[ale] mac v pc

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, D. Alan Stewart wrote:

> How 'closed'? Anyone can develop and sell a PCI board, an ATA device, a 
> USB or Firewire peripheral, or software for Apple systems.

When I can run Mac OS on my PowerPC board, come talk to me.  Until then, 
it's closed.

> There is a place in the world for propietary software and hardware. 
> Whether you want to buy it or not is up to you, there are plenty of people 
> who do.

Oh, I agree -- after all, I'm a Sun admin (who still manage to be
proprietary in practice in spite of making absolutely everything they make,
including their CPUs, available as an open standard ;-).

The flip side is that, as the market has ably demonstrated, there's also a
place and a decided preference for open systems, and people are more than
able to deal with the additional complexity that arises when they actually
have choices.

And if they don't want that, it's possible in the Intel world to just buy
from one vendor.  I can get my video, cpu, memory, NIC, and motherboard all
from Intel if I want....  Now that AMD has a line of NICs coming out, I even 
have a choice of *which* vendor I buy from if I want to lock myself into a 
single vendor.

> It's allowed them to make changes in their architecture that would be near
> impossible to achieve in the Intel market: switching keyboard and mouse
> interfaces to ADB and then to USB, switching the expansion bus from NuBus
> to PCI, switching processor families from 68xxx to PowerPC, and now to
> fundamentally different operating system.

The really funny thing is that those *exact* same changes have taken place
in the Intel market, where you claim such migration is impossible.  
Intel-compatibles have gone from AT / PS/2 keyboards and mice to USB,
they've gone from ISA to PCI / AGP with little dalliances with other busses
(EISA, MCA), they've gone from one operating system (the DOS family) to a
fundamentally different one (the NT family), etc.  So much for the 
superiority of the proprietary architecture....

later,
chris


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