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Grex Micros Item 169: APPLE is dying?
Entered by jurry on Mon Sep 15 07:38:57 UTC 1997:

I read about APPLE buying its main competitor PowerComputing
(half the company that make Mac Clones) and refuse to certify CHRP.
Last week I hear Motorola cancelled their Starmax lines.
The only surviving clones is UMAX. IMO APPLE is dying and
too stupid to make such decision. Apparently they decide
to fight all PC vendolone. They must fight from tiny Power Computing
to Giant Compaq.  What is your opinion? Can they survive into 1999

9 responses total.

#1 of 9 by scott on Mon Sep 15 11:22:53 1997:

Well, I have read that it's not the clone makers that are giving up.  Apple
is no longer allowing clones to be made!  So they will get rid of the
competition, but will also scare off a lot of buyers by limiting the product
to only one (currently unstable) source.

#2 of 9 by n8nxf on Mon Sep 15 11:44:04 1997:

My understanding is that PowerComputing did nothing to expand the
Macintosh market and were simply skimming the cream off of existing
markets that Apple had created.  This hurt Apple sales while doing
nothing to expand its market share.
 
I don't think that Apple is planning to fight the PC market.  Rhapsody,
their next OS release, is suppose to run PC Windoze applications isn't
it?  As well as some variant of Unix, etc?  If one looks back over the
years, it's pretty obvious that the PC and Mac OS's have gotten a lot
closer.  "I do it at the C: prompt" T-shirts are pretty out of style
these days.  I see no reason for the melding to stagnate.  Intel boxes
may well be able to run an Apple OS some day.

#3 of 9 by scg on Thu Sep 18 20:11:23 1997:

It looks to me like one of the things driving Apple into the ground is that
their hardware division doesn't want the software to be able to run on other
companies' hardware, while the software division doesn't want the hardware
to run other operating systems.   If their hardware and software are going
to be at all competative, they need a lot more flexibility than that.  I would
imagine that the best thing for Apple would probably be for the company to
split in half, or for them to get completely out of the hardware business.

#4 of 9 by aaron on Sun Oct 26 05:05:11 1997:

The clones did expand the market base. Apple's problem is that it couldn't
compete with the clones, for price and performance.

#5 of 9 by n8nxf on Mon Oct 27 20:13:54 1997:

Motorola CPUs continue to run circles around Intel CPUs.  Always have.

#6 of 9 by arthurp on Tue Oct 28 05:10:59 1997:

Well, Motorola CPU's aren't carrying the baggage of compatability back
to their 4 bit calculator sires.

#7 of 9 by srw on Wed Dec 24 08:54:30 1997:

It is true that you can still find architecture derived from the 4004 chip
in these pentium thingies. 26 years of backward compatibility takes a toll.

#8 of 9 by n8nxf on Wed Dec 24 11:50:06 1997:

Apple computers are every bit as backward compatible as the clones as far
as I can tell.  I can still run the original MacDraw and MacWright under
OS 7.5  We recently got a couple of ~266 MHz Pentium II HP machines in at
work.  It took our IS person well over a man-day to get the thing running
and talking to the network.  The Intel Pentium II CPU thingy also has a
huge heat sink attached to it and would make a very nice space heater.
The ends of the heat sink were so hot that I couldn't touch it and count
to ten without pain.
 
Have you seen the benchmark tests in the recent Byte?  G3 and Pentium II ?
The G3 is not only a much better performer but also a lot cheaper.

#9 of 9 by srw on Wed Dec 24 19:24:18 1997:

I can run those Mac 68K programs on my PowerMac too, because of software
emulation, not because the PowerPC chip is has design heritage dating back
to 1971.

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