When Apple announced that it was going to be licensing Mac OS to other PC makers, DayStar essentially bet its business on converting from being a manufacturer of high-end upgrades for Apple-built Macs to being a manufacturer of high-end Mac clones. DayStar’s clone was the Genesis MP, and the MP stood for multiprocessing. It was the very first Mac to combine the work of multiple processors toward a common goal.
The problem: Classic Mac OS wasn’t built for multiple processor cores. The operating system knew about its processor, and it used it, and that was it. But the engineers at DayStar had been working on something novel for its high-end audience.
There was such a wealth of innovation coming out of the clone program that Apple itself simply couldn’t do. As consumers, there’s lessons to be learned from the clone program – artificial limitations do not serve us. They only serve corporations.
There are benefits to be had from cloning just as are there are also benefits to be had from being a complete solution provider but using post Jobs Apple as an indication to support the former argument is beyond disingenuous.
Artificial limitations can serve corporations and also benefit the consumer. The iPhone speed advantage (for example) can be directly attributed to supplying the whole widget.
haus,
Using market dominance to impede competitors leads to stagnation. We owe many personal computing innovations to 3rd party sources.
This should be Apple’s new slogan! “Artificial limitations can serve corporations and also benefit the consumer.”
To apple’s credit their A13 chips boast impressive single threaded performance, but frankly “supplying the whole widget” doesn’t have nearly as much to do with it as does outsourcing chip production to the world’s leading chip fab.
Considering that IBM let the cat out for cloning PCs, and now has completely removed itself from making x86 systems, you know if Apple had let it carry on for people to make Mac clones, they probably would have dropped OSX support completely right around the time the iPhone hit it huge.
Granted many people have suggested that is going to happen to macOS soon anyhow. Though I am one who thinks it won’t as then how would they sucker people who need to develop for iOS into getting Macs?
I own a PowerMac 9500MP/180 and it only exists because Daystar existed. That is very cool. It was pretty much pointless to have for Mac OS, but oh my goodness, did it ever run BeOS well!! BeOS ran using both processors in SMP mode. It was a lot faster than the BeBox because it has proper SMP, where as the BeBox used 603e’s and they were hobbled in SMP mode and required a software daemon to made cache consistency work properly. Mine is in storage and I’m hoping all still working. It was probably one of the best BeOS PowerPC machines on the market, only the 9600MP and Genesis Quad MP really bettered it. (Yes, they did a quad processor model!)
There is the other side of the story though. If you have no artificial limitations you get bottom-racing OEMs bundling trial versions of McAfee Total Internet Security Plus with the usually awful McAfee uninstaller that crashes sometimes, just to punish some of those nasty customers trying to escape this obvious attempt of squeezing more money out of them for duplicate functionality that the OS offers for free.
The “no artificial limitations” environment that Windows offers to OEMs is the major reason the Windows experience sucks for most people. Microsoft even encouraged this behaviour in the past by giving “Vista Premium” stickers to definitely-not-premium laptops with 1GB of RAM.
User experience matters, people. Most people won’t format their laptops with a clean image. And in a “no-restrictions” environment, OEMs are in a race to the bottom with each other competing on price on everything but the most hi-end segments (think Alienware) and don’t care about the experience.
BTW the only reason Android OEMs are kept in check is the artificial restrictions placed on them by Google GMS.
kurkosdr,
The thing is, Apple isn’t forced to bundle that software though on the phones it sells. If an end user wants to install that software on their own, well that’s on them. Owners should have free will to install what they want on their devices, it’s their prerogative.
I do recall that, but to be fair that has more to do with windows vista compatibility stickers being placed on unsuitable hardware than anything.
There’s a difference between artificial restrictions and quality standards. You can have a high quality OS that doesn’t place artificial restrictions on owners.
Geeks don’t understand markets.
The type of customer, those $500 laptops were aimed for does not care about bloatware as much as they’re older people delighted they have a cheap machine to send e-mails and surf the web, maybe write a paper or two every now and then. Or they’re poor students who, again, are delighted to get a computer for cheap.
People go on with their lives and really could care less about “bloatware.” Seriously, for most of those people that laptop is just like another appliance.
I own of these, I got it for $200 when a local graphics firm went out of business a few years ago and its amazing! I run OpenBSD on it.