Steve Jobs passed away!

[Kronos]

Guys, get real. Steve didn't invent anything, Steve didn't design anything. They have designers and research department. We did not lose anything.

But Steve was the guy who could see what inventions and what designs needed to be coupled with what marketing to come uo with products pretty much creating their market....

Visionaries don't have to invent anything themselves they just ahve to be "enablers".

[Karlos]

True but Commodore went long before PPCs became mainstream computer processors. Apple were still on 68k when CBM went.

I think naturally, Commodore would have moved to PPC, even if it was a couple of years after Apple. It's the natural progression...

People always seem to say this and back in the day I probably thought it too, but in retrospect, is it really?

PowerPC is an implementation of the POWER architecture developed by IBM. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the 680x0. In fact, other than sharing the same native endianness, they have little in common. For example, just a few key differences:

680x0 allows arithmetic/logic operations to be performed directly on memory addresses (via indirect addressing) encoded in to the of each instruction. The PowerPC is a strictly load-store architecture.

680x0 separates address registers from data registers and segregates the operations that can be performed on them. The PowerPC treats all integer registers as general purpose (a few of which of which may have special meanings in particular contexts, but otherwise they're all the same).

68020+ defines a rich set of addressing modes, including lesser-used (though they were useful in printers apparently) memory indirect operations. The PowerPC supports only basic indirect addressing with the usual increment and decrement operations, and of course, only for load/store operations.

68881/68882/040/060 FPUs typically supported long-double types in addition to the regular float and double precision. The PowerPC FPU typically supports 32/64-bit IEEE754 only.

Bit position increments LSB -> MSB on the 680x0. On the PowerPC it's the opposite way around.

There are more differences too. Some of the above can be considered as a logical consequence of being a RISC processor (though PowerPC is not as "reduced complexity" as many RISC architectures), but others are just outright differences in design.

In all honesty, other than the endianness, the 32-bit 80x86 series (ie not running in segmented mode) probably has more in common with the 680x0 family than the PowerPC does.

Back in the day, I welcomed the appearance of PPC as an upgrade path for our systems and I still get fun out of using them but with even greater hindsight, perhaps it was not the "natural" choice. Or at least not the best choice. Not that it makes any difference now

And just a closing thought, Commodore did make expansion boards for the Amiga with non-680x0 processors on them. Guess what they were...

[Kronos]

C= was allready planning with non-68k (and non-PPC) CPUs for "Hombre". AFAIR we would have ended up with PA-RISC.

Not sure what that has to do with Apple or Mr. Jobs......

[Karlos]

Not sure what that has to do with Apple or Mr. Jobs......

We're 4 pages in. That's 3 pages more than the average when it comes to topic meandering

[Digiman]

Going from 68k Mac OS to PPC was not trivial, therefore same difficulty making TriPos AKA AmigaOS run on PPC. Apple did it twice but Commodore Medhi Ali flavour thought to let others write a stopgap. Apple tackled 68k to PPC and then PPC OS X to x86 OS X (and Jobs also did the same with Nextstep going 68k only to x86 and 68k version). Commodore dug their own grave making 6 machines in a row with a 7mhz 68000! Christ the 33mhz 040 Mac LC was THE SAME PRICE AS A4000/030 25Mhz!

Multi-tasking is what kept me away from PC/ST/Mac/Acorn. Again you can thank Doctor Tim King for porting Tripos to Amiga in a matter of months not Commodore for awesome multitasking OS in 1985. Even compared to Nextstep 3.x Amiga has smoother multitasking. Only IBM OS/2 is similar and that's because they were allowed detailed examination of Kickstart/Workbench in exchange for IBM's REXX.

( http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/tripos.html )

[Digiman]

C= was allready planning with non-68k (and non-PPC) CPUs for "Hombre". AFAIR we would have ended up with PA-RISC.

Not sure what that has to do with Apple or Mr. Jobs......

PPC is likely because making an A5000 Win NT PA-RISC based Amiga would be suicide! PPC is the only logical choice as low-end bread and butter A1200 replacement to stab at the nerdy 386 PC gaming crowd sucking the userbase from Commodore.

You pick a CPU with low cost, as Apple were using huge stocks of 603 the production cost dropped AND you do one OS transition and chipset bus interface transition and end up with A1200 AND A4000/040 successors.

PA-RISC would have meant Commodore bankruptcy very quickly as A500 and A1200 were 80% of all Amiga sourced C= revenue, and PA-RISC + 3RD Party Windows **** OS costs = impossible to make low cost mass market future Amiga models.

[LoadWB]

Guys, get real. Steve didn't invent anything, Steve didn't design anything. They have designers and research department. We did not lose anything.

Actually, I've found several articles interviewing former Apple employees -- if not written by them -- which describ how if he didn't have direct control over the design process, his engineers had to figure out how to meet the demands placed on them by his designs.

IMNSHO, his real genius was in recognizing what was marketable and useful and what was not.  For instance, he snatched up a guy who wrote a graduate thesis which became the NeXT kernal, which became OSX.  And while we had sporadic and disparate places to get J2ME, Symbian, or Palm (amongst others) applications and games, there simply was nothing fully integrated and easy to use like the iTunes store.  He took devices which were decidedly complex or seemingly daunting and put them into the hands of average users, if not directly by his own designs then most certainly by his demand.

Irrespective of my disdain for Apple products in general, or my lack of compulsion to use OSX, Jobs was absolutely a great mind and brought a lot of great things to everyday people, and he deserves at least that credit.

[lsmart]

The two saving events for Apple were Jobs' return and Microsoft's huge infusion of cash.

As I often say, Apple is still alive because Microsoft decided to let them live.

Steve Jobs personally visited Bill Gates to negotiate this deal. It is rumored he opened the conversation with "together, Microsoft and Apple own 100% of the desktop market". Jobs had the ability to talk almost anyone into almost anything. This was the key to his success. Microsofts financial investment was soon repaid an not as significant as one might think, but the symbolic value of the partnership had a lot of impact. The first iMac would have happened without Steve, and maybe even the iPod. But the market would perhaps have reacted differently and investors money might have been to scarce to make any of it the great hit it all has become now.

[smerf]

Hi,

HMMMM!!

Karlos's explanation of 68000 and PPC's,

Didn't think he was that smart.

I mean look at me, well just goes to show every idiot has his day

smerf

[smerf]

Steve Jobs personally visited Bill Gates to negotiate this deal. It is rumored he opened the conversation with "together, Microsoft and Apple own 100% of the desktop market". Jobs had the ability to talk almost anyone into almost anything. This was the key to his success. Microsofts financial investment was soon repaid an not as significant as one might think, but the symbolic value of the partnership had a lot of impact. The first iMac would have happened without Steve, and maybe even the iPod. But the market would perhaps have reacted differently and investors money might have been to scarce to make any of it the great hit it all has become now.

The only reason Microsoft gave a huge infusion of cash to Apple was that at the time they were under investigation for forming a monopoly.

smerf

[EDanaII]

So... am I the only one here who thinks he kept Apple from reaching it's full potential for killing the clone market?

[Duce]

So... am I the only one here who thinks he kept Apple from reaching it's full potential for killing the clone market?

Could be seen either way, really.  Had they not, the market would have been flooded with half assed Mac clones, tarnishing the whole name. Ever buy a POS PC with Windows on it, and curse Windows daily? - then build your own system and find out it's not half bad?  I have.  Apple having the HW on lockdown with the OS seems to have served them quite well, so who knows how it would have gone if Jobs didn't can the program in the late 1990's.  It's given them a pretty much universal user experience offering, anyways.

Apple is a HW company, and I think we can all agree the prices for their systems/devices are very high.  Apple has a high artsy fartsy fanboy appeal that I think may have been diminished by a clone market.

[LoadWB]

Could be seen either way, really.  Had they not, the market would have been flooded with half assed Mac clones, tarnishing the whole name. Ever buy a POS PC with Windows on it, and curse Windows daily? - then build your own system and find out it's not half bad?  I have.  Apple having the HW on lockdown with the OS seems to have served them quite well, so who knows how it would have gone if Jobs didn't can the program in the late 1990's.  It's given them a pretty much universal user experience offering, anyways.

Apple is a HW company, and I think we can all agree the prices for their systems/devices are very high.  Apple has a high artsy fartsy fanboy appeal that I think may have been diminished by a clone market.

All of this was exactly the concern with the clone market: sub-par copies giving sub-par performance and user experience.

One thing Apple has right now is uniformity.  Pretty much every piece of Apple kit is identical to another unit of the same model.  This also helps the user support experience.  Granted this isn't the culture for all of us but, as much as I hate to admit it, it works damn well.

As for Apple being a hardware company, I would say that they do quite well with software, too.  I know plenty of people who swear by iTunes, be they Mac or Windows users, and the Mac OSX looks attractive and feels comfortable.

[mdv2000]

Steve Jobs brilliance was realizing that he could never truly compete with Microsoft in an OS Desktop war... he moved apple to a consumer electronics company more so than a personal computer market. (SONY should have done this... but never figured out the portable market pass the walk-man)  With new versions of iPad, iPhone and iPod iOS 5 - you don't even need a mac (or windows pc) running iTunes - you don't need a pc to backup, store, etc.  

Jobs understood the key to making his products great, was to commoditize (is that spelled right?) the competitions products.  Make their stuff the cheap complements to his premium products.  You pay $200 for an iPod Touch to buy $7 digital cds.  

Also, Jobs had vision (something Microsoft has seriously lacked in years).  He saw people were buying PC in record numbers to surf the web, listen to music (remember the napster craze?), and do their daily life activities like online banking, email,etc.  Also, they were only using about 10% of the power in their hands because PCs was too much for them.

He created the iPod and iTunes products to go after digital music and now more people buy music online than in stores... visit the cd sections of your local wal-mart/target lately?  Only seasonal and top 40 stuff remain and normally less than a whole aisle.

  Next the iPod started doing video,photos, etc. The true game changer was the when the iPhone merged the most desired(and considered a necessity by the current generation)  accessory - a cell phone - with industry leading iPhone.

Next, with iPad he finally made his laptop killer... and hence with the new iCloud service, you won't need a pc/laptop.  

Remember, the dells and HPs sell more pcs in a week than apple sell in a year, but the PROFIT from a single iMac, iPod Touch or iPhone is way more than clones - this is why HP is getting out of the PC market.

Also, add in the service fees along with their % of apps and music sells, etc. and you see why they are one of the top 5 most valuable companies in the world.

Steve had the vision and willingness to make the decisions to invest and take risk.  Also, he made sure he had the right people in the right place to grow the company.

People always want to understand the difference between management and leadership.  

Management is making sure people are doing what they are hired to do.  Leadership is making those people are doing the right things.

Jobs was a leader, not a manager.

R.I.P. Mr. Jobs

[amiga1084]

Well Said!

Rest in peace Steve

[Iggy]

The Ipad is a laptop killer?
Maybe for you.
I still want a keyboard (and I want one larger then a Cell phone has).
So far, nothing has replaced my computers.