John Dvorak says he’s been trying to tell us for years that the end was nigh for the IBM/Apple combination. The Intel platform has some interesting implications (as we said yesterday):
I’ve never understood why the Mac nuts are in such denial over this platform shift. This change to Intel will not only save the platform but potentially drive it into a position of dominance. What will be lost, of course, is the niche and mystique aspect of the Mac which many of its users seem to relish as part of some misguided superiority complex.
A more interesting scenario to me is examining the possibility that Windows users can switch to the Mac OS on their Intel machines. Is this going to be possible?
I have always believed that Apple could enter the PC arena with an Intel-based computer that could run OS-X or Windows and begin to take market share away from Dell and HP.
So why not? If Apple’s real value is their software, doesn’t it benefit them to run it on as many platforms as possible?
The PC industry is undergoing one of those paradigm-shift dealies where the PC is becoming a home entertainment device, and Apple is well-positioned (as they say) to take advantage as long as they understand their actual product.
In the battle over who broke the story first, the Wall St. Journal is taking credit.
A more interesting scenario to me is examining the possibility that Windows users can switch to the Mac OS on their Intel machines. Is this going to be possible?
Nope; IIRC Apple’s said quite clearly that OSX will continue to run only on Apple Macintosh computers, regardless of CPU type.
But then, really, when has John Dvorak ever had any idea what the heck he was talking about?
Apple’s real value might be their software (OSX is certainly a first-rate platform), but their computer-industry profit is all from the hardware. (I say computer-industry specifically to disinclude all the iPod profit, which is immense, but unrelated.)
Part of it is also, I think, that they can keep the whole thing much simpler and more coherent at the driver level by only having to support their own hardware at install-time, and whatever third-party things they choose; wheras on an open hardware platform they have to support a much more varied and dubious set of hardware that can have god-knows-what sorts of interactions. (But you know all that already, I’m sure).
The folks at Apple are certainly smarter and better aware of their market than Dvorak is, and I’m betting on them, not him.
Yes, I’ve seen these declarations from Apple, but time passes and things change. At the driver level OS X is just another NetBSD system, so there’s lots of drivers for it already.
I just think it would be amusing to see them duke it out with MS.