Bob Cringeley makes a bold statement in a blog post responding to Apple’s iCloud announcement: “Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows.” He says, “The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.”
I think the reason for Apple doing this is very simple: if they don’t do it, someone else will do it first.
Will iCould kill Windows and MacOS X? I don’t see how.
Interoperability. They want to place the data in the cloud, hoping users will demand interoperability ( i.e. they want to read the data produced on their windows PC on the iphone ) and force microsoft to stop being an evil tyrant.
“Interoperability” in my book would allow access across competing platforms (hence my name on this site).
The iCloud sounds to me like replacing one evil tyrant with another (probably worse).
And that will kill Windows just how? By ensuring Windows has to be interoperable so that iGizmo users can continue using Windows. Sorry, can’t see how that will work.
I can see, however, Apple doing the other thing: making cool cloud services that work with the iThings and not with the competition. Say, for instance, their music service only working with iTunes and iPod/iPhone. But cool as it is (and “evil” in the best tradition from One Microsoft Way), it won’t kill anything.
I have paid for MobileMe for two years because I don’t like Google calendar’s aesthetics and I like bookmark syncing to my iPhone.
I can tell you, most of iCloud is not a game changer. And Windows won’t even blink at any of the services except one – iTunes in the Cloud.
I know a ton of people who use Windows PC (and Macs often) for two purposes:
1. A web browser
2. iTunes
Most people have iPods and those people need a PC or Mac to use it. With iTunes in the Cloud (now with iPod Touches, maybe one day with other iPods), those users are free to buy things like Chromebooks or rely on iPads alone.
I don’t buy the argument for “data” in general. I buy the argument for iTunes and music.
Most people don’t have iPods, and iPod sales have been declining for years as they are replaced by more capable smartphones, including the iPhone. Only 30% of all Steam users have iTunes installed, which means that less than 30% of them actually use it. And that’s only the computer gamer category, i.e. young males who like technology and entertainment. I think you’ll find there are more iPod owners among those than among pretty much any other segment.
It might not kill Windows, but it would (help) make Windows less important.
The only problem is that Apple want to be the new evil tyrant.
you made me laugh.
“with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded app”
sticking apple, cheap and variety of platforms in one sentence? Bob Cringeley should write jokes instead of news and predictions.
Why not? how many companies provide a line of products from MP3 players, cellphones, tablets, notebooks, desktops, and servers?
The hardware may not be cheap, but once you own it, the software is very cheap. At least I don’t need to spit out half a grand just to buy the OS and an office suit.
Sony provides all of those except cell phones (they might even make those in some markets, I’m not sure). They make many other products that Apple does not.
Microsoft is on all of those from the software level and has even made most of the hardware. They make many other products that Apple does not.
Motorola makes most of those, but I’m not sure about desktops and servers. They make many other products that Apple does not.
I could go on, but there are many other companies that have a MUCH wider list of products than Apple, so what’s the point? I wish people would stop suggesting that Apple is somehow better or more original than every other company on the planet when every one of their products was built on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
Sony does indeed provide cellphones, see the recently released Xperia Play for an example.
You could go on and on, yet none of the companies in your list produce something that is even comparable to what iCloud provided: integration. These companies (less microsoft) provide individual devices, but apple to trying to provide a solution. That is where the revolution is.
I am not saying apple is original. Most of their best selling product are not. But why do they sell more than their original competitors? It is because they just take someone’s idea and implement in a slick and smooth way. Apple product is always about user experience, even though apple tout them as original.
You are so correct. What people fail to understand is that while the iProduct usually isn’t original or unique, the iExperience is. There aren’t many other companies that have products that works pretty flowlessly not just by itself, but with other products from it’s creator? Like it or not, Apple excels by having an iEcosystem, which makes everything else feel like cans connected by strings.
You, however, will spit out a few grand for hardware upgrades… There is actually 2 platforms in Apple land – iOS and Mac OSX. The products within those two platforms only vary in form factor.
PS: Welcome to 2011, Apple no longer sells server products.
a few grand? Are we living in the same world? I haven’t seen an apple product that is “a few grand” more expensive than its competitors.
Only form factors? have you ever used these devices before making a comment? They have completely different emphasis on functionality, and completely different look and feel.
Yes you are right. Thanks for the correction. I meant workstations.
Here’s a new laptop from Lenovo for US$329– http://www.frys.com/product/6488722
The least expensive MacBook is $999.
The MacBook is not 3x better.
It’s not about whether the Mac laptop is “better”, it’s about whether it is what the consumer desires and/or needs. It’s all about balance.
For example, I own a Dell Latitude D620, roughly equivalent to the second generation MacBook that was released at the same time (Core2Duo, DDR2-800 RAM, etc). The Dell was about $300 cheaper, with a larger screen, ambient light sensor, lighted keyboard, smart card reader, bluetooth, built-in WWAN support, Gigabit ethernet, dual pointing devices, and Nvidia graphics. The system is highly upgradeable for a laptop, with two-minute access to the hard drive, RAM, and all wireless devices. With a RAM upgrade I am now running Windows 7, Slackware Linux and Xubuntu 10.04 with ease, and it handles HD video and software compiling equally like a champ. In other words, much more flexible and useful to me than the more expensive Macbook.
Yet, given all of that I desire the Macbook instead some days, if only for the combination of aesthetics and a powerful, innovative OS that combines the best ideas from Windows, *nix and Apple’s own classic OS. I can somewhat compromise with a 95% functional Hackintosh install on a spare hard drive for the Dell, but the slightest little incompatibility destroys the magic of using OS X on this “commodity” hardware.
All of the above is the reason why the only Mac I’ve bought new was the first gen Mac mini, the cheapest Mac of all time. And while I loved it for about a year, I soon felt the impact of buying what was essentially $300 worth of low-end hardware for $600. I decided then and there I would never buy another Mac brand-new. Since then I’ve owned an eMac, a G3 PowerBook and a Core Duo mini. Buying them used meant I paid what they were actually worth to me.
No, but it is a lot better. You pay a premium for better goods in all areas of technology and beyond. If you have two TVs side-by-side, and one cost 3 times more than the other, will you be able to see a three times better picture? Even for AA batteries – you pay double the price for some brands that last longer, but not twice as long. Of course there’s the Apple tax, but that aside, there’s a lot more love gone into the MacBook than that Lenovo…
Try upgrading your Mac with basically anything, you’ll find out that the TCO rises very fast.
Yes, quite a lot actually. See, being in mobile application development you get to work with Apple’s gear a lot.
Functionality and L&F between iOS devices is the same. The functionality and L&F of all OSX products is absolutely the same.(Notebook, AIO, tower and mini are form factors)
I may give you the iPod classic platform, even the iPod Nano looks more like iPod Touch than iPod classic.
No — you just need to spit out one grand or more for the computer to run the OS on — or over two grand over the life of a cell phone contract to get the “Oh, Wow!” subsidized price of $200 US.
The OS is cheap because you’ve already long subsidized the price of it on the hardware purchases.
I hear this argument a lot, but unless you have T-Mobile you won’t pay any less per month whether you pay full price for the phone or the subsidized price, at least in the US. None of the other US carriers offer lower monthly payments for non-contract post-paid accounts. T-Mobile offers Even More Plus plans for those who bring their own unlocked phone to the carrier, or who prefer to pay full retail price and not be tied down, and the monthly savings are pretty good.
Granted, they took it off the website recently so you have to request it in-store or by phone, so it may be going away soon. If that happens there really is no reason not to get a subsidized phone since you’ll pay the same monthly for the entire time you’re with that carrier.
Considering how well they all work together, I fail to see the issue. If you can’t afford it, then don’t buy it, no one’s forcing you. But the price has no baring on the performance, usability, or cohesiveness of Apple’s products. This is a tech site, not a financial site. Money arguments mean little, it’s the technology that’s important.
And, before anyone attempts to wrongly call me a fanboy:
I’m typing this on a Toshiba laptop that’s running Win7; to my right is a tower running PC-BSD; & behind me is an older system running eComstation 2.0. Though I’ve wanted an Apple for personal reasons, there’s just no real reason for me to get one regardless of the cost.
Samsung make just about every type of hardware imaginable including phones, computers, monitors, memory and hard drives. They also make TVs, refrigerators and washing machines!
You’ve apparently been sleeping for the last 10 years.
There’s no other company today that has as successful a reach across not only platforms but market segments as does Apple. Sure, there are companies that are cheap… and there are companies that have a larger variety of random products but there are none that tie them together in a cohesive, affordable ecosystem for consumers.
The only other company that has the potential to come close right now is HP…and that tale will be told within the next 6 months.
Hm… Samsung or any other Asian electronics conglomerate? Platforms? Check. Market segments? Check.
Apple has exactly 2 platforms and targets only the consumer market. Their 0.1 success in business segment is largely overlooked by Apple themselves.
Success? Yes.
Variety of platforms? Nope.
Domination in consumer electronics market? Not absolute, but largely yes.
Affordable? No sorry. Valuable and quality – that may be. But definitely not affordable.
Really? …because the Galaxy Tab and their music players are a huge success???? Oh, wait… they’re sitting mostly unsold…. despite furiously trying to copy Apple. I can’t even remember the last time I saw someone with a non-trivial Samsung device that wasn’t a display of some sort (TV, monitor) or an old piece of stereo equipment.
Again, I ask… what other company is successful across the consumer spectrum: smartphones, music players, tablets, notebooks and desktops, cross-platform consumer software for previously mentioned devices, etc… Heck, even the latest AppleTV seems to have finally hit its target.
Just as an example; Last I checked, the iPad was incredibly affordable. There’s no truly comparable tablet available at that price and certainly none that are part of such a flourishing and inter-connected hardware/software ecosystem. I can’t find anything comparable to a Mac mini with the same features at the same price point from a major manufacturer, either.
What other hardware maker can leverage a ‘cloud’ architecture to bring painless syncing to all their devices like Apple is now doing?
I’m not a fanboy (my phone is a Palm, for example) but no other company seems to really understand the consumer market the way Apple does right now… it took Apple to open up the tablet market.
The iPad isn’t exactly affordable. It may be cheaper than its competitors, granted, but all tablets are still incredibly expensive for what they’re up to in practice. Except maybe Archos’ ones, haven’t had a look at them for some time…
It’s not affordable and yet Apple has problems keeping up with demand.
Hell, parents even buy iPads for their kids.
This “hard time keeping up with demand” means nothing, it’s a very old marketing trick. I’m sure that even with Vista Microsoft dared to use the “oh man we can’t supply enough” trick.
And as for parents buying fragile devices which start at $500 to kids, well… It’s their money. And their kids. But I think it’s insane, and I’m sure I’m not the only one doing so.
Edited 2011-06-07 21:57 UTC
That marketing trick comes in to play when your product isn’t going well and you try to seem it’s actually very wanted so get yours now. The iPas is the best selling tablet by far.
I doubt Apple thinks it will make more money not being able to sell someone an iPad instead of taking the money.
When I google on “windows vista demand” and “ipad demand” at first glance it seems there were no Vista demand ‘n’ supply issues.
My son and his friends use my iPad often. So often that I have resorted to hiding it or claiming it is charging (but daddy, there is no cable attached. damn). No damage as yet.
Well possible, but at launch time, are you sure that Apple were perfectly confident about selling a large iPod Touch for the price of a good mid-end laptop ?
Some product launches are risky, the iPad’s definitely was. In that case, running the marketing machine at full speed may help save the day.
But the sales had to start first, before people start to buy iPads on the suggestions of early adopters, then developers start to develop iPad-specific applications and make it more worth buying, etc…
Once the sales are going, supply shortage an issue. Apple already makes a juicy benefit, and people who have not got their tablet will not feel bad against Apple but against other peoples who have got their one by buying it first. The problem is to start sales, and if anything this might even help starting the sales of the next generation of the same product
Bet lost
I’d have thought, considering how much of their marketing budget Microsoft have spent mitigating the issue.
I suddenly notice that something’s missing to continue this discussion. How old is your son ? Or the sons of those parents which you mention ?
Indeed, if it still holds true for the second generation after the first one has been successful, it might be a genuine supply problem.
PC users don’t buy it directly, but the OEMs and sysadmins which set up Windows PCs for them do. If OEMs start to stay away from the current release and buy the previous release instead to please their customers (as with Vista), it shows on the overall product sales.
Ah, memories… When I was 8, I think that I had stopped experimenting with my father computer’s hardware by putting every possible thing in the diskette drive. My brother and I had recently got our own shared computer, and were now torturing the software (by randomly deleting and replacing system files to see how useful they are, things like that), so that our uncle regularly had to come and fix broken system installs.
My own cassette recorders and associated cassettes still had a fairly short lifetime though : since I carried them around everywhere recording random things, they tended to fall often, apparently too often for them (magnetic tape got jammed, the lid got smashed, the main rubber band tended to get off its track…)
Well, since iOS is designed to not even allow tampering by mature users, you should probably be fine on the software side, but I’d still feel bad giving fragile portable (and thus droppable) hardware to a kid this age myself. As much as I love laptops, an advantage of big and heavy desktop hardware is that it can’t be thrown or dropped by children, accidentally or not. The screen, keyboard, and mouse are the most exposed, but they all tend to be quite robust (except for unprotected LCD screens which can be cut) and the latter two are fairly inexpensive…
Doesn’t surprise me a lot, as flash games are the shareware games of our days
Free, fun and easy to grasp gameplay….
If the iMac G4 is what I’m thinking about ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/IMac_G4_sunflowe… ), I admit it’s a pretty good choice for a kid as far as hardware conception is concerned. Since the most fragile parts are in the bottom, they can’t suffer falls from a high height unless the computer falls off the desk, and careful positioning of the desk in the room and the computer on the desk can help prevent that.
Heh heh heh
Kids are evil, though rarely consciously. Remembering my own youth doesn’t exactly make me desperately want to have some soon, but as the PhD comes closer and considering how high the natality rates are among young researchers, I guess that it’s going to happen someday anyway… Mothers always get the last word on those matters in our societies, and I’m sure that at the time I’ll be willing to try too just for the fun of it ^^
Be careful with what you do then. My father has quickly learned one lesson about gaming-ready computers : always make sure that the kids get the most powerful one if you don’t want them to keep stealing your own anyway.
I’m quite a bit younger than you, so when I was eight and my brother was thirteen we already had CD-ROM Windows games and EMS/XMS settings frustration to play with. That didn’t prevent our father from buying us some development tools to play with, though (many retrospective thanks to him for that).
Ah, you make me remember how much of a geek I am
The best memories which I have from my early youth are by far those linked to my brother and I playing with a computer.
Edited 2011-06-08 09:17 UTC
I first came in to contact with computers around the age of 5 or 6. A number of parents had these Atari 2600 clone game consoles from Philips. The Philips Videopac G7000.
My brother, who was 15 years older, went out to buy a VIC-20 and came back with a Commodore 64. He lived on his own so I had to travel all across Amsterdam to get to his place and play games. I had to type them in from magazines or play them from cassette. After a while I also did some programming. This was really cool back then, turn on the computer and in 2 seconds later you could start typing in code. Back then everybody could code a little, even the “stupid” people.
When he got a disk drive this was amazing. 172 kB on a disk.
Games and software we either bought or copied cracked versions. There was no Internet (not for us anyway) so I had to travel around with disks, swap them at school, borrow them. Spending hours copying them (no multitasking OS!).
We all had Commodores back then. The gamers had the Commodore 64, the gurus the Commodore 128.
Then we all did the natural upgrade to Amigas. Clicking on icons with a mouse. People tried to impress you by telling you you can also double click.
This was a golden age, the 80’s and early 90’s. Then all went bad, Commodore went bust, other computers makers already gone or dying. Apple was expensive and not useful for us kids. PCs were taking over.
PCs were crap. Owning an Amiga you wondered why anyone would by a PC? Black screen, green letters, beep beep it said.
But the PC was winning, the Amiga fading. But being a bit older now I could infiltrate universities. We would sneak in, copy software to diskettes. The latest LHA, PKZIP.
And of course the Internet arrived. Still infiltrating universities, but this time for free Internet access. At home I had an Amiga 500+ and a 2400 baud modem, not he quickest way to go on-line (not even then). This was an interesting time. A lot of pioneering, meeting strange cyberhippie types, hackers at secret locations.
Things were a bit fun again, but that also went away. With recent years computing has become a bit more fun. The pace at which stuff develops is amazing.
Still I miss the old days. My iPad has instant-on, quicker than the C64, but I can’t turn it on and start programming on it. I can’t create crazy assembler routines. I can only run stuff other people made.
It’s not just Apple stuff, it’s everything. Even to a certain extent Linux. In the old days we used to hack on byte level. Freeze a running game, change things in the assembler code and unfreeze it so see what happens (probably crash or sometimes give infinite lives).
But who cares, I still have my retro room with my Commodore 64/128 and a whole lot of other stuff. I don’t hack stuff anymore.
The last thing I did was escape the browser from a PC in a shop. Visitors were restricted to the browser and the store site only. It was easy to escape from it, but the next time I came there they shut down that option. I found another way and that too was shut down the next time. I managed to escape 4 times or so. The last time I was there it wasn’t very busy so I didn’t have time to fiddle around.
That’s one of my big gripes with iOS. The way it fully removes (not simply hides) the software development option. However, I’m a bit surprised by that “instant-on” thing which you mention. In my experience, iOS takes quite a lot of time to boot, like a little minute or so. Isn’t your device just sleeping or something ?
Edited 2011-06-08 14:33 UTC
IIRC you can program stuff in X-Code and copy it to your iDevice, but that’s much more hassle than on a retro computer. Coding in BASIC is also a lot easier.
Apple calls it “instant on”, but really it’s just waking up from standby. When an iDevice sleeps it uses very little power. It still receives notifications and mail, but wastes very little power. So I never turn my iPad off and when I grab it it still has about the same amount of juice when I put it down.
iOS on my iPhone 3G booted very slow. On my iPad 1 and iPhone 4 it’s pretty quick, but I almost never turn them
off.
Posted using my iPhone as my son stole my iPad again.
Of course, but that’s developing on OSX, even if for iOS… See where I’m going ?
AFAIK, iOS is the first general-purpose consumer-level OS that explicitly locks down its internals away from consumers, which can only access them through security breaches or with the help of another OS. I don’t think it’s a healthy precedent. But well… Maybe I start to become the old guy who preferred the way it was done before without noticing, even though I’m a bit young for that.
Edited 2011-06-08 19:47 UTC
You can still make your own software to run on it, you just can distribute is. Probably because Apple doesn’t one someone to spread software that causes problem. They don’t want to link their products to the word “problem”. Back in the old days Steve/Apple didn’t want customers to open up their Macs and try to repair stuff either.
OS X you can boot and start coding away in Perl and Python for example or install a number of programming languages.
If Steve envisions people dropping their desktop PCs in favor of pads then the users turn in to pure consuming customers. Which is good for most users and companies I guess, but not so good for people who look to examine, tinker, experiment and try to do stuff with their device not deemed possible.
I like my iPad and iPhone to “just work” without any problems. But I also, when I feel like it, do strange stuff and I need either my iMac, Linux PC or any old retro machine for that.
My Psion 3a even came with a programming language (OPL). Back then it was almost mandatory you could also program your computer yourself. It was one of the reasons you bought a computer.
But in those days people who bought computers were people who were interested in computers. These days they want to browse, watch movies, listen to moves. Software problems are solved by googling for “<something> freeware” instead of writing some code yourself. I do it too, why spend hours, days, weeks instead of downloading something for free. The downside is we know less and less about coding. 99% of the users don’t I guess. In the 80’s 99% could at least make a small BASIC program.
It’s ironic Apple is in the front of making locked down consumer friendly products while their roots are in the computer clubs.
Well, which one brings more money ?
This is why corporations are never to be fully trusted.
…but I think we have to look at “affordable” in the context of the market the product is in, don’t we?
Otherwise, it’s a free-for-all and entirely subjective. What is affordable to you may not be affordable to me and vise versa.
In any case, when Apple is one of the cheapest in a segment, or has the greatest value per cost, it’s a bit silly for others to suggest the price is an Apple specific issue or barrier to entry.
The ViewSonic sounds affordable for what it is.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/07/viewsonic-announces-250-viewbook…
I’d totally buy one, if I had a use for a tablet…
Indeed, $250 sounds like a fair price for the evolution of the PMP that most modern tablets are. If the thing is well-built and sufficiently polished.
Edited 2011-06-08 06:35 UTC
No one outside the USA cares less about Apple.
Go to any Australian phone retailer and you will see a large range of Samsung, HTC and Nokia products. However you won’t see a single Apple product for sale in most shops.
oh sure… no one cares in Australia. Oh wait…
Apple has numerous retail stores there.
On top of that, according to Quantcast, the oceania area of the world (including Australia and New Zealand) is second only to North America in market share owned by Apple and nearly double that of Europe.
Btw, I wasn’t aware HTC and Nokia were selling huge quantities of tablets, music players, etc… anywhere in the world, let alone Australia… or maybe your post was both incorrect and irrelevant.
Australia has 22 million people. New Zealand has only four million people. These markets are totally insignificant on a global scale.
Australia is as big as the USA but there are only 10 Apple stores in four capital cities. The “local” Apple store may be located more than 2000km away.
Every shopping centre in Australia has at least one specialist mobile phone shop (often three or four). Virtually none of these sell Apple products. Every supermarket and department store also sells phones.
The only reason Apple has a large share of the Australian phone and tablet market is that no real choices existed until very recently. You can now get Android phones for less than $100 without a contract.
Edited 2011-06-08 11:58 UTC
There are 10 stores based on population density/location in Australia. The size of the land mass is irrelevant. In comparison, a single state in the US, Ohio, has around 12 million people and 6 Apple stores. So, Au is doing comparably well.
However, this is irrelevant to your original claim that no one outside the US cares about Apple. Australians care enough that they are second only to the US in Apple usage, percentage wise.
You pretend that iPhones are sold in every mom and pop store in the US. This is not the case. However, in Australia you can walk into numerous provider locations and buy an iPhone including: Optus, Telstra, Three Virgin and Vodafone among others. It’s probably more readily available there than here given it was confined to a single network in the US until a very short time ago.
I imagine, just as in the US, a lot of Australians buy online.
Even if you were to still persist in the notion that it’s hard to find/buy an iPhone in Australia, the reality is that Australians are finding them and buying them in decent numbers.
What is “recently” to you? Android phones have been available in Australia for a while now. In any case, maybe one day in the future the stats might change. Until then, however, the fact remains that the original assertion was a lie.
Edited 2011-06-08 15:08 UTC
Geography is everything. The Australian situation is equivalent to only having stores in NYC, Atlanta, Miami and LA.
The Apple Australia online store takes up to 2 weeks to fill an order. Prices are ~50% higher than the USA
Obviously you have never been to Australia.
There are Telstra, Optus and Vodaphone stores at my local shopping centre. None of them have iPhones or iPads in stock.
Not any more. Everybody wants Android phones.
Affordable Android phones have only been widely available for about six months in Australia. However they now totally dominate the entire mid and upper levels of the market.
As of last month, the oceana area remains the second most popular segment of the market for Apple, percentage-wise. Despite every challenge you’ve tried to put forth, people are still buying them.
You are the one in total denial. This is typical of Apple who constantly distort statistics to make their products seem vastly more popular than they are. All Apple products appeal to a tiny portion of the market – the affluent and gullible.
The Oceania market is so small as to be meaningless – less than the population of Chonqing – a single city in China.
The major phone retailers in Australia don’t stock Apple products (despite your claims). They all sell a wide range of Android phones.
I doubt any other facts will convince you.
Who’s relying on Apple’s statistics??? These are independent stats from places like Quantcast, etc… I’m sorry that reality doesn’t bear quite as close a resemblance to your wishes as you’d want it to but… life tends to do that. You just seem curiously defensive about Apple’s success in Australia.
Furthermore, “Android” is not a company or brand. Hell, the user base is even fragmented along version lines from device to device.
Also, it’s really quaint that you feel Oceania is insignificant but that’s beside the point (Though hilarious that one of the top 3 Apple markets would be used to try and paint their lack of success abroad. lol ). The original claim remains incorrect and irrelevant.
What other company is as successful across consumer segments of phone, music player, tablet, notebook/desktop, etc… with a user-friendly ecosystem tying them together? No one else even has a successful tablet as of yet.
HP seems to be the only one that has even a ghost of a chance in the near future.
You might have an issue with your memory. Certain Apple devices are affordable… But I was replying to your own commnnt:
[quote]affordable ecosystem for consumers[/quote]
That is where you are dead wrong. The ecosystem is not affordable. Because the Apple ecosystem has things as overpriced routers, overpriced H/W components and so on… And if you want the whole “ecosystem” you get to a point where your setup is too expensive(expensive is an antonym to affordable)
Look, I’ll be the first to say that I am a fan of smartphones, and even tablets. But neither of them are going to kill PCs or Macs anytime soon. Maybe for my grandma they will, but not for people who need to get ‘real work’ done.
I think thats they key thing, “for grandma”. Five years ago if grandma wanted a computer it would have been a desktop or laptop running Windows or Mac OSX.
Obviously content still needs to be created so the death of the PC is greatly exaggerated. However in another way is it?
Take the iPad again, how many grandmas will get the device, then how many mums and dads, how many teenagers? There is a large segment just ready for the Post-PC device, where these markets only need to consume web services.
For media/content creation it is worth thinking that internet speeds will improve, uploading a HD home movie won’t take as long. Editing of the movie could be done in the cloud with the iPad like device acting as the interface to the cloud service. All of the editing processed by the cloud and then stored in the cloud. Things like docking the ipad so it can be used with a bluetooth keyboard and large screen suddenly make the iPad device invisible to the end user, suddenly it looks like a PC.
I don’t foresee this soon, but give it five years and i think we’ll be surprised at how much we do in the cloud, just think back to 5 years ago, in 2006 how much were we using the cloud compared to today, it’s only going to continue.
Exactly. I don’t see, in any foreseeable future, small portable device replacing “proper computers”.
Not even the very visionary Star Trek authors could fathom the demise of “proper computers” in a distant future.
OTOH, for the gazillionth time, I want my data on my PC, not “in the clouds”, also because internet services are far from 100% reliable in many countries, including mine. And dial-up is far from dead on a planetary scale.
No. Apple are looking to kill web apps.
Mobile Me / iWork.com was a disaster. They came to the realisation that web apps don’t work in a closed platform. They probably spent thousands of man hours re-implementing a crap ton of stuff in HTML/JS and realised that with browsers being so inconsistent and broken, it would forever be a lost battle. They could never implement and then maintain an OS X app and a web app with the same functionality.
The release of iWork for iPhone shows them pulling themselves back on track. iWork.com will be ditched soon and the MobileMe web interface will linger around for a while and then be ditched too.
Apple believe that the best user experience can never be web apps because the web isn’t good enough as a developer platform in their eyes. They have now turned the ship around and are going to be going full steam ahead into their new direction — the replacement of the web with an API-constricted appstore and apps.
What else would you expect from control freaks….
I just wish the “desktop” Linux distros would stop their colon-gazing and focus on enumerating and providing fail-safes for all the myriad things that can break just enough for geeks to not see a problem.
For example, last I checked, Windows and MacOS don’t have an analogue to “Oops. You followed our simple update GUI and now your GUI won’t boot. Please log into the console and manually use dpkg and apt-get to complete your interrupted upgrade”.
I say this with the best of intentions as a geek whose mother runs Lubuntu quite happily.
I can quite happily say that is mostly an (x)ubuntu issue. I have seen more upgrades break Ubuntu than any other distribution (Fedora being a close second, but at least Fedora outright says that it’s a testbed for new technologies) Personally I’ve been suggesting just Debian Squeeze for normal people. Though I do the initial set up. It’s just simply more stable and you don’t have to sweat it screwing up grub or something every time the user sees the update notification.
Ubuntu usually has a good initial setup, but it really stinks on the upgrades.
All this aside and being a bit off topic, but I don’t see iCloud doing anything except for those iFreaks that think that iApple can’t make any iShit.
Hi,
I’m not sure about other distros, but I’ve been running Gentoo for a long time and watching stuff break for a long time.
The last update I did (yesterday actually) I upgraded to Gentoo’s new “OpenRC” init system, which deleted my “/etc/net.eth0” script. With this script gone the computer had no networking, and because this computer is the LAN’s DHCP server it took out my entire LAN. It’s funny how seriously screwed you are when you can’t google for answers. I had to (temporarily) configure a different computer for static IP before I figured out what happened. It wasn’t the only problem either – mysterious “unknown policy ‘ne'” and “unknown facility ‘menone'” messages from sysklogd (I gave up and switched to metalog instead), a few quirks (fixed with revdep-rebuild), and some other warnings (relating to the removal of HAL) I think/hope can be ignored for now.
It’s not Gentoo’s fault, or the fault of any of the maintainers for any distribution – they do amazing work trying to hide the symptoms of an insurmountable “herding cats” problem.
The real problem is a cultural problem – the idea of “choice is good” (until you’re the poor sucker that has to deal with an unlimited number of variations) and “better is better” (if you don’t consider global effects and the cost of changing from “existing/established” to “different but slightly better in theory”).
In my opinion “cloud” is an apt metaphor – rising on hot air, and likely to blow away when the wind changes…. 😉
– Brendan
where do you live? 2004?
I live in 2011 and Debian Sid/Experimental routinely have dpkg/apt-get failures. Having 11 years of extensive experience in the platform allows me to fix it, but the average user will junk it.
The average user won’t be running Debian, let alone sid and experimental.
The average user will be running either Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSuse and each of these has MAJOR stability problems.
Wait, the unstable/testing branch routinely has failures? Really? I’d never have thought. Man, they should put out a stabilized, reliable branch, for people who like consistent, working products and don’t like dealing with frequent breakages. I wonder why they don’t?
I’ve also never had that happen in the 10+ years of linux desktop use. But I’m sure it probably does happen. Linux breaks, but its so much easier to fix. Windows and mac have limited options if the gui really is broken, without a boot disc to rescure you’re kind a screwed.
I’ve had Linux break. I’ve had Windows break. I’ve had MacOS break. None are particularly easy to “fix” when something bad goes wrong, unless you know the system much better than the average Joe. I don’t think Linux is easier to fix, when with a Mac you can just install the system again in a new folder. You can do the same with Windows but your applications won’t work any more. I’ve never even attempted it with Linux, but I suspect I would be a mess. In reality, for the average Joe, a format and reinstall is the easiest “fix” for serious problems, regardless of OS.
I’ve had MacOS break as well. One morning, it simply refused to boot, and kept giving me a strange hard disk error. I called AppleCare and told them the error it was giving me, and they were worse than useless. They told me to take to Apple store and get the hard disk replaced because it was dead, even though I knew it was not because Apple’s hardware diagnostics said there was nothing wrong with it, and I could access the hard disk just fine by mounting it from a Linux boot disk with HFS+ support.
I finally gave up on trying to figure out how to fix it after I could find no info on Google either about what the error meant or how to fix it, backed up my files, wiped the disk, and reinstalled OS X. That resolved the problem and it hasn’t had any disk problems since.
So bottom line, it was definitely an OS X issue that not even Apple itself knew how to resolve.
Eh AppleCare != Apple. I’m certain someone at Apple Inc knew how to fix it, but getting that information out of them can be tough, AppleCare or not.
Oh, I’m sure someone at Apple would have been able to tell me what is wrong. But getting the problem escalated to an OS bootstrap engineer at Apple is nearly impossible.
Also, whatever happened was apparently odd enough that even Google didn’t know anything about it. Don’t remember anymore what the error message was. But Google knew nothing about it.
Yeah, I’m not the average Joe. I was talking from my perspective as well as the perspective of anyone who wants me to fix my computer
To be fair, that doesn’t always work with Mac anymore either. A lot of Mac applications no longer use the sample “drag and drop” approach like they used to. Some of them have actual installers these days. And some of them don’t place all of their stuff neatly into a single app bundle anymore than can just be dragged anywhere.
Which of course, brings up a problem with Mac that Apple hasn’t addressed yet. Uninstalling applications that were installed with an installer can be problematic. In many cases, you can’t simply drag them to the trash to get rid of them. They will still leave crap laying around in the Library folder and such.
“Linux breaks, but its so much easier to fix”
Last time I’ve seen a non-linux GUI fail on a PC or Mac was when I still had Windows 98. Linux? Well ehm… let’s just say I have an extensive history of having to edit xf86config and xorg.conf files by hand to recover my X11 and Xorg… Yes even in modern “point & click” ubuntu days I recently had to fall back to my in-depth knowledge of these config files.
So, easier to fix? Wake up. If something goes wrong on a linux system, and you can’t get on the internet – you’re screwed these days, unless you “fix” stuff like that on regular bases (which also isn’t a very good sign). Linux is not for end-users.
We obviously have had different personal experiences which have contributed to our differing perceptions of the reliability of Guis. While our personal ancidotes wont settle any argument, it may help to broaden both of our mindsets.
I’ve twice switched over friends computers to Ubuntu because windows XP was completely broken ( wouldn’t boot to gui) and the install disk was awol. I’ve also had no choice but to use Ubuntu on systems that were built using questionable hardware with non functioning windows drivers ( shame on me for trying to save some money on the motherboard, but still).
If something goes wrong on any system and you can’t get on the internet- you’re screwed these days unless you ” fix” stuff like that on regular bases ( which also isn’t a good sign). I don’t know why it would be different for any system. I’ve brought xp, linux and osx back to life before ( with the help of knoppix and access to the internet), but could not have done that without the internet. I don’t think you can single out Linux on that one.
IMHO, Linux is easier to fix, because the blueprints (source code, documentation, etc) for it are widely available. People know how it works. Again, you may have a different opinion based on your experiences and that’s great. We can agree to disagree. Given the choice, I’d rather be attempting to fix a linux box.
I’d have to disagree with that. I’ve had system upgrades and such break Linux in very weird ways that were definitely not easy to fix. Some of these required more than an hour of research on Google trying to find answers.
And of course, one only has to look at the number of threads in the Ubuntu forums that go something like this:
asker: “I have probmem so and so”
answerer1: “Did you try A?”
asker: “Tried that. Didn’t fix the problem”
answer2: “Try B”
asker: “Tried it. Still having the same problem”
This will go on for a bit longer, until the answers just stop coming, leaving no answer that actually solved the problem.
I definitely don’t think Linux is any easier to fix than Windows or OS X.
Edited 2011-06-08 15:59 UTC
That’s just the common theme of Ubuntu forums. Try Arc/Gentoo forums next time.
The Linux world’s greatest strength for IT people is simultaneously it’s greatest weakness for the common user. There’s a such thing as having too many options. For the average person, some decisions need to be make for them & the basic rule of thumb is this: “The more technical the choice, the less the user needs to even know that the choice exists.” And why’s this? Well, because the user usually doesn’t care about technical choices, they don’t really mean much to the common user. Nine times out of ten, if the user wouldn’t understand either choice, then they really don’t need to be exposed to the fact that there’s an option. Obviously, the opposite is true for the average computer savvy techie user & on up towards the true gurus.
That’s because all of the companies that didn’t realize how wrong this was for users have already died out. There’s a reason that Apple & Microsoft are still around today as OS providers & it isn’t solely because of monopolistic practices. The same is true now as it has been since the beginning: “Normal people need to be provided solutions that work & they don’t really care how or why these solutions work; they also don’t usually care about the ideological differences behind each solution, it’s all about the ROI value.” Kernel panics == downtime == loss of money. When Windows does this, there’s someone to point the finger at & they could potentially lose their job if it doesn’t get fixed. This isn’t always the case with Linux; there’s a perpetual number of distros & there’s always someone to tell you that you’re free to try another one. Well, companies don’t have time to rotate between the flavor of the month distro, since “DOWNTIME == LOSS OF MONEY.”
We are a different breed of people. But, sometimes, we let our passions blind us from some of the obvious facts. There’s the ideal way & then there’s the practical way for the real world. They don’t often match. At least you can see the difference & that’s refreshing!
They actually are. The X server has definitely seen a lot of development aimed at ensuring some kind of graphical environment can always come up. The VESA driver is a pretty reliable fallback, even if it’s not something you want to use all the time. This plus modern RandR has helped immensely (modern RandR so you can re-condifure a running X server, which helps with reliability in that if an X server is put into an unusable state, it can potentially be transitioned back to a usable state automatically).
The reason is even simpler: They just wanted to have a service that used the word “cloud” like everyone else
Wow, this pretty much hits the nail on the head. I read all the iCould announcements, and yawn, what is the big freaking deal, I don’t get it.
Oh, this statement from Cringeley is one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever heard from him. How is a website where you can store stuff and sync stuff going to kill Windows, Mac, or any other OS???
Is this not obvious for you? He’s not talking about killing the actual platform. He’s talking about killing the advantage that one platform would have over the other by subjugating app development to the web, instead of running it through the API’s that would tie it down to the host platform. Obviously, there would still be a need for the host OS, to a point. Though, I believe that Google is trying to make that need go away, also.
Everyone wants to say cloud. Of course, what everyone doesn’t want the non-techie users to know is that the cloud is as old as unix (maybe older). It’s no different than having mainframes that users had to login to from terminals. How funny it is to listen to companies attempt to charge for the services of an old technology, but talk about it as if it’s brand new!
I’d hardly say it’s to kill windows, its more to compete with Microsoft’s cloud offerings: http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-touts-skydrive-statistics-take…
blah blah blah. Apple is trying to provide good products and services that people want and then need and will make Apple rich for ever and ever.
You heard me.
With 11.04, Canonical are doing a good job of doing that themselves. (IMHO)
Unity is NOT ready. It is unfinished.
Gnome 3 is the same btw.
The distros that adopt it are repeating the KDE4.0 fiasco all over again.(IMHO).
Ubuntu is Zero threat to Apple. Windows 8 is.
But there again, I’m probably a typical GOM (Grumpy old Man) and really hate these dumbed down UI’s. I might be getting old (write my fist prog 40 years ago) but I an’t ready for the big button phones just yet.
Ubuntu probably reached it’s zenith with 8.04. Each subsequent release has been been less stable and more annoying IMHO. The latest Natty 11.04 release is absolutely atrocious.
Many of you might not have noticed yet, but MS and Apple is pretty much playing on the same team..
There are much stronger bonds between those two that they like to admit. Of course they are competing, but as friends, they will not destroy each other
They have found out that they are much better off raping the worlds a$$ together..
EDIT: typo.. taking the worlds assets together..
Edited 2011-06-07 23:07 UTC
Need a box of tissues? We wouldn’t want you to cry too much.
Cringely is just fishing for hits with sky high speculation, classic Dvorak style
Give me a break. Apple and it’s 5% market share could not kill Windows no matter how much they tried. And the competition has never been about platforms. It’s been about applications. And the iCloud is not going to change that. Windows is still going to rule the applications market.
Edited 2011-06-08 13:04 UTC
Apple doesn’t want to kill Windows for the same reason that Lamborghini doesn’t want to kill Ford. Both products do the same as their respective competitors, but there’s an air of perceived exoticness of the one that’s more expensive & less owned. This is how price tags are allowed to stay higher, regardless of the opinion of someone who isn’t a customer. No matter what people think, Apple’s making a nice chunk of change with it’s prices & that’s all that really matters. You don’t have to have the highest marketshare to have higher profit margins. Profit margins are what counts, not marketshare.
That’s not completely true when it comes to computing platforms. If you don’t have marketshare, it makes it harder to attract third party developers for the platform. And without third party developers, platforms don’t survive.
Granted, Apple attracts enough third party developers to keep the Mac platform alive. But the amount of software available for Mac is minuscule compared to the amount of software available for Windows.
“Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.”
Having been shown the way? Sorry? Did Apple invent the cloud? It hasn’t shown anything new in this event, everything has been implemented by Google and Android community since day one. It’s the first event in that Apple is catching the competence and it’s not innovating at all.
Google has been promoting the cloud for years and it hasn’t and will not kill Windows anytime soon. Nor will Apple.
I honestly don’t think thats the case. If Apple really wanted to kill Windows they would work to make Mac OS X an universal OS. They already have a strong following of non-mac hardware users who are making Hackintosh computers. So if they made Mac OS X truly universal and geared for other non-mac PCs, we’d probably see a greater shift to the OSX platform.
Like Fake Steve once said, when you get obsessed with distroying MS or Windows you lost.
From the blog entry:
How did that work out for Sun again?
You know, (some) people like to be in control of their own data.
What happens if (when) the “iCloud” goes down? It’ll never happen? What assurances do we have to the security and privacy of our data? (brings to mind DropBox) What about … oh forget it.
Don’t believe the hype people!
I love reading these articles that try to speculate only to turn out to be spectacular failures – anyone remember the analysts in the past who claimed that Itanium would be a $30-$50billion market, RISC processors all dead, and Dvorak claiming at one point that Apple would sell a customised version of Windows NT. Yes, it seems that any two bit schmuck with a blog is automatically given more credence than he deserves simply because of a platform he might own (aka domain name plus descent marketing).
iCloud is in response to two factors; firstly the fact that they could no longer justify charging for something that quite frankly is being provided free of charge by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. MobileMe was never any better than the free alternatives to justify the price tag of AUS$108 per year and from what I had heard the growth had pretty much stagnated (many opting for ‘DropBox’ instead of MobileMe when it came to cross platform file sharing). The second part was the biggest bane of ones experience on iTunes was pretty much when it came to having to re-download music where you’d have to send an email off to Apple, plead to them to allow you to re-download it, and if you’re lucky they’ll let you. On top of that then add the need to get all devices synchronised beyond contacts etc. I hardly see iCloud as something revolutionary, the changes just bought everything in line – that you can re-download your music just like you can re-download the applications you bought from the AppStore. What held up this basic change? the record companies fought tooth and nail every step of the way.
iCloud is simply a natural evolution of MobileMe into something more than just a set of services one can get for free but with a price tag. The 30% cut they take from software sold on AppStore? that pays for the services that they expose to developers through the iCloud API, the cheaper operating system? to get users to upgrade faster, developers to take advantage of new features faster and thus propel Mac sales forward in much the same way that software propels i-device sales forward.
Edited 2011-06-09 02:15 UTC