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No, the iMac era was not relevant to the business failure of Apple. The issue was that they were built on PPC, and IBM, et al, were utterly failing to provide h
by olliej 4y ago
No, the iMac era was not relevant to the business failure of Apple. The issue was that they were built on PPC, and IBM, et al, were utterly failing to provide hardware that was in any way competitive from a price perspective, and for the last few years of that architecture they weren't even providing performance competitive hardware at any price.
As far as hardware goes, Apple could reasonably charge a premium for a lot of Mac hardware: They were known for high end LCD, Speakers, they were ahead on USB, DVD, Firewire (...). But people don't care about the architecture of the CPU, they care about the speed it can do something, and PPC CPUs cost more than Intel or AMD by a vary large margin (I've always assumed whole-number factor?), and towards the end of the era PPC was also slower than the competitor. I'm not a business person, and obviously know nothing about Apple's financial or business plans, but I can't imagine that having to pay a huge premium for the most expensive part of a Mac (and having that also be both slower and hotter than the competition) was probably chewing out a huge amount of any profit margin than was manageable.
Paying licensing fees for popular formats is an obvious thing for a personal computer company to do - that Ubuntu, or some of the other "end user" distro, never did just seems petulant.
- 7speter 4y agoWere IBM cpus really magnitudes more expensive than Intel/AMD cpus or were they just packaged in macs that had their own premium tacked on (in part because of the integration of cutting edge standards like usb and wifi when wintel vendors were years behind admittedly)? I was reminiscing the other day about the common early aughts meme of pc builders on forums always talking about how they could build a pc that was twice as powerful as a mac for nearly half the cost :), but if anything the price of the ibm power cpus were an abstract mystery because consumers only ever saw them in macs (until the xbox360 anyways)
- olliej 4y agoThat’s actually a really interesting question. As I think about it, all I can produce is “everyone knows they were more expensive”, which is questionable in terms of veracity :D I’ll see if I can find some actual figures
- olliej 4y agoI spent a bunch of time searching, and all I can find is parts on ebay today. Everything of the era is just people saying that everyone knows they cost more than intel parts. Nothing I found actually backs up the claim with real numbers, so?
- pram 4y ago> common early aughts meme of pc builders on forums always talking about how they could build a pc that was twice as powerful as a mac for nearly half the cost Why do you need to reminisce about this, these exact posts show up on every Apple hardware release to this day lol
- 7speter 4y agoThe apple silicon cpus are like twice as fast as the offerings from amd and intel and barring the mcm tech and speed of apple silicon, the otherwise comparable stuff from x86_64 costs almost the same as the apple stuff, except for the mac pro