Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC [mailto:chad at shire.net]
>Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:33 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: David Kelly; FreeBSD-Questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
>
>
>
>On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
>>
>> The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract
>> money from
>> the customer base.  As I already said in my first post, lots of people
>> are like you -
>> perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product.  Apple wants
>> money
>> from them -
>> so Apple has to shake things up.
>
>Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW.  No need
>for them to be shook up.

So then Apple is coming out with all that new hardware for nothing.  Too
bad
for them then since according to you nobody will be buying it.

You can't have it both ways.  Either the Apple userbase will continue to
use their older Apple hardware and not buy the new WintelApple gear -
in which case this move to Intel chips will be a giant flop - or they
will
rush to the new gear and dump all their old gear, thus causing untold
millions of bucks to flow into the Apple coffers.

I think Apple knows it's userbase and they know that if they simply kept
going with the same Power PC architecture that there would not be
a compelling enough reason for the userbase to pay money for new
hardware.
Since the goal is to get money, they needed to do something that would
cause real differentiation with the new product.  Changing the CPU is
definitely
that.  Now, with MacOS X86, Apple can put real marketing pressure on the
laggarts in it's customer base to upgrade.  And they will, and Apple will
get a pile of money for doing it.

> You make claims but have nothing more than
>your opinion to support it.

Naturally, since Apple isn't going to tell the real truth - which is they
want to
extract a pile of money from you - their customer.

You keep talking like the laptop market is paramount - but who says it
is?  Laptops are always more expensive, and much more fragile.  Do you
honestly think that laptops make up the bulk of Apple's sales today?
When
you can get a G4 minimac for under $500?

>  Logic doesn't even support it.
>

No, in this case there's real logic behind it.  It is rather unflattering
to the
typical Apple consumer of course - nobody wants to admit that they are
being manipulated, obviously - but it is very logical.  Much more so than
the official line from Apple which basically is a statement that the
Apple
hardware designers aren't smart enough to design a laptop that will
handle the G5 "Mommy, the chip is to hot, it hurts our hands, wahhh
wahhhh
wahhh"

But on second thought, these are the designers that made a computer
look like a table lamp, so maybe they really -aren't- smart enough to do
it.

Ted