11 o'clock news - the death of Apple

From our previous thread on Windows 7 I mentioned that the sky was falling on Apple (insert tasteless Newton joke here).

http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&ncl=1292968533&topic=b

Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, who revitalized the company after his usurper jumped ship (and Gil Stein proved ineffectual) with the iPod, has been extremely coy over the last few years about his health. He has now taken a 6 month leave of absence, probably to begin some sort of treatment.

With lack of leadership and an ailing economy RBC has downgraded Apple's stock from $125 to and "underperforming" value of $70.

Apple losing jobs could easily be catastrophic for them. While I don't agree with every decision he's made, he's pretty much willed the company from near complete irrelevance to a marquee name.

It could, but then again maybe not. Apple was lost in the woods for a long time. Jobs transformed it into a company with a coherent vision for a digital lifestyle, and a super-profitable business. Even if Jobs were to croak, neither of these would go anywhere in the short term; it's of course anybody's guess if there's talent in the house for someone to carry on where he left off. However, in my experience the importance of individual CEO's is overrated -- even Jobs.

Plus, if you've been following the Apple scene for more than a couple of years, you'll know that the Death of Apple (tm) gets breathlessly announced about every six months; yet somehow they manage to soldier on.

So I ain't buying your story. Might buy some Apple stock, though.

Prime Junta said:

...
Plus, if you've been following the Apple scene for more than a couple of years, you'll know that the Death of Apple (tm) gets breathlessly announced about every six months; yet somehow they manage to soldier on.
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Just like the imminent death of PC gaming, in other words.

I'm not saying it's a definite, but Apple, more than any other CEO, has rally been involved hands on in directing the company. He's a control freak, which has served them well. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a point where Apple learned what it could from jobs, then takes it to the next step, or if they flounder, not knowing what to do without their leader.

They have a big facility in Austin and I know a few people that have worked there over the years. They've told me the difference in how the company was run, everything from the most minuscule detail to broad strategy, is night and day different once Jobs came on.

I think his success has been identifying the next trend, then making the business savy decisions to lock out competitors (like the hard drive deal on the original iPod that screwed creative or the iTunes drm deal). That's pretty rare to find in one person. Hopefully, he surrounded himself with people that learned from him and can do the same thing.

Well I think Apple is a prime example of how much a good CEO can steer a company - usually a founder - and when the suits take over it just becomes a soulless corporation that lacks vision.

Would Ford still be around if he wasn't in charge to put out the V8? You know the suits would have made a V6 to save costs and go no where. Where's Motown now without Barry Gordy running everything?

A good CEO fits the perfect profile of a Weber's Charismatic leader.

Good CEO's matter when creating companies. That's what Steve Jobs did at Apple -- twice. However, once it's been established, they become a lot less important.

Also, "becoming yet another soulless corporation" is not the same as "dying," you know. In fact, the former sounds like just the thing rabid Mac-heads would say if Jobs did retire/die, but it's not something you can put your finger on.

Apple's stuff as it currently exists did not spring fully-formed from Jobs's forehead. There's an enormous amount of absolutely cutting-edge design and engineering gone into them. Jobs's contribution has been the vision -- what Apple is *for* -- and the courage to do crazy and annoying stuff that usually doesn't work, but when it does, ends up as something transformative.

But: you cannot do what Apple does if big, core parts of the company don't *understand* the company's vision, at such a deep level they don't need constant micromanagement to get there. It's called "corporate culture." Jobs's real achievement has been to create Apple's corporate culture -- one that's simultaneously brilliant, innovative, courageous, and exciting on the one hand, and arrogant, exclusionary, condescending, and stubborn on the other. That kind of culture has momentum; it attracts the kind of people who thrive in it. I'm fairly certain there are people there ready to step into Jobs's shoes.

The big difference at Apple now compared to when Jobs first left it is that back then, Apple did not have a coherent corporate vision. Jobs had his vision; Markkula, Wozniak and the others had theirs. They fought. Jobs left. Apple set out for its long trek in the wilderness, and Jobs made his brilliant but ahead-of-the-times NeXT. This is completely different from the situation now: Apple is built around a vision of the iLife -- a collection of gadgets and programs that together form something greater than the sum of its parts, and insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives. (Other than gaming, which for some bizarre reason Jobs still doesn't 'get.')

So no, Jobs isn't indispensable to Apple, any more than Timo Koski or Jorma Ollila were to Nokia.

Apple do not have any products that are attractive to me, so I do not care.

It would be better for the market if everyone bought a PC, I don't think anyone likes locking software to specific hardware, or being restricted to one manufacturer.

I mean if you buy a PC you could choose a graphics card from NVIDIA memory from kingston, hard-drive from seagate, and you could choose a good custom price.

Apple just gives you a machine that looks good and cannot run most software or games.... it is beyond me why someone would buy a Mac.

GothicGothicness said:

Apple do not have any products that are attractive to me, so I do not care.

It would be better for the market if everyone bought a PC, I don't think anyone likes locking software to specific hardware, or being restricted to one manufacturer.

I mean if you buy a PC you could choose a graphics card from NVIDIA memory from kingston, hard-drive from seagate, and you could choose a good custom price.

Apple just gives you a machine that looks good and cannot run most software or games.... it is beyond me why someone would buy a Mac.

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But Macs *can* run most software and games. Just install Windows on them, via Boot Camp or VMWare or some other virtualization software.

As for the rest of it, Macs just work better. I use a Mac at work, and a PC (Vista x64, hardware, on the whole, higher-spec than the Mac) at home. The PC feels like a sputtering, clunky old Ford. The Mac feels like a rock-solid, brand-new Mercedes. It just has masses of small features improving usability all over the place. The upshot is that I can do everything I do with *much less effort* -- fewer keypresses, fewer mouseclicks, fewer mouse movements. It puts everything at my fingertips, and looks better doing it. Sure, it costs a bit more (if, that is, you consider your time of no value), but then a Mercedes costs a bit more than a Ford too.

This wasn't the case about six, seven years ago when I switched from the Mac to the PC, by the way -- I had an iMac G4 (or G5?) then, and it was in most respects worse than the PC. But Apple has come a long, long way since.

So, what you are saying is that Mac OS X is better than windows ?

If Mac OS X is indeed that superior, they should release it as a competitor to windows, and allow anyone to use the hardware they want.

Not that I am that familiar with boot camp, but at least when I run vmware, everything works slower compared to a pure windows XP machine, or pure ubuntu / linux distribution. Why would you want to have a Mac to emulate windows on it ? and if you are running Mac OS X , you still have the problem of a lot of software not working in it ? I know there is also an emulater of windows you could run inside Mac OS X, but again for me it works slower.

But if you are just using software that is availiable to Mac already and you save a lot of time by using OS X, I can now see that it makes sense using it for you.

GothicGothicness said:

So, what you are saying is that Mac OS X is better than windows ?

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Yup.

If Mac OS X is indeed that superior, they should release it as a competitor to windows, and allow anyone to use the hardware they want.

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I agree. (In fact, I've argued that since before there *was* an OS X -- Windows only caught up to Mac OS around Windows 95, and even that was debatable.)

But they don't want to, and since they own the damn thing, that's their prerogative.

(There are hacks out there that let you install OS X on non-Mac hardware, by the way, but of course Apple doesn't like that. See here and here, for example.)

Not that I am that familiar with boot camp, but at least when I run vmware, everything works slower compared to a pure windows XP machine, or pure ubuntu / linux distribution. Why would you want to have a Mac to emulate windows on it ? and if you are running Mac OS X , you still have the problem of a lot of software not working in it ? I know there is also an emulater of windows you could run inside Mac OS X, but again for me it works slower.

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Boot Camp isn't emulation; it's just a bootstrap that allows dual-booting. Ever since Mac went Intel, the hardware is capable of running Windows natively. In fact, rather amusingly, when PCWorld ran Vista benchmarks on laptops, the MacBook Pro held the spot for "fastest Vista laptop" for a while.

VMWare and other virtualization systems do make a performance hit, but it's relatively small. They run the binaries natively too -- they only implement a wrapper that interfaces with the host OS. I'm not sure I'd want to run games from a virtual machine, but for anything else it works fine. (I'm running both Ubuntu and WinXP in VMWare on my work box, and both run very snappily as long as I don't run out of memory -- running both at once while trying to do stuff on the OS X side is tedious. But then it's only a basic white MacBook, not heavier iron.)

But if you are just using software that is availiable to Mac already and you save a lot of time by using OS X, I can now see that it makes sense using it for you.

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Yep-o. The only thing Macs aren't good for nowadays is games; Jobs doesn't get them, never did; the only way to get a good Mac game system is to buy one of those Mac Pro monsters. The iMac 24 is a step in the right direction, but still falls short. Hm, perhaps if Jobs quits this will change...

I have one of the recently released Macbook Pros, running WinXP as well as OS X, and it has become my only main computer. It is just rock-solid hardware wise and runs everything I need between the two platforms.

As for Apple sans-Jobs, I think things will sett;le out after the current hysteria.

@PJ - No its not the same as dying, I was just being tongue-in-cheek with all these naysayers saying the sky is falling as I think most people are.
Jobs didn't leave as much as he was forced out, that's been well documented and we've since learned how much of a control freak he was and probably still is. Wozniak had his vision yes but he was the one that left as documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers.

@GG - imagine a PC where you can get anything you wanted off the shelf and it would work, you could program it easily, that wasn't clumsy and worked all the time without the need to pull jumpers and find the right drivers. That was Wozniak's vision and that was the Apple ][. That's what Jobs got rid of.

Gil Stein went the route of selling OS 9 on other hardware and suddenly HP started seriously biting into Apple's own market. Stein lacked vision and was pressured from outside like trade magazines to do these sort of things. When Jobs regained control from him the first two things he did was kill the Newton and price the ROMs off the market to kill the hardware competition.

I actually worked at Apple briefly in '99 and Jobs was doing a number of things, including and especially streamlining the bureaucracy. At the time Apple was acting like three different companies.

Gil Stein in his memoir of the company said the biggest problem he had was having board meetings, making decisions, then watching as everyone ignored him (the most hilarious was the subtle rule that men shouldn't wear dresses to work). This was the biggest difference between him and Jobs IMO - Jobs' ego and stature is able to get people to say how high.

PJ, you may be right about how the company is run now - its certainly different than it was 10 and 25 years ago, but I think the past failures of Scully and his insistence of over the top Pepsi like profit margins and Stein's lack of vision and inability to steer such a corporate culture is what has investors spooked today. Its obviously an even bigger self-inflated-opinion-of-themselves company than it was even back then.

(you mentioned failures of Jobs. Appliance computers was one - the stupid things that looked coffee table art. TBH I don't think OS X (which is an upgraded NeXT as you mentioned) is the rousing success that the company ostensibly paid him $600 million in stock for. For example, I'm not aware of of any Unix users that converted over to OS X - I mostly hear them badmouth it).

txa1265 said:

I have one of the recently released Macbook Pros, running WinXP as well as OS X, and it has become my only main computer. It is just rock-solid hardware wise and runs everything I need between the two platforms.

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How is it for gaming? By the spec, the 9600M GT graphics chip seems a bit underpowered. How is it in practice? -- I really like the look of the MacBook Pro otherwise; this (and stinginess) is the only thing that's holding me back.

Lucky Day said:

(you mentioned failures of Jobs. Appliance computers was one - the stupid things that looked coffee table art. TBH I don't think OS X (which is an upgraded NeXT as you mentioned) is the rousing success that the company ostensibly paid him $600 million in stock for. For example, I'm not aware of of any Unix users that converted over to OS X - I mostly hear them badmouth it).

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I know several; I work with one of 'em, actually. If Linux counts as Unix, that is. I know several who badmouth it as well; that's mostly about the way OS X doesn't put things in the same places as most other Unices, making it a bit of a PITA to administer before you've learned it.

Rousing success or not, it's the only Unix-based OS that's genuinely ready for all-around desktop use, and, as I've stated, I find it a long way ahead of Windows in every technical and usability respect. I don't know if it's worth $600M, but it's certainly worth *something.* But that's now; this certainly wasn't the case with v10.0, 10.1, or even 10.2 -- these were in most respects clunkier as desktop OS's than Windows 2000 or XP, and clunkier than Debian, SuSE, or RedHat as server OS's.

Prime Junta said:

How is it for gaming? By the spec, the 9600M GT graphics chip seems a bit underpowered. How is it in practice? -- I really like the look of the MacBook Pro otherwise; this (and stinginess) is the only thing that's holding me back.

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I am running *everything* on it ... it runs Crysis perfectly well, and am installing Mirror's Edge today (and Rise of the Argonauts as well). It is a *laptop* ... so by those standards it is really nice - about as powerful as the >$4000 Dell XPS1730 I got in the spring. No laptop will match up with a desktop, but the Mac laptops have nice hardware that works nicely in my experience.

That sounds pretty good. I was thinking that if it was in the same ballpark as my 3-year-old desktop, I might switch. Being able to run Crysis at all, let alone "perfectly well," sounds promising.

a friend just got the new Macbook Pro - must say that I prefer the older keyboard with the rounded, slighty bevelled silver keys. Black looks ugly - blech - and I really don't like the flat keys they opted for now. Doesn't feel as nice.

Anyway, he was demoing the graphics - managed to stall/stutter several times with high-end windows games (although that was under bootcamp) and he as 3GB of memory. If you're a power gamer (it's my one vice - and not something I'll compromise on!), the graphics card wil not make you that happy. He played Crysis - on high settings it did not run that well. Certainly didn't hold a candle to my desktop PC (which has an 8800GTX - a card which is now oudated). So, if you're looking for a gaming machine I would pass on this. There are higher-end laptops that are better spec'd for current graphics and a quite a bit cheaper - here Mac's are outrageously expensive. I like my (previous gen) macbook pro, but I'm not an apple zealot who insists on buying everything that Mr Jobs - or his minions - dreams up on the crapper ;-) (I have this image of him sprawled on a divan, expounding on his atest gizmo to some lacky, furiously scribbling notes...)

Hee hee.

My desktop PC (AMD x64 X2 4800+) has an 8800GTS/320, so my frame of reference is a fair bit lower to yours. (Incidentally, I'm not happy with the way Crysis runs on my rig -- I have to turn down the graphics to the point where it looks blocky and really pretty bad; luckily I didn't care much for the game itself, though, so I don't feel too bad.)

The reason I want a Mac is that I prefer it for everything other than gaming. It's just plain nicer to do stuff with. I'm also in no hurry to change machines; my desktop box does everything I want it to do quite well (other than run OS X, that is), except I can't take it with me when traveling.

booboo said:

There are higher-end laptops that are better spec'd for current graphics and a quite a bit cheaper

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I'd love to hear ... most things with similar quality components, such as Dell XPS and Alienware - are actually more expensive. Most of the ones touting gaming that are cheaper are really ... cheaper .