constantnormal Says:
August 31st, 2010 at 10:22 am
@Mike in Nola
“Many are still using XP, which is like 7-8 years old and are able to run most apps and run it on recent machines. Try doing that with the Mac OS.”
… news-flash, Dude … You can install Windows on any Intel Mac, and that has been the case since the first Intel Mac. Apple supplies device drivers tailored to their hardware to make the process as painless and trouble-free as possible. A number of commercial enterprises use Macs to sun their Windows code base, because the Macs are more reliable and solid, and continue to run Windows XP, where a lot of newer Windows machines no longer do so. And the uniform hardware platform makes even Windows run a lot closer to “stable”, which casts some doubt on the wisdom of running “on millions of combinations of motherboards, videocards, and other pieces of hardware.” Most people don’t want to endure the pain of debugging their particular unique configuration of hardware with the Windows Swiss army knife software and the “millions of combinations of” device drivers, which are all written by manufacturers with varying degrees of skill and quality control.
People don’t understand the difference between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft has never built decent hardware (except for their mice) and seems incapable of doing so in a manner that the markets will accept. Through their indirect control over the Wintel hardware manufacturers, they retain all the profitable stuff (software) and could care less what cost-cutting short cuts the hardware manufacturers take in their battle to bludgeon each other into the cheapest (not least expensive, but cheapest — there is a difference) products.
Apple doesn’t build software for general consumption — they are a hardware manufacturer, and offer software ONLY as an incentive to buy their hardware. I suspect that if one could break down their product lines by profit margins, apportioning development costs appropriately, you would see that the hardware provides the bulk of the profits, with the software playing a much weaker role in generation of corporate profits. They used to offer their system software for free, until the possibility of unauthorized cloners convinced them to abandon that approach. And as a hardware manufacturer, OF COURSE they obsolete the previous generation of products to make way for the new. But Apple typically provides migration assistance software to enable older apps to run on newer machines (for a time). I recently was surprised/shocked to find that the Rosetta migration assist facility under Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) would allow AppleWorks (a decade-dead all-in-one app similar to Microsoft Works, if anyone remembers that), an app that was designed and built for the PowerPC instruction architecture using the Mac OS 9 (pre-OS X) software APIs to launch and run. I am certain that Apple did not intend for this to occur, but neither did they intentionally block it.
BTW, Microsoft does the same thing, via bloatware, with ever-expanding versions of the Office apps forcing people to move to faster machines with larger hard drives. I can recall when Excel and Word would fit on diskettes, along with bootable copies of the Mac OS. And there are limits to Microsoft’s cross-platform compatibility. As the number of processors on the cpu die gets larger, it gets hinkier and hinkier to trick XP into running on those machines. And because Microsoft sells software, they are not really interested in having their customers hang onto their ancient crufty system software.
The two product families are designed and built using entirely different models, and using entirely different design philosophies. Whereas Microsoft pushes the hardware costs out onto the computer manufacturers, which take various approaches to solving that problem, resulting in less-than-perfect integration with the hardware and device conflicts being a fact of life in the Windows world, Apple aims to make everything work together as smoothly as possible, and will make changes to either hardware or software in the pursuit of that goal.
That’s why, if one were to profile the typical happy Windows user vs the typical happy Mac user, one would find the Windozer having a distinctly smaller set of usages for his/her machine, while the Mac user is all over the map, doing anything and everything with their Macs, and loving every minute of it.
But it is certainly true that Apple will move to obsolete hardware, usually in the adoption/abandonment of peripheral device connection standards. Apple abandoned the floppy drive with the iMac, along with serial and parallel ports , and any day now I expect to see them drop electrical signal connections entirely, in favor of Intel’s new Light Peak technology, which will enable a simpler, faster path to devices via optical connections, running multiple devices over a single fiber optic cable or via one of the wireless technologies. In addition to obsoleting older products (which mush be done to move new ones out, for both Microsoft and Apple), use of fewer technologies in connecting peripherals makes the entire product more reliable and trouble-free.
These two user groups are distinctly different in size and character. That’s why there is such a split in market share between the two platforms. They do not directly compete, but instead go after entirely different groups. Nothing wrong with that — but it flies in the face of the stereotypical PC vs Mac wars. There is no war … some Mac users run Office, and some Windows users run their systems on Macs. If there really were a “war” between the two, this would never happen. Whether one prefers Macs or PCs depends entirely upon their usage profile.
If one is Borg-like, so is the other, in about exactly the same proportion, but expressed in different ways.
I think maybe that BR is looking at market cap when assessing the “verdict of the markets” :)
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