John H. Robinson, IV([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:41:48PM -0700: > > Sun's Solaris can run on Sparc, UltraSparc, and x86. What does making > MacOS restricted to PPC provide for Apple? A more limted market for > their OS? > Good question. Mr. Jobs seems to like limiting the markets though. For example, when he was running NeXT, the marketing strategy changed every other month. This month it's "Sun is the mother of all competitors" which didn't appeal to the "mass" portion of mass-parkets. Then it's "The education community", but they never actually made it easy for students to own them because of price and lack of financing options (which other vendors had). Then it's "vertical markets", which meant selling to police stations and clinics, hospitals, etc.
They were great computers, and I lusted for one for a long time. They were just too stinking expensive for a UCSD student to buy. > Personally, I don't see anything wrong with porting MacOS to x86. The > only problem I can see is supporting all the different x86 compatible > components. Apple can get around that one by doing what Sun does: 1) > Have a very reastricted Hardware Compatibility List, and/or 2) selling > their own x86 systems. Don't forget, OSX is essentially a resurrection of the old NeXTStep OS. Most people remember that company as a proprietary hardware company. However, after the hardware manufacturing stopped, the OS was ported to x86 and supported. There were, for a while, a vendor or two selling high-end x86 hardware with NeXTStep installed. IIRC, there were significant complaints about driver support. It seemed like the company hadn't prepared for the number of hardware drivers they'd need to support and then were constantly under the gun forever after. NeXT support was frequently criticized for stringing customers along with partial truths and alleged flat-out lies. _Then_ NeXT really went away. But the point is, a lot of the work has been done, and hopefully lessons learned. This isn't the kind of ground-breaking move that people seem to make it out to be. The only question would be if they can improve the execution. > > The only thing it might do to Apple is increase the likely hood of > someone illegally installing their OS onto a non-Apple system, such as a > Dell or Sony. This is the same problem Apple faces when it releases an > updated OS, though. > MS is shouldering such a huge portion of the losses from pirated software. It's about time someone came along to help the poor slobs. ;-) > Where is the gain for Apple to keep its market limited? There is none; wouldn't make sense. But single-button mice don't make sense, either. I pretty much line up with jhriv on this one. CPUs just don't seem to be an important differentiating factor between platforms as they used to. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
