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To be fair, he was fired from the Macintosh/Lisa division. He resigned from Apple on September 13, 1985, but was fired from the division in the summer, and was replaced by JLG.

He was removed from the Lisa team and relegated to the Mac team. At the time the Mac was the replacement for the Apple II and was in no ways similar to the lisa. Jobs turned the Mac into what the Lisa should have been. An inexpensive GUI based computer that could sell for 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a Lisa.

This was a demotion - not a firing. It also was not the thing that forced Jobs to resign, but was the beginnings of the fallout with Scully that eventually led to Steve Jobs trying to get the board to oust Scully, when the board sided with Scully, Jobs resigned and took the best and brightest to form NeXT. Apple sued and in a settlement with Apple, NeXT was banned from producing any systems for a lower price than Apple's highest priced system. Apple (Scully) then proceeded to raise the price of the Mac and produce ever bigger and more expensive systems thus assuring that neither company could compete with the PC market that was rapidly becoming a commodity market with ever shrinking prices and margins.

The indistry will do just fine without Apple. They are not unique, they don't drive technology, they don't really do anything other than marketing and design. The real people who make the computer industry work are Intel, AMD, Ati, Nvidia et al...

Mac OS X has had no effect on the computer industry? What about Final Cut Pro, iMovie, iTunes and the Mac mini?

Yes, what about them? I've never used them. Is there something special about them?

(I'm not allowed to reply to myself, so I'm gonna have to edit it to point out that I'm being a Sarcastipundit(tm) in the vein of Stephen Colbert ... )

Edited 2006-10-03 07:03

The indistry will do just fine without Apple. They are not unique, they don't drive technology, they don't really do anything other than marketing and design. The real people who make the computer industry work are Intel, AMD, Ati, Nvidia et al...

I didn't say that apple drives anything.

apple is the kind of agent that sits on the sidelines merrily doing it's own thing...forcing everybody else to keep one eye on them, thereby keeping the industry in 'check'.

To say that apple does nothing other than marketing and design (some will say those two are the hardest parts of business, btw), is ignorant.

OSX, as one example, is a great take on how to build a marvelous operating system *experience*.

And that's what apple does best...create experiences. And that's one of the hardest things to do.

Take your blinders off...don't hate the apple.

Actually generic PC manufacturers are even less unique. Will the "industry" do fine without them?

Apple has driven the market since it's inception with the brief period from 1995 till 2000. Windows arguably caught a then stagnating Apple in 1995 with Windows 95. But even during this time the "innovations" were often simply improvements on earlier ideas. ie. MS copies "Publish and Subscribe" on the Mac as OLE and then extends it to become Active-X. NeXT was innovating but not many people noticed.

The return of Jobs to Apple marked a return to Apple's position as the primary innovator as it assimilated NeXT and Introduced the world to OpenStep with a Mac UI wrapper - OS X. Now once again the new ideas are coming out of Cupertino!

Apple's influence? We all use Macs - either the cheap imitation that is windows, X11 (a better imitation) or the real thing - OS X (technically it is an imitator but because it has the Apple name you can't call it that).

The roots go back to Palo Alto and AT&T, but the modern computer all follow the look and feel of the first computer to put them together - the Mac.

X11 (a better imitation)

X11 is NOT an imitation of QuickDraw, CoreGraphics or any Apple technology. In fact, it could be said that the server/client separation and remote desktop feature, pioneered by X11 (in 1987!) influenced both Apple and MS in the design of the graphics layer of OS X and Vista respectively.

CoreImage, CoreGraphics, CoreVideo, CoreData, Applescript (no, AS is far more than an automation that sends keystrokes and mouse clicks), Firewire and MPEG4 (uses QT container) are just a few examples how Apple has helped to drive innovation in the computing industry.

While I highly doubt that Apple came up with many of those ideas itself (maybe some of them), they recognized the value of the ideas and made them accessible to developers and consumers.

Also, the user experience is more than the look of the product. Apple did not just design something that worked. They designed something that's convenient to use by packing useful programs, designing GUIs that require less clicking and navigation, adding the ability to automate programs and transfer data between one and another (Applescript), making the OS unobtrusive, providing dictionary popup tips etc. While anyone of these changes would be insignificant, hundreds of such changes will add up and create a positive user experience.

you said: "CoreImage, CoreGraphics, CoreVideo, CoreData, Applescript (no, AS is far more than an automation that sends keystrokes and mouse clicks), Firewire and MPEG4 (uses QT container) are just a few examples how Apple has helped to drive innovation in the computing industry.

While I highly doubt that Apple came up with many of those ideas itself (maybe some of them), they recognized the value of the ideas and made them accessible to developers and consumers."

Actually, all of them were created at Apple, except the MPEG-4 codecs (and the file format is Apple, as you correctly noted).

Throw in Automator (and anyone who thinks for a second that VIsual Basic is anything like it hasn't looked at Automator) and iTunes while you're at it.

Edited 2006-10-04 16:29

Gone are the days when Apple used premium hardware and justified the price premium.

Hate 'em or love 'em, they're too expensive. I can get a PC with identical hardware for half the price.

nalf38
>>Hate 'em or love 'em, they're too expensive. I can get a PC with identical hardware for half the price <<

OK list your parts and provide links for prices.

This is claimed all the time (esp on these boards) and no one has successfully backed it up yet.

OK list your parts and provide links for prices.

This is claimed all the time (esp on these boards) and no one has successfully backed it up yet.

Why was this post modded 5? I've done so in the past, only to be attacked first on not using a 'big name brand like Apple', and then when I switched to a computer from a big name brand for comparison, I was attacked for not providing EXACTLY the same specs (including firewire).
And even then 'It didn't include OS X, which you should take into the price'. Grr.

I concluded there was no arguing with Apple fanboys, and subsequently ceased trying.

Have you looked at the new Macs? The closest Dell to a Mac Pro comes in at $1k more, and it doesn't look anywhere near as nice. The closest Dell to the 24" iMac is about 10% cheaper, which is about right considering the iMac uses laptop parts to achieve a slim/quiet design. If you've priced SFF PCs, you'll know that a 10% premium for a space-efficient design as an absolute bargain. And then there's the mini. For half the price of a mini, you can get some VIA mini-ITX piece of shit that'll be a fraction of the speed and bigger to boot.

The only machines Apple has right now that aren't price-competitive with Dell are the Macbooks and the Macbook Pros, which haven't been updated to Core 2 yet (which is just a matter of Dell's faster product cycle). If you look at the Core 1 models from a month or two ago, the Macbook was fully price-competitive, within a $100 or so with more features (Bluetooth, webcam, remote).

rayiner is right and wrong.

Its right that duplicating a mac in hardware terms will usually end up with the same price or higher. And its right that doing this in particular with the Mini will end up either with a higher priced AOpen version or a very poorly performing mini-ITX.

But its wrong to think this shows that Apple is a price effective choice. If you want to see why this is so, go to www.macwarehouse.co.uk and see what you get for less than the price of a Mini on the non-Mac side of the house.

However, in all those tens of better performing lower priced systems, you'll not find one that duplicates the form factor or the precise configuration.

Nevertheless, for most people, they are better and cheaper buys.

http://sys.us.shuttle.com/BuildXPC.aspx?id=1175">Shuttle is basically the same as the mini. It's a hundred dollars more, but it's easier to work on which definitely makes up for the price difference.

It depends on the machine. The Mini is definitely in this category (you can get better and cheaper machines if you ignore form factor). The new iMacs are only partially in that category (you pay a $100 or $200 for the form factor, which is tolerable on a $1000-$2000 machine). The Mac Pro is completely not in this category. For the price of a Mac Pro, you could barely buy the parts that go in it.

On a $2500 Mac Pro, the wholesale price of the CPUs (2x $750), motherboard ($350), and RAM ($200) comes to over $2000. Throw in a case comparable to those Lian-Li ones costing $150+, a good PSU, a 7300GT, a HDD, bluetooth/wifi card, etc, you're going to be hard pressed to keep it under $2500, even before you consider shipping costs and the cost of assembly.

Sure, because when Apple would be gone there would be noone that developes BSD or builds PCs with ASUS Hardware right?

Agreed. Well written and entertaining article.

Edited 2006-10-02 20:21

Aye. I really like the article, but it could've done with a thorough proofreading. The incomprehensible sentences are slightly too numerous.

Windows ME wasn't the worst product ever.
Microsoft BOB was.

I thought New Coke was the worst product ever....

"I thought New Coke was the worst product ever...."

No, it wasn't... Coca-Cola "Blak" truely *is*!

Coke + coffee... they oughta call it Coca-Cola "BLECH!"

It amazes (and disgusts) me that it's still on store shelves today. It's the nastiest thing come out of the Coca-Cola factory since... EVER! I couldn't bear to drink a few sips before chucking it in the trash, the first time I tried it, when it was first released.

I'd drink those "cherry cough syrup" (blech!) energy drinks like Red Bull, looooong before I'll EVER take another sip of Blak.

Don'tcha just love off-topic posts like these?

"b) ... they plan a merge between Apple mac os and windows "

Ummm-- what part of Windows would you keep? MSFT had their chance to reamin relevant, but went Vista instead of UNIX.

IBM didn't "allow" clones. They figured the only way they could bring a PC to market in the time frame they wanted was to use off-the-shelf parts, but kept the BIOS secret to try and force lock-in. Compaq opened the doors to the clone market by reverse engineering the BIOS and the rest is history.

Since IBM published the source to the BIOS in the back of the Manual... No, they didn't keep it secret.

And to copy the BIOS and put it into a Taiwanese Clone Motherboard was as easy as burning an EPROM.

I know, because I worked for a company that did just that.

I left, because I couldn't deal with the blatant theft.

Phenix reverse engineered the IBM ROM which was NOT published. What was published was the supervisory calls (software interrupts) - the API. This is almost all that was needed to reverse engineer a compatible BIOS. They did intend to keep it secret, but because they only included the the most basic hardware interfacing code in the ROM (about 2K of assembly) this was a much easier task than reverse engineering the Apple ROM that included much of the OS (128K as I remember it).

Even although they have now left the market, I argue that they have done better out of it than they ever would have had they kept the architecture closed. The open architecture stole market share, but it drove down prices, allowing the less well-off to buy machines and therefore increase the size of the market in total (99% of 100 is 99, but 58% of 200 is 116 - lower marketshare, but bigger numbers). Indeed, it seems that keeping technology closed is the best way of eventually pricing/driving your technology (or worse, your company) out of a market. All companies die eventually, but it happens even quicker with proprietary stuff.

The list of companies that have made this mistake and been killed off (or had their technologies killed off) is legion.

Apple (got *near* it several times, and was arguably saved only by buying more and more off-the-shelf parts)

Commodore

Atari

Digital

Data General

IBM (yes, even using proprietary technology, IBM saw strong competition from clone-makers (Amdahl) and companies exploiting new markets (DEC, Digital)

Apollo

HP (with MPE and then PA-RISC)

Note that in several cases, having a *better* technology (cf Amigas with 1990 PC-compatibles, or IRIX versus Windows) did nothing to save the company in the long run. Producing a *generic* product - that sells!

The only things that will save you and/or your technology is (a) being open, intentionally or otherwise (IBM, AMD, AT&T (Unix)), (c) being massively entrenched (guess who), or (c) corporate welfare. Sooner or later the movers and shakers of the buyers' market move on, and if you don't compete with a compatible product, You're Dead.

And the Acorn Risc architecture of course.........

The only things that will save you and/or your technology is (a) being open, intentionally or otherwise

MS is a closed as you get. They go out of their way to make sure their products don't play nice with others.

No-one who reads this website will tell you I was defending Microsoft! Far from it.

I'd wait until the Core 2 processors trickle down from the Mac Pros. They're much more powerful then the regular Core processors.

What's political about being upset over 12 hour days, forced over time and a sleazy company?

"The reporter, You Wang, and editor, Bao Wen, work for the China Business News, a Shanghai-based daily newspaper. Wang confirmed that they have had their credit cards, apartments and car confiscated for writing an article on June 15 that said employees at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory work 12 hours a day, exceeding the hours-per-week work limit.

The report also alleged that workers had to stand while working for 12 hours every day without rest and were not allowed to talk. Female workers reportedly fainted during the long hours."

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192501...

"When people think about Apple's early history, they think of Steve Jobs walking around Silicon Valley barefoot extolling the virtues of the Apple I. They think of Wozniak and Jobs assembling the computers in the Jobs' garage. They don't think of Chinese workers doing 15 hour days and being paid less than minimum wage to produce cheap iPods. Apple really ought to bite the bullet and fire Foxconn,"

Since when is the iPod part of Apple's "early History". And who are you to criticize Apple? You think Lenovo is any better? You wear Nike's? I wear them; they suit my feet. I wish they paid their workers a living wage, but I am not a Nike stockholder and a boycott would be overkill. I AM an AAPL stockholder and DO vote "FOR" any matters aimed towards improving corporate ethics or governance.

Since when is getting cheap iPods more important than Apple's public image?

Apparently since it cuts into Apple's profits.

"All it seems to me that when I hear people scream about 'poor labour conditions' and 'poor pay' when it is nothing more than a veiled attempt to justify their hatred, bigotry and straight out xenophobia."

Really? So my empathy for people who are getting exploited is not a reflection of the kindness of my soul, but some hard hearted impulse to justify depriving people of a lively hood.

Just because I don't like see people exploited doesn't mean I hate them; it just means I know corporations know better.

We often call underpayment by US standards exploitation and bigotry. Often the low wages are the quite high in the country where the work is performed. We hear things like these poor workers are paid only $3 a day, however if the average salary in the area is $2 a day then the "exploited" people are not being harmed at all.

I do not claim to know about the conditions that the manufacturing company that Apple uses for iPods is, but Apple investigated it and did not find bad conditions. Of course the question is do you trust Apple to perform this audit or not.

To me, the deciding factor is if you as the worker, do they want the job to go away because they are being "exploited." If the answer is no, then they are not being "exploited."

Often these charges are made by Americans that fear that these are potential American Jobs. They wish to have people say that they would rather pay more for an iPod built in America. However, part of what allows us to enjoy the low prices we want is the use of cheap foreign labor. In most cases it is a win-win as the workers can be paid above the norm of the area they live in, while we get inexpensive goods.

I do not think that we can say it is bigotry as much as it is ignorance that makes people look for these statements.

I do not claim to know about the conditions that the manufacturing company that Apple uses for iPods is, but Apple investigated it and did not find bad conditions. Of course the question is do you trust Apple to perform this audit or not.

In my opinion it's unwise to trust any company or organisation to conduct its own audit. This is why even the police has an internal affairs department, or equivalent. Of course, then you have the problem of "who polices internal affairs?"! ;-)

Any entity auditing itself is not a valid audit. But that is not what Apple did. They audited their contract manufacturers. So if you are Apple, you do want to find the truth and you hope that it is that they are acting properly. However, you know that third parties will discover the truth and it will come out. So there is not a big reason to hide it. If the conditions are bad you make a big public insistence that they change the conditions allowing you to negotiate with other manufactures incase they can not come up to standards.

Unlike an INTERNAL audit, there is a reason that you may be able to trust the Apple one. Apple does not want it's name to be associated with inhumane treatment, so they have a positive incentive to have an accurate report.

So which do you trust more? An Apple audit or rumors? Until I see a reason to think otherwise I prefer to trust Apple. If someone has real evidence, let them come forward with it. Without any evidence to the contract I will even accept a truly internal report.

Yes, there is a difference between being "exploited" where they are happily employed, I've been "exploited", and actually being exploited where they are close to slave labor.

My original statement didn't have room for the above semantics.

Agreed; want to know what I get paid? I get paid $11.20 per hour NZ$, translated into US dollars, that is around US$6.8 per hour - to t