Apple Archive

'Why Apple Failed' promised to reveal an accidental discovery that was key to Apple's recovery. Here's it is: the real reason the company was able to turn things around and create new growth for the Mac platform. Why Apple Bounced Back.

"Apple's recent quarterly earnings report blew past all expectations. More importantly, dramatic unit sales growth shows the company is executing a working strategy for building the Mac platform. That raises the obvious question: why has Apple's market share historically been so low, and why did Apple fail to make any progress in the 1990's? Here's a look at why Apple's platform fell into crisis, and why the solutions prescribed by analysts didn't work."

Increasing component costs and pressure to cut its prices mean Apple's best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell, analyst firm Gartner claimed on Tuesday. In a surprisingly ambitious report, called Apple Should License the Mac to Dell, Gartner says Apple should concentrate on what it does best - create software - and make use of Dell's production and distribution infrastructure.

"A couple of weeks ago, Apple invited me to its campus to get a close-up look at Apple's Xserve Xeon. It is a marvel of physical design, so much so that I find that it implausible that Xserve Xeon and Xserve G5 could have been designed by the same company. Xserve G5 was pretty tight, but Xserve Xeon makes its predecessor, not to mention ever PC 1U rack server I've seen, look slapped together. I was struck by perfectly Xserve Xeon was designed, and in particular by how easily it comes apart. I have high standards in this regard. I told a friend that I will only buy or recommend servers that I can install, remove, disassemble and repair with one hand, a TSA-approved butter knife and no instructions."

Linus Torvalds has picked up one of Apple's new Intel-based Mac minis to play with, but the Linux creator still prefers Apple's old PowerPC architecture for his primary desktop machine. "I'm actually still running a G5, but I also have a Mac mini," Torvalds revealed today in an e-mail to ZDNet Australia. "I like the design, and it's the right form-factor to be a replacement machine for my wife and daughter, but sadly, Apple screwed up the firmware in various stupid ways."

Ignorance can be bliss, but it's not a tight defense, lawyers say. When Apple disclosed Wednesday its internal investigation had uncovered some stock-option backdating, the company said Jobs was aware of the practice but unaware of its accounting implications. The probe also did not find any misconduct by Jobs or other current officers, the company said. In a blend of semantics and general legal analysis, however, securities experts say Jobs could still face some kind of penalty over the situation.

"Like it or not, buyers of x86 servers, clients, and workstations face a major platform shift as the 32-bit CPUs, operating systems, and applications slowly fade into history. That historic migration will have dramatic impact. Yet one factor keeps getting pushed aside as we obsess over hardware progress: humans. Among the demands we make of new technology, raising human productivity should top the list. And although 128-bit registers have productive effect, usability has a magnitude more impact. That's why Apple's latest Macs and OS deserve a good, hard look as mainstream enterprise fare."

Apple was at an all-time low in 1996, in a severe financial crisis that worried Mac users around the world. Apple's shareholders and customers were losing faith, and competitors were closing in fast. The worldwide press badmouthed Apple in 1995 and 1996. Ten years on, Apple is a different company.

David Maynor and Jon 'Johnny Cache' Ellch aren't telling the complete Mac Wi-Fi flaw story after all. At the last minute, under pressure from SecureWorks (Maynor's employer) and Apple, a talk at ToorCon here was cancelled and replaced by a 'rant' from Ellch about what he described as an 'unprofessional' approach to the issue by both companies. Ellch, out of respect for his friend Maynor, declined to take questions or talk on-the-record about the brouhaha, but he did release the text of his rant, which was aimed squarely at Apple and SecureWorks.

"Apple's Unix - or who knows what it'll be called by then - will overtake commercial Linux in rate of revenue growth by the end of 2007. By mid-2008, Apple's sales of systems with factory-installed Apple Unix will exceed the total combined sales of x86 systems factory-shipped with commercial Linux. At the end of the decade, we'll find that Apple Unix has overtaken commercial Linux as the second most popular general client and server computing platform behind Windows."

"I want Vista to be a better OS than it's been promoted to be, but at the same time, I also want OS X to finally receive the public adoption that it deserves. Now is the time for Apple to creatively promote its Macintosh platform with OS X. This is the critical hour, and if Apple is able to take advantage of the uneasy feeling that many have towards Vista, then they could attract an untold amount of new users."

"Codenamed Kenstfield (Core 2) and Clovertown (Xeon), Intel's new quad-core processors will dramatically increase the amount of processing power you can have in a single system. Given that the Mac Pro features two LGA-771 sockets, you could theoretically drop two Clovertown processors in there and you'd have an 8-core Mac Pro. Without a doubt Apple will release a quad-core version of the Mac Pro, either by the end of this year or early next year, but are users who buy the Mac Pro today missing out? While we're still a couple of months away from being able to test a retail Clovertown CPU in the Mac Pro, we wanted to see if the current engineering samples of the chip would work."

Apple held a special event for the press today. Most of the event was about iPods; prettier colours, bigger capacities, you know the drill. For the really interesting stuff, you had to sit out the whole thing: Apple gave us a sneak peek of a product coming in 2007. In Q1 2007, Apple will release a settop box, half the size of the Mac Mini, to which you can stream content. It has a built-in power supply, USB, ethernet, 802.11 'wireless component video', optical audio, HDMI ports, and old RCA stereo audio ports. It sports a Front Row-like interface, and can be controlled using the Apple remote. Its codename is 'iTV'; a different name will be chosen. It will work with iTunes on Macs and PCs, and it will cost USD 299. Update: Eugenia and I both blogged about the product announcements. Eugenia loves the gapless playback, and I miss adherence to industry standards.

Brian May, the guitarist of the legendary rock group Queen, recently got a MacBook Pro for his audio work, upgrading from his G4 laptop. Brian argues about some software problems (e.g. not getting a low battery warning from the system anymore) and the fact that the laptop runs very hot.