10 years ago Michael Dell said Apple should close shop

[uncharted]

sdyates wrote:
Apple came very close to closing shop, and Nintendo was not far away before they came out with the Wii.

Rubbish.  Nintendo were not anywhere close to 'closing up shop'. The DS was already a hot seller and before that the Gameboy Advance was printing them money.

[Terse]

Kronos wrote:

He was also right on the death of the 68k.... how long has it been since a 680x0 has been on par with other desktop-CPUs ?

So he was only wrong bout x86, but how much do today RISC-hidden-behind-a-CISC-interface zombies have to do with the 486s popular back when he made that prediction ?

But had the industry (particularly Apple) continued to back the 68K would it not also have gone the RISC-and-CISC route too?

I do agree that apple made the right choice in backing x86.  It makes litle sense to fight a whole industry by almost completely bankrolling the opposing technology.  Jobs said as much this last time with the switch to x86.

[coldfish]

CEO's are only human.
Human beings say stupid sh*t all the time.

Just take a look around these forum. :-D

[DonnyEMU]

Keep in mind I own several machines including Amigas, Windows machines, and some intel macs and power pc macs..  

Apple gets away with not having the issues that Microsoft does by limiting their configurations and things that they support. Plus they handle 3rd party driver development quite differently.

Personally I feel if Microsoft only had a family of one type of Motherboard, the hardware/software would do just as well with it..

[AndrewBell]

coldfish wrote:
CEO's are only human.
Human beings say stupid sh*t all the time.

Too true. Remember Gates' comment about 640k RAM being sufficient for everyone?

Regarding the comment by Michael Dell, it's better than the friendly comments Gates would make while he plans your demise. Bill once said that OS/2 would be better than further development of Windows 3.x, then stuck the knife in with Win95. At least you know where you stand with Dell.
________
Vaporizer guide

[bloodline]

Terse wrote:

But had the industry (particularly Apple) continued to back the 68K would it not also have gone the RISC-and-CISC route too?

To be fair RISC and CISC don't really exist any more, all CPUs now are hybrids of those old concepts. As luck would have it, the x86 is quite well suited to this... The 68k is too orthogonal, it's great for asm coders but not for  modern CPU designs. You have to hack the ISA to much and it loses compatibility and thus there is no point!