Originally posted by: bamacre
loic2003
Apple will always have it's niche in the market, as it always has. They are doing well with the Ipod as well as a couple other things. But they don't compete, nor do they want to compete, with the likes of MS, Intel, and Dell. So to compare the two sides of the spectrum is really just irrelevent. Why compare Apple and MS when Apple chooses not to? Why compare a Mac with a Dell when Apple isn't even trying to compete with Dell?
Apple has their little niche that they are happy and successful with. They obvioulsy have no desire to be as big as other large tech giants. There's nothing wrong with that. They'll have obstacles in the future because of this, but they will evolve, and succeed just as they always have.
What the hell?
They've always been in direct competition with Microsoft. They will be using intel chips soon, and dell have already asked if they could release boxes with the x86 version of OSX.... which steve said no to.
Check out past keynotes. You'll see the comparisons between the processors apple used and the equivalent intels.
They aren't just happy in their little niche. They're fighting hard to gain that market share. One of the ideas of the iPod is to introduce people to the apple brand name. When people who have had a great time with their iPods are next out loooking for a PC they may spot an apple box someplace and give it whirl.
You realise half the features of windows XP were directly ripped off from apple's OSX? It was so blatant that apple even take obvious
digs at microsoft for their plagiarism in the OS field. If they're
copying each other then it's plain to see that they are in direct competition.
Originally posted by: AMDZen
"Intel suxx, our processors spanks the sh!t out of everything Intel, AMD, or otherwise. Just look at these Benchmarks" - Apple loser, May 2005
"We are switching to Intel because we have decided our processors suck. Intel will help us to carry on in a future where our CPU architecture is outdated." - Same Apple Loser, June 2005
So which is it? Well we all know now, Apple has switched.
Here you're talking as though the development of processors was linear and without change. Apple have always aimed to go for the best chips to do the processing they require. They used to run motorola chips, but motorola couldn't come up with the goods. They had to then switch to IBM, who have managed to come out with a very decent G5 chip, but there have been massive problems sqeezing this chip down into a form suitable for a notebook. This is why apple notebooks are stagnating at a max speed of 1.67GHz with a truly poor bus speed of 167MHz. They slap huge amounts of cache on die, but still things are slow. Intel have a much more reliable roadmap and are already making very good notebook chips that blow the powerbooks out of the water. For this reason, apple have gone with the seriously difficult decision to swap over not just the chip manufacturer, but the architecture of the CPUs.
Naturally, this must have been a real dick in the ass as far as decisions go, what with the fact they previously slated intel, the fact that X86 is theoretically inferior to powerPC and that it'll be very hard to limit the OS to their hardware alone (apple don't like users to be farting around with drivers and all that other crap).
They needed the processing power, though, and that's why they made the decision. You'll not see an intel powermac until late '07, but you'll be seeing updated iBooks/Powerbooks in the next few quarters. Don't by an apple notebook any time soon. And with all new hardware/software, you're always best to wait for version 1.2 or so.
Hope this answers your question.
