

Sony’s 2001 offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops - electic
http://9to5mac.com/2014/02/05/sony-turned-down-offer-from-steve-jobs-to-run-mac-os-on-vaio-laptops-says-ex-president/

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ChuckMcM
While the story may or may not be true, I cannot believe that Sony would have
been able to sell Microsoft on the idea that some of their "PCs" were going to
run MacOS. There was a pretty interesting example of how Microsoft responds
when ASUS first tried to ship a x86 laptop with Linux as standard. (the EEEPC
line) It resulted in a huge flap that spilled out publicly with things like
ARM laptops being ordered off the expo floor at CeBIT and Microsoft bringing
back a "dead" version of Windows XP for that particular model. But the bottom
line was they went all out to keep ASUS from shipping a non-windows Laptop and
that was in 2006 or 7. Five years earlier I expect they would have just
threatened to pull Sony completely out of the OEM licensing program.

~~~
mattdotc
Dell was able to pull it off. The only Dell PC I've ever purchased was an
Inspiron 1420n which came bundled with Ubuntu 7.04.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-
inspiron-1420n-u...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/dell-
inspiron-1420n-ubuntu-laptop-review/)

~~~
ChuckMcM
That's a fair point. It was a bit later, the interesting bit about the anti-
trust suit is also good, I could see how Sony _could_ pull it off, but I still
don't think they ever seriously considered it.

------
Keyframe
Story from 'the wife' seems a bit stretched - especially the part about next
morning flight.. but all in all it wouldn't be surprising if there was some
truth to it because Jobs was obsessed with Sony since 80s and tried to,
basically, build Sony 2. This is well documented and probably the most visible
part of it was his turtleneck attire which was modeled after what he saw at
Sony (they wore uniforms).

~~~
pavlov
The creative director of Apple's ad agency tells a story that illustrates
Jobs's Sony obsession well [1].

In 1998, when Steve Jobs was back as interim CEO at Apple and had a cool new
consumer computer nearing completion, he wanted to call it "MacMan", along the
lines of Walkman. It was changed to "iMac" at the last minute.

We nearly ended up with PhoneMan 5s running ManOS 7...!

[1] [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-
named-...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669924/steve-jobs-almost-named-the-
imac-the-macman-until-this-guy-stopped-him)

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
I would absolutely buy and use any operating system called ManOS.

~~~
pi-err
ManOs X ! The hands of fate log10!
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/)

------
Stratoscope
A friend of mine on CompuServe back in the '80s posted a story about running
into some Sony execs at CES. He told them he loved the picture quality of
Betamax, but he was afraid VHS would win because it could fit most movies on a
single tape and people didn't want to switch tapes.

One of the Sony execs looked at him and said, "We think we know what is best."

~~~
PakG1
For a long time, iOS didn't have multitasking. If Steve Jobs heard that
complaint from someone and replied, "We think we know what is best", would
that person have thrown their hands up exasperated? Sometimes, visionaries are
right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes, the customer is right, sometimes
the customer is wrong. It's sometimes a crapshoot.

~~~
MBCook
"We know what we're doing" basically _was_ Apple's response to multitasking.
They said the iPhone worked well enough. Once they figured out a good way to
do it, one they were happy with, they released it.

It's not a perfect comparison. The iPhone worked quite well without multi-
tasking, I had one. It wasn't a big problem. On the other hand, having to
always swap tapes half-way through a movie would be a deal breaker for most
people. Sony eventually addressed that, but it was too late.

------
georgechen
Of note: the original PowerBook 100 was design by Apple and manufactured by
Sony.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100)

------
ozten
I've been looking for a new laptop that will build Firefox or FirefoxOS in a
reasonable amount of time. Macbook Pros, AFAICT are the only game in town.
(Would love to be wrong here)

Perhaps in this alternate universe... Sony, Lenovo and others are producing
reasonable high-end laptops.

~~~
ginko
I'm pretty sure the top-end Dell Precision mobile workstations have more
computing power than the top-end Macbook pros, for instance. The same is
probably true for the HP Elitebooks.

They may not be as light, though.

~~~
simcop2387
Yep if you're willing to trade weight you can easily get a core i7-3840QM
which can do 8 threads (4 cores) fairly fast. My current one I've been able to
emulate some of the last gen consoles even for fun, compiling Firefox or
Firefox OS is largely going to be an issue of disk speed which is fixable with
either gobs of ram or and SSD, (preferably both, though overprices the
alienware m18x r2 will take multiple drives, an msata ssd, and 32gb of ram and
can be upgraded to workstation graphics cards if you have the cash).

~~~
acchow
Disk i/o is not the bottleneck when compiling an OS.

~~~
simcop2387
When i was last using gentoo (which admittidly was a while ago) it was pretty
much the bottle neck for most things if you wanted to compile in parallel,
largely because intermediate steps are written out to the disk before linking
and less so because of reading. That said it is possible to do it all in
memory but then you end up memory bound which is also possible to work around
by throwing money at your ram (or downloading more off the web).

------
nly
Would it have really made a difference? Inter-company collaborations always
end up with one company becoming dependent or the other buying them out, or
both. Vaio would have become synonymous with Mac OS until Apple ditched them
and left them to the same fate as they currently face.

~~~
MBCook
Apple's problem was the other clone manufacturers undercutting them. Sony is a
company that is known for being willing to charge premium prices for their
premium products. It may have worked out.

I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference though.

~~~
yuhong
I am thinking commoditization of the entire device is flawed while
commoditization of parts is not. The way people think they can buy a PC for
cheaper than the price of its parts is probably a good example.

------
lstamour
Originally posted at: [http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-
secre...](http://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-
well)

Kim replies in the comments there, too. Intriguingly, the post is marked as
"Not for Reproduction," whatever that means.

------
oofabz
Sounds like Steve was trying to break into the Asian market. Mac OS has always
been a mostly North American phenomenon but Steve liked to think big.

Mac OS world marketshare: [http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-
system/ap...](http://www.webdeveloper.net.au/web-usage/operating-system/apple-
mac-osx/)

~~~
zhemao
Wow, Iceland really likes Macs. Can anyone explain why? I suppose the
population is small enough that it only takes a few adopters to drive up the
percentage, but still.

~~~
astrodust
It could be due to localization issues. Is Icelandic OS X better than
Icelandic Windows? The availability of an Icelandic keyboard?

~~~
wcfields
Could be that pre-OSX was built with very good localization for more obscure*
languages and it carried over into today.

*(Icelandic has at most has ~350k speakers)

------
benologist
I really wish Apple would just open this up, or go all out and open source it
which I guess may be possible now that they've stopped charging for it.

Looking at the North Korean ripoff version earlier today [1[ it was by far the
nicest looking linux desktop I've ever seen heh.

[1] [http://rt.com/news/north-korea-os-mac-747/](http://rt.com/news/north-
korea-os-mac-747/) or on HN
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188036)

~~~
MBCook
They haven't stopped charging for it, it's not free. It's subsidized by Mac
sales.

If they open sourced OS X, they would kill it's funding source and screw
themselves.

Actually, that's _exactly_ what happened when they allowed clones.

------
drivingmissm
Sony would have passed because of iTunes, Sony isn't going to sell hardware
that plays songs from Sony Music and pays Apple as the middle man.

------
mmphosis
maybe running the very new (and buggy) Mac OS X version 10.0 (Cheetah) or
maybe the later 2001 Mac OS X version 10.1 (Puma)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1)

the pairs of ppc and i386 header files

I had heard of Apple internally testing Mac OS or Mac OS X on Intel-based
hardware.

~~~
jarvic
Jobs specifically claimed that every version of OS X had been compiled for
both PowerPC and Intel processors, though I can't remember if any proof of
this was ever given.

~~~
ams6110
NEXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc, Motorola, and I think PA-RISC at various times.
No reason to believe they didn't have an Intel build of OS X from day one.

