steveh

Microsoft's "saving" Apple was hardly done out of altruism, nor did it cost Microsoft anything in the long term.

In 1997, Microsoft bought 150,000 shares of Apple preferred stock, convertable to common shares of Apple stock at a price of $8.25, redeemable after a three year period, for $150 million. Apple was worth ~ $3B at the time.

By 2001, they'd converted all of the shares into common stock, netting the company approximately 18.1 million shares. 

By 2003, they'd sold all of it.

It was mostly optics.

Before Apple took the site over (and made their various changes) it was built for, and was the headquarters for Four-Phase Systems (makers of the first all-LSI minicomputer systems) back in the late '70s. One of the things that happened during the company's move from its previous headquarters involved moving their fab; when the move was done, the fab was spun up, and it worked (not something you could count on back then).

The basic layout of the campus was much like its current format, if quite a bit simpler. Four-Phase is long gone, having been swallowed up, or parceled out to various other companies, including Motorola and Canon, but it was a pretty interesting place to work for a guy new to the Valley, and ended up being a stepping stone from there to Apple a little later for me.

foregoneconclusion said:

 Electronic music has been around since the Beatles and doesn't seem to have eliminated much of anything. 

Electronic music has been around since before any Beatle was born, at least as early as 1928, when the Theremin was patented.

bloggerblog said:

I use the SD card slot as a second drive on my MBP, and the HDMI port to display my work during a conference. Carrying adapters is a pain in the arse, I already carry around an HDMI for the iPad Pro and have one lost already, they're $50 each. The fact that I also have to carry two sets of headphones, a Lightening for my iPhone and a standard for my laptop is yet another head scratcher.

Quit carrying one of the headphones; your iPhone already has an adapter for the old 3.5mm plug. 

I was at the event, being at the time a technical writer in the Apple// division. The Apple//c documentation set was the last major project I worked on at Apple. Lessee now...

1. What's with the articles' calling the //c a "terminal"? Being as it's the computer itself, it would make more sense to call it an almost-laptop. As it happens, there was an LCD display that was made for the //c, smaller and lighter than the CRT display Apple sold with the computer. Never saw the LCD display in the wild, as far as I can remember, but it shows up in an early scene in the movie 2010.

2. Nope, not Pat Benetar nor Bonnie Tyler, just some local voice talent.

3. The earthquake was a nice touch, making the announcement "earthshaking". When it hit, you could tell which exhibitors were not from California, as they began packing up to leave right now. The main hint that the quake was happening was the big roll-up doors at the back of Moscone started shaking and rattling like some really big kid wanted in.

The epicenter of the quake also happened to be about two miles from our home at the time in Morgan Hill, about 60 miles south of SF. We'd recently put up about 20 quarts of canned cherries, all of which ended up shattered on the floor of the garage. What a mess to clean up.

rogifan_new said:

I’m in the middle of a thunderstorm right now with winds gusting to at least 30-40mph. Just for a test I said “Hey Siri is it windy out”. Siri responded back, “No I don’t think it’s all that windy, only 9mph”. Siri still can be such garbage. Unbelievable.

Do you seriously think that Siri actively collects, say, weather conditions everywhere itself?

If whatever information aggregator is used for things like weather conditions isn't up to the minute, Siri gets the same thing you'd get by directly contacting the same source. Blame NOAA (or whomever) for the error.

nunzy said:

Some people just hate Apple.

That, or the guy was snowbound too long last winter.

borps said:

I really think this announcement from Autodesk it entirely dishonest. They've decided to discontinue macOS support and now they want to make it look as if it was Apple's fault, which is nonsense.

Sort of like Adobe's dropping FrameMaker for the Mac. Don't update the software for a couple years, then claim that poor sales (of the dusty thing) was because nobody was interested in it. Ignoring years of "when are you going to update/fix the package"?

viclauyyc said:

Apple have a Mac Pro that almost cost $10000. But it don't even have TB3.

It would have been a neat trick to get TB3 on a machine that was shipped more than two years before TB3 first shipped on any commercial product.

spice-boy said:

I already have a self driving car, it's called mass transit. 

Yeah, great. It goes where it wants to go, not necessarily where I need to go, on its own schedule, which might not be when I need to be wherever I need to go.

And it costs as much, or more, than driving myself over a month of workdays, while taking more time to do it. I do get to pay for part of it even if I'm not using it, so there's that to consider.

I have used mass transit, off and on, over a 35-year working career. It works for some people in some areas, not very well at all for a lot more.