“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.