[Ti] what "Think different" means

[Dr. Trevor J. Hutley]

At 23:46 -0700 8/6/05, Steve Wozniak wrote:
>Switching to Intel doesn't reconcile well with 
>what "Think different" means to most of us.

Steve - I think this statement of yours somehow 
sums up many of our reactions - that suddenly, 
the Mac is no longer different.

It caused me to reflect on the aspects of the Mac 
that we thought were different, and how these 
will be affected by this change.  My analysis 
concludes that we are still on the positive side. 
It also leads to a proposal for a 2-tier product 
strategy.

What made the Mac different, in my view (as a Powerbook user), was:

1.  the industrial design (I hope we lose none of that)

2. the cutting edge hardware eg FW, screen, slot-drive (may not be affected)

3. the OS (hoping this will go from strength to strength)

4. the performance, which we understood was due 
to the superiority of the PowerPC chip

Perhaps it is only the latter aspect that we are 
going to lose.  If the Intel pathway to the 
future includes some decent chips, maybe the 
situation is not as bad as we initially thought, 
upon the announcement, which made us all think of 
x86 history.

It may also be that the chip architecture becomes 
less important once we have very high levels of 
performance, and 'most' people are not pushing 
the performance envelope.  With the car analogy: 
does it help to know that my new car has a top 
speed of 145 mph conmpared to your car which has 
a top speed of 150 mph, if we really need to 
compare behaviour in a land where the speed limit 
is 70 mph?

It still irks me, however, to know that we are 
knowingly moving in a direction that seems 
inferior.

Do we imagine that we could end up with a 2-Tier 
offering (a sort of Toyota or Lexus analogue), in 
which a PowerPC chip is offered to a discerning 
or demanding client segment ?

If Apple offer the right development tools for 
compiling applications for either, it could be a 
feasible strategy.  Then we would have Macs for 
the existing type of customer, and Macs for the 
masses, we could say.

It works for Toyota.  I even see that Dell are 
thinking of this 2-tier offfering now.  Their 
current mass product and a product for the more 
discerning buyer.  So market segmentation 
thinking is just starting up in this market 
place.  Apple could implment such a strategy very 
well from where they are now, and where they are 
going.

regards,  Trevor