Schiller Says Apple Is the Last PC Maker From the Mac Era, Forgets About HP 474
An anonymous reader writes "Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, recently claimed that Apple is the only computer company left from the early days of the Mac. Unfortunately for him, HP still exists. "Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone," Schiller told Macworld in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus. 'We're the only one left.' I'm sorry Apple, but when exactly did HP declare bankruptcy? We contacted an HP spokesperson for a statement on Apple's ridiculous claim and were pointed to its timeline history page."
Re:And IBM (Score:1, Informative)
Nope. IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo about a decade ago.
And Dell (Score:3, Informative)
Michael Dell started assembling and selling PCs from his dorm room in 1984, the same year the first Macintosh was made.
Re:!HP (Score:3, Informative)
Woz is alive. Jobs has passed.
It USED to be Agilent... (Score:5, Informative)
They just split the company yet again, and the electronics test/measurement operations (the descendant of the original HP business) got rebranded as "Keysight Technologies":
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/... [nasdaq.com]
A company called "Hewlett-Packard" still exists, but they sell printers and PCs. Nothing to do with the company that Bill and Dave started in the Palo Alto garage....
Re:He is probably correct (Score:2, Informative)
Agilent. Aligent is something else.
Re:According to the history page... (Score:5, Informative)
Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Panasonic were Japanese electronics manufacturers making MSX-based personal computers in 1983 before the Mac was released and they're still manufacturing PCs today.
A couple of others, one well known, one not so. (Score:5, Informative)
The title is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
The quote is
"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone, we're the only one left. We're still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over." said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing
As far as making personal computers before Apple and still doing it, I think it's a stretch to count HP because of a calculator, and I'm not even counting HP's attempt to get out of the PC market recently. The HP-150 that came out after they started working on the Mac... is that even in the same ballgame as the 1984 Mac, I don't think so.
Apple started on the Mac in 1980 from what I can tell.
The nitpicking is really skewing his point - HP is ALSO still around because they've had to reinvent themselves over and over.
Re:Only Toshiba (Score:5, Informative)
Sony Viao L-series all-in-one desktops PCs.
http://www.sony.co.uk/product/... [sony.co.uk]
Fujitsu (no longer Fujitsu-Siemens) Esprimo desktop PCs.
http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/prod... [fujitsu.com]
Panasonic tablet-based PCs running Windows 8.1
http://www.panasonic.com/busin... [panasonic.com]
Re:!HP (Score:4, Informative)
Schiller's wrong, but HP isn't the company which exists from that era. It's Compaq, they just call themselves HP.
Re:Oh (Score:5, Informative)
IBM don't make PCs any more
That's funny, because I see them selling workstations and tower servers [ibm.com]. Those are PCs.
Dell started 8 years after Apple (and after the Mac)
Dell traces its origins to 1984, when Michael Dell created PC's Limited while a student of the University of Texas at Austin. The dorm-room headquartered company sold IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components. [wikipedia.org]
Acer started 13 years after Apple (and after the Mac)
The Micro-Professor MPF-I, introduced in 1981 by Multitech (which, in 1987, changed its name to Acer) [wikipedia.org]
NEC don't make PCs any more
Really? [nec.com]
Sony made their first PC 7 years after Apple (and after the Mac)
Really? [wikipedia.org]
Cray never made PCs
"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone"
Fujitsu only started making PCs 14 years after Apple (and after the Mac)
In 1954, Fujitsu manufactured Japan's first computer, the FACOM 100, and in 1961 launched the transistorized FACOM 222. [wikipedia.org]
FM-7 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Oh (Score:5, Informative)
IBM just announced Lenovo is purchasing the server business, so... that correction is false at least. The Dell one is too, since Dell started in late 1984, nearly a year after the first mac shipped.
The rest check out. The MSX is of particular note, as it's the platform (MSX2) where the Metal Gear videogame franchise started. Unfortunately, most people are more familiar with the later NES port. It was a pretty terrible port with much more primitive graphics and lots of important stuff removed, like, say, the actual metal gear the game is named after.
Re:It USED to be Agilent... (Score:4, Informative)
Apple is currently manufacturing the new Mac Pro in the US, but it's true that they didn't do any manufacturing themselves for a number of years.
Re:!HP (Score:4, Informative)
The company I worked for back then owned five of them. So I can tell you without a doubt that it was nor just a concept piece.
Re: still exist, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The only non standard part Apple use is the motherboard, everything else is pretty much standard parts, memory, HDD, CPU's, GPU's etc are all stock standard parts available in whatever flavour machine you want Apple or not.
That's not true. They usually use modified versions of standard components. The current MacBook Pro has the RAM and SSD soldered onto the motherboard, and while the CPU is standard it has a custom connector and cooling system that has forced enough physical differences in the chip that it cannot be replaced. Most macs these days don't even have a GPU, they rely on intel's latest integrated ones which are finally pretty decent.
The Mac Pro is the only model Apple sells with fully standard CPU... but the GPU is non-standard, it's made by AMD but is a weird hybrid of two different GPUs that AMD sells, and Apple is the only company who can use it... one of the two GPUs in the mac pro even has a socket on it so you can plug in a bloody PCIe SSD card. On the GPU! They ran out of PCIe lanes on the processor, so the SSD has to share the lane of the second GPU which is actually a sensible choice since it's highly unlikely you will be maxing out the PCIe card (1.5GB/second) at the same time as doing serious computations on the GPU. That definitely is not a standard part.
On iOS apple builds everything themselves, they are famously known to have over 1,000 engineers working on just the CPU for the iPhone. They haven't gone that far with the mac but it's standard procedure to take components from other companies like AMD and Intel and Qualcomm but then modify to suit their own needs.
Re:And IBM (Score:3, Informative)
Apple Computer was rebranded Apple in 2007. It's clearly the same company, and had nothing to do with the launch of the Mac in 1984 - it was rebranding because Apple sells tons of phones and tablets, and not just "computers". And since it's clearly the same company, changing "Apple Computer" to "Apple" doesn't affect whether their claim is correct or not.
To drill into their details:
- "When we started the Mac" was several years before the Mac shipped. Specifically, it was 1978, when the Lisa and Mac both started parallel development as competing teams.
- Clearly when he said "computer" what he was talking about was "personal computer". There are still a few of the mainframe-era companies around and still selling mainframes. But in the early personal computer market, all of Apple's competitors from the early days are out of the business. Remember, Apple's founders left HP to start Apple specifically because HP didn't think personal computers were viable, so I'm pretty sure Apple didn't forget that HP existed. Arguably HP did sell their first personal computer, the incredibly obscure HP-85 starting in 1980 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0029/). Long after Apple Computer was selling the Apple ][, and a few years after the Lisa and Mac projects started.
So IMO if you accept that by "computer" he meant "personal computer" and by "when we started the Mac" he meant when they started working on it, not when it shipped, I think his claim is true.
Re:Oh (Score:5, Informative)
And this is why Slashdot needs a "Wrong" moderation.
a) The quote was specifically "computers", not "PC's"
b) He mentioned HP....but you conveniently ignored that one.
c) Sony made it's first computer (a PC even) in 1982 [sony.net], before the Mac
d) NEC still makes computers (servers)
e) Acer was making PC's in 1983 [wikipedia.org], before the Mac
f) Fujitsu made computers in 1954, and PC's in 1981 [wikipedia.org], before the Mac
But yeah...you were right about IBM & kinda right about Dell (though it could be argued it was just a rename of his PC's Limited...which started in 1984), so I guess 2 out of 8 is a good day for you....