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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#201

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kstenerud wrote: post #104
te_chris wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a large proportion of premium mac sales are to people in the creative industries using specialist software distributed outside the app store, I don't think your intuition is correct on this one.

What percentage of the mac user population are they? 5%? 10%? 80% of mac users are like my mother-in-law: The Mac is a machine that does their taxes, emails, word processing, small business stuff, browsing, movie watching, and sometimes video chat if they're not doing that on their phone. And if a company that depends on the creative industry is selling its software outside of Apple channels, I'm sure they'll have th…

I have no data but I bet it's far more than 10%. Your mother-in-law doesn't need a fancy iMac or $2,000 Macbook Pro.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#202

Post by scarface74 »

arvinsim wrote: post #183
scarface74 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

32 bit Carbon was deprecated in 2012. Did it really take a rocket scientist to know that you shouldn’t be writing 32 bit software in 2017? 10 years after the last 32 bit Mac shipped?

You keep on repeating that devs are stupid because they only coded their apps in 32-bit. Perhaps you need to be more charitable and try to find the reasons why devs and businesses chose to only support 32-bit.

Well. Business that don’t keep up with technology get left behind. I have no sympathy for developers who sat on their hands for a decade.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#203

Post by scarface74 »

toyg wrote: post #172
scarface74 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that “wide net” working out? - Microsoft is a non starter in mobile - trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful - Windows is horrible as a touch first interface. - even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows. -it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows. - They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to…

MS was on mobile before mobile was mobile (pun intended), and part of the issue was probably that they got in the game so early that, by the time tech was actually mature, they were out of gas. Ballmer thought he'd seen it all, and he had not; when he realized, they panicked and reacted like headless chickens. It's a cautionary tale for the ages, but it could have easily gone the other way around. On the other hand,…

There was nothing in the justice department ruling that forced them to stand still when it came to browser development. Apple moves faster with Safari/WebKit after they started with KHTML. Apple wasn’t exactly a large company when they introduced Safari.

They also lost billions of dollars on the console market. Is it even as profitable as the AirPods now?

As far as getting in mobile too early. Failing at the Newton didn’t exactly hurt Apple getting back into mobile. You do remember that Apple was almost bankrupt in the 90s?

Apple was able to port OS X to the iPhone partially because it didn’t have all of the bloat of Windows.

I developed on WinCE devices using both .Net CF and C++/MFC. I am very much aware of the limitations.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#204

Post by scarface74 »

slantyyz wrote: post #180
scarface74 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an overwhelmingly market share in a declining low profit margin business is the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. No one cares about PCs as a business anymore.

>> No one cares about PCs as a business anymore. Is that true? While I get that this isn't scientific proof, there seem to be a lot of Youtubers out there making a decent living off videos of building and reviewing PCs and Macs. Linus Tech Tips has >11M subscribers, Dave2D has 2.7M subscribers, etc.

Have you looked at the profits of every single PC maker? It’s a low margin business.

Making money off of YT videos is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#205

Post by Wowfunhappy »

timw4mail wrote: post #110
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

68k to PPC was exactly "going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture". ARM today is waaaaaaaaaaaay more popular than PowerPC ever was, and nearly infinitely more popular than when Apple switched from 68k, and 68k was very popular back then.

68k was also a dead end. It was very popular, in computers, video game consoles, etc. But it also never got up to ~100MHz. Going to PowerPC was the only real option at the time.

...y'know, is there a reason they chose PowerPC over, well, x86?

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#206

Post by peace2all »

> “Today we discuss”...

Meaning, today I write. Because what I say is necessary. Can’t just be silent.

When is he gonna give up the ghost? He’s not at Apple for a reason. Yet he’s obsessed with them.

No one at Apple sought him out before going in any direction. He’s been a non-entity there for two decades. Yet he can’t stop trying to tell us all how to think about everything they do.

Gruber is at least a little more attached to Apple.

But the two of them sound like two old cranks: one consistently fawning over all Apple decisions, the other fretting.

I don’t know what it’s like to devote one’s life to discussing a single corporation, even one as wildly successful and entertaining as Apple.

I always wonder if these guys ever wake up and think, “Maybe today I’ll just delete my blog, stop reading press releases and tech news about Apple, and go build that cabin or walk a trail”.

Maybe they’re terrified no one would miss them? Or maybe they’ll find that life is better and that they wasted the last few decades of their very precious and limited life?

I don’t know. Maybe they are so enmeshed it just never occurs to them. It just always makes me sad to see their posts. Maybe that says more about me in some sad way than it does about them. Don’t know.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#207

Post by scarface74 »

arvinsim wrote: post #182
scarface74 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an overwhelmingly market share in a declining low profit margin business is the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. No one cares about PCs as a business anymore.

I lump together "PCs are doomed" in the same category as "Apple is doomed". Both are not even remotely true.

PCs aren’t doomed no more than Android devices. They are just both a low margin commoditized product that compete on price.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#208

Post by scarface74 »

slantyyz wrote: post #171
scarface74 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you are ignoring the low cost Surface computers that are meant to compete on price with the $329 10.2 inch iPad or even the $499 iPad Air. The iPads can actually run well with 2GB of RAM. Microsoft Office is a much better experience on an iPad without a keyboard than any hardware that Apple sells.

The Atom-based Surfaces with the Atom x7-8700 - that's the same processor I have in my GPD-Win. It's more than usable for light users. Heck, its built-in GPU outperforms the one in my Surface Pro. While x86 Surface (not-pro) might have been "meant" to compete on price with iPads, I don't think that's how it worked out. I tend to think most of the people who will buy a low end x86 Surface want/need Windows in the firs…

Have you compared the performance of the atom based Surface to the cheapest iPad?

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#209

Post by scarface74 »

mrkstu wrote: post #191
scarface74 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad you did the edit. I was about to tell you a story about comparing my Mac LCII with an upgraded 68030-40 and my PPC 6100/60 running emulated software.

Yeah- you were generally standing still at best. The nice thing though is that as your apps (and OS) updated, you were continually getting 'free' speed boosts.

I went backwards theoretically. The 6100/60 emulated a 68K at about the speed of 68030-25. But by the time I upgraded in early 1995, the software I cared about was native.

I had been using SoftPC to run compilers for school. I bought the DOS Compatibility Card for my 6100 and that was a dream machine.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#210

Post by mrkstu »

scarface74 wrote: post #209
mrkstu wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah- you were generally standing still at best. The nice thing though is that as your apps (and OS) updated, you were continually getting 'free' speed boosts.

I went backwards theoretically. The 6100/60 emulated a 68K at about the speed of 68030-25. But by the time I upgraded in early 1995, the software I cared about was native. I had been using SoftPC to run compilers for school. I bought the DOS Compatibility Card for my 6100 and that was a dream machine.

I have a Performa 6115/CD sitting under a desk- I should fire it up and see if it still works. Was my main machine for a long while.
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