Disqus - Latest Comments for adm

Re: Why Mac cloning today wouldn't be like Mac cloning ten years ago

adm — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:18:15 -0000

Apple sells hardware. The make software... so that they can sell hardware. They are very VERY up front about this. Most importantly, Apple - and by 'Apple', of course, I mean 'Steve' - has reinvented Apple in the last 10 years by selling 'the whole product'. It's this 'whole product' concept that has enabled Apple to make inroads.

You've left some math out. I'm sure you know this, but it bares repeating. Every box of Mac OS they sold to a cloner maker was nearly guaranteed to lose them a hardware sale, as you discussed. I know as a reseller of Apple hardware, at the time we were getting 10%-20% margins. If Apple was getting even 5% markup on their hardware (and that's a pretty conservative number), they still received twice as much from a $2000 sale of hardware then they were getting from selling the OS to a cloner. So almost ever box of Mac OS lost them money. Businesses are supposed to make money, not lose it.

Further more, the clones were also "cheap, horrible machines for consumers which had no style, and just looked like slightly quirky beige boxes." Do you remember the Umax boxes? Yikes! Even PowerComputing boxes were utilitarian. "[Apple's] professional range was just dull, and not well-engineered," as were all the other clone makers. I cut my hands on the hardware inside more clones than I care to remember. They used cheap parts because they were buying at quantities less than 10% that of Apple. They had to keep prices down somehow. Have you been inside a Dell or a Gateway? Have you been inside a Mac Pro?

So, if Apple currently makes their money on hardware, and if they sell hardware in a market completely dominated by Windows by having a really cool "whole product" whose functionality is very difficult or impossible to duplicate on another platform, why would Apple want to make a quick buck on selling boxes of Mac OS to competitors? The chances of Dell clones cannibalizing Apple sales is pretty high, even if they sell sub-$1000 Macs. Steven Maker, the NPD Group's vice president of industry analysis, said in an interview with eWeek, "If you don't give people a choice, people will spend more." <http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/chann...>

Apple's had the two most profitable quarters in its history in the last year. Sounds like they're doing pretty well without cloners. Someday, perhaps they'll have to deal with Monoply status. Then, perhaps, the answer may be 'cloning'. But at less than 5% worldwide market share, I think that's a little premature.

Re: Why Mac cloning today wouldn't be like Mac cloning ten years ago

adm — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:30:55 -0000

Ian,

With respect, I think you're being disingenuous when you say the point of your article was not to put forward that Apple should consider re-evaluating a cloning program. If you are honestly only trying to point out that the Apple of today is significantly different than the Apple of 10 years ago, few people would have read your post and I doubt you would even have bothered to type it. I would imagine that it's as obvious to your readers as the weather.

Your point, made in bold, is that Apple lost market share due to the poor quality of their computers. It was this poor quality that caused customers to look elsewhere. Some of them found the equally poor quality clones. Finally, you conclude that since people where buying clones in order to avoid quality concerns from Apple hardware (a dubious conclusion, given the poor quality of the clones and Wintel boxes) and since Apple no longer has these quality concerns, then Apple would do well to reconsider licensing their OS.

The PCC boxes were so much like Wintel boxes that they were regularly reviewed as such <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_...>. The Umax boxes were worse. Radius tried that funky wavey front panel, which at least made it obvious that they weren't PC's. But as you probably know, all of them were painful to open and work on. All of them used the same logic board designs, whether or not they used the identical components. All of them were trying to compete with Apple on price while selling less than 10% of Apple's volume. And all of this while the PC's of the day were abhorrently unattractive, with their own - admittedly less proprietary - shoddy workmanship. In the crowd of computers from that era, Apple's really don't seem like they stand out as shoddy.

There are a lot of issues to harp on from 1995-1997. I wouldn't dig in your heals over the quality of the Apple line.

As an aside, Apple almost never demonstrated hardware that it wasn't ready to release within the next quarter. I bring this point up because Motorola and Power Computing regularly did. The StarMax 6000, as you know, was a CHRP box running the fast G3 chips coming off the press. I'm certain you know this, but it bears mentioning to readers who don't. When chips come off the press, their ability to clock up to higher speeds is not equal. Some are better than others, which allow them to be clocked up faster. The distribution of chips coming off the assembly line, then, looks a bit like a bell curve, with the majority of the chips unable to reach the speeds of the very fastest chips, who are in the small minority at the beginning of the curve. If all you have to do is put together a handful of demo units, then you can really pull out the stops and hand-pick a few high-end chips from that curve, stick them in a StarMax 6000 demo unit, and bring it to Macworld. If, on the other hand, you have to be ready to ship a few hundred thousand computers with these chips in them, that's obviously a different story. Power Computing was famous for releasing the very fastest chips in their computers about three months before Apple. But when they were only going to sell 100,000 computers this year, with the majority of those having low to mid range performance CPU's, they didn't have to wait very long to stockpile enough high end CPU's. Apple, who sold more computers in a month than PCC sold in a year, typically had to stockpile for, you guessed it, three months before they could announce their product.

Re: Why Mac cloning today wouldn't be like Mac cloning ten years ago

adm — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:03:20 -0000

Aww, that stinks. Sorry for the double post, Ian. Your website was briefly unavailable (as reported by OpenDNS). I should have looked to see if the post actually went through. =/ Feel free to clean that up. They are identical.

Cheers!

Re: Ok, Apple Not Stupid - The Have Just Turned Into “The Man”

adm — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:18:28 -0000

It's widely known (from internal Microsoft memo's, for example) that Internet Explorer was a response to the Internet's booming success in the 90's, not the other way around.

If 90+% of people in the 90's hadn't been exposed to Internet Explorer, they'd have used some other browser. Imagine how many fewer sites (and appliances) would require IE now. I dare you to buy a LinkSys managed switch without owning a Window's PC. And it has a web-GUI!

So you used bad example. Fine. Your point, it would appear, might be summed up with a question like this: "to what degree should Apple manage security risks on the new iPhone platform?"

There is a whole spectrum of positions one might take on this question. But there are a few aspects of the iPhone as a software platform to keep in mind:

- Apple has said publicly that the iPhone/iPod Touch are a huge part of their handheld computing platform
- Apple's 'plaftorms' since the return of Jobs have life times measured in decades (iMac, notebooks, Xserve, Mac OS X, iPod)
- The iPhone as a software platform is only 3 months old

Discussions like this one can serve to inform and even apply pressure as Apple continues to develop this nascent platform. But to expect Apple to treat the iPhone platform as a mature platform (even if it is fairly polished compared to other handheld platforms) might be a bit like asking a parent to make their toddler clean up her room before she can watch TV. Right idea; wrong time.