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PCs have the advantage of an open hardware platform. Apple won in laptop and mobile where open hardware either doesn't really exist or is very hard and inferior

by api 9y ago

PCs have the advantage of an open hardware platform. Apple won in laptop and mobile where open hardware either doesn't really exist or is very hard and inferior. The shift to smaller portables leveled the playing field. It's also important to note that Apple won in part by embracing a more open software ecosystem. OS X is Unix and inherited compatibility with a massive open source ecosystem. I predict that if Apple locks down macOS(X) like iOS and locks out this ecosystem they will once again decline, especially since both Windows and Linux have improved as desktop/laptop OSes since OS X became dominant at the high end. I would not argue that Apple was best in the 80s or 90s. They were actually kind of overpriced, closed, and original macOS was not that great. The best of the closed PCs was probably the Amiga, but Commodore's mismanagement botched that one. If Commodore were better managed they could have survived and become Apple. Windows and Linux still dominate larger desktop workstation machines.

baldfat 9y ago
Amiga was well above the offerings from Apple. Amiga had a AppleOS emmulator and the Amiga was actually faster in emmulation then on Apple's metal. My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6. The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference. Seriously Mac had monochrome and Amiga had this! Amiga 2000 1987 tv commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Owning the Amiga back in the 80's taught me my first lesson that it's not always the technologically superior product that wins in the marketplace. Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink. The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it. Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them. Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.
  - api 9y ago
    Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl, and ugly more closed platforms like old school ASP, Visual Basic, Powerdynamo, Cold Fusion, etc. Those really really really sucked. With Java you could write modern structured debuggable code with real tooling and have some confidence it would run in production like it did in dev. Smart phones are disappointing in a lot of ways but they're a big improvement over J2ME flip phones, dumb phones, and PDAs. The problem with the Amiga was AFIAK Commodore's management. They should have divested themselves of all the old stuff and doubled down on marketing and supporting Amiga. Instead they kept lots of irons in the fire, wasted a lot of money, and in the end got killed by the IBM PC platform juggernaut. I wonder if the clear superiority of their tech made them over-confident.
    - pmoriarty 9y ago
      "Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl" Perl was a mature, full-featured and very useful programming language when the earliest versions of Java rolled around. Java relied on the bloated, super slow JVM, was super buggy, and really did not add any value. The "write once, run anywhere" hype turned out to be just that. So I really don't see how it was a "huge step up" in comparison. More like a huge step down.
      - watwut 9y ago
        Nevertheless, perl is pretty much not used anymore, except for small scripts. Java still happily lives on server and inside larger projects, where the hell I would not wanted to use something like perl.
        pmoriarty 9y ago
        I wasn't talking about now. I was replying to api's assertion that "Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl...". So that's about how Java was back then, and whether it was a "huge step up" from Perl. It wasn't. Yes, Java improved greatly over time, and yes it's more popular now. Whether its current popularity is deserved or not is debatable, and a separate issue.

by api 9y ago

baldfat 9y ago

Amiga was well above the offerings from Apple. Amiga had a AppleOS emmulator and the Amiga was actually faster in emmulation then on Apple's metal. My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6. The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference. Seriously Mac had monochrome and Amiga had this! Amiga 2000 1987 tv commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.

pmoriarty 9y ago
Owning the Amiga back in the 80's taught me my first lesson that it's not always the technologically superior product that wins in the marketplace. Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink. The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it. Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them. Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.
- api 9y ago
  Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl, and ugly more closed platforms like old school ASP, Visual Basic, Powerdynamo, Cold Fusion, etc. Those really really really sucked. With Java you could write modern structured debuggable code with real tooling and have some confidence it would run in production like it did in dev. Smart phones are disappointing in a lot of ways but they're a big improvement over J2ME flip phones, dumb phones, and PDAs. The problem with the Amiga was AFIAK Commodore's management. They should have divested themselves of all the old stuff and doubled down on marketing and supporting Amiga. Instead they kept lots of irons in the fire, wasted a lot of money, and in the end got killed by the IBM PC platform juggernaut. I wonder if the clear superiority of their tech made them over-confident.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl" Perl was a mature, full-featured and very useful programming language when the earliest versions of Java rolled around. Java relied on the bloated, super slow JVM, was super buggy, and really did not add any value. The "write once, run anywhere" hype turned out to be just that. So I really don't see how it was a "huge step up" in comparison. More like a huge step down.
    - watwut 9y ago
      Nevertheless, perl is pretty much not used anymore, except for small scripts. Java still happily lives on server and inside larger projects, where the hell I would not wanted to use something like perl.
      - pmoriarty 9y ago
        I wasn't talking about now. I was replying to api's assertion that "Java was slow and immature in the 90s but it was a huge step up from PHP, Perl...". So that's about how Java was back then, and whether it was a "huge step up" from Perl. It wasn't. Yes, Java improved greatly over time, and yes it's more popular now. Whether its current popularity is deserved or not is debatable, and a separate issue.