“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.