> Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, who began paving the way for everyone starting in 1957.
I would love to know the funding model for the next 25 years. Altavista was their latest, but it looks like they got burned on their Rainbow 100 in 1982. Took 8 years to report their first loss, and 10 years for a founder retirement. Looks like Vax was their bread and butter for a couple decades.
I love this stuff. If I smell this even close. DEC was basically funded to develop most of modern computing infrastructure, when their was none. They never really came out with icons like a PC. They just crafted the way things get structured for decades....with the funding of....?
For most of their existence, DEC had very aggressive IBM like sales people. They sold large systems. When they tried the Rainbow, they pretty much did everything wrong. They didn't have a sales staff that knew how to sell a $2000 computer. You'd call them about the Rainbow and they wanted to send a sales team. Also, the Rainbow alienated the hackers at the time by its closed nature compared to the IBM PC. For example, you could only use DEC floppies that cost significantly more than normal ones.
Apple is back because they learned their lessons and picked a market that is more forgiving for closed systems. But they won't succeed forever. Just now they had to maintain their lead by vertically integrating processors.
This has positioned them against the entire chip market where everybody is threatened by Apple. Can Apple outspend everybody else, including the entire Chinese and Korean economy?
Sooner or later, the open market will have the better components, just like the PC market. How many more buffers does Apple have to stay in front?
I feel like you're echoing Clayton Christensen in this comment. It may be possible to escape the inevitable destruction he describes by sustaining a culture that cares about innovation.
The thing that woke me up to the Apple way was when I learnt that an early macbook did not need a crossover cable, because its ethernet adapter would auto-negotiate. In design terms, this was low-hanging fruit that was lying around for years. Nobody gets paid for innovations like that, so nobody did it. Until Apple did.
Imagine working at a normal company, and trying to implement that. You would be scorned by colleagues and middle managers as someone who does not focus on the bottom line.
I doubt that IBM, HP or Dell could execute a transition like M1. Apple maintains some spark that makes it possible.
> Can Apple outspend everybody else
The best things in engineering come from small teams who care about quality, and who are given room to chase it. No amount of spend or manpower can compensate for a lack of spark.
> in design terms, this was low-hanging fruit that was lying around for years. Nobody gets paid for innovations like that,
That is perhaps not the best example. Auto-MDI/X was pretty expected after auto-duplex and auto-speed. It was available in switches for years before it was available in NICs. This wasn't an Apple initiative. They probably sourced the autosensing NIC in your Macbook from some established vendor.
What held all three standards back, apart from the additional components and cost, was mainly compatibility issues. Early on, vendor incompatibilities caused autodetection to misfire sometimes, link drops made for a frustrating experience.
You're articulating an investment thesis that has been fairly popular the last 20 years: That other tech companies are protected by impregnable moats, while Apple is perennially one botched product away from going out of business.
But it seems to me that the company is in reality demonstrating far greater resilience and versatility than the cliches would have it.
Consider "picked a market": In 2005, I was joking that my job (macOS Engineer) was "writing firmware for iPod docks", because back then Apple was perceived as a Music player manufacturer that built computers as a hobby. Then, for a good decade, everybody decided Apple was a phone manufacturer. The increasing share of iPhone revenue was seen as an alarming sign. The last couple of years, iPhone revenue share decreased slightly, and that was seen as an alarming sign as well... go figure.
Now (after having done a casual drive by on the fitness tracker and mid-range watch industry), Macs are getting talked about again. You see this as a desperate lunge for survival. I beg to differ.
As a more specific argument, competing against the open market was a disadvantage for Apple when they were low volume, in the PowerPC days. But at this point, I believe they have sufficient volume to maintain custom components. The rest of the industry still has greater volume, but they have to live on lower margins, and are lacking some of the synergies working for Apple, so it's not a given to me that Apple is truly at a disadvantage.
However, at the level of semiconductor manufacturing as opposed to design, the considerations are somewhat different (no clear long run advantages for anyone, no clear benefits to vertical integration, open market wins in the end), which is, I think, why Apple is still outsourcing that step.
Every other hurr-durr company seems to think that the only way forward is to keep piling crap on top of crap. Apple shows everyone when it's time to take something out and leave it in the past.
And people fucking love it. That's their biggest "buffer".
Microsoft & Samsung et al. are the kings of "Me Too", whereas Apple (like Nintendo) is "Not me".
There are people that don't give a fuck about specs and numbers, but what something can do and how pleasant it is to use. Until other companies can figure that shit out, Apple is always going to have a lead.
> And people fucking love it. That's their biggest "buffer".
Yes, Apple has a strange cult appeal. Their customers are happy even when they are being exploited.
> Disc drives, legacy ports, headphone jacks, blinking lights, chargers...
Apple shows everyone when it's time to take something out and leave it in the past.
There are plenty of manufacturers refusing to throw away headphone jacks, and customers are making buying decisions based on it. It may yet turn out to be a poor decision for Apple. It certainly hasn't resulted in them clawing back any market share from Android.
I believe Asus' EeePC was the first massively popular computer to omit a disc drive, not anything from Apple. Ultrabooks were similarly an upmarket response to the popularity of netbooks.
Most of the legacy ports Apple has discarded were their own unpopular proprietary ones, adopting USB dug them out of their own hole and put them on an equal footing with PCs.
For years Apple was trying to push firewire and avoid USB2, to their customers' detriment, which was an obvious mistake to everyone at the time and proved to be a failure.
> Most of the legacy ports Apple has discarded were their own unpopular proprietary ones, adopting USB dug them out of their own hole and put them on an equal footing with PCs.
Uhh the first iMac was the first computer to ditch all legacy ports and go USB-only, and Apple got flak for that too.
Market cap is just public opinion, one bit of negative press can destroy it. To handle failures you need cash on hand, which can't get suddenly erased. Apple has plenty, but not 2T.
Apple survived in part by lasting long enough for there to be a consumer market for whom openness was irrelevant but who were willing to pay a huge premium for design.
My comment was more of an additional reason (on top of the openness of their earlier computers) for why arguing that closed systems didn't stop Apple is not a great argument. Apple got incredibly close to failing. Had it not been for Microsoft's investment they very well might have.
Their closed approach took a long time to start paying off, and so using Apple as an example for why DEC's closed approach wasn't a problem doesn't really add up.
I think the VAX was an icon. I did most of my CompSci undergrad on VAXen running Ultrix. But the VAX and even the later Alpha mnachines were too expensive for individuals or small businesses. Their entire business model was built around sales to corporations, government agencies, and academic institutions that wanted and could afford centralized multiuser machines.
As a sort of microcosm, my undergrad CS started off with a top end dual-VAX, and ended with Sequent Symmetry 386 multi-processor systems that had vastly more processing power and memory.
I would love to know the funding model for the next 25 years. Altavista was their latest, but it looks like they got burned on their Rainbow 100 in 1982. Took 8 years to report their first loss, and 10 years for a founder retirement. Looks like Vax was their bread and butter for a couple decades.
I love this stuff. If I smell this even close. DEC was basically funded to develop most of modern computing infrastructure, when their was none. They never really came out with icons like a PC. They just crafted the way things get structured for decades....with the funding of....?