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Apple Businesses

Apple Sale Rumors 166

Posted by CmdrTaco from the theories-and-rumors dept.
zaks writes "I found this ZDNet article on Yahoo, saying that Apple may soon be sold. They attribute the story to "third-party sources close to Apple and its Interim CEO, Steve Jobs". The potential buyers discussed in the article are Disney, TimeWarner, and Viacom. "
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Apple Sale Rumors More

Apple Sale Rumors

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  • Were this DOJ thing not going on, I'm sure MS would be salivating at the prospet of buying up their last competitor. But with the Feds watching, they can't.

    But who says that Apple has to be bought by someone? I say just liquidate the company and all its assetts, divide up the profits among the shareholders and actually end the company's existance. It'll be the last nail in Microsoft's coffin. And MS will will finally receive the punishment it deserves. Apple will have died for a purpose rather than fading into obscurity or being absorbed into an aimless corporate conglomerate.

  • No one seems to have a memory... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What is this, about the 1000th time we've heard this rumor about Apple being sold over the years? And yet a lot of people fall for it and day stuff like "yeah, but this time it sounds real...".

    Rumors of it's sale and/or demise have been going around ever since the Mac came out.

    This is old new...been there, done that. Let's move on. If it IS sold, then sure, that will be news.

  • Anything for a fast buck.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think Apple may be beating the Brooklyn bridge for being the single must sold thing ever....

  • Is it June already? (Score:3)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Saturday June 12, 1999 @12:52PM (#1853303) Homepage
    Well I'll be damned, it is June already. You can always tell because it gets too hot and humid here in the midwest, and rumors that Apple's going to be purchased by Disney start making their rounds.

    I've heard this rumor at least once a year since I was in high school (remember? Before there was a Windows NT? Ahh....). You can almost set your watch by it. Personally, I'll start believing that Apple's going to be bought out when I see some hard information about it, rumors be damned.

    ----

  • "You can modify any page here, and add your questions, answers, and examples of Squeak code". Eeep! We are talking ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System) out there and alive on the Web! How is it that nobody noticed this happening?
    Just looked at the whole main front page. Damn if it isn't the simple truth! Forget 'weblogs', that's tame and tiresome- 'Swikis' are clearly the novel concept. Yes, there are old versions, yes it can be reverted (with a certain amount of tedious cut+paste) from backups in the case of wilful destruction, but by God if it isn't ITS (intentional total lack of) security all over again, with the same social contract and extended trust. I could have tweeked out the HTML all I wanted- that's what it's about. So could you. Of course I didn't- I don't know enough about Squeak to contribute- yet. I hope people get the same shock of recognition that I had, and realize, 'Damn- this _is_ my page! They don't even know who I am but I get to edit the HTML of it anyhow.' I hope whatever slashdotters are slashdotting all these sites (one was already tottering under the load) can understand the freedom of this. It's like the freedom of linux coding only applied to a shared web space. I think this is wonderful. I had no idea anyone was doing anything this daring, this cool.
  • ...for very large values of "interim."
  • The main differences between AltiVec and MMX/SSE/whatever:
    • AltiVec-optimizing compilers on release (I heard CodeWarrior will simply recieve a "Optimize for AltiVec" checkbox in the prefs)
    • AltiVec acceleration of low-level OS tasks (copying, math, etc.)
    • Many more registers, plus some other streamlining inside the processor that MMX/SSE didn't have.


  • Posted by d106ene5:

    Wait until Q1/Q2, when the next version of Mac OS X Server hits (in addition to Client) -- along with dual or quad processor G4s

    This is reminiscient of the spew once heard on the OS/2 advocacy groups. "Wait until...". Whatever. Apple won't be any better position to market to the enterprise once any of this comes into play. Here's why:

    1. Intel boxes are fast enough for 99% of desktop users. "Faster" doesn't turn many heads these days unless you're talking high-end CAD, animation, data mining, etc, and Apple doesn't exist in these markets anyway.

    2. OSX. The last thing IS managers want is to have to integrate yet another OS into the office network. Why would they bother when they can already do anything the Mac would do for them with cheaper Wintel boxes they already administer?

    3. History. Apple has never made a dent in the enterprise market. Those trends are meaningful - are you going to be the brave IS manager who bets the shop on a largely untested OSX platform? Don't give me all this bunk about how NextStep is a proven platform - there is plenty of new code in OSX to merit testing. Apple has never and will never be a piece of the enterprise puzzle.
  • Posted by APrescott:

    Don Crabb has been spreading mis-information about Apple for a long time. Just weeks before Mac OS X Server shipped he was running around screaming that Apple had cancelled it. Why would anyone listen to a word he says anymore?

    I've heard so many Apple take over rumors that I'll believe it when I see it.
  • Posted by Redalert:

    >You can't stand that they've taken your precious >open source model and used it for their benefit, >and are soon going to have as rock-solid an OS >as Linux.

    I think you really need help. Apple doesn't have much to do with open source, and Darwin is another failure waiting to happen. It is not really open source.

    I'm sure if things continue the way they do I'm sure that Apple will be alive five or even ten years from now, but I doubt they will ever rise above 8% of the total market share.

    >Wintel monopoly falls, bleeding, into oblivion >and the Mighty Macintosh takes its rightful

    Again Apple will never takes it place among the mighty. Their market share might grow, my guess is it won't, but even if it does it will never take Intel/AMD. The only thing that could have killed Intel is if Microsoft would have turned most of their work to the Alpha port of NT. Which of course they didn't since x86 controls the market, and will until Merced is released.

    The PowerPC never had a chance and never will. Simply put it isn't good enough, and even IBM realizied this when they decided to sell off most of the line to Apple. Don't you think if people were interested in it you'd see a direct Redhat port of Linux, and Microsoft would have stayed on.
  • Posted by Redalert:

    >actually there are two ppc distributions very >similar to redhat - mklinux >w.mklinux.apple.com) and linuxppc >www.linuxppc.com). you should really check your >acts before making such blatently incorrect >tatements. ppc is a great platform, don't trash >t without good reason.

    I'll trash the PowerPC platform anytime I feel free too. It's a chip that's on the same playing field as the CISC based P6 design. What it's not is a real RISC design. I think you've been reading too much MacKido.

    As for LinuxPPC and MkLinux being based on Redhat that is somewhat true. Actually I'm not so sure about MkLinux, but the other is.

    The problem is that you don't see the port directly from Redhat. You do on the other hand see ports of Alpha, x86, and Sparc. There are a number of ports that are not offical, but none of them are completed enough to use full time. Hell you can't even recompile WordPerfect 8 to run on PowerPC.

    Note:
    The one feature I find attractive about LinuxPPC is that with Sheepshaver you can actually run Mac OS through Linux. Another advantage is that it seems to be rather fast due to the architecture of the processor, but comes no where near Alpha.
  • Posted by lamer_is_my_middle_name:

    Whaddayamean?
    There's already linux for the Mac, both for mk86 and PPC
  • That woud be "Interim CEO for life."


    (Alas, not too original. I stole the line from SportsCenter, where Bud Selig was often referred to as "Acting commissioner for life." Selig was "acting commissioner" of Major League Baseball for several years before becoming the real commissioner recently.)
  • That fool is none other than DOn Crabb, who I believe has said this before. He's also said many other stupiud shit things and thinks he can tell Apple to do whatever he wants. He's full of shit but he just keeps popping up on one crappy site after another. Damn.

  • Despite the fact that they compete with the Wintel complex, Apple is guilty of this too. Their blatantly false adverts about how the original 233MHz iMac was "faster than Intel's fastest PII" (at the time, 400MHz), et cetera are just as bad as any of Intel's P2/3 commercials, which claim everything from "our CPUs let you do all these neat things that the other guy can't" to "the PIII makes the 'net go faster".

    Every time I hear someone complaining about Apple's "blatant false advertising" in the iMac ad, I have to wonder about the reading comprehension of the person making the charge. They did not say the 233MHz iMac was "faster than Intel's fastest PII". If you listen closely, what they actually said was, the processor powering the iMac is up to twice as fast as the fastest Pentium II. Anyone with a brain also knows that the reverse is also true: the Pentium II is up to twice as fast as the PPC G3. That is, I'm sure you can find some benchmark where either of those statements is true. Believe me, if Apple had made a claim which was factually untrue in their advertising, they'd get nailed for it. Or maybe I'm being monumentally naive.
  • "I'm not sure why you're so transfixed on the money issue. While he has stock, he only takes a $1/yr paycheck. All evidence points to the fact that he's not in it for the money."

    On a point of information, as far as I know, Steve Jobs only holds one share of Apple stock in order to keep his family on a health plan. This makes Jobs' motives even trickier to fathom. There is quite a lot of interesting stuff being written about this though, such as Gil Amelio's new book and a couple of corporate histories of Apple.

  • Motorola is fabricating it, but the original champion for adding a vector processor was an engineer at Apple who came up with the original spec. I'm sure Motorola did an awful lot of modifications to it in order to make it feasible.
  • They didn't call it an FPU because it isn't just an FPU, its a vector processor. Floating point units (and integer units) are part of this vector processor but calling it a FPU doesn't define its operation. The G4 or whatever its eventually named will contain an FPU, it will also contain this AltiVec processor which happens to be a vector processor.

    Vector processors are what power the traditional supercomputers like the Cray T90 or the NEC machines. They are capable of performing dot product or vector operations on multiple data in a single cycle. The vector processors on machines like the T90 are much more powerful than AltiVec.

    You are correct on one thing, special code will need to be made to make use of the AltiVec enabled processors but Apple has had the compiler available to the general public for some time now, as well as AltiVec emulators.

    Not all code works well on a vector processor, but the return on investment for code that does is rather stunning. It so happens that a lot of graphical operations do play very nicely on a vector processor.
  • The old software doesn't stop working, or at least the majority of it won't. There will be backwards compatibility, but software running in backwards compatible mode won't make use of the new 'modern' features. Apple has already gone through these exercises at least twice: The original 68K based macs had a 24 bit memory address. Programmers would play tricks and use the otherwise wasted 8 bits for a variety of things. Great... except when 32 bit memory busses were introduced, some of the software that made use of these hacks broke very badly. The next event I know of was the transition from 68K processors to the PowerPC. They wrote a fairly decent 68K emulator. The fastest 68K mac shortly after the introduction of the PowerPC was a PowerPC. It wasn't perfect, some things did break, but by and large it worked.

    Some possibly lesser changes were the introduction of PCI (no backwards compatibility with NuBUS at all) and USB (you can get USB->ADB converters)
  • No, throughout the design of a product the specifications slowly evolve from rough paper tigers to a final specification. Interim specifications aren't released as they're part of the design process and could potentially assist others in either reverse engineering exercises or in avoiding pitfalls in competing projects.

    I'm trying to recall where I originally read this, it was probably a trade magazine like EE times but it wasn't something I thought I'd ever reference again.
  • I was surprised not to see AOL in the list of potential buyers. I wonder if the coffers have finally run dry, or if they're just holding out for a better price. So much for useless conjecture.

    Sean
  • Plus MacOS Rumors [macosrumors.com] already ran this two months ago. Then, it was that Jobs, "real" CEO of Pixar, supposedly wanted Disney to buy Pixar, and "possibly" was interested in selling Apple along with it.

    My bets are on Jobs's ego. He has more ego than anyone else in Silicon Valley, and isn't going to sell Apple for anything (unless Jobs has been replaced by a space alien.) Apple is his baby. He almost went shit nuts when Sculley forced him out.

    He's not going to let someone else be in charge of Apple. Especially since most companies think using what's most conventional and what's most popular is the way to do business.

    Apple's been the biggest innovator in computing for years. If it gets sold to anyone else, it will die.

    J.

  • While I consider it doubtful that the company's going to be bought, the fact that Jobs only draws a $1/yr salary from Apple is not very relevant. The CEO of Netscape also drew only a $1/yr salary, and he didn't have a job at Pixar. But he had stock options from Netscape. To play devil's advocate, it's not entirely irrelevant to remember how Netscape's CEO ultimately made his last batch of money from the company.

    And, while Apple's $6.3B market capitalization is indeed high, that wouldn't be a showstopper for the companies that show up in the variations on this rumor. (Sony has a $40B market capitalization, and Disney a $60B.)

    The question is ultimately whether or not these companies think they'd have something to gain by buying Apple. While Sony and Apple may be targeting similar markets, Apple doesn't fill in any gaps in Sony's product line. (One can argue that Macintoshes are intrinsically more attractive to media creators than Sony PCs, but it's more realistic for Sony to try to give media creators a compelling reason to move to the Vaio line when they outgrow their current computer through interoperability across their video and professional editing lines.) And, while Disney doesn't have a computer line that Apple is competing with, it's questionable as to whether they'd want a computer line. There is no better business case I'm aware of for a "content provider" to market their own computers than there is for a TV network to market their own televisions.

  • Check out the Squeak system, which, oddly enough, was partially written by Disney.

    It gets better. Squeak came out of a research group at Apple, which later moved to Walt Disney Imagineering to keep working on it.

    Colin

  • Yeah, we've all heard this before. Apple is going
    to die/be purchased by [company]/whatever. Much
    as I hate to admit it, Apple is probably going to
    be around in its current guise for quite some time.
    Maybe once MacOS X becomes standard, I can stop
    thinking of the iMacs and new G3s et al. as an
    unmitigated plague upon the face of computing.

    But more importantly, whatever foo at ZD wrote this
    thing is just that, a total fool. He slings buzzwords like "digital video" and "MP3 audio" in an attempt to bolster his bogus speculation. He reveals himself to be under total control of the marketroids as well, with statements such as "how does 60 million polygons a second hit you?". 60Mpolys *is* fast. But I'd wager that if he'd said 6Mpolys instead, his readers would have been just as impressed, despite the fact that every commodity 3D card can push that many polygons. He also seems convinced that AltiVec is somehow relevant. What was that big new thing that Intel was hyping that was supposed to change the way we computed, bringing multimedia pizzaz into everyday tasks and accelerating gaming into the next century? Oh yeah, MMX. And we all know how MMX played out: some games use it, mostly to speed up sound playing and some other mundane tasks, but it had none of the big impact Intel predicted. Moving on, 3DNow! from AMD and Intel's analogous extensions, SSE, are and will continue to be nearly...
  • You're right, no consumer level cards can pump 60MPolys, which was part of my point. However, 6MPolys is well within reach. The Voodoo2 can render 8MPolys, I believe, and the new generation including the TNT2 can push around 12.

    MoNsTeR
  • (posting from lynx, text field length limit)
    ...pointless. True, 3DNow! did allow the K6-2 to *match* the gaming performance of the PII in many cases, but so would have designing that chip with a pipelined FPU (a move that would have improved more than just gaming performance). Note the K7, sporting a 3 fully pipelined FPUs (more than the PPro/2/3), that, when code is properly compiled for it, surges out 30%+ ahead of the P6 core *at the same MHz*. Assuming Intel follows their lead and redesigns their FPU, then 3DNow! and SSE will go to the marketing graveyard along with MMX: used, but never really appreciated. It's not too hard to see that AltiVec will suffer the same fate, unless perhaps Apple's uber-marketroids pull out all the stops...

    But anyway, I've rambled on far too long about multimedia processor extensions, only to show that the author was your average everyday idiot who believes all the marketing. In fact, after reading 2.5 years of Computer Shopper, I'd be inclined to say the same about EVERY Ziff Davis author. There was one CShopper columnist, I believe his name was Eric Grevstadt, who "got it". He wrote about how we don't really need $3,000 desktops and $5,000 laptops to run Word and Excel, how "upgradability" is a phantom feature, since most users never upgrade and upgrading is usually less economical than buying a new PC (for mainstream users, anyway). Knowing that, it's not too hard to understand why Computer Shopper, a publication that thrives on advertisements from vendors selling overpriced, overpowered PCs, didn't like him and gave him the axe. Ziff Davis is in bed with MS, Intel, Dell (et al.), plus any number of other big players in the Wintel PC industry, and they have a vested interest in keeping computing
    expensive, de-empowering, and deceptive to the unwitting user. Despite the fact that they compete with the Wintel complex, Apple is guilty of this too. Their blatantly false adverts about how the original 233MHz iMac was "faster than Intel's fastest PII" (at the time, 400MHz), et cetera are just as bad as any of Intel's P2/3 commercials, which claim everything from "our CPUs let you do all these neat things that the other guy can't" to "the PIII makes the 'net go faster". As a friend of mine adamantly maintains, Disney is one of the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse (MS is another, I forget the other 2), and them gaining another foothold into our lives by acquiring Apple would be a Bad Thing.

    But hey, that's just the great whirlwind that is modern computing. If I said "I wouldn't have it any other way", I'd be lying, but I have come to half-accept it. But the important thing is to understand it, to see through the hype, FUD, and half-truths is more and art than a skill.

    Happy computing.
    MoNsTeR
  • Nope. I just glanced over Apple's site, found quite a few expo talks and white papers. AltiVec, like MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE, is an instruction set extension and needs to be programmed/optimized for.

    Really now, why would they have given a uber-FPU a special name? It would have been far more straightforward and effective to say, "our FPU is really f***ing fast all by itself! you don't need to code in some obscure ISA extension!" Like I said, seeing through the hype is an art. Things with names and campaigns behind them are rarely simple.

    MoNsTeR
  • I don't have all the specs here, and I'm to lazy to reread them anyways. But there's an apples and oranges difference between AltiVec and FPU.

    You might be confising them, because in the Intel world the FPU must be turned OFF when MMX is in use. How is it Intel says MMX is great for 3D is BEYOND me... as far as I am concerned MMX was good for a few PhotoShop extensions. AltiVec does not have this crippling design flaw - with PowerPC the Integer, Floating Point AND "vector processor" (AltiVec) can all run simultaniously.

    Another huge advantage of AltiVec is preexisting applications already support it by way of QuickTime. It wasn't until recently that Microsoft started writing multimedia layers into their OS (although they change name every month...). QuickTime's been around for AGES, and if you accelerate QT with AltiVec everything is going to require much less CPU or simply run faster.

    One last difference between AltiVec and MMX is when you want MMX you must write that code in assembly - x86 Assembly SUCKS compared to just about anything else. Provided compiler support is there, you can use any damn language you want with AltiVec. This is great for quick everything, but it helps those kind souls doing Mac ports of popular open source utilities.

    I didn't even get into benchmarking, because I don't care. Simply because of the bad design of MMX you'll never see large parts of Windows taking advantage of it. Now I wish I had waited on buying my B&W G3 because AltiVec is almost here, but this is the way things work...
  • ...but people are repeating themselves.

    I remember Crabb saying almost the exact same thing back when Apple had roughly 20% of the consumer market.

    These rumors have one major problem, which is that large media conglomerates have little to gain from taking such a MAJOR gamble by purchasing Apple. Hell, most of them are still smarting from their last foray into computers, namely their invasion of the consumer gaming market a few years ago.

    Unless Microsoft is broken up by a DOJ, Apple's chances of becoming the Sony of consumer computers is slim to nothing. Microsoft's marketing machine has too many spin doctors on their side (and industry players won over by them) for that to happen.

    And after working at Viacom for 5 years, I find it hard to believe even the best marketing wonk could overcome the pencil pushers.
  • A few facts: Jobs has stated that he wants Pixar to be as big as, and independant from, Disney, with all the trimmings (theme parks, games, TV, toys, music, etc.) The Pixar/Disney deal is merely a marriage of convenience until Pixar gets known and established enough to be independantly distributed.
    Meanwhile Dreamworks is chafing under M$'s rule, and Katzenberg (late of Disney) is full of rancor for his old employer.
    Jobs is still a friend of his fellow farm-boy, George Lucas, who has just launched one of the most profitable films in history.
    With a few small stretches, this looks extremely promising for animation. Dreamworks kicks out Gates, reforms around Spielburg and Geffen. Spielburg and Lucas hire Katzenburg, lure Jobs over to their side of the Force, bringing Pixar over. Together they buy Apple, meaning that they not only have control over the whole means of producing movies, but even the computers used to produce the special effects, the game software, the light shows at the new Pixar theme park, etc. Disney finds itself up against a studio that makes FAR better movies than Prince of Egypt, and the Cosmic Balance is restored.
    AMEN! and pass the popcorn.
  • ok as long as Microsoft kills Windows too. I'm sick of crashing and a terribly thought out design and I'm sick of people promoting it as the greatest thing in the world and screwing those who don't agree.
  • bankruptcy? You have no idea what you are talking about! Apple still had over a Billion dollars of completely liquid assets (cash), without debt, at their worst point. Microsoft bought 150 million dollars worth of non-voting Apple stock, all in all that was chump. That 150 mil was part of a larger settlement (I think it was in the order of 600 million) that Microsoft HAD to pay Apple for stealing the Quicktime code. Apple would still be alive for years to come loosing money every quarter if they wanted to. They were never really in trouble, just in the case of public preception.
  • not to dispute your original point but, to my knowledge NOTHING renders 60million polygons per second. I believe that you may be able to find around 6 million or so with some oxy cards or doubtfully some tnt2 stuff, but that's it. If i'm wrong please tell me where to buy...
  • While AltiVec is being hyped by Apple, it is really a Motorola creation. As you known, IBM and Motorola have a philosophical disagreement wrt to the PowerPC architecture; IBM wants simplicity and pure speed, while Motorola wants the additional SIMD instruction set.

    AltiVec is relevant to the issue at hand (ie. Disney). In terms of audio and video processing (we're talking multimedia, not necessarily restricted to gaming), many of the basic algorithms are primarily vector manipulations. Rather than having each individual programmer reinvent the wheel, Motorola, Apple, and others are recoding these essential algorithms using the AltiVec technology. I believed that things like optimized FFT's (audio manipulations), DCT's (video), BLAS (lot's of applications) are or will be available. As for the polygons, I want 60M lighted, textured, Gouraud shaded triangles per second (then I will be really impressed).;-)

    I realize that you are wary of the hype (as one should be), but check out the performance specs [apple.com] for some very useful algorithms. I personally hope that this is not hype. I also wish that AltiVec optimized libraries (e.g., FFT's) become available for LinuxPPC.

    BTW, elsewhere in this thread you comment about the Apple hype concerning the PowerPC performance. IIRC, the integer Byte test results were heavily biased by a single test (bit manipulation?); Apple then reported the "average" test results.
  • Interesting. I guess that I bought into the hype that Motorola was spreading about AltiVec.;-) I always thought that AIM was an "interesting" alliance made up of strange bedfellows.

    Do you know what the original specs were and how much it changed in the actual implementation?

    If this comment starts off as a +2 it is not because of content.
  • From what I remember, MMX/MMX2/SSE was never/will not be supported because it is too hard to code for. You had to use straight assembly code (1010111010011000110001101101) and even then the speed increase was negligable. Even more, the MMX instructions used the same registers as the FPU, and switching modes between MMX and FPU stuff slowed the process way down, and I think thats the way it still is.

    On the other hand, you code Altived in C/C++, which is much easier than assembly, to say the least. And the Altivec unit is its own seperate processor, and doesn't share any registers. the Altivec processor is also much beefier, like 128 bit 200Mhz, etc., etc., etc. More info ( 1 [mackido.com], 2 [mackido.com], and 3 [mackido.com]) at the greatest of insight sites, MacKiDo [mackido.com].

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack

  • Origionally (1996/97) it was not called AltiVec, it was TriMedia, or something. Specifically Philips TriMedia processor(s), a set of three parrallel (sp?) processing prossessors (say that more than twice fast ") that were going to be used to boost 'multimedia' speed. It was really cool stuff, but never panned out. Now this looks even better...

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • Generally, if it's a classic, then you keep it anyway. And if you keep it just to look at it, you don't need to rebuild the engine. If you're going to sell it, why not sell it at a lower cost and not do all the rebuilding sh--tuff?

    I'm not a car guy, and I usually don't get why all these car guys do these car guy things like car guys. Confused yet? I'm always confused. ")

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • Just a couple of minor corrections/clarifications (sp?). While I'm not sure if Jobs sold all his stock or not (any way to find out, people?), I do know that the only reason he takes any salary at all for his iCEO position (which is the aforementioned $1 a year) is so he can get on the company insurance plan, or something like that. On the M$ investment thing, that $150 million stock, Office 98, and some other things was an out of court settlement for some trial concerning Apple's QuickTime, and how M$ wanted to buy it or whatever. One of the big things mentioned at the time was that the shares were nonvoting shares, which isn't actually an 'investment' per se.

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • what a humiliation for Linux to be put on Apple ppcs.

    And it's better to be on some crappy Intel box? Remember kiddies, 2 x 2 = 3.9999999999999998!

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • Well, while I am not sorry for that lack of sleep and caffiene induced rant last night, I could have worded it a bit better if I wasn't so out of my mind at the time from the aforementioned sleep and caffiene issues. What brought it on was that half the posts up there were some version of 'Apple sux!', which does not pertain to the discussion at all. And I do not care what platform you use. That's just as superficial as basing your opinion of someone on what color their skin is or what their religion is. Probably even more superficial.

    I deal with Macs every day, and Windows boxes every day (I work at a computer store). That one guy mentioned that both crash with the same frequency, but Macs get up easier, which is pretty much true, but I don't see Macs die as often. I have almost no experiance with Linux, so I can't give my opinion as to it's reliability, but I still think it's cool. It's the rebellious thing against Windows today that the Mac was against IBM way back when. Like I said before, I still want to try Linux PPC, and actually I just ordered version 5 a couple of minutes ago. So there!

    For better or for worse, I am starting to feel like Jon Katz... ")

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • You mean you have to code to an entirely different API to take advantage of an optimized FPU?

    Leave it to Macheads to turn that into a feature. If MS did it they'd be frothing at the mouth (more so) about Yet Another API.
  • I used to support the MS Exchange client on the Mac. God what a nightmare, but I blame Exchange, as it wasn't much better on Windows.

    However, among all apps from any vendor, be it MS, Claris, Adobe, whatever, I was always having to delete corrupted prefs files, rebuild desktop files, and harkening back to the days of DOS and TSR's, resolve extension conflicts.

    I will say one thing about the macs: they fell over just as easily as the windows boxes, but they were a hell of a lot easier to get back up again, since configuration was reasonably centralized, and I could always back up the entire system folder if I needed to.

  • Again?!? (Score:1)

    by Tuor ( 9414 )
    And don't open any e-mail titled "Good Times"

    I give it three months for the next Disney bid on Apple. ;-)
  • Stock price isn't as important as market capitalization. Here are the companies ordered by market cap:

    1. Intel 180.6B
    2. Dell 86.706B
    3. Compaq 37.73B
    4. Gateway 9.587B
    5. Apple 6.365B
    6. AMD 2.464B
    7. 3Dfx 244.4M

    Here are a list of the mentioned purchasers, by market cap:

    1. AOL 107.7B
    2. Time-Warner 73.0B
    3. Disney 58.5B
    4. VIACOM 20.9B
  • Every once and a while, Apple gets doomed, usually as it begins an ascendancy (which history tells us will be doomed anyway). Apple is going to die; Apple is going to be sold; Jobs held back all the *good* ideas for his real computing push, which he wants to make independant of the Apple "stigma". There is as much pro as there is con. More grist for ZDNets mill, I suppose.

    Maybe they will get sold, the DOJ will tear down M$, and we will all be working to make Samba more compatible with Mac network stuff instead of NT. Really, we can turn on dimes, does it matter? Someone will always port Linux, reverse-engineer protocols, and generally subvert the mainstream. Does it matter who has the market share?
  • Duh.... maybe you should actually think before you post.

    LinuxPPC - CHRP, PREP, and Powermac Linux, now at R5 [linuxppc.com]

    Yellow Dog Linux: for Power Macintosh, G3, and iMac [yellowdoglinux.com]

    MkLinux: Linux for PowerMacintosh on a Mach3 kernel [apple.com]

    I guess some /.'ers are as ignorant of Linux as they are of Macs.

  • I doubt the coffers have run dry yet. :) If I were AOL at this point, the only things stopping me from buying Apple outright would be:

    a) Fear of the DOJ.
    b) Worries about short-term losses from Apple.
    c) The fact that I could probably buy whoever buys Apple.

    -W-
  • *sigh* ok, I can't say that I know one way or the other whether AltiVec is a Motorola or IBM addition to the design. But here's what I can tell you.

    IBM is already using AltiVec in it's embedded PPC setups - mostly routing equipment. Has been for close to a year.

    Having already been familiar with AltiVec as the brain inside a piece of networking equipment, I thought it somewhat odd when it started getting hyped as an MMX-beater.

    Furthermore, IBM and Motorola have reversed their decision to go separate ways with PPC design.
  • Um, if the #4 desktop computer manufacturer should "die", what about #5, #6, ... Or do you want the Big Three - Compaq, Dell and Gateway - to be the only game in town?

    ) Potentially #3 - I don't know how large portion of the others' markets are made up by servers, where Apple are practically non-present - yet.
  • Yourself and a few others tool exception to my remark that "There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades."

    You all missed my point, perhaps because I didn't express it very well. Let me try harder.

    In fact I agree there is little doubt that Apple can continue to hold its own for the foreseeable future, and maybe even make some small gains. But shareholders generally want more than that.

    When I said there was nowhere for them to go I was talking about growth, which every business must seek if it is to continue to survive. There can be
    no standing still, yet Apple by themselves cannot increase their market share at the expense of Wintel as they just don't have the resources to fight that war.

    But Disney and Time-Warner do have those resources, and a far better marketing line than Intel, Microsoft, IBM or even Apple. Most of the growth in consumer computing that is yet to take place will not be techno-driven. It is content that will make the difference, not lust for hardware or stylish operating system interfaces. Those of us for whom those things make a difference have already bought in.
    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • I know this rumour has been floating around for a long time but that is only because it is so credible. The real mystery is why it hasn't happened yet.

    Ultimately this merger has to take place. There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades. But think of the uniquely friendly, unthreatening public image of the Mac combined with the marketing power of one of the dominant media transnationals.

    I guarantee that this would be the computer of choice in most family homes. My young kids can hardly switch on their Windows 95 computer without running into problems with the ATI video card driver or other typical Win95 lockups and crashes. They could have had a Mac but the perceived lack of software meant that was never really an option.
    It doesn't take a genius to see how an iMac plus "bugs'n'daffy" plus a shedload of first class marketing could put Microsoft out of the home computer business almost overnight.

    If Jobs doesn't jump at this soon then I think there will inevitably be questions as to his fitness to guide the company forward beyond this point. But Jobs has shown that one thing he is not short of is business acumen. My guess is that he is just waiting for iMac revenues to put Apple back on a sound financial footing and see a couple of new technologies like the new streaming software out the door first. That way he will have the leverage to cut the best deal for the company and its shareholders.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • Apple has never and will never be a piece of the enterprise puzzle.

    Who says OSX Server is aimed the "enterprise"? What about the traditional Mac server market in DTP shops and education? Right now, these people are largely using WinNT for the bigger jobs.

    Besides, Apple only makes desktop hardware - hardly enterprise server stuff.
    --
  • Apple has proven themselves to be able to make a product that the average Joe Six-Pack can sit down and be able to use relatively easily without much training (that and some Mac hardware/software integration is very sweet, while other aspects of it we all loathe).

    Apple has always also proven themselves in the content production industry - magazine, TV, movies, etc. Most reputable media shops will at least have a Mac somewhere.

    Apple has also got a unique marketing push, and as much as I can't stand most of Apple's products, I do admire the way they marketed products such as the iMac. Their push was to get these products into the home, and they did it in record amounts because they tried approaches that had never been done before. It was sort of a no-nonsense approach: "you could really use this product, here's what you can do with it, and look it's so cheap!"

    Apple's perfect niche would be the consumer media market. You have the backing of the content producers, since Apple dominates that market. All they need now is a cheap consumer product to display that content, and it has to have the Apple trademark ease-of-use.

    Most people I bet would just want something they could look up sports scores, check the news, and maybe blast out an email or two, without the expensive overhead of a PC. Apple could make a thin-client box that people could keep on their kitchen table and read it while having their morning coffee, and if they marketed it well enough, it'd sell like crazy.

    Apple would need to align with some media corporation to make this successful though - I don't think a total sellout would be necessary, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off without a media giant's backing as well. Who better than the Disney media empire to help Apple out? Again, I don't think they'd need to sell out, but for them to have the Disney AND Apple branding on the system thanks to an alliance of some sort, then it might be pretty successful.
  • I'm not a mac user. I've almost never touched a Mac. I like macs and mac users, anyway.

    Why?

    Because I never get any calls for tech support from them.

    System halted
  • Well, I guess it was about time. The rumors of Apple being bought by Oracle were getting stale. These "someone's buying Apple" rumors seem to happen every 6-12 months or so. Personally, I don't see a content company buying apple (especially for the 3-4 billion that it would take). What is having a computer/OS manufacturer going to do for Viacom, Time-Warner or Disney? Piss off Microsoft? Get a new method reaching consumers? They already have that.

    IMHO, buying a company doesn't automatically add it's strengths to your company. You have to work really hard at integrating the two companies together. Sometimes it ends up taking too much time and effort in comparison to the supposed advantages/synergies you were buying in the first place. This is especially true if the two companies are different, either in corporate culture or corporate focus. Hell, even bank mergers don't work sometimes.

    Which brings me back to my original point. I can't see the big advantage that any of these companies get by buying Apple. Partnering, yes. Lots of good stuff can happen with that. And it won't cost them 3.5 Billion. C'mon guys, show me somehing original.

    There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself

  • Yeah I know. I was just stating the theoretical minimum needed to control 51% of the stock. 'Twon't happen any rate.

    There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
  • Don't forget that MMX took over the floating point registers, you could only do one or the other. AltiVec is simply another unit and doesn't affect use of floating point.
  • MMX is not dead, actually I'm using it all the time now after I found the C-bindings to go with it for gcc.

    You'll have to work a little bit on the innermost parts of your loops, but the reward makes it well worthwhile.

    I am doing 600+ mips at 166mhz ;-)

    Give me a K7 and I'll be doing .. .. almost 5000 mips. This is for 16bit sound synthesis.


    MMX C-bindings can be found at:

    http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~swar
  • I'm not buying the notion of Apple being sold (yet). But Apple is sitting on close to three billion (that's billion with a 'b') dollars, which they will want to use at some point. There ARE rumors of a major Apple purchase of some sort in the works, probably in the form of a stock buy-back, rather than an aquisition. Apple just got their own house in order, why gum up the works by having to absorb a new company?

    It would be cool if they'd lisence the groovy new Cassiopea E-100 Palm PC from Casio. It drives me nuts that Apple hasn't come up with a full color, QuickTime supported replacement for my trusty Newton 2000. Steeeeeve, where is it?

  • The Mac is a great machine. If I had to run a business, I would put all of my non-technical employees on Mac's, and all of my Techs on any Linux or *BSD of their choice. For non-techs, Macs are great. It's a mom and pop type of computer. UNIX just isn't mom ready, and Windows is not a viable choice in my opinion. I wish Apple the best of luck, and I hope they fight to grow in the market. A computer is a tool, and as tools go, there are several varieties of the same tool. You wouldn't choose an M1-Abrams for a sunday drive, and you wouldn't choose a Lexus for combat. They both are land vehicles, but they are built for very different objectives. Linux is an M1-Abrams, and the Mac is a Lexus. Mom get's the Lexus, and we drive the tank.
  • My assumption is that these rumors are just that. For the last few years and especially since Jobs signed on, sale rumors surface every few months. People even read the Microsoft investment (which the DOJ trial revealed was primarily a payoff to bury patent disputes) as indication that they wanted to buy, when it was a token payment in terms of a percentage of Apple stock. Because Jobs in his role as Pixar CEO is in bed with Disney, they'll always be mentioned in buy-out rumors.
    Similarly, his friendship with Oracle CEO Ellison (who's on the Apple board) means that they'll be mentioned.

    I don't believe the stockholders want Apple to be sold. ZDNet is just engaging in another round of Apple-bashing, based on whisperings of actual alliances and deals to come with other big players.
  • "...both suck"

    Hmmmm. Let me guess: you do all your image editing, word processing, and other work on a 'NIX box, right? Well, for the other 98% of us, both are tolerable, either out of elegance and ease-of-use or corporate requirement.
    Oh, and like most other computers (for now), if one sets up their MacOS system properly, it doesn't really crash. I kow my laptop here has been up for two weeks (and only went down then when I unplugged it w/o putting in a battery. oops!). Fortunately, it's entirely easier to set up than 'doze or any 'NIX. I've never had any driver problems either, but that may just be me. Don't even get me started, though, on @%#@#!! IRQs!

    --Andrew Grossman
    grossdog@dartmouth.edu

  • Ultimately this merger has to take place. There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades.

    I'm sorry, I really don't the logic in this. So Microsoft has 90-something percent of the OS market share - good for them. Does that mean that instantly, every other company that makes an OS needs to sell to some other, larger company?

    By your logic, most Linux distributions will now have to be sold off to some other computer company; Be Inc. will get sold to who, Adobe?; god forbid the old commercial Unix variants and any other alternate OSes out there (Where will Amiga go?).

    Your argument sounds similar to what Microsoft said to IBM: Where else are you going to go? We're the only place in town. The fact is, no company has to or should sell out in light of this "owning of the market". Hell, if everyone STARTS selling out, then we WILL all end up under Microshaft. And what good is that?

    This merger does not have to take place. Financially, Apple is standing well enough on their feet these days. Their stock is higher than AMD, 3DFX, Dell, Compaq, and is just slightly below Intel and Gateway. And I don't see anyone telling Compaq to sell off to another company.

  • $150 million, while it seems to be a lot, isn't the reason for the agreement. The reasons Apple entered the agreement was to keep Office for the Mac current with the Windows version. Without Office, the Mac would become another Amiga. Great technology but not enough mainstream applications. The reason M$ entered the deal was to settle once and for all the "look and feel" lawsuit and also to push IE in order to put Netscape six feet under.
  • There are several core shareholders who will not sell, and that will hold the raiders at bay. Ellison toyed with the idea, but found that the investors did not like the direction he wanted to take Apple.

    BTW, I bought in at 26 per share, now it is pushing 50 per share. It seems to be holding up better than some of the other computer stock. So, yes, I like Apple.

    It is now too expensive to buyout IMHO, they should have tried when it was 13 per share.

    I will be interested to see how the various Linux IPO's fly. this might not be the best time for an IPO, it seems the internet/computer fever has cooled. It's still good, but not as good as it was.

  • If your journalistic career is not doing well, nobody is paying attention, just drop your drawers and utter gloom and doom predictions about Apple. Recycle rumors, feed into the bash Mac mentality, even though it has gone out of style. Even the "shorts" have stopped playing the Apple volitility game on WallStreet. Don, you're a year behind times, buy outs, bankruptcy fears, are as old hat as beige.

    Better to speculate on the feeding frenzy if Microsoft loses the DOJ case. Can you say armies of lawyers? Now that wil be fun to watch. Every software company that feels MS has stolen from them, pressured, and squashed them, will be waiting for their chance to slice off a piece.
  • Would Goofy replace Jeff Goldblum?
  • Darwin is a wild card. what is to keep da geeks from porting it to the Intel platform? Is this a backdoor way to knock NT off it's game?

    Hey, this iMac of juniors is easy to use. Hmm wonder if I can use it at the office. It runs MS office, and it would look good at the receptionists desk, and that strawberry color is the same as our logo color.
  • It may make sense for Apple to be sold, but it doesn't make sense for anybody to actually buy it, at least not the companies mentioned in the article.

    Disney and Sony are in the entertainment business. Why would they want to get into the niche computer manufacturer business? They don't need the technology. They don't need the cash--and Apple's cash flow is a hardly a sure thing, particularly compared to Disney's. Nobody is going to buy a big company like Apple just because they think the iMac is cool.

    Selling a company like Apple only happens if it looks good to both the buyer and the seller. Disney buying Apple looks pretty good for Apple, but it doesn't look that good for Disney.
  • It isn't gonna happen, as much as people _really_ think jobs is some underhanded dealer with apple, he enjoys being at apple, just look at him at Macworld and WWDC. It's just another attempt by ZD to bash apple. I really dislike ZD and i wish they would get a life and leave apple out of the rumor game. as of late _nothing_ gets out of apple because of Steve Jobs, no rumors nothing, so take this "rumor" very lightly
  • Here's a way to look at it that's about as likely and far more scary: Steve Jobs, on some miracle from High Up There, becomes CEO of Disney. Then, he takes Apple and Pixar and whatever else he owns and mixes it into a big Disney shake. The whole idea that Steve would give up Apple is absurd. But this way, who says he has to?

    Incidently, I'm only posting this because it's just as likely as the alternative (anyone buying Apple). It just won't happen. Too much money involved.
  • Two data points. My Mac (an aging 6100 with MacOS 8.6) constantly runs ICQ, Nutscrape, Eudora, IPNetRouter (a software router firewall), and my notoriously shoddy Road Runner Manager (to connect to the cable modem). The last time the computer was rebooted was a month ago, when I upgraded the operating system. My PC (with twice as much RAM and ten times the storage space) running Win98 has crashed four times today. Three of the crashes were GPF's caused by Explorer.

    Does Apple have the resolve to switch to OSX? You're for damn skippy they do. Note that this is a company that implemented a switch from 68000 architecture to PowerPC, with close to ZERO deleterious effects on the user base. Were there teething problems? You betcha. NOTHING like going from, say, Win3.1 to 95/98 or installing NT on anything. Porting to Carbon (the new MacOSX API) is TRIVIAL. It's EASY EASY EASY to do, and it's a no brainer for anybody who wants to sell software in the very profitable Mac market.

    Note that my comments are restricted to mass market consumer operating systems. No comparisons to truly reliable operating systems is expressed or implied. : )
  • Of course it's a rehash of the toolbox. The reason is, if you want legacy code to work, you have to have a toolbox for it to call. This implies that it's somehow bad to allow old software to work, which is what the previous poster was pointing out would be a Bad Thing. Can't have it both ways! Is it possible to make a better operating system if you start tabula rasa? Sure! But nobody will buy it. Old software can be easily migrated with Carbon (just like the 68k emulator smoothed the transition to PowerPC), and new code will be written in ObjC (how are they going to "kill" this? If people know it and want to use it to write Mac software, is Apple going to tell them no?) or Java (which is nowadays a popular programming language, why SHOULDN'T Apple use those brains).

    Seems to me like you're objecting to the new OS because it's too flexible. : )
  • That's one interpretation of what Carbon's for, but I think it's an inaccurate one.

    When Apple undertook the Herculean task of switching architectures from 68k to PPC, they HAD to provide the facility for running legacy applications reliably. If they hadn't, the company would have been deader than Elvis. It's exactly the same thing now. If Apple does not allow legacy code to work on the new OS, then all the naysayers will win, and that'd be a Bad Thing.

    Maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument. The Carbon Dater application does precisely what you are describing...it checks a given app and tells the coders what (minor) changes will be necessary to get it to work on MacOS X. This has nothing to do with the Java/ObjC development environments for clean-slate projects.
  • "With its QuickTime 4.0 technology, its upcoming Mac OS X, as well as with its G3/G4 Altivec multimedia extensions that will turn the next generation of Macs into true multimedia blockbusters (can you say digital video and MP3 audio?)"

    I don't know about your mac Don, but mine can play MP3s just fine. The only improvement which would be possible is PMT, so my player wouldn't skip during times of heavy CPU load. In other words, in terms of being a "MP3 blockbuster" Linux and Windows are as good as anybody will ever get, and the mac will catch up very quickly. Steve Jobs's focus on gaming and multimedia has had incredible results, and the mac is starting to catch up with windows, but superior multimedia technology (in terms of 3D and sound) is definetely not a reason for Disney to purchase Apple.

    As for the up-and-coming technologies, future macs will obviously blow away anything we have today, but the offerings from Intel and others will also continue to improve, and future wintels will be just as much of a multimedia powerhouse as the latest and greatest mac.

    "But to work, those images and sounds have to be compelling and well-known. Enter Disney and Mickey Mouse or Time-Warner and Bugs Bunny. As Bill Gates knows from his acquisitions, you have to have the content as well as the means to distribute it if you want to win in the next century."

    Wouldn't Disney prefer to put Mickey Mouse on every PC, x86, and mac alike, rather than making specialized content for a "Disney iMac" that cost them $10 billion?

    "Of course, there are many crash and burn opportunities for an Apple buyout by an entertainment giant. But it sures beats being a 7 percent solution the rest of Apple's life. I can't imagine Steve Jobs settling for that."

    I personally can't imagine Steve Jobs having to run every decision through Disney execs. I can just imagine him with his iMac prototype hearing them say "It'll never work, it doesn't even have a floppy drive!"

    Harvey
  • I don't see a content company buying apple (especially for the 3-4 billion that it would take)

    Your estimate is a little low... Apple's current Market Capitalization is 6.6 Billion. With 3 Billion in CASH to defend itself buying Apple would cost significantly more than 3-4 Billion.
  • Considering the advantage Apple has/had, I wouldn't be surprised if they did buy them. But we all learn that for some odd reason, Apple is like this big humungous boulder on an open field. It just sorta sits there, moves a little at times of an earth quake.

    ---
    Ok.. the Austin Powers spoof for 'groovy linux boxes' is going too far
  • Considering the multimedia advantage.. surprised if disney did buy.

    I should really use that preview button.

  • This article's logic:
    1) Steve Jobs is selling lots of Macs.
    2) Steve Jobs is making lots of money.
    3) Macs suck.
    4) Therefore Steve Jobs is selling Macs only so he'll be bought out.

    This is obviously faulty logic. Steve Jobs may be perfectly content to have 7% market share. If I were Apple, though I'd be making a big push towards thin clients; start selling stripped-down iMacs for $500 preconfigured to connect to a VNC server running on LinuxPPC on a supercharged G3 and you're halfway there already. Only serious geeks would buy this setup for home, but at work, these would sell like hotcakes.

    I wouldn't mourn if Disney bought Apple. Apple could easily shift to a mainly content company; make iMacs the machines of choice for video buffs, with DVD players and embedded content and super-easy Web browsing, and many would buy them. If Apple can get back to doing truly groundbreaking multimedia work, I think they could be very successful.

    What if Apple bought a smaller movie company? It has the cash. They'd have the same advantages as if Disney bought them. They could even buy Pixar; Apple has tons of creative talent, which is just what a too-technically-minded company like that needs. I think the SEC would call this a conflict of interest, tho.

    ~scriptkiddie

    PS: There is a way to recapture the alpha-quality, slightly slipshoddy but still amazing feeling you got when you first saw a Mac. Check out the Squeak system [squeak.org], which, oddly enough, was partially written by Disney. It isn't just a programming language; it's almost a whole operating system.
  • what u dont understand is that content companies are in danger of being at the mercy of os/connectivity companies who are CLOSER TO THE CONSUMER. the new game is all about who's on top of the transactional chain. apple + disney _could_ mean greater distribution for disney's shit. if you look at microsoft they're trying to integrate horizontally - content commerce software connectivity. aol too, in fact everyone's trying some variation on this theme these days...

  • euh ? (Score:1)

    by fizzz ( 30154 )
    I can understand that this, euh hmmm, "news" will generate a very interesting discution among slashdot readers but, c'mon..., obviously nobody gives it any credance in the short term. So, if you didn't post it to bring back the usual {Mac GUI - OS X} vs {Linux and familly} feud and possibly the Slashdot Overload mode, why did you post this lame attempt at a news article ?

    I am an avid fan of the mac platform, as well of my Debian distribution. Yet I still don't understand what could motivate someone to see anything interesting in this article.

    P.S. : I got it, maybe ZD needed the money generated by all the ads it will get to load to all the slashdot readers...
  • If you are going to sell your car, yeah you clean it, get it running decent, etc., but you don't go overhauling the motor, redoing the interior, put new tires and wheels on it, repaint it. You only do that if you are going to keep it.

    If the car is a classic, then you might.

    -jhp

  • The "RealityMonsterTM multisubsystem" in the high-end SGI Onxy2 systems renders "up to 210 million polygons per second and [has a] 7.2 gigapixels per second fill rate", although the high-end Onyx2 might not fit in your door. Go here [sgi.com], and bring LOTS of cash
  • Last I heard steve jobs had little or no stock in apple. Also, he doesn't get payed for being CEO. Why would he bother doing all this work and then selling apple? To make money? I don't think so. These rumors are old. Don crab's rumors have been pretty wrong in the past. Go check out his articles at maccentral.
  • This rumor has been running around in the background for many months. AppleInsider annouced that a Disney buyout was immenent at least two or three months ago, but that never materialized, obviously. Oddly, this article was written by Don Crabb, a longtime Mac commentator, so it's hard to believe he hasn't heard these stories for a long time. He must have been up against a killer deadline and couldn't think of anything else to talk about. It's total hooey.
  • Gimme a break. ZDNet isn't exactly targeting the fringe, so it can't be full of jargon like "60Mpolys". Saying "60 Million polygons per second" isn't a pointer to Crabb's cluelessness, but the phrase he used ("how's that grab you?") is just lazy writing.

    I'm still not sold on AltiVec being a big deal just yet, but the Apple has a much better chance of having AltiVec adopted by the majority of developers than Intel did with MMX. Oddly, in this case, the smaller market share for the MacOS works in its favor as Apple only has to convine a handful of major players (Adobe, Macromedia, Avid, etc.) to support the instruction set and the rest of the developers will flal into lockstep. We'll see how it plays out, but most likely not for two years or so.

    The keys to success are:

  • Or maybe even...well, nothing really sarcastic for Time-Warner.

    Product placement in WB 'toons, perhaps? Imagine: Brain plots his next scheme to take over the world with his G3 tower while Pinky plays Q3Test on his iMac!
    --


  • Intel boxes are fast enough for 99% of desktop users. "Faster" doesn't turn many heads these days unless you're talking high-end CAD, animation, data mining, etc, and Apple doesn't exist in these markets anyway.

    Faster was your word, not mine. :) I don't think anybody will buy into the platform because it's simply faster. When referring to dual/quad G4s, I only meant that this is what's required to compete head-to-head in terms internet serving.

    Once that plateu has been reached, then ease-of-administration issue merits consideration of the platform, particuarly for people that don't grok concepts like glibc2.


    OSX. The last thing IS managers want is to have to integrate yet another OS into the office network. Why would they bother when they can already do anything the Mac would do for them with cheaper Wintel boxes they already administer?

    You make a good point, and I don't have a particuarly good answer to that. But the fact is everything changes, and it can be initiated by anyone at any time. Linux is proof of that.


    Apple has never and will never be a piece of the enterprise puzzle.

    Never is a long time.


    Scott
  • My reply to Don Crabb, the author of the article. In short, it ain't gonna happen -- just like it hasn't happened for the past five years.

    -----
    Regarding your article -- just because "persistent, well-informed, and highly reliable sources" are telling you a looney story, doesn't mean it's true. Apple has become very adept at spreading misinformation campaigns to locate and plug its security holes. A few points:


    > But as long as the company has neither the inclination (which means as long as
    > Steve Jobs is not interested), nor the resources to try to sell its wares to
    > corporate accounts,

    I don't understand this at all. There is no resource issue that prevents Apple from selling to enterprise markets. They just aren't ready yet. Wait until Q1/Q2, when the next version of Mac OS X Server hits (in addition to Client) -- along with dual or quad processor G4s.


    > * In short, Jobs saves the company. But saves it for what?

    It's his baby.

    I'm not sure why you're so transfixed on the money issue. While he has stock, he only takes a $1/yr paycheck. All evidence points to the fact that he's not in it for the money.

    > Enter the Walt Disney Company, or some other entertainment giant such as
    > Time-Warner or Viacom.

    This is an old story. It was part of a previous misinformation campaign.


    > Apple could be the first computer company to really build a cheap crossover
    > computer/game console/Web access box. An access box that would pump 3D digital
    > video and sound like a bat out of hell.

    How many times are we going to go down this road? Again and again, people come out with boxes like this, and again and again, nobody buys them. Steve is quite clearly against this. Remember Columbus?


    > Enter Disney and Mickey Mouse or Time-Warner and Bugs Bunny.

    Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny are not going to sell games, except to preschoolers. That's a niche -- the very thing you purport Apple is trying to get away from. Computer game sales today are based on technological prowess, reviews/word of mouth and multiplayer capabilities.

    Movie licenses just don't do that well. The most popular games in the last few years are basically the Quake and Myst francises.


    > But it sures beats being a 7 percent solution the rest of Apple's life. I
    > can't imagine Steve Jobs settling for that.

    This is just the beginning. P1 will change a lot.


    There are other fundamentals holes in story thinking. If Apple was going to be bought by a consumer company (like Disney), why would they ship Mac OS X Server? Why would they release Darwin? Why would they continue to develop AppleShare IP?

    The "Apple will be bought out" argument is as old as "Apple should do software only/Apple should do hardware only." Apple's not going to be bought anytime in the near future. It's against everything that they have worked for. Here's a partial list of companies that, over the past several years, were supposed to have bought Apple:

    Sun
    Microsoft
    IBM
    Sony
    Disney
    Oracle

    It just ain't gonna happen.


    Take it easy,

    - Scott
  • uhh, get your facts straight about MMX/AltiVec. MMX died because developers had to go out of their way to support it. FWIU, AltiVec is more like a super-FPU that you don't need to specifically program for.

  • After reading a number of Crabb's columns, it's pretty obvious he's just posting beaten-down flamebait that can almost be categorized as urban legend spam. No company is going make a purchase of Apple at this point which has over a billion dollars in liquid spending cash, over two years worth of technology still to introduce, and a marketing momentum that has just started to rain down on consumers. In addition, after reading all these posts I notice all the platform-bashing kiddies in all their penis-envy are out in full force with their "this/that sucks" jive. It's just funny to see how they end up signing off as what they are... anonymous cowards without a clue.
  • oh yeah btw.. like most irresponsible internet columnists, crabb is just pulling out the good ole' flamebait rumor tactic to draw all these people to his site to read the article, start a platform war, then rack up on all the advertising hits to the page (quick way to get massive hits your site is to post bullsh*t flames about the mac). sheesh, crabb doesn't even have to sleep his fatass up the corporate ladder. he just has to run his mouth off with total BS.
  • Apple still had over a Billion
    dollars of completely liquid assets (cash), without debt, at their worst point.

    People fail to realize this point. With all of the doom and gloom published about apple, the one thing that no one ever heard was that they were broke or on the verge of bankruptcy because that never was the case. They were never in the situation that Chrysler was in. There are those who suggest that M$ is propping apple up simple b/c they investd $150M. Give me a break.
  • To everyone who is worried that Apple will and this mythical buyer will become another AOL or Microsoft: Calm down. It's not going to happen. If a company wanted to buy Apple, they should've done it over a year ago when it was cheap. These days there's no way anyone could afford it.

    Is Apple "allied" with Disney? You betcha. But Disney does entertainment, and Apple makes computers. If Disney bought Apple, its competitors wouldn't use Quicktime - which is the most valuabe product they have.

    Shame on Don Crabb for writing such rubbish, and shame on Yahoo for taking rumors as news.

  • Speaking of which.. I was driving up I-35 between Austin and Waco a few weeks ago when a new blue VW bug passed me. I didn't think much of it until I happened to glance at the license plate. It said "IMAC2". I nearly went into anaphylactic shock from being that close to someone that trendy. I just know he/she bought the blue iMac to match the color of the bug. Ick.

  • It must be summer. The temperature is reaching record highs around the US, and hot, irritated people are reaching irrational conclusions. In this context...

    I'd like to announce that I'm not buying Apple Computer. I will not be adding it to my vast personal entertainment empire - though the expected convergence of consumer electronics and workstations is drawing near. Nor will I negotiate with Volkswagon to install MacOS on the new iBug (even if my action blocks Bill Gates from putting NT there first). And despite widespread rumors to the contrary, I am not lobbying both Capitol Hill and the Department of Energy to replace the entire Library of Congress with a few Powerbooks.

    For though the masses fear the end of the millenium, and the adolescence of P1 is upon us, I just can't see squeezing more than $2 billion on my credit cards.

    [Seriously: I still remember when IBM was going to buy Apple in the early 1980's.]

  • Just imagine, "Apple.com, now part of the Go Network" "apple.go.com" *gag*

    If Disney did buy Apple, I don't think I could stop myself from buying an iMac and putting Mickey Mouse ears on it though


    Del

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