9 ms·

Sony’s 2001 offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops

74 points by electic 13y ago

nly 13y ago
Would it have really made a difference? Inter-company collaborations always end up with one company becoming dependent or the other buying them out, or both. Vaio would have become synonymous with Mac OS until Apple ditched them and left them to the same fate as they currently face.
- MBCook 13y ago
  Apple's problem was the other clone manufacturers undercutting them. Sony is a company that is known for being willing to charge premium prices for their premium products. It may have worked out. I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference though.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    I am thinking commoditization of the entire device is flawed while commoditization of parts is not. The way people think they can buy a PC for cheaper than the price of its parts is probably a good example.
- smaddali 13y ago
  In an alternate version of history, It may have been possible for Apple and Sony to seal the relationship and may be co-operate on iPhones and iPad, possibly slowing down Samsung Juggernaut. Well.. you never know...
- toufka 13y ago
  It's interesting to see where Apple has done visible product collaborations before. Rarely have they been effective. In the post-clone (Jobs.2) era I can recall the HP-iPod [1], and the Motorola RAZR with iTunes [2]. Both (differently) lopsided in their loyalties. Both failures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod%2BHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod%2BHP [2] http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/12/motorola_razr_with_itunes_coming_to_us http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/12/motorola_razr_with...
ozten 13y ago
I've been looking for a new laptop that will build Firefox or FirefoxOS in a reasonable amount of time. Macbook Pros, AFAICT are the only game in town. (Would love to be wrong here) Perhaps in this alternate universe... Sony, Lenovo and others are producing reasonable high-end laptops.
- ginko 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure the top-end Dell Precision mobile workstations have more computing power than the top-end Macbook pros, for instance. The same is probably true for the HP Elitebooks. They may not be as light, though.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    Yep if you're willing to trade weight you can easily get a core i7-3840QM which can do 8 threads (4 cores) fairly fast. My current one I've been able to emulate some of the last gen consoles even for fun, compiling Firefox or Firefox OS is largely going to be an issue of disk speed which is fixable with either gobs of ram or and SSD, (preferably both, though overprices the alienware m18x r2 will take multiple drives, an msata ssd, and 32gb of ram and can be upgraded to workstation graphics cards if you have the cash).
    - acchow 13y ago
      Disk i/o is not the bottleneck when compiling an OS.
      - simcop2387 13y ago
        When i was last using gentoo (which admittidly was a while ago) it was pretty much the bottle neck for most things if you wanted to compile in parallel, largely because intermediate steps are written out to the disk before linking and less so because of reading. That said it is possible to do it all in memory but then you end up memory bound which is also possible to work around by throwing money at your ram (or downloading more off the web).
Keyframe 13y ago
Story from 'the wife' seems a bit stretched - especially the part about next morning flight.. but all in all it wouldn't be surprising if there was some truth to it because Jobs was obsessed with Sony since 80s and tried to, basically, build Sony 2. This is well documented and probably the most visible part of it was his turtleneck attire which was modeled after what he saw at Sony (they wore uniforms).
- pavlov 13y ago
  The creative director of Apple's ad agency tells a story that illustrates Jobs's Sony obsession well [1]. In 1998, when Steve Jobs was back as interim CEO at Apple and had a cool new consumer computer nearing completion, he wanted to call it "MacMan", along the lines of Walkman. It was changed to "iMac" at the last minute. We nearly ended up with PhoneMan 5s running ManOS 7...! [1] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-the-imac-the-macman-until-this-guy-stopped-him http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-...
  - jamesbrownuhh 13y ago
    I would absolutely buy and use any operating system called ManOS.
    - pi-err 13y ago
      ManOs X ! The hands of fate log10! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/
    - expo123 13y ago
      add an "o" to it : ManOOS i.e. manoos : in marathi language word for a "people"
    - r-s 13y ago
      What about BroOS?
  - Keyframe 13y ago
lstamour 13y ago
Originally posted at: http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secre... Kim replies in the comments there, too. Intriguingly, the post is marked as "Not for Reproduction," whatever that means.
oofabz 13y ago
Sounds like Steve was trying to break into the Asian market. Mac OS has always been a mostly North American phenomenon but Steve liked to think big. Mac OS world marketshare: http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/apple-mac-osx/ http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/ap...
- zhemao 13y ago
  Wow, Iceland really likes Macs. Can anyone explain why? I suppose the population is small enough that it only takes a few adopters to drive up the percentage, but still.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    It could be due to localization issues. Is Icelandic OS X better than Icelandic Windows? The availability of an Icelandic keyboard?
    - wcfields 13y ago
      Could be that pre-OSX was built with very good localization for more obscure* languages and it carried over into today. *(Icelandic has at most has ~350k speakers)
ChuckMcM 13y ago
While the story may or may not be true, I cannot believe that Sony would have been able to sell Microsoft on the idea that some of their "PCs" were going to run MacOS. There was a pretty interesting example of how Microsoft responds when ASUS first tried to ship a x86 laptop with Linux as standard. (the EEEPC line) It resulted in a huge flap that spilled out publicly with things like ARM laptops being ordered off the expo floor at CeBIT and Microsoft bringing back a "dead" version of Windows XP for that particular model. But the bottom line was they went all out to keep ASUS from shipping a non-windows Laptop and that was in 2006 or 7. Five years earlier I expect they would have just threatened to pull Sony completely out of the OEM licensing program.
- mattdotc 13y ago
  Dell was able to pull it off. The only Dell PC I've ever purchased was an Inspiron 1420n which came bundled with Ubuntu 7.04. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-inspiron-1420n-ubuntu-laptop-review/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-inspiron-1420n-u...
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    That's a fair point. It was a bit later, the interesting bit about the anti-trust suit is also good, I could see how Sony could pull it off, but I still don't think they ever seriously considered it.
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    In February of that year, I bought a Dell Dimension e520n, which came bundled with a copy of FreeDOS. I still own that computer, which has a 1.86ghz Core 2 Duo, and it currrently runs Arch Linux.
- fpgeek 13y ago
  In 2001, Sony had all the leverage. The Microsoft antitrust case was still open. The DoJ and Microsoft proposed a settlement in Nov 2001 which wasn't accepted by the judge until Nov 2002. The last thing Microsoft needed was a brand-new allegation of anti-competitive conduct to blow all that up.
georgechen 13y ago
Of note: the original PowerBook 100 was design by Apple and manufactured by Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100
Stratoscope 13y ago
A friend of mine on CompuServe back in the '80s posted a story about running into some Sony execs at CES. He told them he loved the picture quality of Betamax, but he was afraid VHS would win because it could fit most movies on a single tape and people didn't want to switch tapes. One of the Sony execs looked at him and said, "We think we know what is best."
- PakG1 13y ago
  For a long time, iOS didn't have multitasking. If Steve Jobs heard that complaint from someone and replied, "We think we know what is best", would that person have thrown their hands up exasperated? Sometimes, visionaries are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes, the customer is right, sometimes the customer is wrong. It's sometimes a crapshoot.
  - MBCook 13y ago
    "We know what we're doing" basically was Apple's response to multitasking. They said the iPhone worked well enough. Once they figured out a good way to do it, one they were happy with, they released it. It's not a perfect comparison. The iPhone worked quite well without multi-tasking, I had one. It wasn't a big problem. On the other hand, having to always swap tapes half-way through a movie would be a deal breaker for most people. Sony eventually addressed that, but it was too late.
mmphosis 13y ago
maybe running the very new (and buggy) Mac OS X version 10.0 (Cheetah) or maybe the later 2001 Mac OS X version 10.1 (Puma) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1 the pairs of ppc and i386 header files I had heard of Apple internally testing Mac OS or Mac OS X on Intel-based hardware.
- jarvic 13y ago
  Jobs specifically claimed that every version of OS X had been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel processors, though I can't remember if any proof of this was ever given.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    NEXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc, Motorola, and I think PA-RISC at various times. No reason to believe they didn't have an Intel build of OS X from day one.
benologist 13y ago
I really wish Apple would just open this up, or go all out and open source it which I guess may be possible now that they've stopped charging for it. Looking at the North Korean ripoff version earlier today [1[ it was by far the nicest looking linux desktop I've ever seen heh. [1] http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/ http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/ or on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036
- MBCook 13y ago
  They haven't stopped charging for it, it's not free. It's subsidized by Mac sales. If they open sourced OS X, they would kill it's funding source and screw themselves. Actually, that's exactly what happened when they allowed clones.
drivingmissm 13y ago
Sony would have passed because of iTunes, Sony isn't going to sell hardware that plays songs from Sony Music and pays Apple as the middle man.

74 points by electic 13y ago

nly 13y ago

Would it have really made a difference? Inter-company collaborations always end up with one company becoming dependent or the other buying them out, or both. Vaio would have become synonymous with Mac OS until Apple ditched them and left them to the same fate as they currently face.

MBCook 13y ago
Apple's problem was the other clone manufacturers undercutting them. Sony is a company that is known for being willing to charge premium prices for their premium products. It may have worked out. I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference though.
- yuhong 13y ago
  I am thinking commoditization of the entire device is flawed while commoditization of parts is not. The way people think they can buy a PC for cheaper than the price of its parts is probably a good example.
smaddali 13y ago
In an alternate version of history, It may have been possible for Apple and Sony to seal the relationship and may be co-operate on iPhones and iPad, possibly slowing down Samsung Juggernaut. Well.. you never know...
toufka 13y ago
It's interesting to see where Apple has done visible product collaborations before. Rarely have they been effective. In the post-clone (Jobs.2) era I can recall the HP-iPod [1], and the Motorola RAZR with iTunes [2]. Both (differently) lopsided in their loyalties. Both failures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod%2BHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod%2BHP [2] http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/12/motorola_razr_with_itunes_coming_to_us http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/06/12/motorola_razr_with...

ozten 13y ago

I've been looking for a new laptop that will build Firefox or FirefoxOS in a reasonable amount of time. Macbook Pros, AFAICT are the only game in town. (Would love to be wrong here) Perhaps in this alternate universe... Sony, Lenovo and others are producing reasonable high-end laptops.

ginko 13y ago
I'm pretty sure the top-end Dell Precision mobile workstations have more computing power than the top-end Macbook pros, for instance. The same is probably true for the HP Elitebooks. They may not be as light, though.
- simcop2387 13y ago
  Yep if you're willing to trade weight you can easily get a core i7-3840QM which can do 8 threads (4 cores) fairly fast. My current one I've been able to emulate some of the last gen consoles even for fun, compiling Firefox or Firefox OS is largely going to be an issue of disk speed which is fixable with either gobs of ram or and SSD, (preferably both, though overprices the alienware m18x r2 will take multiple drives, an msata ssd, and 32gb of ram and can be upgraded to workstation graphics cards if you have the cash).
  - acchow 13y ago
    Disk i/o is not the bottleneck when compiling an OS.
    - simcop2387 13y ago
      When i was last using gentoo (which admittidly was a while ago) it was pretty much the bottle neck for most things if you wanted to compile in parallel, largely because intermediate steps are written out to the disk before linking and less so because of reading. That said it is possible to do it all in memory but then you end up memory bound which is also possible to work around by throwing money at your ram (or downloading more off the web).

Keyframe 13y ago

Story from 'the wife' seems a bit stretched - especially the part about next morning flight.. but all in all it wouldn't be surprising if there was some truth to it because Jobs was obsessed with Sony since 80s and tried to, basically, build Sony 2. This is well documented and probably the most visible part of it was his turtleneck attire which was modeled after what he saw at Sony (they wore uniforms).

pavlov 13y ago
The creative director of Apple's ad agency tells a story that illustrates Jobs's Sony obsession well [1]. In 1998, when Steve Jobs was back as interim CEO at Apple and had a cool new consumer computer nearing completion, he wanted to call it "MacMan", along the lines of Walkman. It was changed to "iMac" at the last minute. We nearly ended up with PhoneMan 5s running ManOS 7...! [1] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-the-imac-the-macman-until-this-guy-stopped-him http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-...
- jamesbrownuhh 13y ago
  I would absolutely buy and use any operating system called ManOS.
  - pi-err 13y ago
    ManOs X ! The hands of fate log10! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/
  - expo123 13y ago
    add an "o" to it : ManOOS i.e. manoos : in marathi language word for a "people"
  - r-s 13y ago
    What about BroOS?
- Keyframe 13y ago

lstamour 13y ago

Originally posted at: http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secre... Kim replies in the comments there, too. Intriguingly, the post is marked as "Not for Reproduction," whatever that means.

oofabz 13y ago

Sounds like Steve was trying to break into the Asian market. Mac OS has always been a mostly North American phenomenon but Steve liked to think big. Mac OS world marketshare: http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/apple-mac-osx/ http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/ap...

zhemao 13y ago
Wow, Iceland really likes Macs. Can anyone explain why? I suppose the population is small enough that it only takes a few adopters to drive up the percentage, but still.
- astrodust 13y ago
  It could be due to localization issues. Is Icelandic OS X better than Icelandic Windows? The availability of an Icelandic keyboard?
  - wcfields 13y ago
    Could be that pre-OSX was built with very good localization for more obscure* languages and it carried over into today. *(Icelandic has at most has ~350k speakers)

ChuckMcM 13y ago

While the story may or may not be true, I cannot believe that Sony would have been able to sell Microsoft on the idea that some of their "PCs" were going to run MacOS. There was a pretty interesting example of how Microsoft responds when ASUS first tried to ship a x86 laptop with Linux as standard. (the EEEPC line) It resulted in a huge flap that spilled out publicly with things like ARM laptops being ordered off the expo floor at CeBIT and Microsoft bringing back a "dead" version of Windows XP for that particular model. But the bottom line was they went all out to keep ASUS from shipping a non-windows Laptop and that was in 2006 or 7. Five years earlier I expect they would have just threatened to pull Sony completely out of the OEM licensing program.

mattdotc 13y ago
Dell was able to pull it off. The only Dell PC I've ever purchased was an Inspiron 1420n which came bundled with Ubuntu 7.04. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-inspiron-1420n-ubuntu-laptop-review/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-inspiron-1420n-u...
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  That's a fair point. It was a bit later, the interesting bit about the anti-trust suit is also good, I could see how Sony could pull it off, but I still don't think they ever seriously considered it.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  In February of that year, I bought a Dell Dimension e520n, which came bundled with a copy of FreeDOS. I still own that computer, which has a 1.86ghz Core 2 Duo, and it currrently runs Arch Linux.
fpgeek 13y ago
In 2001, Sony had all the leverage. The Microsoft antitrust case was still open. The DoJ and Microsoft proposed a settlement in Nov 2001 which wasn't accepted by the judge until Nov 2002. The last thing Microsoft needed was a brand-new allegation of anti-competitive conduct to blow all that up.

georgechen 13y ago

Of note: the original PowerBook 100 was design by Apple and manufactured by Sony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100

Stratoscope 13y ago

A friend of mine on CompuServe back in the '80s posted a story about running into some Sony execs at CES. He told them he loved the picture quality of Betamax, but he was afraid VHS would win because it could fit most movies on a single tape and people didn't want to switch tapes. One of the Sony execs looked at him and said, "We think we know what is best."

PakG1 13y ago
For a long time, iOS didn't have multitasking. If Steve Jobs heard that complaint from someone and replied, "We think we know what is best", would that person have thrown their hands up exasperated? Sometimes, visionaries are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes, the customer is right, sometimes the customer is wrong. It's sometimes a crapshoot.
- MBCook 13y ago
  "We know what we're doing" basically was Apple's response to multitasking. They said the iPhone worked well enough. Once they figured out a good way to do it, one they were happy with, they released it. It's not a perfect comparison. The iPhone worked quite well without multi-tasking, I had one. It wasn't a big problem. On the other hand, having to always swap tapes half-way through a movie would be a deal breaker for most people. Sony eventually addressed that, but it was too late.

mmphosis 13y ago

maybe running the very new (and buggy) Mac OS X version 10.0 (Cheetah) or maybe the later 2001 Mac OS X version 10.1 (Puma) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1 the pairs of ppc and i386 header files I had heard of Apple internally testing Mac OS or Mac OS X on Intel-based hardware.

jarvic 13y ago
Jobs specifically claimed that every version of OS X had been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel processors, though I can't remember if any proof of this was ever given.
- ams6110 13y ago
  NEXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc, Motorola, and I think PA-RISC at various times. No reason to believe they didn't have an Intel build of OS X from day one.

benologist 13y ago

I really wish Apple would just open this up, or go all out and open source it which I guess may be possible now that they've stopped charging for it. Looking at the North Korean ripoff version earlier today [1[ it was by far the nicest looking linux desktop I've ever seen heh. [1] http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/ http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/ or on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036

MBCook 13y ago
They haven't stopped charging for it, it's not free. It's subsidized by Mac sales. If they open sourced OS X, they would kill it's funding source and screw themselves. Actually, that's exactly what happened when they allowed clones.

drivingmissm 13y ago

Sony would have passed because of iTunes, Sony isn't going to sell hardware that plays songs from Sony Music and pays Apple as the middle man.