“From a philosophical standpoint, just what IS a Mac? It isn’t the chip, which will be from Intel — and which in the past has been provided by Motorola or IBM anyway,” Michael Fraley writes for KPC News. “It won’t exactly be the OS, which is built on top of Unix. The motherboard will be Apple technology — but does a motherboard alone make a computer an alternative to the other machines sold in stores across the country? Is that what we’re left with — an image, an entire culture, wrapped around a motherboard?”
“All right, perhaps that last sentence was a bit overdramatic. Still, it’s worth thinking about. When the vital parts and even a good chunk of the OS is strung together from the same sources many other manufacturers use, what makes a Mac ‘alternative?’ Are the Apple hardware and software developers more like good cooks who can take common ingredients and work their own magic with them? Apple has the opportunity to gain in many ways from this alliance, but what it has lost — its distinctiveness — may be a difficult thing to recapture,” Fraley writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You put zeros and ones into a processor and zeros and ones come out (simplified to make the point). A processor does not make a platform. Did the Mac cease to become a Mac when Apple switched to PowerPC? No, it got better. Did the Mac cease being a Mac with the change to Mac OS X? No, it got better. The Mac will not cease to be a Mac with processors from Intel, either, as Steve Jobs proved by running Mac OS X on Intel during his WWDC keynote presentation. Apple are “like good cooks who can take common ingredients and work their own magic with them.” The secret sauce of a Mac is the result of the Mac OS X operating system, Apple’s attention to detail and quality, both in hardware and software, and Apple’s control of the whole widget.
With one cook in charge of the hardware and the software, Apple presents personal computers that just work and work in a way that is intuitive to the end user. The “Wintel” concept of “too many cooks in the kitchen” does not put one master chef in control the whole experience which, while pretty good for driving down the cost of PCs, also results in a fragmented user experience where things just don’t work as one would expect. The Mac just works, usually as a human being would expect it to work, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the processor or the individual pieces. A Mac is the product of one company that’s concerned with end users’ whole experience. “Wintel” is not.
A Mac is Steve Jobs
Fraley glosses over and errs in dismissing the OS so quickly…
it’s 0’s and 1’s that love me
I prefer the kitchen from Cupertino.
The Mac is a state of mind. That’s why so many were pissed off when Steve started screwing with it again.
At every transition there were those, myself amoung them, who were quite satisfied with the status quo and didn’t see the need for change.
This present transition better turn out as good or better than the first two did.
There are 10 types of people in this world, ones that understand bindary, and ones that don’t.
A Mac is, I would say, a combination of two things:
1) Mac OS X: a beautiful, stable, user-respecting, virus and spyware free environment. Contrast it to Windows. Windows relentlessly presents the user with time-wasting information (“now hiding unused items”, “click here to take a tour of Windows”, “your computer may be at risk”, “new hardware discovered”, “Windows is configuring your new hardware”, “your new hardware is now ready to use”, etc…), it is so fragile that moving applications around breaks them, it mistrusts the user to the point of inflicting a draconian registration process, it has no Unix-style proper command prompt, it is highly succeptiple to viruses and spyware by design, and it is of questionable stability. It has no rich GUI features like Exposé or Dashboard, it has no OpenGL hardware-accelerated GUI, it has nothing that can compare with Spotlight, it has no vector-based 2D rendering system. Mac OS 10.4.2 will enable Quartz 2D Extreme, which will accelerate all GUI 2D graphics using the graphics card.
2) Apple hardware: designed by the genius Jonathon Ive. Apple hardware is a perfect blend of form and function, just like Mac OS X. Glance at a PowerBook, then a Dell laptop. The PowerBook is sleek, elegant, aluminum, thin, light. The Dell is clunky, plastic, thick and heavy. The PowerBook has a slot-loading DVD-burner, DVI-out, FireWire 800, an auto-dimming screen and an auto-iluminating backlit keyboard. Some Dells are finally including DVI-out, but certainly not dual-link DVI-out like the high-end PowerBooks. Dual-link DVI is required to drive ultra-high resolution displays such as the 30 inch cinema display. The PowerBook has 2-finger scolling and an internal gyroscope used to lock the hard drive in case of falls. Dells have neither feature.
Macs have a wonderful blend of superior hardware design and superior software design, made to work perfectly together. The particular CPU used to achieve this ends doesn’t really matter.
I would not say that Mac is a state of mind, but I would say that Macs are likely to empower you to do what you want to do, and to stay out of your way while you do it. In this way Macs might get you into a certain empowered state of mind, maybe even a less tolerant with mediocrity state of mind. It is important to note that this state of mind follows from using the excellently designed hardware and software; Apple gives this state of mind to you, regardless whether you brought it with you to begin with.
Mac users are ordinary people who are accustomed to having excellent computer experiences, while Windows users are ordinary people who are accustomed to having mediocre computer experiences.
I stopped reading at “it ain’t the OS, it’s just UNIX.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this man has no experience with the macos X at all.
A Mac is a quality computing experience that constantly evolves, usually in good ways, to adapt to the ever changing expectations of its users. Macs did not cease to be Macs when they went from the 68k processors to the PowerPC processors. Macs did not cease to be Macs when Apple switched it from the old classic operating system to the new Mac OS X. And Macs most certainly will not cease to be Macs when they switch to Intel processors. The user experience will continue to get better with faster, more efficient processors with a more productive upgrade cycle (allowing Apple to catch up on processing power) and affordable upgrades to the operating system itself. As long as the creative and the perfectionists continue to run Apple Computers Inc, Macintosh computers will always be Macintosh computers.
“The Mac is a state of mind. That’s why so many were pissed off when Steve started screwing with it again.
At every transition there were those, myself amoung them, who were quite satisfied with the status quo and didn’t see the need for change.”
There’s always need for change. As for screwing with us, I think that’s in his job description.
So just what is a Mac? It’s not an OS or a chip or a motherboard. Remember when Jobs pushed for the first Mac to be bolted shut so it wasn’t user serviceable? It was deemed a final product, something of a work of art. The final product was greater than the sum of its parts. It’s evolved over the years, but always to push the envolope, not just to stay ahead of the competition. That’s why some of the bigger changes seem so jolting until they pay off – they aren’t reactions to an evolving industry, they are the actions the industry reacts to.
How was that?
Its distinctiveness is not lost because OSX is what sets Apple’s Macs apart from the Wintel community which has Windows XP. Apple also has great applications that only run on Macs such as the apps included with every Mac which is the iLife 05 suite. iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and garageband 2.0.
The Mac still stands way apart from any Wintel box from Dell in it’s quality and unique design which Apple does with the greatest detail.
Even though Apple does not advertise it anymore they still think different.
Kids..you weren’t there when it it skipped to UNIX ..so I can only assume you will ignore the transition when it goes to Intel ( the undisputed King of PC ordinariness). Happy blind following. being Mac used to be all about being different. The last REAL Mac OS was OS 9 and as much as it sucked..it was exclusively Mac. May God have mercy on our souls ( if there is one…which I don’t assume).
I think I got it: It’s a way of thinking about technology such that everything just works. The Mac remains a closed architecture system, against the better ambitions of rich white guys everywhere. Because of this closed system, the Apple developers have less variables to worry about, and instead have a stable framework in which to develop and expect consistent results from their software.
What makes a Mac a Mac? It’s the prioritizing of the experience, and stability of the system, against the better judgement of profitablity.
So Apple makes Consumer Electronics instead of Computers… how can they sleep at night.. knowing all the profit they’re foregoing? They decide to start making a family of Consumer Electronics devices, like the iPod, to apply their ‘tactical elegance’ to other markets…ones where the market values ‘feel’ and ‘user experience’ more than… say.. Half Life 2.
Nick: “[Windows] has no Unix-style proper command prompt”
Two legs bad, two legs better, eh?
Globewriter,
but Intel didn’t (doesn’t) like it’s role. MS and Intel stayed together a long time; they got rich together; but now they can’t stand the sight of each other.
Intel wants to innovate and start again and its been looking longingly at Apple – attractive and sexy – and making overtures, which were turned down… until now!
Intel is delighted. They’re feeling orgasmic. All their pent-up frustration will now turn to creative energy.
Apple and Intel will have a great time together.
It used to be a machine that was built to address certain strengths (audio, video, prepress, scientific applications).
With the abandonment of the AltiVec, that edge will be lost. There is a reason why the scientific community was excited about Macs & OSX, and it wasn’t just the Unix underpinnings. AltiVec ran circles around Intel in the floating point math that is required for intense modeling applications.
Simply consider that a much less-expensive cluster of Macs, with fewer processors, blew away Intel-based clusters. Then wave goodbye.
From a philosophical standpoint the Mac is OS 9.
What is OS 9? The odd crash aside, it was the relationship between a simple, smart, constant, visually neutral GUI; the lightening speed of responsiveness of the GUI; a desktop hierarchy which said ‘here’s the System Folder, organisation of the rest is completely up to you; and the totally natural real-world analogy of Folder/File/Desktop containers.
OS X is STILL leagues ahead of Windows, but as Jobs and co continue to undermine much of what made the Mac a real work of genius (replacing freedom with eye-candy and hoping no one will notice), it’s becoming ever more urgent to ask what the difference is between ‘insanely great’ and ‘greatly insane’.
Well said Charko. I agree there is a big creative wave being built up as a result of this momentous change. And it will come crashing onto the shore like a tsunami – just as MS launches Longhorn – and the image will be of a Longhorn brought down with a Leopard at its neck.
Betrayed: Why do you reject out of hand the possibility that between Apple and Intel they won’t be able to reproduce that scenario? I don’t see Jobs for one second making the decision to go Intel without being pretty damn sure that that kind of advantage remains with the Mac. I do not believe that they are just going “eye-candy, consumer, games”. They are moving the Mac forward, gathering in more of the market as it develops. Intel will want to make sure that happens too.
An iBook and an Xserve have different hardware but they’re still Macs.
It’s the OS, stupid.
People don’t switch from Windows just to get better-designed machines. They want Tiger!
Plus, no one seems ‘happy’ working with Windows anymore. I presume all the creativity elements are gone when you spend all day just defending your PCs and network from attack rather than the fun stuff of building something new. You spend most of your day as a paranoid security expert! When the creativity is gone, all your best and brightest jump ship or are snapped up.
Apple’s MacOS is very ‘clean’ since it is very much based on open source code, has been forced to compile on two processors for the past 5 releases, is based on Unix and is attracting the ‘best and brightest’ to join Apple.
Also, I find it interesting that the MacOS on the MacIntel developer machines has been pirated onto the internet to run on generic boxes without problem already – did Apple ‘allow’ this? Apple is not stupid, I think this is a ploy to build up demand in the non-Mac world. I reckon this code will expire at the end of next year when they want their MacIntel development boxes back. When the production boxes come out they will have serialised DRMs so we can freely install the MacOS on any ‘Apple’ computers without Microsoft’s draconian registration system, but unable to install on any generic PC box. I hope they will then license the MacOS to other vendors too.
If Apple really do only have about 2% of world wide shipments, then an increase to 10% over two years is more than five times the profit since they have already covered the cost of the research and development. If they can provide some Windows apps to run until they move them to MacOS X, multiple stable suppliers (Apple, HP & Sony are enough) and commit to the MacIntel platform for 10+ years, then I believe many companies would move over. Companies don’t like changes since they’re expensive. This is low risk since at worst they could reformat their Apple boxes and run full Windows again!
Apple’s killer solution is their servers. Novell kept Windows at bay since they controlled the server end. We all wanted Novell to run over Windows, but they refused. Once Novell lost the servers, they lost control. If Windows loses the servers to Apple it will be hard for them to get it back. Currently the range of software offered by the Apple servers, the rack-mounted XServe, the super-computer software and not the XSAN mass storage makes it a huge winner over HP, IBM, etc in price and performance. Yet it is an unsung hero of Apple since they can’t break into that market – yet.
What remains after all this is the games console market – or is the wireless iBook and Mac mini a suitable substitute? Now all we need is for Transitive to make a translation layer for IBM’s Cell processor so we can run X-Box and PS3 games on our MacIntel boxes!
Many answers possible, but one of them is:
Mac is NOT M$
Once hardware equality is achieved (ie, if we can get OSX to run on cheap hardware – believe me, that will happen far more quickly than even Apple would like it to happen), lots of people will switch to Mac for that reason alone. Mac is NOT M$.
Even a ‘cheapened’ version of OSX (less stable for having to provide for the needs of all those ‘fifth-party driver’-hungry people out there) will be many people’s preferred choice. Right now, their wallets dictate that they don’t have that choice.
Actually, I think that the article’s ‘cooks’ metaphor was a good one. Take Jamie Oliver, for instance. He takes the same basic ingredients that other cooks use and he makes something *better* than the rest.
Al said: “The Mac is a state of mind. That’s why so many were pissed off when Steve started screwing with it again. At every transition there were those, myself amoung them, who were quite satisfied with the status quo and didn’t see the need for change.”
Al, it’s people like you that fail to realise that Apple is a business first and foremost. While Steve Jobs started the Mac, it would have evolved much quicker if he wasn’t removed from power in ’85, and that moron Skulley put in his place. What has happened to the Mac was what HAD to happen tothe Mac. There is no advantage to having a PowerPC under the hood anymore… There was no advantage of having a 100% ground up, proprietary OS operating it all… The moves Apple have made allows them to compete and take the best COMPUTER SYSTEM PACKAGE TO NEW DEGREES OF SUCCESS… With the world slowly but SURELY lowing their patience with Microsoft’s lousy, bug ridden, mouldy swiss cheese of an operating system, driven by a bunch of power and money hungry turds who don’t care about the end user at all, and instead pander to the bottom line, APple’s course of action is just another one of divide and conquer.
It’s working… albeit slowly. I had a Mac SE/30 many, MANY years ago, and when it died (figuratively – it had a HD failure, I retired it and as I already had PCs (due to my line of work as a networking professional), I just migrated over to Windows 3.11. Was I more comfortable in Windows land? Hardly! It was pure crap, but I was going through a divorce and could not afford to save Mac, and the happenings at Apple with them near bankruptcy prevented me from buying another… I was seriously afraid they would not last through the year, and if anyone recalls, they very nearly did not.
I “upgraded” my PC to Windows 95, and was barely as comfortable as I was on the Mac, though in some ways I could do more (when I wasn’t fixing the damn thing). I got an MCSE on NT3. I let my Novell cert. expire. I stopped playing with IBMs unmarketed OS/2 altogether.
I paid attention to Apple’s coming reneisaince when they bought NeXT, and brought back the original visionary. When Nextstep was being ported over to become OS X, I believed it was the ONLY route to success, and eagerly awaited the results. I already had experience with Sun OS, BSD and Linux, and was thoroughly convinced of their TECHNICAL superiority over that piece of crap kludge NT. I accepted a job in IT Management and could do whatever and looked seriously at Mac again… I came close to buying a PowerBook, but the company bought me a Stinkpad, and I decided I would not spend my own money at the time. I was laid off in ’02 when the corporate structure was realigned with the corporate parent IT department running all the wholly owned companies going forward, moved to Florida, tried to change careers (still trying), and earlier this years, the frustration with Windows, malware, and everything else, finally hit the “I can’t stand it anymore!” level… I promptly went out and bought a new Mac, and have not used the high end Windows PC I bought last year as anything more than a file server since.
I was a little shocked when Apple switched hardware, but if I was still running an IT department for a successful DOT-COM, it would only make Macs more attractive. If I was still in that position, they would be switching Mac due to Tiger already. Mac OS X is a good solid OS that does all anyone needs from a computer, does it VERY well, has an appreciable (if not incredible) lower cost of ownership. If other IT managers keep looking at their bottom line (and they always do), all they need to do is think beyond the mundane, and past the immediate purchase to realise that they have a better choice. Admittedly, most do not come from technical background and are as intelligent as lone ants, but some, like myself, were techs for a long time and never stopepd being one inside. It’s guys like me (who stayed in IT) who will push the CEO and CFO to buy Macs, and the Intel deal just makes it that much more convincing.