Apple Fools: Times the House of Jobs went horribly awry

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Apple's official establishment. Since 1976, the House that Steves Built has pushed out some of the most beloved personal electronics products in the world. There will no doubt be plenty of articles waxing poetic on the many successes that have dotted the last four decades for the Cupertino …

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

The last series of the Newton actually worked as advertised, which was a big improvement over all the previous models that didn't. Lots of good ideas that were pretty nifty for the time. Still the best address book function in any mobile device I have ever come across. And I still nurture a grudge about the Newton being cancelled.

Switched over to a Sharp Zaurus eventually which was 'in colour' and more compact, but not as good.

[sebacoustic]

Gulp...

Every time I see a story on the Newton, I feel a pang of sadness, because mine, in a cardboard box with accessories, developer books etc, went to the dump instead of the small "keep" pile, by mistake, during a loft clear out in circa 2006. I loved that machine (N130), despite its many flaws. Apple products ceased to be cool about the time they dropped the rainbow logo.

[Mage]

Newton

Probably Jobs was right to kill Pippin, Clones, Power PC etc. But killing the Newton was a mistake actually.

I doubt Apple will be around in another 40 years, but who knows. Apple may re-invent themselves again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Newton

No matter how badly Apple screws up, they'll still be around in 40 years. They have too much money to simply sink without a trace in that time. They certainly wouldn't be relevant if they went back to their 1985-1997 missteps, but they'd still exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Newton

No matter how badly Apple screws up, they'll still be around in 40 years. They have too much money to simply sink without a trace in that time.

.. as amply demonstrated by Microsoft :).

[Chika]

Re: Newton

.. as amply demonstrated by Microsoft :).

They aren't alone. Actually you could see Microsoft as being at the top of the decline that others such as Nokia or Novell. In all cases, what you see them doing is exactly what Apple's execs did at the time when they were first chucking Jobs out and it might have worked too if those same execs had any real idea when it came to innovation. The trouble is that too many of these companies fall into the hands of beancounters who only see these companies in terms of current sales and have no idea about trying things out, risk and so forth.

The article, for example, mentions Acorn. This was the company that brought the ARM into being (the chip name predated the company by a few years - the original name was the Acorn RISC Machine) and demonstrated its uses in its Archimedes and Risc PC ranges of computers yet, in the midst of preparation for a new machine that could have yet again leapfrogged the competition of the time, they were summarily clobbered by a bunch of beancounters who decided that the future wasn't in that sort of thing. They weren't prepared to risk anything, instead asset-stripping the company then going on their merry way. Acorn didn't stand a chance.

I may not have had much time for Steve Jobs but it can't be denied that Apple is a pale shadow now of what it was a scant four or five years ago and, since you mention it, Microsoft isn't either. Each continues to throw out ideas but without a clear direction other than that dictated by the bottom line which, so it seems, is the only thing a beancounter is interested in.

[GENGHIS7777]

Re: Newton

Microsoft is going through a rejuvenation. It's trying to mature it's new Windows 10 and while it is still under development, MS will be vulnerable. Having said that it's cloud platform, Azure seems to scoring well, and so is Office 365.

The MSFT v AAPL wars can easily get tribal. But that's too simplistic.

[GENGHIS7777]

Re: Newton

In 1996, Apple's Mac OS was reaching the end of its technological life. It needed another OS and was casting around on how to make this happen. It's Mac product range was getting confused and people were moving over to PCs. Ironically the Newton took 5 years to mature but by then it was due for a rewrite too.

Apple was in Triage. It needed a loan from Microsoft, the partial sale of its stake in ARM and the iMac G3, which helped rejuvenate the Mac OS product line in 1998 until OS X could come through in 2001, to survive.

You can put the boot into Microsoft, but actually the challenges Apple and other tech companies face, at a certain level, are remarkably similar. Sooner or later your base technologies get long in the tooth and then you've got to cast around for a replacement. Hopefully you can do it while cash flow is good.

Further irony: the tech platform closest to the Newton in usability (HWR, stylus support, portability) is Windows 10 and the Asus Vivotab or Lenovo 8" ThinkPad tablets.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Newton

Looking forward both Apple and Slurp could disappear for different reasons most likely. A couple of key blunders, coupled with a few years of massive losses and either could be gone.

My sense Apple is less vulnerable because they provide the key components to an entire ecosystem including hardware. As long as there is a demand for the ecosystem Apple is probably in good shape. Hardware will wear out and need to be replaced and that represents potential repeat sales to Apple.

Slurp is primarily an OS and software vendor. They are more vulnerable to shifts in software usage such as large migration to cloud/SaaS options where the underlying OS is unimportant. Slurp is not primary provider of the hardware used in their ecosystem so they are vulnerable to OEM defections to another OS (the current alternative is Linux). Also, the value of software and the ability to force users to replace it is more tied to hardware life cycles going forward than to new releases. User software and OSes are generally mature products that does wear out like a microwave will. Old software, if one can still run it, will do what was designed to do when it was released just the same as when it was released.

[Naughtyhorse]

Re: 1985-1997 missteps???

Have you seen any of the tat they have produced in the last few years?

If they fell into a barrel of tits they would come out sucking their thumbs!

By all accounts St. Jobs was a nightmare to deal with, but you have to grudgingly admit he really knew what he was about - or at least stood his ground even if he was wrong!. Everyone else at 1 infinite loop (what an appropriate address) not so much, I guess the last person Jobs would consider working for was Jobs.

As an anti fanboi the last few years have been very entertaining, as they dropped the ball time and time again. It's going to catch up with them soon.

As far as I can see, it's just a question of how long it takes them to burn through that (mahoosive) pile of cash they are sitting on.

[Palpy]

Re: 1985-1997 missteps???

Well, the thing is, Apple is not burning through their pile of cash at the moment, they are adding to it. Net profit for the last quarter of 2015 was $11.1 billion.

"The Company posted quarterly revenue of $51.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.1 billion, or $1.96 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $42.1 billion and net profit of $8.5 billion, or $1.42 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 39.9 percent compared to 38 percent in the year-ago quarter."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 1985-1997 missteps???

Have you seen any of the tat they have produced in the last few years?

If they fell into a barrel of tits they would come out sucking their thumbs!

By all accounts St. Jobs was a nightmare to deal with, but you have to grudgingly admit he really knew what he was about - or at least stood his ground even if he was wrong!. Everyone else at 1 infinite loop (what an appropriate address) not so much, I guess the last person Jobs would consider working for was Jobs.

I'd be careful with confirmation bias. Steve Jobs made mistakes too, but they were somewhat less enthusiastically advertised :).

[Dan 55]

Re: Newton

Worth noting that Apple killed Power PC in 2006 but it seems much earlier in the article. Jobs returned in 1997 so he took a while to get round to it.

[admiraljkb]

Re: Newton

"I doubt Apple will be around in another 40 years, but who knows. Apple may re-invent themselves again."

Actually, Apple has so much money right now, that if they ceased operations altogether, laid off all engineering and sales staff they'd still be around, and probably even bigger in 40 years as an international investment bank.

[Anonymous Coward]

That hockey puck mouse

I confess that I found the hockey puck mouse to be very 'hand-friendly'. Indeed, it's been one of my favourite mice over the years.

There's nothing unusual about my right hand so I have no idea what I was doing wrong.

[TeeCee]

Re: That hockey puck mouse

You're holding it right.

[Dan 55]

Re: That hockey puck mouse

I've never known any mouse from Apple after the turnaround (puck, mighty, magic) to be actually usable. Is it so difficult to bundle something that works and lasts like a cheapy Logitech?

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: That hockey puck mouse

*Did you use your machine once a month?

They are the worst designed mouse I have ever used, combined with MacOS9 working in a computer shop when nothing we sold was Apple. I have also just realised I could have replaced it with a free Special Reserve Mouse (Only 8 reddies), didn't realise they were USB and never thought to check. I still want to beat any of those stupid machines with a baseball bat (Blasted bomb icon appearing when attempting to save stock take details at 2AM in the morning!).

*Warning I am a biased person when it comes to Apple devices, don't take it personally.

[Ivan Headache]

Same here.

My other mac - an aging (but still very robust) Power Macintosh G3, is chuntering away behind me scanning Trannies from the 80s with its SCSI connected slide scanner. My interface with it is via a much maligned hockey-puck.

Like AC above, I find it so easy and natural to use and can honestly say it has never given me any hand problems at all - it it had done I wouldn't still be using it everyday.

[PhillW]

Re: Same here.

Which website are you putting the scans up on!!!!!

[Anonymous Blowhard]

Re: Same here.

Big fan of the Ford Transit eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Newton fishing

There was something fishy about the departure of the Newton. Didn't Microsoft give Apple a pile of money about that time? Was the demise of the newton anything to do with that?

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Newton fishing

The Newton was conceived "when Steve was away". Ergo a bad idea per definitionem.

Bit of a PHB moment there for Steve, actually.

[O RLY]

Re: Newton fishing

Didn't Jobs kill the Newton because of the stylus? That's what the Isaacson biography says, I think.

And that story was part of the Apple Pencil launch snark.

[Kristian Walsh]

Re: Newton fishing

Newton was first spun out into a standalone subsidiary of Apple, called Newton, Inc (Claris was similarly split out); later, it was "spun-in" to Apple again, mainly so that Jobs could shut it down.

Newton's last product line was "eMate" a small laptop form-factor aimed at the US school market (and a forerunner of the design language that would appear with PowerBookG3/iMac/iBook). It did okay, and looked like opening a new market, but maybe someone in Apple saw it as a threat to Apple's own, higher margin, computer sales into that market.

But the big benefit of Newton was the investment in ARM Holdings. There were only two things that kept the company running through 1997: income from the ARM shares and the $400M settlement/investment from Microsoft.

I briefly worked on the "Tanzania" 4400-series PowerMacs - I wouldn't class it as a failure, though. By the standards of the time, it actually sold well. More importantly, it provided a lot of experience about reducing Apple's dependence on expensive components, particularly its reliance on SCSI for mass-storage; a year later, iMac arrived, with many of the same PC-parts-bin bits inside, just in a fancier case.

The hardware "failures" had all occurred before the likes of the 4400 came out. The real damage to Apple was done by the bewildering "Performa" range, where some were decent, and others were complete dogs, and even people inside Apple had trouble remembering which was which.

[Sgt_Oddball]

Apple peripherals....

Why is it when apple manage to make one good peripheral they bugger up the other one?

The iMac keyboard was alright and the inbuilt USB hub was clever, but that bloody mouse.... Then they fixed the mouse by the g5's power macs and instead made a keyboard without a rest that had almost an inch if lift before a quite steep curve. They bugger your wrists up something rotten.

Now they've moved onto having a wireless uber short stroke keyboard that feels numb to use its very odd.

Say what you will about ms they know how to make peripherals (I've got a 12+ optical mouse that still works just fine and the comfort keyboard I used to have lived upto it's name)

[I Like Heckling]

Re: Apple peripherals....

I still use my old 5 button MS optical mouse that's around 3yrs old now, still working perfectly and currently attached to my mediaserver.

In the drawer next to me I still have my 13yr old MS keyboard that still works perfectly despite being repeatedly stripped down and the top half put through the shower to clean it out every few months... In fact I'm wondering why it's in the drawer and not attached to the media server instead of the dreadful £4 Tesco POS........

BRB

OK... that's sorted that out.

Microsoft USED to make fantastic durable peripherals... from what I hear today. They're not as good as they used to be... But then neither is the software they try to force upon you.

[RNixon]

Re: Apple peripherals....

I use the wired Apple flat keyboard and rather like it. It did take me a while to get used to it, of course, but typing on a long-stroke keyboard irks me now.

Logitech also make some similar keyboards (the term for the things is 'scissor action' because of the frame that holds the keycap).

I won't get near an Apple mouse, though. I use a Kensington ExpertMouse. Which isn't a mouse at all, it's a trackball.

The big problem with the flat Apple keyboards is that they just can't be taken apart to clean them. So if you spill a Coke on it, that's the end of that.

[Stevie]

Bah!

The problem that killed off the Newton prematurely was the fast spreading stories concerning the handwriting recognition's legendary ability to take anything you tried to write and morph it into something almost but not entirely unlike anything you intended.

I was told by a Palm insider some years ago that had Mr Jobs not insisted on the handwriting recognition the Newton would have shipped with Graffiti, the bedrock on which Palm later built a monster. Imagine the consequences of that.

And though almost everyone who saw Graffiti in use thought it difficult to use, just about everyone who actually tried it found to their surprise that it was intuitive and easy. I owned a Handspring Visor and loved the way I could hold a conversation with someone and take minutes without looking at the screen or my hands and end up with a readable and accurate record of whatever was being discussed.

Had the Newton been fitted with Graffiti instead of handwriting recognition as its primary screen-to-text mechanism it not only would have lived longer it might well have prospered. I might even have owned one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bah!

Mr Jobs was not there when the Newton was launched!

So can't be blamed for the hand writing, he actually hated the Newton calling it "that scribbley thing"

One of the first things he did on his return was kill off the Newton

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bah!

If the Newton had lived, Apple would have been handicapped by "Newton compatibility" when they came out with the iPhone. Can you imagine compromising its design to include a pen and support for writing those stupid chicken scratches?

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Bah!

Nope. I think you are confusing the Newton and the Palm PC.

Palm used a pen and Grafitti handwriting (a modified alphabet you needed to learn) to input data. "Stupid chicken scratches" is a very good description of that. The Newton would learn to recognize its users handwriting. Like I posted above, one of the things that worked in the last series (but not in the first*, second,...). The pen was needed because the touchscreens we have today were not around yet. There is no reason to assume the handwriting recognition couldn't have been ported to a finger-sensitive screen.

*It really was a lot like this. Drove you mad when you wanted to get stuff done, good fun at parties.

[Chika]

Re: Bah!

The problem that killed off the Newton prematurely was the fast spreading stories concerning the handwriting recognition's legendary ability to take anything you tried to write and morph it into something almost but not entirely unlike anything you intended.

I wondered about that. Was it that Newtons were so bad, or was it bad press on the back of the atrocious Amstrad device that was released a few months before it?

[dajames]

Re: Bah!

The problem that killed off the Newton prematurely was the fast spreading stories concerning the handwriting recognition's legendary ability to take anything you tried to write and morph it into something almost but not entirely unlike anything you intended.

The Newton was supposed to adapt its handwriting recognition software to match the writing of the user and -- I'm told by who had a Newton -- it did that rather well.

The stories came about because most people who tried the Newton's handwriting recognition did so in shops by playing with the Newton on display. That Newton had just spent the last week adapting its recognition software to a different user every five minutes, and was consequently barely able to recognize a straight line. It would have worked better after a factory reset!

[Stevie]

Re: Bah!

The stories came about because most people who tried the Newton's handwriting recognition did so in shops

Well, much damage must have been done by the Doonesbury plot line that had Mike buying one and then failing to get it to record anything accurately. I don't imagine Trudeau did that from anything but personal experience.

I bought something in a New York musicians store years ago and all the sales were conducted using Newtons. They seemed to have no problem, but they were using what would be now called an App.

[The First Dave]

Re: Graffiittii

Grafiti was fine once you got used to it for the basic alphabet, but the strokes needed for _any_ of the punctuation characters, or say a £ sign, were impossible to remember, and generally quite difficult to execute even when looking at the crib sheet.

[Stevie]

Re: Graffiittii

Of course, everyone who has pointed out that SJ was not at Apple during the Newton era is right. My memory is obviously at fault on that detail, but I do remember being told that the Graffiti product was a Newton-born affair that was discarded.

Discarded Ideas drove a bunch of portable device innovations - the Handspring Visor was made by people who left Palm when 3COM took over and had a differing vision of the Future of the Handheld Device.

Mea Culpa on the erroneous SJ blaming.

[jamesb2147]

So many gaffes

Decisions, decisions... What about refusing to let developers build apps for the iPhone for the first year or two? Or that crap "music phone" from Motorola that ran "iTunes" in some f'ed up Java mobile environment? Or blatantly violating labor law in the US by masterminding an illegal conspiracy among tech companies not to poach each others' employees (it still amazes me that so many CEO's went along with this... they deserve to be in prison and the behavior needs to be discouraged)? There are many more than are listed in this article.

[Dave 126]

Re: So many gaffes

> What about refusing to let developers build apps for the iPhone for the first year or two?

What about it? It didn't hurt the adoption of the iPhone by the people Apple wanted to buy it. Remember that the 1st gen iPhone was not great compared to the second version with 3G - the first iPhone had too many compromises, but it acted as a good statement of intent.

>Or that crap "music phone" from Motorola that ran "iTunes" in some f'ed up Java mobile environment?

Again, what damage did it do Apple? Not many people bought them, and if anything it might have been useful to Apple in muddying the waters around the 'Apple phone' rumours. This was at a time when most phones from Sony Ericcson, Samsung and Nokia didn't even provide a 3.5mm headphone socket, cos you were supposed to use whatever headset the phone shipped with. Urgh. Samsung were competing on the 'worlds thinnest' slider and candy bar, Motorola were competing on fancy materials, SE were using their Walkman and Cybershot branding, Nokia seemed a bit confused...

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: So many gaffes

Hmm, well put - I guess that's why I didn't buy a first generation iPhone.

I actually wanted a phone. not a statement of intent.

[Dave 126]

Re: So many gaffes

It's just a MK I thing.

- First Ipod: FireWire only, Mac only. 'Only' 5GB. Three times the price of a MD player.

- First iPhone - no 3G

- First iPad - didn't receive nearly as many OS updates as the MK II product.

It isn't just an Apple thing. Sony, internally, saw product range lifespans as being like a day, from sunrise to sunset. Mk I was 'build it any way you can'. MK II was the 'iconic' version being more refined, and bought by more people than just the first adopters. Sony would then produce themes and variations. And yes, Steve Jobs had a friendly relationship with the tops executives at Sony. In turn, the father of the Playstation and VAIO was a fan of Essingler's Mac design languag, and Sony's design team would use Macs. (Source: Digital Dreams. The Work of the Sony Design Centre - ISBN: Google it yourself)

What we forget in the UK is that Apple only sold the iPhone through one network, and insisted that they didn't take the piss on data charges.

[werdsmith]

Re: So many gaffes

Refusing to let developers build iPhone apps for the first year or two cost them a year or two of app store revenue. Not that they needed it, but being a corporate they would still have wanted that money.

[macjules]

Clones and eWorld

So you were not going to mention the Daystar Genesis then I guess in the Apple Clones section? One of the true success stories of Apple's 'wilderness years' and certainly the best 'Mac' of the period. Very pricey indeed, but then again it introduced multi-processing to Macs .. in 1995 and by God it was fast. Able to have its processors very easily upgraded and coupled (in 1997) with 7.61, which was Apple's final version of Copeland and the only OS to record less than 17 known bugs, it was an absolutely amazing computer.

As unmitigated, complete disasters go you should have mentioned eWorld: Gil Amelio's 1994 'answer' to AOL and CompuServe. It was supposed to be a 'village' for Mac users as a replacement for AppleLink, took forever to load up (if at all) and, get this, it cost a (then) staggering $8.95 a month in order to REDUCE demand. Well, that worked so well that it never got any demand at all: something that should have been warning bells to all at Apple about Amelio.

[Rich 11]

Re: Clones and eWorld

the only OS to record less than 17 known bugs

Maybe that was because so few people used it that so few bugs were uncovered...

[TheOtherHobbes]

Re: Clones and eWorld

I've always been baffled by Amelio's time at Apple. He's a very smart guy with a solid track record, and unlike a lot of America's Finest Idiot CEOs[tm] he's done just fine with most of his projects.

But not at Apple. At Apple he did really stupid things.

I don't entirely understand how or why.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Clones and eWorld

But not at Apple. At Apple he did really stupid things.

I don't entirely understand how or why.

You seem to be forgetting the Reality Distortion Field^(tm)

[Dave 126]

Clones

Jobs killed off the Mac clone program, but he was willing to make an exception for Sony VAIOs. Sony, however, had already invested too much time Windows VAIOs to switch to OSX.

http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.html

[VinceH]

"So, the next time you want to have a laugh at Newton's expense, be sure to also thank it for the chip powering your smartphone."

I'd much rather thank Acorn for that since - as you mention in the article - it was their baby.

[Dave 126]

>I'd much rather thank Acorn for that since - as you mention in the article - it was their baby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings#Founding

The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology. The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for their Newton project. Its first profitable year was 1993.

And as the article notes, Acorn weren't the only RISC designers in town at the time, but were cheaper than the competition.

[MOV r0,r0]

No Dave, the microprocessor - not the company! Article mentions ARM in the context of being a chip so VinceH is correct. Steve Furber's micro architecture, Sophie Wilson's instruction set, all implemented by Acorn engineers.

ARM-as-company-not-acronym came much later and the 'We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make' company has long since sold all their 40% stake in them.

[VinceH]

@MOV r0,r0

Indeed. The company being formed was roughly five and a half years after the first ARM processor ran its first piece of code - and the project started about a year and a half before that, a whole seven years before the company was formed.

[MOV r0,r0]

Quite so @VinceH. Dave 126 is right that Acorn weren't the only the designers but they were the only choice. Lowest power, best MIPS/W, room on die for MMU and I guess being the lowest price didn't hurt. Could have got I/O and video on die too if required - already done that previously with ARM250: add 'world's first commercially available SoC' to 'world's first commercially available RISC desktop PC' then? :)

Way to go Acorn, we miss ya!

[Martin an gof]

Way to go Acorn, we miss ya!

My RiscPC is still in daily use, albeit almost exclusively for email and the occasional use of Impression. I'm about to start looking seriously at RiscOS on the Pi, too, for various reasons...

By the way, have you all seen this post by ARM? The image at the bottom of the page is rather beautiful.

M.

[Chika]

My RiscPC is still in daily use, albeit almost exclusively for email and the occasional use of Impression. I'm about to start looking seriously at RiscOS on the Pi, too, for various reasons...

You really should! I've been having fun on my RISC OS Pi (Haruka) though I haven't yet tried porting my email across from Miyuki or Madoka yet - I still miss !Pluto for email. I was thinking about building a RISC OS setup inside a Phoebe case I have sitting around but that's for another time!

Just waiting to see how things go about getting RISC OS to work on a Pi 3. That'll be interesting!

[Martin an gof]

I still miss !Pluto for email

Always been a Messenger shop, mine. In fact I have the server version, which serves email to all the other computers in the house... though Claws (the preferred client on Raspbian) doesn't talk nicely to Messenger, and while Thunderbird worked fine on the other Linux machine (I now use Kmail), on the Mac it sometimes fails to open mails with attachments.

That said, a 200MHz StongARM with 80MB RAM isn't the world's fastest email server, and it does find it difficult to cope with larger email attachments, so my next step is probably going to be migrating the function either to another Pi, or possibly to a jail on my FreeNAS box.

Never let it be said that I'm an impulsive sort ;-)

M.

[werdsmith]

"Just waiting to see how things go about getting RISC OS to work on a Pi 3. That'll be interesting!"

Not very, because I don't think it that as it stands at the moment it can't make use of the four cores in the CPU, just spins along on one of them. So you might as well just get a zero for £4 and use the Pi3 for something more appropriate.

[Captain Queeg]

MobileMe

I can't believe I've read this far an not seen MobileMe mentioned.

For me, stuff that works well is Great, stuff that doesn't work is bad but nothing is worse than things that might work, but only if the wind is the right direction and certainly not anytime you /really/ need it to have done.

It's like owning (say) a Morris Marina back in the day. Better to take a bus and plan your commute rather than have the Marina play up 15% of the time and randomly ruin your commutes.

MobileMe was rubbish. Nothing more or less and it took Apple a long time to get sync reliably working, which Google had made to look so easy.

iCloud is much better but still not infallible.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Don't feel too bad for the PowerPC, however. It has enjoyed a fine life post-Apple as its descendants would be used for both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, as well as IBM's Power server line.

...and tons of embedded devices, in particular cars, in various licensed forms (which, I hear, actually means that most of these have special features that make then not fully compatible, leading to rapidly aging developers).

There is even radiation-hardended versions out there: RAD750 etc.

[Destroy All Monsters]

The sad part is....

...that Steve scamming the other Steve out of a couple of hundred dollars for his Atari hardware by upgrading the price asked in secret turned out to have no consequence at all.

Karma theory falsified!

[Dave 126]

Re: The sad part is....

And yet Woz ended up with so much money that he was giving it away.

There are various ways of looking at morality, but if you start throwing figures at the question then we might be inclined to look at it in a pragmatic fashion.

If someone steals my wallet containing £20 but after a few years gives me a suitcase full of cash, I'm not sure that I would be too negative towards them. I guess it depends on the context, such as if I was going to use that £20 to take a lovely lady on a date.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah...

Iwakura Lain from the ~1995's anime Serial Experiments: Lain in front her newly bought NAVI running "Copland OS Enterprise" (the animation looks a bit awkward for modern tastes ;_; )

[Chika]

Re: Oh yeah...

Iwakura Lain from the ~1995's anime Serial Experiments: Lain in front her newly bought NAVI running "Copland OS Enterprise" (the animation looks a bit awkward for modern tastes ;_; )

Good grief I'd forgotten about that! I'll have to dig my copy out - it was a bit of a slog to watch unless you were really in the mood! Mind you the Japanese have quite a sense of humour with that sort of thing (an example was in one of the Pretty Sammy episodes where we see a Pineapple computer, if memory serves...)

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you unable to watch "El Reg Videos" for some reason (don't know why since meaningful debugging information seems to have gone out of fashion back when Bush announced "Mission Accomplished", or maybe even earlier, maybe when Clinton stained dresses), the Apple/Microsoft love-in is here:

Macworld Boston 1997-Full Version

Jobs: "We believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser" (Public voices: "BOOOH!!", Jobs seems to be sweating somewhat)

Jobs: "We gonna be collaborating with Microsoft on Java (WTF am I even hearing?)

Jobs: "I am happy to have a special guest with me today... via satellite downlink ... and I'm gonna get him up on stage right now" (after several seconds, Darth Vader appears on-screen...)

[Destroy All Monsters]

My preciousss!!

That AT&T RISC CPU: the Hobbit.

According to Jimbo's bag of unbelievable tidbits:

However, the Hobbit-based Newton was never produced. According to Larry Tesler, "The Hobbit was rife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced. We balked after AT&T demanded not one but several million more dollars in development fees."[5] Apple dropped their interest in the Hobbit and moved on to help form Advanced RISC Machines, ARM, with a $2.5 million investment. When the company sold their stake in ARM years later, they netted $800 million.

And a very interesting note:

One interesting side effect of the Hobbit design was that it inspired designers of the Dis virtual machine (an offshoot of Plan 9) to use a memory-to-memory-based system that more closely matched the internal register-based workings of real-world processors. They found, as RISC designers would have expected, that without a load-store design it was difficult to improve the instruction pipeline and thereby operate at higher speeds. They felt that all future processors would thus move to a load-store design, and built Inferno to reflect this. In contrast, Java and .NET virtual machines are stack based, a side effect of being designed by language programmers as opposed to chip designers. Translating from a stack-based language to a register-based assembly language is a "heavyweight" operation; Java's virtual machine and compiler are many times larger and slower than the Dis virtual machine and the Limbo (the most common language compiled for Dis) compiler. Android's Dalvik virtual machine, the Parrot virtual machine and Lua virtual machine are also register-based.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: My preciousss!!

> "The Hobbit was rife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced.

> We balked after AT&T demanded not one but several million more dollars

> in development fees."

Meanwhile, the Active Book Company - a Cambridge startup whose product was something like a real hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy - jumped FROM arm TO hobbit, for bizzare reasons now forgotten. Doom followed soon after.

[MOV r0,r0]

Re: My preciousss!!

'When the company sold their stake in ARM years later, they netted $800 million.'

Yep, sold for a tenth of its current market cap (40% stake, over $8B now). Also, 'We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies blah blah blah'.

Oopsie.

[sleepy]

The $150M rescue by Gates

Although the $150M got the publicity, it wasn't actually that important. The most important thing for Apple was a public commitment from Microsoft to support Office for Mac into the future. Without it, buying a new Mac looked a flakey proposition at the time. For Microsoft there was a big payoff too: if Apple could survive against the PC, then Windows couldn't be proved to be a monopoly. MS needed Apple to survive to keep the government off their backs. Yes, Office for Mac was profitable, but not as profitable as letting Apple die, if they could be sure of not being broken up by the government. This was obvious at the time, but for some reason, not to journalists.

[Dave 126]

Re: The $150M rescue by Gates

>This was obvious at the time, but for some reason, not to journalists.

Hehehe! I remember reading at the time, in a dead-tree edition of Wired, "Twenty Things Apple Must Do To Survive" or somesuch title. Jobs then did the opposite of damn-near everything Wired recommended, and the bottom line has vindicated him.

( Recently Wired.com has blocked articles unless I turn off my adblocker - I stopped visiting Wired, which is a shame cos it's good for a laugh from time to time. Curiously, I didn't have a complete adblocker extension running - I see all the Reg ads - but I do have Ghostery installed. )

[sleepy]

No apps on the first iPhone

Commentators seem ridiculously naive about the statements of Steve Jobs and other spokespersons. Take for example the screen size of both the iPhone and the first iPad. Apple for a long time acted as though they were the "correct" size and other sizes were silly. It was just a pretense, of course. It directed competitors aside to easy pickings at other sizes. This accelerated the growth the smartphone and tablet markets without making much profit or competing head to head, and it enabled IOS app writers to perfect their UI's. (Samsung's position was more complicated)

"No third party apps" on the original iphone has been projected as a "mistake" both inside and outside Apple. But both at the time, and in retrospect, security was by far and away the most important thing for Apple to nail down for a permanently network attached iPhone. That's why the only official way to program it was Javascript. This recruited for Apple an army of unpaid hackers to find the security flaws and thus "jailbreak". I think this hacking was deliberately encouraged. Apple used old versions of open source software with known exploits to expedite the jailbreaking cat and mouse game. When the app store finally came, IOS was a secure place to make a lot of money selling apps for a dollar or two, making IOS the platform of choice for developers, despite the greater number of Android devices.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No apps on the first iPhone

An IT-and-praxeology knowledgeable Zbigniew Brzezinski in the boardroom? It is more likely than you think.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Apple 'mistake' that everyone gets wrong?

"It came down to two possible chips, one built by AT&T and another built by UK company Acorn"

Rather more "designed by Acorn" - back then, the ARM CPU was built by VLSI to an Acorn design. Acorn never had a semiconductor fab of its own.

[Anonymous Coward]

Must You?

....Dear, Sweet Vulture, dredge up the 80's and 90's every bloody chance you get? There was nothing fun or compelling or cool about computing at the time; we simply did the best we could with what we had on hand. Hence, Lionel Ritchie and the Walkman. Perhaps, some dark and distant day our Descendants will forgive us our daily sins. Unlikely if the Reg continues to post those awful little photos of Jobs and his awful little hairdos. The "PC/Mac Battle of the Non-Networked Stars"? The predecessor to all the little Tard Fights that now characterize much of the Internet and its underlying infrastructure and/or Corporate Masters. Microsoft and Apple (And Oracle and IBM and Facebook and Google and and and....) won, We lost. We have a vast, autonomous, decentralized Pavlovian-Based Brain-Killer that Sherwood Schwartz and Aaron Spelling could only have dreamt of.

[Halfmad]

Linux and Windows fan here but give Apple credit..

I think you're being a little harsh, I supported Macs during most of the 90s and into the early 00s and the PowerPC, hockey puck mouse etc were all incredibly popular in local schools here. They were reliable and in the case of the mouse extremely good, colourful and different which interested the kids, the alternative was the beige Dells we had at the time. The only downside was the cost of replacement parts and failure rate of PSUs but a lot of younger kids didn't get near a PC until they were 10+, with Macs staff were happy to let the kids have a play from the age of 4 in a nursery (hence me removing lollypops form CD drives almost weekly).

Each to their own but personally I'm not a brand-loyalty person, I'll flip-flop between OS and product based on what fits my need (and is best value for money) but I do think having a dig over the hockey puck mouse is a little daft when it did the job and was at least trying to be different at a time when everything was beige and the same damn shape!

[P. Lee]

Mac Gui on Solaris?

I wonder if that would have saved Sun from Oracle? An excellent GUI on workstation-class early on might have seen Window off.

Not that BSD or Mach aren't fine, its just that there was a time when Solaris had the midrange and an GUI on Solaris X86 might have allowed it to clean up on the desktop too. I feel sad for Sun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mac Gui on Solaris?

A/UX was something of an attempt, killed off by high costs and relatively high hardware requirements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Power PC not so bad

The Power PC processors were a step ahead of the Intel offerings of the time.

However they didn't get the volume and the chips stayed expensive.

It's one of the "if only's" of computing history - if only windows NT on PPC wasn't so dire (absence of 3rd party software, quite reminiscent of the underlying reasons for desktop Linux not making it to the mainstream).