“I was so wrong. Well, not exactly wrong. Let me explain. In the past 15 years, I’ve devoted no small number of column inches to swipes at Apple Computer. Apple, I said, was always just a little too cute and too smug, and it clearly missed the technology march early on in the 1990s. It stuck with RISC and got crushed by CISC. Each launch of each system was greeted by a fawning mainstream media that might as well have been Apple’s personal PR team. Each launch also miscalculated demand (good for Apple prices, bad for consumers). Apple took the GUI straight from Xerox Parc [sic] and then got righteously indignant when Microsoft did it one better,” Brian Fuller writes for EE Times.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple most certainly did not take the GUI straight from Xerox PARC. Windows sufferers routinely use that myth to make themselves fell better about using badly faked upside-down and backwards Macs. Bruce Horn was one of the main designers of the Macintosh software, and he worked at Xerox for years before that, so he’s uniquely qualified to discuss their relationship, which he does in his article: On Xerox, Apple and Progress.
Fuller continues, “Ultimately, Apple lost the technology war. It embraced Intel microprocessors. Then it was I who was too smug and just a little too cute. But a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. All of those chants the Apple cult spouted (easy to use, intuitive, safe, uncomplex, powerful) turned out to be, er, right. Functionality trumps technology.”
MacDailyNews Note: What “technology war” did Apple lose?
Fuller continues, “For a guy who a decade ago said most Apple devotees needed to get a life, my Apple retraction doesn’t come easy. Why am I offering it? Because my wife and I got our youngest a Macbook for Christmas. I’d argued for a PC laptop, like a Hewlett-Packard brand, because you can find better prices than you can for trendy Macs. I lost that battle, partly because my wife thought trendy would appeal to the teen.”
Fuller writes, “What really hit me Christmas day was that, right out of the box, the Macbook worked. Not like a computer should work–like a consumer product should work. It booted up and self-configured for our wireless network and other things, and literally within three minutes, our son was taking photos and e-mailing them to friends from the Webcam in the laptop. The machine has a remote-control device so that, assuming the laptop is networked with, say, speakers or a larger screen, you can run your music software from across the room. You just can’t do that with a PC laptop.”
Fuller’s crow eating session in full here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Armin” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Welcome, Brian. Keep on this path, you’ll get all the way here eventually.
Thank goodness for Fuller’s teenage son that his wife has enough brains (and is obviously wearing the pants in the family) to purchase a MacBook for the young lad at Christmas. Fuller’s recounting sounds a bit like the “Grinch who Stole Christmas”, where the poor Window’s user finally learns the real meaning of “plug and play” or “ease of use”. If only he wrote it in rhyming sentences.
Anybody wants to bet his next gadget will be an iPhone?
Awesome. Welcome to the fold. This is why Apple will be around for a long time. Their customers are getting younger and younger and if your product is right, the teens will be loyal into adulthood. Microsoft et al will die a long, slow and painful death.
For the record, today’s P6 chips by Intel are not deemed CISC processors. And, since when did Apple “lose” the technology war? Apple is a very smart company, headed by one of the brightest minds of the last century. What they do is very simple but difficult. Choosing to leverage the many advantages of Intel’s line up of processors was a very smart move, not merely a move to win some concession in the computer industry.
Old argument, old debate.
What a surprise! When someone shuts their mouth long enough to actually research what they are bashing, they sometimes find out that they were wrong the whole time.
Hopefully, his blinders stay off.
MDN MW = “husband” (WTF?)
hey – don’t be mean. It doesn’t matter how one comes to see the light as long as they do.
There are time to criticize and a time to gloat, but this is not a time for either. As Mac users, we should feel happy that Fuller has finally seen the light and grateful that he was gracious enough to eat crow in public.
Gloating or criticism would simply be, well, rude and inappropriate. Fuller should be congratulated for writing this and acknowledging that Apple was right after all.
Welcome to the Mac!
I think Mtnmnn’s point wasn’t that Apple threw in with Intel because the PowerPC was technologically inferior (excepting power consumption), but that Intel had a broader array of low-power processors for the many small form factor products Apple wanted to make using OS X technologies.
The AppleTV and the iPhone are just the first examples. I’m sure there’s many more to come…
New Type!
Well said!!
There is still much to do.
“….because you can find better prices than you can for trendy Macs.”
Not with the same configuration you can’t.
About my previous post, I see that Intel just claimed it has no chip inside the iPhone.
So then, only the AppleTV is an example of what’s to come.
Now if only POTUS and his puppeteers would forsake accruing souls for their lord of Darkness and embrace the light of Peace and Love – the world might keep spinning after all.
Ah, the sweet smell of crow.
Problem is folks, there are tens of millions of doubters like him out there.
He should have been professional from the start being a professional, and actually done his homework before slamming the Mac, but it took him years to start to believe.
What chance the average folk out there who know nothing but a 500 buck Dull machine. It will take decades to convince them all.
I think slow is better anyway! Too many too fast will unbalance the karma of the whole thing.
Speaking of shutting one’s mouth; Did you ever fart so hard you ended up in another zip code?
I just threw up a little in my mouth…
Frankly, yeah, that’s right, I said frankly…I do no believe this guy should have been writing tech articles at all.
You’re supposed to know the subject you’re writing about and this guys confessing that he’s had his head up his ass all this time yet he wrote and criticized anyway and mislead countless numbers of people. You say he’s repentant but he still sounds pretty smug to me.
“I was so wrong. Well, not exactly wrong.”
“….took the GUI straight from Xerox Parc.”
“…indignant when Microsoft did it one better,”
“Apple lost the technology war.”
“…can find better prices than you can for trendy Macs.”
The anti-creative cretin has spoken.
Just another pathetic pc moron… stick with Vista schmuck.
Fergy wrote: “I think slow is better anyway! Too many too fast will unbalance the karma of the whole thing.”
Absolutely Fergy. I also enjoy being in the minority when that minority is the elite.
Isn’t it amazing that the FUD has started already. Writers on CNET and The AGE in Melbourne Aust have written crap already. The dick at the Age read between the lines and said Apple has now moved away from computers because of the word being dropped in their new name. What a tool, hasn’t done his research has he!
The dickweed at CNET is crapping on about scratched screens and that you have to use two hands instead of one, which is supposedly the case with ‘smart phones’. What the hell does that have to do with anything, does he need his spare hand to diddle himself through a hole in his pocket to make it a worthwhile experience. Geeeeeesssss….
These wankers just don’t get it! Their editor’s just don’t get it either because the allow this shit to be published. The press has just become this huge bunch of egotistical pricks who think their word is better than the truth and dare I say it ‘the truth really doesn’t matter’ as long as it sells papers. Not only on Tech matters but across the board.
I have noticed that there is now a huge number of reporters who have their pictures beside their column. I don’t want to see their friggin mug shots, I just want them to do their job and report the truth and actually do some research before they open their mouths.
Expect tons more shit before the phone comes out in June.
At least he admits that he was Fuller Shit in the past. MW: “Fire” away, Brian.
“Functionality trumps technology.”
What a maroon! It’s the technology that defines the functionality and Apple seamlessly and intricately weaves software and hardware to provide the best in computing experiences. Hey, Brian, just because Apple products seem to work like “magic” it really isn’t mojo.
You know, I think that Brian missed his calling as a writer for alchemy in the Dark Ages.
Maybe this guy is the so-called hundreth monkey.
“As the story goes, monkeys live in colonies of up to a hundred individuals and on one of the islands, a colony of monkeys all of a sudden started to do something new and wonderful to their food, washing the roots they were eating in a certain much more effective way. When the hundredth monkey learned the new technique, all the monkeys, even those on distant islands all of a sudden ‘knew’ that new technique and started using it.”
Evolution is a series of quantum events.
“Functionality trumps technology.”
It is the OS and its integration with everything that matters.
Most users don’t know or couldn’t care less about the technology.
They just want it to work. Full Stop, End of Sentence.