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Operating System Specific Discussions => Other Operating Systems => Topic started by: persia on November 06, 2009, 02:12:46 PM
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CNN posted this video story yesterday that explains why Apple avoided Intel for so long. It appears that when Steve Jobs was just starting up making computers in the garage he approached Andrew Grove for a discount on memory. Andrew responded that they give discounts to large orders not to small companies like yours. You are a nobody, why should I give you a discount. That apparently stuck with Steve Jobs for a long time and that's why he went with IBM and PPC instead of Intel.
So the who Intel versus PPC debate was not about endian-ness or features, it was about a bruised ego...
http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2009/11/05/tm_steve_jobs_apple_ceo.fortune/
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CNN posted this video story yesterday that explains why Apple avoided Intel for so long. It appears that when Steve Jobs was just starting up making computers in the garage he approached Andrew Grove for a discount on memory. Andrew responded that they give discounts to large orders not to small companies like yours. You are a nobody, why should I give you a discount. That apparently stuck with Steve Jobs for a long time and that's why he went with IBM and PPC instead of Intel.
So the who Intel versus PPC debate was not about endian-ness or features, it was about a bruised ego...
http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2009/11/05/tm_steve_jobs_apple_ceo.fortune/
Yup, that sounds like Jobs' ego alright. As a former Apple][+ owner, I have deep respect for Woz, and contempt for Jobs.
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I'd say that was a good enough reason to avoid Intel. Screw 'em! Not only that, but there are those of us who still value choice. The PPC lineup made their computers unique - just as they did with the ST's and Amiga's. I wish IBM and Motorola were still producing chips in an evolutionary way for mainstream computers. Lack of choice is not good. It's what's ruining this and other countries.
Oh, and I remember reading in my MacWorld's that Apple went with Intel originally because IBM couldn't cost effectively produce a small enough/heat & energy enough efficient chip for their laptops beyond the G4 line...
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Well intel get massively fined by the Europe and are now being taken to court in the US for giving people money to only use their chips, and increasding prices for people who used AMD as well
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I don't buy Intel, haven't done for a good few years. AMD chips tend to give more bang per buck and run cooler. Sure Intel may have the edge at the top end but I don't buy top-end chips, they are beyond the range of my wallet and seldom give anything close to value for money.
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Steve Jobs was named CEO of the decade by Money Magazine. He took a company on the ropes, worth about 5 billion and turned it into an industry leader worth 40 times that. But I think they're also right, the '00s were the decade of Apple, but the '10s will be the decade of Google. Android has a better chance to catch the big three (Symbian, Apple and RIM) than anyone else....
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Steve Jobs was named CEO of the decade by Money Magazine. He took a company on the ropes, worth about 5 billion and turned it into an industry leader worth 40 times that. But I think they're also right, the '00s were the decade of Apple, but the '10s will be the decade of Google. Android has a better chance to catch the big three (Symbian, Apple and RIM) than anyone else....
And what did the Amiga assets go for after Commodore? About $14 million or so?? Pffft!!
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One reason why apple moved away from ppc was that they heard sony/nintedo/Microsoft plans to use ppc cpus in their consoles.
Apple has had big problems to get enough ppc cpus from motorola/ibm
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@persia
I have similar story with an IBM representative.
Sounds a good reason to me for Apple to stay off Intel. Some companies pretending to be something, should really hire people more carefully...
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One reason why apple moved away from ppc was that they heard sony/nintedo/Microsoft plans to use ppc cpus in their consoles.
Apple has had big problems to get enough ppc cpus from motorola/ibm
That might have been about 2% of the reason to go toward using Intel CPU's and I think Steve Jobs bruised ego probably had some small part for Apple going from 68k to PPC, instead of making the switch to Intel back then, but it seems pretty obvious that the reasons for Apple staying with PPC as long as they did, was the amount of work it took to switch to x86 plus the lack of performance, or performance and heat generated differences gap that was continuing to widen between PPC and x86 CPU's.
Jobs had MacOSX running on Intel x86 long before he released it to the public, he just waited for the right marketing moment to make the switch. The worst thing he could have done would be to release it prematurely without third party software support and less performance due to MacOSX not being completely ready and able to do everything better on Intel than on the G5 PPC. Apple could not afford a "so-so" reception to that switch, as Jobs already knew that many of the users would be resistant, just as many Amiga users still let their feelings get in the way of purchasing Intel CPU's for any of their PC's.
I think to take this video comment about why one Intel exec thinks it took so long for Apple to make the switch seriously is laughable. Where was Jobs before he came back to Apple? What CPU's did the NeXT system run on? Maybe I should go check, but IIRC the NeXT switched to Intel x86 before Apple did, or did the NeXT start out on x86? I don't know, because it was never something I was interested in.
If it is entertaining to keep speculating on what OTHER reasons Apple finally switched to x86 and Intel, go ahead and continue making these .......... well let's just say they are unsubstantiated opinions.
:laughing:
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NeXT started with Motorola chips and made the decision in 1992 to go to Intel rather than IBM (PPC). This is probably the point at which Steve Jobs forgave Grove, in '97 Jobs took over an Apple entrenched in IBM chips. 9 Years later the IBM chips were eliminated. There is every indication that OS X was Intel ready from the beginning.
But it was a long process. He had to get OS X off the ground and wean people off classic before the switch could be made.
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NeXT started with Motorola chips and made the decision in 1992 to go to Intel rather than IBM (PPC). This is probably the point at which Steve Jobs forgave Grove, in '97 Jobs took over an Apple entrenched in IBM chips. 9 Years later the IBM chips were eliminated. There is every indication that OS X was Intel ready from the beginning.
But it was a long process. He had to get OS X off the ground and wean people off classic before the switch could be made.
I just finished reading an excellent wiki on the NeXT companies and history. I think most of the guesses I made in my first post in this thread were confirmed in that wiki and I would agree with persia's statement above.
I think Jobs was long over the memory chip discount grudge with Intel before Apple made the switch to x86 publicly.
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Steve Jobs had planned to get the Mac to nice cheap x86 CPUs since the introduction MacOS X. But the problem was Mac Classic software, he had to get OSX established before any transition could occur, also x86 speeds needed to be there to allow invisible PPC emulation.
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Problems to get enough ppc cpus is only 100% fact we know, all the other reasons can be considered as a advertaising speech, more or less.
I'm not trying to say anything about how big reason it was but I'm sceptical for other reasons.
I of the biggest reason, I belive is that Mac Os was old and it would needed to completely rewriten to get all fancy moden features to it, and of course difficult. Result would have been broken compatibility and still needed to rewrite all applications, wich is not big difference to current situation. In the other hand they had already bought modern x86 and so they decided that it would be more economical way move on.
It would have been stupid to say: "we are moving to intel because we have problems to get cpus to our computer" or "We don't want to spend our money to develop modern Os from scratch"
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Actually, Apple stayed with PPC because PPC was better than Intel/AMD/Cyrix chips. And at the time that really mattered. MacOSX might have been developed x86 compatible before the 2005 Intel transition/regression but mainly because "it could be done" rather than the superiority of the technology. The performance benefits came long after the G5 was introduced and the PPC project was abandoned. Apple have chosen their companion and has stayed loyal up to now. This offered many opportunities but also had many risks. Apple simply wanted out of the CPU business and motherboard design. Time (not just 5-10 years) will tell whether this was a wise decision.
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Actually, Apple stayed with PPC because PPC was better than Intel/AMD/Cyrix chips. (SNIP)
This was debunked by several benchmarks. Care to restart K8 Athlon 64 vs PowerPC 970 and K7 Athlon vs PowerPC G4 debate?
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Just saying that PPC is best is useless comment :/ and still there is lots of benchmarks and results vary by who has made them and of course people want to point out those benchmarks that support his/her opinion.
This is not ppc vs. x86 thread, at least I hope so.
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I have a similar story why I avoid Apple.
Legend says Steve was at a computer show and watched the Amiga, he was suppoused to have said "colors, who needs colors?" when he saw Amiga 1000.
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This was debunked by several benchmarks. Care to restart K8 Athlon 64 vs PowerPC 970 and K7 Athlon vs PowerPC G4 debate?
Benchmarks are just biased statistcs. And you do know what they say about statistics, don't you ? It's interesting how many people still interprete the G5 vs Pentium benchmark fiasco the wrong way.
Anyway, the PowerPC looked good but there was too much animosity between the partners. Apple failed to push it hard in the desktop, Motorola was about to restructure and IBM underestimated the Mac OSX momentum.
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I have a similar story why I avoid Apple.
Legend says Steve was at a computer show and watched the Amiga, he was supposed to have said "colors, who needs colors?" when he saw Amiga 1000.
And like most legends, It's a load of bullshit.
Apple were already making colour computers at the time of the Lisa and Macintosh. The reason the Lisa wasn't in colour was because the hardware engineers couldn't design out of a wet paper bag, And the Mac didn't because It was too costly and would use too much memory.
Remember, the mac was originally designed to sell for $1500 (Even with the very real apple tax, but a glorified pepsi salesman jacked it up even more!), and they had the disadvantage: No hippies had designed some custom chips they could use, They couldn't just manufacture chips in house like commodore did, etc. Plus, that superbowl advertisement was EXPENSIVE.
Not to mention the cost of ram in early 1984! $599.00 for 256KB. Insane.
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I think it was another "point of difference" that Apple had over x86, something that they could use to market against all the x86 clones, because the OS really wasn't something to harp on about at the time.
And they did that with all the "benchmarks" that Apple chose to prove that per mhz the PPC could beat a pentium. Whether the benchmarks truthfully represented performance differences in the real world for the average user or were contrived tests that worked better on PPC architecture is another argument. Jobs just had to run a few photoshop filters that worked faster on PPC to prove his point to the masses that PPCwas indeed faster. Nowdays the hardware point of difference is largely aesthetic, which works better than ever to get people to get a mac.
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CNN posted this video story yesterday that explains why Apple avoided Intel for so long. It appears that when Steve Jobs was just starting up making computers in the garage he approached Andrew Grove for a discount on memory. Andrew responded that they give discounts to large orders not to small companies like yours. You are a nobody, why should I give you a discount. That apparently stuck with Steve Jobs for a long time and that's why he went with IBM and PPC instead of Intel.
So the who Intel versus PPC debate was not about endian-ness or features, it was about a bruised ego...
http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2009/11/05/tm_steve_jobs_apple_ceo.fortune/
This should surprise nobody. Jobs is a sociopath.
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I don't buy Intel, haven't done for a good few years. AMD chips tend to give more bang per buck and run cooler. Sure Intel may have the edge at the top end but I don't buy top-end chips, they are beyond the range of my wallet and seldom give anything close to value for money.
AMDs suck hardcore in laptops. Definitely not cooler chips.
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AMDs suck hardcore in laptops. Definitely not cooler chips.
My Core2 Quad (Q9450), with the stock intel cooler reached a whopping 32 degrees (C) when using four separate instances of mencoder to convert a collection of different media files to mpeg-4 recently.
That's hardly hot running, is it?
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And they did that with all the "benchmarks" that Apple chose to prove that per mhz the PPC could beat a pentium. Whether the benchmarks truthfully represented performance differences in the real world for the average user or were contrived tests that worked better on PPC architecture is another argument. Jobs just had to run a few photoshop filters that worked faster on PPC to prove his point to the masses that PPCwas indeed faster. Nowdays the hardware point of difference is largely aesthetic, which works better than ever to get people to get a mac.
This is a practice x86 chipmakers do for over 2 decades. When the G5 came out, innocent x86 consumers complained because Apple's benchmarks didn't use Intel's heavily optimised compiler instead of gcc. They really thought their hardware was better than what it was in reality. Instead of questioning why their hardware was noticeably slower when not using Intel's C++/Fortran they blamed Apple (just if Intel's compilers were available in PowerPC or gcc wasn't already more optimised for x86 than ppc).
Intel has done so much false advertising (not only against other platforms but also aginst AMD) in the history of computing it's ridiculous. MMX/SSE were worse than 3DNow, let alone Altivec but prevailed and thus evolved because Intel pressed and used monopolistic practices. If using Altivec vs SSE benchmarks via Adobe filters Intel is guilty as well since most benchmarks and OS/application features depend on them today (even to a greater extent).
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Anyway, the PowerPC looked good but there was too much animosity between the partners. Apple failed to push it hard in the desktop, Motorola was about to restructure and IBM underestimated the Mac OSX momentum.
FWIR, Jobs removed Apple from the AIM alliance as he revoked OS9 clone licenses. That was the death for the PPC right there. Motorola took a huge write off for their recently opened production line for PPC desktops (StarMax?) that was going to use OS9. IIRC, Motorola took Apple off the priority list for CPU purchases. IBM was not amused by Jobs' actions.
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Why do we care about this pathetic individual and his pathetic OS.
We Amigans knows better, with more development in AmigaOS it is going to crush OsX like an apple under an elephants toe.
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Its more than being about a bruised ego. When you are a small company and you need some help from a supplier and they treat you this way, its some indication of the kind of relationship you may have with them going forward. Why would you support any supplier who treated you that way when you really needed the help?
After Apple took off, I don't blame him for saying screw intel now that we're a big player.
Motorola's willingness to work with them as a small startup was rewarded later for sure, thats business. If someone treats you like dirt why would you reward them with multi million dollar purchases later?
I'm no mac fan, but I think both Woz AND Jobs are brilliant. Apple went into the toilet when Jobs left, when he returned they were back with a vengence. Jobs then pushed the phones and other technologies, and returned them to a major player in the industry. Love him or hate him, he did that. His work on Next is more proof of his genius, he left apple and created a whole new platform that was very successful in a short time.
Next would eventually become Apple's new tech. I think it was great Irony that apple came begging Jobs to return and make Nextstation tech the new mac.
On the ego issues he has, I can forgive any man of his obvious business skill and technological brilliance a little ego. I met him a few years ago through a mutual friend, and had dinner with him and my friend. I found him to be a great guy, yes he did seem to have a bit of an ego, but considering his accomplishments,that is to be expected. I really enjoyed meeting him and hearing some stories about mac and apple first hand. Interestingly, I mentioned my love of the amiga platform, and he told me that he and most at apple envied the custom chips and capability of the early amiga.
Like most believe, he said amiga had a huge advantage early on but did not take full advantage of it. I remember he said they dropped the ball after that advantage began to slip and did not upgrade the chips as fast as they should. He said apple considered Amiga a larger threat to them than ibm/pc's because of the custom chips and the multitasking os.
When I told him I always chose amiga over mac when buying a new computer, he said "I forgive you." Next, he took my business card before dinner was over. The following week I got a package in the mail, it was
a mac powerbook with no note or anything. I remember he kept saying over dinner if I used a mac for awhile I would never want to use another platform. I tried the powerbook for awhile, then gave it away to a friend.
I still prefer amiga. :)
Steven