensuring they go just low enough to put them in reach of people who want them, and success doesn't depend on penny-pinching CYA CIOs. Windows succeeded because it was good enough, just as Android is. Apple is trying hard to sure you don't have to settle for "good enough", you can actually have good, this time.

etherael 16y ago
I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally, which would actually be a good measure of if the hardware was worth the cost. They're just trying to tie the software to the hardware and push the benefits of the software to the average user in a way that it can't be separated from the hardware (via their DRM etc in the chips). Nothing Apple has ever made has been compelling to me in any way, shape or form. So from my perspective, they generally make worse products than the alternatives, this includes OS9, OSX, and definitely OSX touch.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.
  - etherael 16y ago
    My progression was TI-84 -> C64 -> Amiga OS -> Linux. I never had to choose between whatever microsoft or apple were trying to pedal at any given point in time, they both always struck me as bad choices by comparison.
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      Do you actually have any real experience (on the order of months) using the other systems, or is this an ideological position?
      - etherael 16y ago
        I've spent multiple months, never more than one at a time, on windows due to having to have access to some locked in infrastructure at an employer or somesuch and virtualisation not being practical at the time but I eventually got so frustrated with it I just ended up working around it. OS X forced myself to use for one month, hated it more than windows.
        houseabsolute 16y ago
        > forced myself to use . . . Sounds like your mind was already made up. Whatever works for you I guess.
        etherael 16y ago
        On the contrary, I forced myself to use it because I am well aware that even now, linux is not perfect. and back when I forced myself to try out OS X it was a fair bit less perfect still, Case in point, it was not a flawless install on this notebook I am currently using it on, I had to fiddle and experiment and google to get the video settings just right because the internal hardware is by no means standard (two video cards, one for high power low battery life, one the other way around). Things like that I frankly don't want to have to deal with and if I could have the power of Linux with someone else handling setup for me so it all "just works" as Apple afficionados are so found of saying; I'd be all over it. I was even prepared to sacrifice some of that power so I wouldn't have to deal with it. But at the end of the day it simply did not cut the mustard. Mouse acceleration curve was infuriatingly bad, the interface was bland and ugly to the point of distraction, I hated the iconoclastic keyboard layout seemingly designed just to show the rest of the world how smart Apple is for putting the control key near the space bar. There was at the time no way to get the functionality offered by the compiz grid plugin, nor GL zoom, nor the multitude of plugins I make use of in various linux programs all the time, and the spaces implementation was clunky by comparison to the compiz based version of the same. And all to boot I was ticked off at having to pay Apple to cripple me in all of the above fashions and accept an inferior CPU/memory/hdd to boot.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  Yes, people who buy Macs place enormous value on having a flat, nondescript image of a piece of fruit on their computers. We are all massive brand whores, and there has never been anything compelling about the design of Macs. Also, Linux users, and you especially, are extremely representative of the market for computers.
  - etherael 16y ago
    touche and a riposte, I'm well aware I'm not representative of the market for computers, but if you're here this probably applies to you also. So whilst you and the audience of mac users here may not be a massive brandwhore, that doesn't invalidate the point that a significant amount of the mac userbase actually are. And when you have a company that is selling fundamentally the same product with a different label on it and marking it up 40%, yes, that does tend to be the difference. Maybe back in the Power PC days you had a point, but what's inside the magnesium case is now pretty much the same as what's inside the black plastic one.
    - dieterrams 16y ago
      Ignoring the fact that the hardware design is widely lauded as outpacing the competition, your argument is sort of like saying that two books are fundamentally the same if they're made of the same materials. Most users could care less if the computer's running on an x86 or PowerPC chip: everything is ultimately subordinate to user experience, cost, availability of desirable software, and interoperability. (At least two of those are highly contingent on the individual user: cost and availability of desirable software. If you're a heavy PC gamer, a Windows PC remains much more desirable than a Mac overall.) Historically, Macs have owned user experience, but lost on everything else. These days, cost is still relatively high (although historically lower, given the drop in component prices), but the other things have gotten better. Growth of the web, cross-platform file formats, ability to run Windows on Mac hardware, shift in gaming from PCs to consoles, etc. have done a lot to mitigate the disadvantages of Macs. This, by the way, is coming from someone who'd been using DOS and Windows up until a few years ago.
      - 16y ago
- blasdel 16y ago
  > You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally Linus Torvalds does this, and has for a decade (he had several Powerbooks before the Intel transition). A lot of the other kernel developers do too. They have money, want to get shit done, and don't have ideological hangups about these things. If you spend your $2k for a non-shit laptop on a Thinkpad instead, you're just buying into a different high-margin premium brand, and at this point one that's been on the decline for years. There isn't really DRM in the chips, you know. It's just in the software, and it's very easy to get around, because Apple doesn't really care. They don't even normally bother with serial numbers, much less product activation.
  - etherael 16y ago
    I know you can hackintosh, but the thing is I actually dislike OS X, I dislike the missing features of linux etc etc, so that means nothing to me. At the moment I use an Asus UL80vt, it took some tooling around to get it perfect, but it is that from my perspective now, and it only cost me 1k AUD. Interesting point about the Linus thing, I was specifically talking about everyone I know that actually uses Linux, they'd look at me like I was crazy if I suggested they buy a mac for the hardware (cause it would necessarily subtract from the grunt margin on the box they could get, instead, and also mac hardware is always significantly behind the performance curve at their cutting edge compared to what's available outside apple's walled garden.)
joe23 16y ago
exactly. the ipod touch is cheap. so is the ipad. the iphone is expensive mainly because of cellular service, not the hardware. Apple will make a run for more that the premium market. with an expanded vertical strategy. i.e. great combo of hard/soft/os/arm a4 chip.
- blasdel 16y ago
  Well, the iPhone is expensive because Apple can collect fat pure profits in rent from the cellular carriers. Unsubsidized, the iPhone costs $800 when the iPod touch costs $200. The cell modem that differentiates them costs a tenth of the difference in price.
mkramlich 16y ago
Your last sentence struck me as really summarizing the difference in the product/market strategy of Apple vs Microsoft: great vs good enough aka premium experience vs lowest price
mattmanser 16y ago
Wholeheartedly agree with this one, one can only speculate at what home computing would look like now if Jobs had stayed at the helm of Apple. Fact of the matter is computing is having the revolution it should have had 10 years ago in terms of usability. Microsoft? Complacent since Windows 95. I honestly hope the personal computer dies the horrible death it should have had 10 years ago. There's nothing personal about windows 7, it's just not as bad as Vista. Linux and Android, I laugh in your face. Fantastic for the minority of people like us. Shit for most people. If you even doubt how crap open source is get some non-techie friends to use gimp vs photoshop, word vs whatever crap they're peddling these days as star office, iPhone vs Android, visual studio vs eclipse. Even MSSql vs MySql, the MySql workbench is pathetic, and that's saying something as SQL Server Management Studio was a step backwards from Query Analyser in terms of usability. Chrome vs Firefox. God I hate Firefox having now used a decent browser. Open source is designed by programmers, for programmers. And we are weird. Android is slightly aberrant to this, but made the mistake of trying to be an 'every device' piece of software, falling into the same trap that Windows fell in so many years ago. Which makes it practically crap. A swiss army knife when what you really need is a fork. The only reason Android phones are even selling is because they're a cheap iPhone. Cheap being the operative word in usability too. It's just not very good. Doesn't help that handset hardware manufacturers have been generally totally pathetic at software. The number of crap UI's nokia's pushed out over the years almost beggars belief that they sold any phones. While as a programmer/hacker kind of person I love being able to extend my own device I definitely do NOT believe that most normal people enjoy dealing with poorly designed technology. It's been this way since VCRs made their way into living rooms. Hell Sky boxes, freeview boxes, even remote controls. Put them next to an iPod and you realise just how bad their designs are. Actually not just bad, shocking. Most hardware manufacturers just do not spend any time or effort designing the UI. And for the last 15 years every computer hardware manufacturer has been using the cure-all, satisfy no-one, band-aid that is Windows. Apple have already proved usability massively triumphs extensibility with the iPod & iPhone. They've totally cornered the profitable high end computer market. But where are the other computing visionaries? The Kindle? Please. The Sony reader. Ugh. The JooJoo? Oh dear. If only there were more. Hell I don't care about the downvotes I'm going to get for this, wake up and smell the revolution of computing people. Usable technology.
- 16y ago

by bonaldi 16y ago

etherael 16y ago

I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally, which would actually be a good measure of if the hardware was worth the cost. They're just trying to tie the software to the hardware and push the benefits of the software to the average user in a way that it can't be separated from the hardware (via their DRM etc in the chips). Nothing Apple has ever made has been compelling to me in any way, shape or form. So from my perspective, they generally make worse products than the alternatives, this includes OS9, OSX, and definitely OSX touch.

bonaldi 16y ago
The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.
- etherael 16y ago
  My progression was TI-84 -> C64 -> Amiga OS -> Linux. I never had to choose between whatever microsoft or apple were trying to pedal at any given point in time, they both always struck me as bad choices by comparison.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    Do you actually have any real experience (on the order of months) using the other systems, or is this an ideological position?
    - etherael 16y ago
      I've spent multiple months, never more than one at a time, on windows due to having to have access to some locked in infrastructure at an employer or somesuch and virtualisation not being practical at the time but I eventually got so frustrated with it I just ended up working around it. OS X forced myself to use for one month, hated it more than windows.
      - houseabsolute 16y ago
        > forced myself to use . . . Sounds like your mind was already made up. Whatever works for you I guess.
        etherael 16y ago
        On the contrary, I forced myself to use it because I am well aware that even now, linux is not perfect. and back when I forced myself to try out OS X it was a fair bit less perfect still, Case in point, it was not a flawless install on this notebook I am currently using it on, I had to fiddle and experiment and google to get the video settings just right because the internal hardware is by no means standard (two video cards, one for high power low battery life, one the other way around). Things like that I frankly don't want to have to deal with and if I could have the power of Linux with someone else handling setup for me so it all "just works" as Apple afficionados are so found of saying; I'd be all over it. I was even prepared to sacrifice some of that power so I wouldn't have to deal with it. But at the end of the day it simply did not cut the mustard. Mouse acceleration curve was infuriatingly bad, the interface was bland and ugly to the point of distraction, I hated the iconoclastic keyboard layout seemingly designed just to show the rest of the world how smart Apple is for putting the control key near the space bar. There was at the time no way to get the functionality offered by the compiz grid plugin, nor GL zoom, nor the multitude of plugins I make use of in various linux programs all the time, and the spaces implementation was clunky by comparison to the compiz based version of the same. And all to boot I was ticked off at having to pay Apple to cripple me in all of the above fashions and accept an inferior CPU/memory/hdd to boot.
dieterrams 16y ago
Yes, people who buy Macs place enormous value on having a flat, nondescript image of a piece of fruit on their computers. We are all massive brand whores, and there has never been anything compelling about the design of Macs. Also, Linux users, and you especially, are extremely representative of the market for computers.
- etherael 16y ago
  touche and a riposte, I'm well aware I'm not representative of the market for computers, but if you're here this probably applies to you also. So whilst you and the audience of mac users here may not be a massive brandwhore, that doesn't invalidate the point that a significant amount of the mac userbase actually are. And when you have a company that is selling fundamentally the same product with a different label on it and marking it up 40%, yes, that does tend to be the difference. Maybe back in the Power PC days you had a point, but what's inside the magnesium case is now pretty much the same as what's inside the black plastic one.
  - dieterrams 16y ago
    Ignoring the fact that the hardware design is widely lauded as outpacing the competition, your argument is sort of like saying that two books are fundamentally the same if they're made of the same materials. Most users could care less if the computer's running on an x86 or PowerPC chip: everything is ultimately subordinate to user experience, cost, availability of desirable software, and interoperability. (At least two of those are highly contingent on the individual user: cost and availability of desirable software. If you're a heavy PC gamer, a Windows PC remains much more desirable than a Mac overall.) Historically, Macs have owned user experience, but lost on everything else. These days, cost is still relatively high (although historically lower, given the drop in component prices), but the other things have gotten better. Growth of the web, cross-platform file formats, ability to run Windows on Mac hardware, shift in gaming from PCs to consoles, etc. have done a lot to mitigate the disadvantages of Macs. This, by the way, is coming from someone who'd been using DOS and Windows up until a few years ago.
    - 16y ago
blasdel 16y ago
> You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally Linus Torvalds does this, and has for a decade (he had several Powerbooks before the Intel transition). A lot of the other kernel developers do too. They have money, want to get shit done, and don't have ideological hangups about these things. If you spend your $2k for a non-shit laptop on a Thinkpad instead, you're just buying into a different high-margin premium brand, and at this point one that's been on the decline for years. There isn't really DRM in the chips, you know. It's just in the software, and it's very easy to get around, because Apple doesn't really care. They don't even normally bother with serial numbers, much less product activation.
- etherael 16y ago
  I know you can hackintosh, but the thing is I actually dislike OS X, I dislike the missing features of linux etc etc, so that means nothing to me. At the moment I use an Asus UL80vt, it took some tooling around to get it perfect, but it is that from my perspective now, and it only cost me 1k AUD. Interesting point about the Linus thing, I was specifically talking about everyone I know that actually uses Linux, they'd look at me like I was crazy if I suggested they buy a mac for the hardware (cause it would necessarily subtract from the grunt margin on the box they could get, instead, and also mac hardware is always significantly behind the performance curve at their cutting edge compared to what's available outside apple's walled garden.)

joe23 16y ago

exactly. the ipod touch is cheap. so is the ipad. the iphone is expensive mainly because of cellular service, not the hardware. Apple will make a run for more that the premium market. with an expanded vertical strategy. i.e. great combo of hard/soft/os/arm a4 chip.

blasdel 16y ago
Well, the iPhone is expensive because Apple can collect fat pure profits in rent from the cellular carriers. Unsubsidized, the iPhone costs $800 when the iPod touch costs $200. The cell modem that differentiates them costs a tenth of the difference in price.

mkramlich 16y ago

Your last sentence struck me as really summarizing the difference in the product/market strategy of Apple vs Microsoft: great vs good enough aka premium experience vs lowest price

mattmanser 16y ago

Wholeheartedly agree with this one, one can only speculate at what home computing would look like now if Jobs had stayed at the helm of Apple. Fact of the matter is computing is having the revolution it should have had 10 years ago in terms of usability. Microsoft? Complacent since Windows 95. I honestly hope the personal computer dies the horrible death it should have had 10 years ago. There's nothing personal about windows 7, it's just not as bad as Vista. Linux and Android, I laugh in your face. Fantastic for the minority of people like us. Shit for most people. If you even doubt how crap open source is get some non-techie friends to use gimp vs photoshop, word vs whatever crap they're peddling these days as star office, iPhone vs Android, visual studio vs eclipse. Even MSSql vs MySql, the MySql workbench is pathetic, and that's saying something as SQL Server Management Studio was a step backwards from Query Analyser in terms of usability. Chrome vs Firefox. God I hate Firefox having now used a decent browser. Open source is designed by programmers, for programmers. And we are weird. Android is slightly aberrant to this, but made the mistake of trying to be an 'every device' piece of software, falling into the same trap that Windows fell in so many years ago. Which makes it practically crap. A swiss army knife when what you really need is a fork. The only reason Android phones are even selling is because they're a cheap iPhone. Cheap being the operative word in usability too. It's just not very good. Doesn't help that handset hardware manufacturers have been generally totally pathetic at software. The number of crap UI's nokia's pushed out over the years almost beggars belief that they sold any phones. While as a programmer/hacker kind of person I love being able to extend my own device I definitely do NOT believe that most normal people enjoy dealing with poorly designed technology. It's been this way since VCRs made their way into living rooms. Hell Sky boxes, freeview boxes, even remote controls. Put them next to an iPod and you realise just how bad their designs are. Actually not just bad, shocking. Most hardware manufacturers just do not spend any time or effort designing the UI. And for the last 15 years every computer hardware manufacturer has been using the cure-all, satisfy no-one, band-aid that is Windows. Apple have already proved usability massively triumphs extensibility with the iPod & iPhone. They've totally cornered the profitable high end computer market. But where are the other computing visionaries? The Kindle? Please. The Sony reader. Ugh. The JooJoo? Oh dear. If only there were more. Hell I don't care about the downvotes I'm going to get for this, wake up and smell the revolution of computing people. Usable technology.

16y ago