On Jun 7, 2005, at 11:51 AM, Joseph Alotta wrote:
I used to be a NeXt developer. This announcement is very
reminiscent of the NeXt announcement to stop making those little
black boxes and bring NeXt OS on Intel chips. We had just bought a
ton of hardware and they demo this clunky 386 PC. First of all, it
looked nasty. We were used to that elegant design. Secondly, it
kept crashing. It destroyed the culture. It was like putting
Haydn into the juke box at a disco. Everyone went home. The vice
president of our division, who bet his career on NeXt, resigned and
NeXt languished for years.
It is the same scenario playing out again. Will Steve Jobs never
learn?
Did NeXT produce their own boxes, or did they allow installs on any
PC with supported hardware. I believe that is a key difference.
Apple boxes will be exactly the same as they would have been, except
they will have a different CPU. You still won't be able to install
OS X on a commodity PC without jumping through a lot of hoops.
I think the only way that you look at it is that if IBM couldn't or
wouldn't deliver the processors Apple needed at a reasonable price,
what else could Apple do?
Ian
