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The idea of the replacement for the original Mac OS being sourced from within IBM (instead of from NeXT) is flatly scary. OS/2 is the most obvious source, and i

The idea of the replacement for the original Mac OS being sourced from within IBM (instead of from NeXT) is flatly scary. OS/2 is the most obvious source, and it actually had quite a few strengths, but it's really hard to imagine it being an elegant replacement for Macs, just as it's hard to imagine Apple turning things around without Jobs at the helm. Really, I don't imagine much of Apple would still be around at all. So unless we imagine Linux storming the gates, I guess that would mean Microsoft vincit omnia. And without Apple, smartphones would likely still be niche Blackberry variants for heavy email users and such. Certainly the advent of tablets as popular consumer devices seems unlikely. Wow, the technology world might be pretty different.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
There are always lots of problems with these counterfactual scenarios. For one thing, if Apple had gone ahead and disappeared they wouldn't have been around to compete with. It's hard to imagine what would have become of, say, the BeOS in a world without Apple because in practice Apple did survive, and stole all of Be's oxygen. It is important to remember that computing trends are driven by manufacturing. Even if Apple had gotten taken apart and Steve Jobs had (improbably) taken up bass fishing, processors would still have gotten smaller and more efficient, batteries would have continued to improve, displays would have been built. Touchscreen devices would have eventually arrived. Hard drives would still have gotten larger and cheaper on schedule; flash memory would still have gotten cheap enough to build SSDs. And these trends would have encouraged the growth of, say, pure-digital delivery of movies and music - Apple didn't invent the MP3, or Napster, and they famously didn't invent the portable MP3 player. What Steve Jobs did was see all the trends very clearly, realize the products that they would eventually enable, and just steer straight towards those products with ultimate focus. But the trends were still there. These things were going to happen. It's true that some of them might have arrived years or even decades later, though, and with a lot less flair.
- wanorris 15y ago
  BeOS is a good point. And even if Be itself didn't change the world, there might have been flocks of Apple refugees who moved on to make something else wonderful. So perhaps many of the same things would have happened if another player had developed to fill an Apple-like niche. As far as the technologies you mention go, they would have happened, but without Apple (or a sufficiently Apple-like player), they would have happened differently. Most of the other things you're talking about happened before Apple got to them. I had a Creative Labs Nomad -- it was cool to have, but the user experience kinda sucked. Sony and Toshiba in particular have a long history of making great thin and light computers that have generally fallen outside mainstream consumer price points, and many of these predate the original MacBook Air, nevermind the current generation ones. There were a variety of touchscreen phones that predate the iPhone, such as those based on WinMo. I had one or two. They tended to be unreliable and have errant apps that could wreck your whole system, so the UX kinda sucked. What Jobs's Apple was great at, especially with iOS, was distilling things down so that they were simple and friendly and had really good judgement about what to include, what to leave out, and how much control to expose to the user. The net result was that lots of technologies that were slowly happening anyway suddenly became massively popular because Apple managed to build the perfect product for a mass market. And as I say this, keep in mind that there's not a single Apple device that I use on a daily basis. I use Windows and Android happily, and wouldn't trade my current setup for any of the fine products that Apple makes. But simply by existing and releasing the products they did, Apple made Windows and Android better. Windows tablets had a lousy experience and sold poorly, and Apple completely redefined what it means to be a tablet with the iPad. Now Microsoft has delivered an awesome preview of Win 8 tablets, which would never have existed without the iPhone. Android and Windows Phone would be very different if the iPhone had never come to market and demanded that everyone rethink the idea of the smartphone. That's what I was trying to get at. Hopefully it makes more sense this go around.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

There are always lots of problems with these counterfactual scenarios. For one thing, if Apple had gone ahead and disappeared they wouldn't have been around to compete with. It's hard to imagine what would have become of, say, the BeOS in a world without Apple because in practice Apple did survive, and stole all of Be's oxygen. It is important to remember that computing trends are driven by manufacturing. Even if Apple had gotten taken apart and Steve Jobs had (improbably) taken up bass fishing, processors would still have gotten smaller and more efficient, batteries would have continued to improve, displays would have been built. Touchscreen devices would have eventually arrived. Hard drives would still have gotten larger and cheaper on schedule; flash memory would still have gotten cheap enough to build SSDs. And these trends would have encouraged the growth of, say, pure-digital delivery of movies and music - Apple didn't invent the MP3, or Napster, and they famously didn't invent the portable MP3 player. What Steve Jobs did was see all the trends very clearly, realize the products that they would eventually enable, and just steer straight towards those products with ultimate focus. But the trends were still there. These things were going to happen. It's true that some of them might have arrived years or even decades later, though, and with a lot less flair.

wanorris 15y ago
BeOS is a good point. And even if Be itself didn't change the world, there might have been flocks of Apple refugees who moved on to make something else wonderful. So perhaps many of the same things would have happened if another player had developed to fill an Apple-like niche. As far as the technologies you mention go, they would have happened, but without Apple (or a sufficiently Apple-like player), they would have happened differently. Most of the other things you're talking about happened before Apple got to them. I had a Creative Labs Nomad -- it was cool to have, but the user experience kinda sucked. Sony and Toshiba in particular have a long history of making great thin and light computers that have generally fallen outside mainstream consumer price points, and many of these predate the original MacBook Air, nevermind the current generation ones. There were a variety of touchscreen phones that predate the iPhone, such as those based on WinMo. I had one or two. They tended to be unreliable and have errant apps that could wreck your whole system, so the UX kinda sucked. What Jobs's Apple was great at, especially with iOS, was distilling things down so that they were simple and friendly and had really good judgement about what to include, what to leave out, and how much control to expose to the user. The net result was that lots of technologies that were slowly happening anyway suddenly became massively popular because Apple managed to build the perfect product for a mass market. And as I say this, keep in mind that there's not a single Apple device that I use on a daily basis. I use Windows and Android happily, and wouldn't trade my current setup for any of the fine products that Apple makes. But simply by existing and releasing the products they did, Apple made Windows and Android better. Windows tablets had a lousy experience and sold poorly, and Apple completely redefined what it means to be a tablet with the iPad. Now Microsoft has delivered an awesome preview of Win 8 tablets, which would never have existed without the iPhone. Android and Windows Phone would be very different if the iPhone had never come to market and demanded that everyone rethink the idea of the smartphone. That's what I was trying to get at. Hopefully it makes more sense this go around.