Mar
02
2008Why Apple Will Dominate the Home Computer Market in the Decades to Come
02
2008
It has nothing to do with OS X. Well, not in the way most Apple fans think.
I recently stumbled across two different, unrelated articles which point to the same conclusion. In order for comptuters to truly shine, the software MUST be tied to the hardware.
The first article, “Has Vista Lost all Credibility?” talks about how product development and product marketing conflicts between Intel, Dell, and Microsoft led to a lot of the faults of Vista (and provides 158 pages of internal email evidence backing it up).
The second article, “Why I Quit“, by former Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas, talks about how even with complete control over the software, the PC platform architecture has become so convoluted over the decades that machines that are technically 1,000 times faster, they’re 10 times slower in “doing stuff”, like playing audio or moving windows.
This problem is only getting worse, and Vista has proven it once and for all. The open “Wintel” architecture used to matter, when people were regularly building and upgrading their own systems, but those days are long gone. With $250 PC’s at Wal-Mart, the average user is as likely to upgrade their own computers as they are their pocket calculator. PC’s are disposable commodities now, and people are fine with that.
Apple knows this, which is why they developed the Macbook Air the way they did. You can’t even (officially) replace the battery in this thing. It’s a sealed, black box for the average user, and even though it comes at a premium price, people don’t care. They want the illusion that the computer is just a single thing that just does what you want, whether it’s powered by Intel, Motorola, or magical fairies.
True innovation in computing (in this day and age) will only come from an integrated hardware and software platform. The Amiga was a quantum leap ahead of its contemporaries (as Con Kolivas points out) because of its hardware innovations. Apple is currently the only company following this path, and this is why Macs will become the defacto home computer within 20 years, regardless of how cool OS X is.