Is PPC squeezing the life out of Apple?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Well is it? You know this isn't a troll. I don't own a mac, but I use, exclusively, macs in the lab. I like them. I lust after a mac notebook, and will have one as soon as I can justify a G4 notebook (hoepfully in the form of an updated iBook by MWNY). But...



Despite doing so many things right with their design and software, is the slow progress of the PPC, not only holding Apple back, but slowly eroding their market more than anything else?



What can be done about it? My cousin just bought a $1000 Canadian P4 1.6Ghz (about 650 USD) not including monitor. It's running photoshop 5.5 with a host of plugins. And it is fast. Much faster than any 1000 dollar Win2000 PC has any right to be. I'm not sure if it's really faster than SP733's and DP533's, but it cost only a 1000 Canadian.



FUD? I'm suffering from a little attack of it right now.



[ 03-03-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    I think it could be, but really, what are the alternatives? They've hitched their wagon to the jackass called Motorola and now they don't have much of a choice. But I think that it's only part of the reason Apple is not doing much better right now (and I think they're doing ok).



    Apple is squeezing the life out of Apple. No advertising of relevant features. No aggressive marketing dispelling the myths that we all know by heart. Screwed up delivery schedules. Releases that are never as good as they could be (putting a GF2MX in the new iMac when there's a GF4MX available; using 667 G4's in the pb when we know there are 800 G4 waiting, etc). They are stuck in ways and that's causing problems for them. "We like where our products are, so they're going to stay where they are." Jesus, Apple, if there are faster chips available, use them! If there are better graphics cards out, put 'em in! I just wish that Steve didn't feel the urge to tout every upgrade at a big show so that we don't have to wait. (He's getting better, but he still loves the limelight.)



    On some level, I understand why Apple does things the way they do (channel inventory, anyone??), but there's got to be a better solution. Right now, if anything is going to kill Apple, it's going to be them.



    [ 03-03-2002: Message edited by: torifile ]</p>
  • Reply 2 of 10
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    [quote]Originally posted by torifile:

    <strong>I t

    Apple is squeezing the life out of Apple. . No aggressive marketing dispelling the myths that we all know by heart.

    [ 03-03-2002: Message edited by: torifile ]</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I don't want to be a troll , but the myth is that the G4 are more powerfull than the athlon or the P4 northwood. Excepting some altivec stuff, the G4 is too slow.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    yeah, the G4's aren't really going anywhere. odds are that they have another 6 months or so tops before it makes it s serious enough problem to really tank the company.



    the 500Mhz wall was horrid. we should have been where we are now over a year ago. i have no idea how anyone is supposed to catch up to AMD and Intel when they've fallen over a year behind.



    but hey, time will tell. apple has supposedly been 1 step short of dying before. for all i know they're gonna' multithread everything and start making quads standard. but they do have issues with their chips, and there's basically nothing they can do about it. at least not quickly.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    spindlerspindler Posts: 713member
    The MHZ gap has hurt quite a lot, but I think the new iMac will bring sales back up to around a million units per quarter which is where they were in 1999.



    Sales of the PowerMac have been hurt the most. Apple used to 350,000- 400,000 per quarter and now are selling less than 250,000. That's bad in terms of money lost and loyal customers lost. The good thing though is that Apple CAN come out with quad processor Macs. apple must make huge profits when they sell a high end Mac for $3499. If it cost $400 more to make it a quad than a dual processor they still will make good money.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    The alternative to PPC is x86. And if it ever comes to that, Apple will no longer be able to sell PCs. They'd be a software and consumer electronics company at best.



    I'd rather stick to PPC.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    [quote]Originally posted by torifile:

    <strong>I think it could be, but really, what are the alternatives? They've hitched their wagon to the jackass called Motorola and now they don't have much of a choice. But I think that it's only part of the reason Apple is not doing much better right now (and I think they're doing ok).



    Apple is squeezing the life out of Apple. No advertising of relevant features. No aggressive marketing dispelling the myths that we all know by heart. Screwed up delivery schedules. Releases that are never as good as they could be (putting a GF2MX in the new iMac when there's a GF4MX available; using 667 G4's in the pb when we know there are 800 G4 waiting, etc). They are stuck in ways and that's causing problems for them. "We like where our products are, so they're going to stay where they are." Jesus, Apple, if there are faster chips available, use them! If there are better graphics cards out, put 'em in! I just wish that Steve didn't feel the urge to tout every upgrade at a big show so that we don't have to wait. (He's getting better, but he still loves the limelight.)



    On some level, I understand why Apple does things the way they do (channel inventory, anyone??), but there's got to be a better solution. Right now, if anything is going to kill Apple, it's going to be them.



    [ 03-03-2002: Message edited by: torifile ]</strong><hr></blockquote>





    Advertising: Apple already cannot meet the demand for iMacs. What do you want them to do: create 400,000 backorders and a tremendous amount of ill will?



    The technology in Apple products: Apple puts in their products the best components that they can to maintain that price point. Is that so hard for everyone to understand? If they gave the iBook a GF4MX and one of the twelve 1.6ghz G4s which have ever come off the fab, it would cost $8,000 a pop. What would be the point of that?
  • Reply 7 of 10
    glurxglurx Posts: 1,031member
    [quote]Originally posted by ColorClassicG4:

    <strong>If they gave the iBook a GF4MX and one of the twelve 1.6ghz G4s which have ever come off the fab, it would cost $8,000 a pop. What would be the point of that?</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Yeah, but they'd sell all twelve...
  • Reply 8 of 10
    The reason Apple has slow chips is because Motorola/IBM have no particular reason to develop fast ones for them.



    Apple's market share is in a general decline -- under 3% for a couple of years; and the chips they use are primarily aimed at the embedded control market -- to which Moto can sell orders of magnitude more processors than they can sell to Apple. Therefore any chip Moto sells Apple has to be targetable at their principle market first. That means low heat/power consumption. It's no accident that Apple uses such lowpower chips in their desktops and thus is able to make things like the new iMac and the utterly wrongly-priced and consequent failure G4 Cube.



    There are some things where the G4 can excel at due to Altivec -- but most of Apple's presentation is dependent on people not looking into the details and accepting a substantial amount of BS. Altivec aside, a 1000MHz G4-variant is simply not as fast as a 2.2GHz P4 Northwood or AMD AthlonXP 2000+ on their proper platforms. It may be faster than them in some things clock/clock, or even period for Altivec, but those things are not enough to make up the glaring clock disparity.



    Apple is a great deal of smoke and mirrors.
  • Reply 9 of 10
    glurxglurx Posts: 1,031member
    The real problem is Motorola is apparently run by pack of incontinent & senile baboons. I base this judgment solely on the available evidence. No other answer fits the known facts nearly so well.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    moogsmoogs Posts: 4,296member
    As long as the number of Apple users continues to grow - even if it's just a million or two new users a year - the answer is no. PPC and Apple's past mistakes already squeezed the life out of things as far as the market share battle goes, but not in terms of Apple's financial viability and the viability of their products.



    Despite the lack of new hardware technologies of late, Apple is doing well. One of the few companies to come out of this recent recession in as good or better shape than it was going in. That pretty much speaks for itself.
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