Tag: Apple

Comparing Apples to Intels

MacCentral is hyping a New York Times article which regurgitates what a lot of other people have noted: the Pentium IV sucks. In fact most benchmarks suggest that it is slower lower end Pentium IIIs, except with software that is specifically re-compiled for the Pentium IV. But is this time for gloating for Apple fans?

Dennis Sellers thinks so, writing,

He explains how that megahertz ratings are valuable only when making speed comparisons between chips in the same family: comparing a Pentium III with another Pentium III, for example. They’re meaningless when comparing different chips.

“That’s why, for example, a 500-megahertz Macintosh chip is much faster than a 500-megahertz Pentium III,” he says. “Getting excited about a chip just because it runs at 1.5 gigahertz is a little like pouncing on a house just because it’s $50,000; first you’d better find out whether it’s a Taj Mahal or a tool shed.”

Megahertz is definitely not the end-all, be-all of a computer system and the 500mhz Macintosh is certainly much faster than a 500mhz Pentium III. But that comparison isn’t very helpful either.

Here’s a much better comparison. I can buy a 900mhz Athlon system with nice 3d graphics card, 40 gig hard drive, 128mb memory, and 17-inch monitor, for about $1300. For anything I’m going to do, the Athlon system is going to be at least as fast and probably faster than a G4 500mhz system.

A G4 500 mhz system with similar components costs about $2,500 without a monitor. That’s simply an insanely high price given what people can buy in the Wintel-compatible market. Sure you’re stuck using Windows with all its attendant problems, but is the Mac’s usability really worth $1,200? For most people the answer is no.

Intel has made a number of missteps lately, but its mistakes will likely create further openings for AMD and other competitors rather than spur Apple’s growth until Steve Jobs and others find a way to bring Macintosh hardware costs in line with Wintel hardware costs.

Apple today is in much the same position as Dell. Dell has an exclusive arrangement with Intel whereby it only sells computers with Intel processors — as Intel has misfired, Dell’s sales and its stock price have both suffered. Aside from the fact that I have friends who work at Dell, I could care less. If I can’t get the machine I want from Dell I’ll just go buy from any number of manufacturers who sell Athlon-equipped machines. Apple, like Dell, would do well to reconsider its business model that ties its operating system to a single chip vendor prone to missteps.

Does Apple Care About Its Customers?

Chris Scott writes about his recent problems buying a Macintosh (short version — Apple decided to use a proprietary interface for their Apple Studio Displays that is incompatible with older G4 computers).

Reading his story, however, this isn’t an Apple problem per se but from my experience is standard operating procedure among most hardware companies. I know people who work in technical support for large computer manufacturers who are very good at what they do, but I’ve also spent more than enough time talking to a customer service representative who knew less about the hardware than I did.

Scott is peeved that the box on his computer monitor didn’t say that it wouldn’t work with “older” G4 machines. It wasn’t quite as much money, but I once bought a game and on the box it said it required a 3D graphics accelerator. No problem — I’ve got one of those. Unfortunately you had to go to the company’s web site to learn that the game did not work with about ten 3D accelerators, including the most popular card on the market at that time (and it took the company about 6 months to get all the bugs finally worked out for those 3D cards).

Apple Back in the Red — What Is Management Thinking?

Yikes. I feel sorry for anyone who bought Apple stock back in July — losing 66 percent of a stock’s value in about less than 5 months has to hurt. A CNET story on Apple’s latest earnings warnings included both the usual Apple problem plus a shocking revelation.

The old news is that Apple simply isn’t making a dent with Windows users.

“Why would they be any immune to these problems than anybody else?” PC Data analyst Stephen Baker said. “If people are not willing to upgrade, that hurts Apple more than some of the other makers. A big part of the iMac business and the PowerMac business is people buying new machines. Apple on an overall basis is not taking share from the Windows guys.”

When the iMac first came out, I thought Apple had a pretty good shot at picking up sales from people disappointed at the complexity of maintaining a Windows system. I suspect the dirt cheap prices on low-end Windows machines is simply erasing any advantage the iMac had. I’m amazed at what I can walk out of Best Buy with for only $600 or $700.

The really shocking thing is that Apple is sitting on a ton of cash and Jobs was bragging about it to analysts.

Jobs noted that Apple has about $11 per share in cash and short-term investments, compared with Gateway’s $3 per share and Dell Computer and Compaq Computer’s approximately $1.75 per share each.

“We have an Arnold Schwarzenegger balance sheet,” he said, “with over $4 billion in cash.”

If I were an Apple investor I’d be wondering why? How is sitting on $4 billion in cash getting Apple any closer to achieving the sort of growth in computer sales that it needs (the last time I checked, Apple was still in the business of selling computers rather than hoarding cash).

In fact if its revised fiscal year revenues are correct, Apple’s cash holdings are 66 percent of revenues. Way too high for a company having the sorts of problems Apple is having.

The Last Gasp of the Mac Evangelists?

A lot of people who I normally think have pretty good judgment actually agree with this writer’s argument that Apple shouldn’t make its operating systems run on Intel/AMD hardware. As someone who has used Macintosh computers extensively in work environments, but never owned one personally this seems to me like the last gasp of the Mac evangelists.

In many ways the article could be boiled down to this — the Macintosh is dead in the long term as anything but a niche platform so why bother even trying to turn that around by offering the OS on anything but Apple hardware. Its interesting to see how thoroughly the Mac evangelists have become victimized by Apple’s corporate culture.

The author writes that it would be foolish for Apple to port the OS because it would never survive the onslaught in the world of PC hardware,

Apple makes most of its moolah from hardware sales. The average margin on the iMac alone is four times greater than the selling price of Mac OS X Beta. If Apple couldnÂ’t compete with the PowerPC Mac cloners going for its jugular, it will be minced to shreds in the hypercompetitive PeeCee market.

This, of course, has been Apple’s Achilles’ heel from even before it introduced the Macintosh — the lure of short term profits has always overshadowed any potential long-term thinking.

Apple is like a football team that sticks with a has-been quarterback because 6 seasons ago he got them to the Super Bowl. Sticking with the has-been is usually an easy choice — the fans will support it, the owner usually feels a debt of gratitude to the guy, and the players look up to him. But if excellence in the sport is what you want, occasionally you have to make important but unpopular decisions.

Apple has always stuck with the path of least resistance and it and its customers are paying the price as the platform increasingly becomes a niche market.

Spam for the Rest of Us

Ugh. CNNFn has a story about what John Sculley is doing these days. The short answer — he’s turned into a vulture capitalist fronting for Gizmoz.

Gizmoz, it turns out, is one of a small group of companies with a vision — spam for the broadband age. That’s right folks, now rather than just getting those “Girls, girls, girls” and “Need some easy money?” spam in plaintext or HTML, Sculley and company want to send you full motion audio and video.

Here’s own CNNFn summarizes the plans of one of Gizmoz’s competitors, RadicalMail,

At the heart of the Radical approach is a small applet written in the Java programming language and delivered via e-mail. When a user clicks on the mail icon to open the message, the action pings the Radical computer servers to deliver a video file, Flash animation, an audio clip like a pop song — whatever the client wants to send. This content comes to life most often within the e-mail window.

You just got DSL and now the spammers want to make it unusable by clogging up your Internet connection with their crappy ads. This is progress?

Of course the spammers see it differently,

Such technology holds the promise of giving companies unprecedented access to information about their customers — and raises the threat of unprecedented privacy intrusions. The marketer can tell, for instance, when clients open their e-mail, whether they stay with the streaming media file, and whether they follow through on a transaction.

As a result, the competitors are careful to emphasize that these e-mails are not unwanted “spam” spewed at random across the Internet. Instead, they say they rely on “opt-in” mailing lists and “permission-based” marketing programs, in which consumers request the information they send.

Yeah right. Most opt-in marketing schemes are bogus because, a) they default to opting you in, and b) they make it too difficult to get out.

Sometime in the past couple years I installed Quicktime on one of my computers and now regularly get updates from Apple about its upcoming products. Similarly, several years ago I signed up to receive some updates via email from Wired owned sites, and could not for the life of me figure out how to unsubscribe later. Finally the stupid e-mail stopped when Wired’s internet properties changed hands and the part I’d been subscribed to got dropped.

One of the people quoted in the CNNFn story is still using yesterday’s buzzwords, extolling the virtue of e-mail as push media. Except when it comes to spam like this it’s more like pushing and shoving.

Steve Jobs Doing Damage Control

CNET has coverage of Steve Jobs conference call with Jobs trying to do some serious damage control after Apple’s disastrous earnings report.

The funniest part is Jobs saying that Motorola is going to have a 700mhz G4 chip, as CNET puts it, “toward the first part of 2001.” Given Motorola’s track record that means Q4 2001 if at all.

On the other hand, given the gargantuan task that faces a company in today’s market that tries to control both the hardware and OS ends of a major computer platform, it’s a wonder they manage to stay in business at all. The best thing Apple could do is take a cue from the proposed death antitrust penalty against Microsoft — split the company into two separate entities along hardware and software lines (converting Apple shares into shares in both companies), and let her rip.

My suspicion is the hardware company would fail pretty quickly while the software company would take off. The hardware end of things is just killing Apple and they need to find an alternative or it’s going to end up killing the OS end as well.