[Ti] Re: IBM introduces new PowerPC processors

[T.L. Miller]

On 7/9/05, at 9:04 PM, Chris Olson, <chris.olson at astcomm.net> said:

>Leveno is now the 3rd largest manufacturer of computers in the world, 
>trailing only Dell and HP.  They're bigger than Apple.  Way bigger.

BTW, the name is Lenovo. IBM is a part owner.

>Take a look at the Mac x86 dev boxes.  I now have one to play with.  
>It's a commodity PC - Intel manufactured motherboard, chipsets, 
>graphics, ethernet, the whole 9 yards.  It boots Windows XP perfectly 
>fine.  Except for one little problem; I can buy the same thing from 
>Dell way cheaper than what Apple is going to charge extra for their 
>fancy case.  Same thing applies to PowerBooks.

That shouldn't be surprising. Overnight, we shouldn't expect Apple to
come up with a whiz-bang x86 product just for people to play with.


>In the past the PowerBook was a good buy because you couldn't buy a 
>Unix-powered PowerPC-based machine anywhere else for the same price.  
>Once your PowerBook has nothing but an Intel Centrino in it, same as a 
>Dell, it better be able to compete on price point.  But you say, "oh, 
>the PowerBook comes with OS X".  Big deal.  The Dell will run linux 
>just fine, and modern desktop linux systems are every bit as good as OS 
>X.  It's still just Unix under the hood.
>Apple has done well selling a product you couldn't get anywhere else, 
>and charging a premium price for it.  They're a hardware company, not a 
>software company.  Unfortunately, Apple isn't very good at being the 
>cheap commodity champion, and computers aren't iPods.  If an 
>Intel-based PowerBook is $100 more than a Dell or ThinkPad with the 
>same stuff in it, I'll buy the cheaper one.  And so will millions of 
>other consumers.  A fancy case with an Apple logo on it isn't going to 
>cut it in the commodity PC business.

Apple has never been in the commodity computer business - that premium
we pay finances OS development etc. The Mac OS will be designed to only
run on Mactels and only a few people will go to the trouble to defeat
this set-up.