Joe,
Thanks for the comment. I think your analysis represents a sound conservative stance on Apple's near future. At times I have almost convinced myself that Apple will remain flat for a good while. But there are these annoying wildcards that I just can't get out of my head.
The capability of the new board is one, especially the pairing of Jobs and Ellison. Maybe it will be Ellison selling his NC concept to an emerging technoculture like Malaysia. I can see him throwing the hardware side to Apple. There are such vast, untapped markets out there and the world is changing to quickly to comprehend.
Then there's Rhapsody and the developement system, coupled with the new PPC technology. Data wharehousing is going to explode one of these days and I hear that NT isn't upto the challenge in terms of scalability and other features. What's more, Oracle seems to have the lead as the database software. Ellison again. The World seems to need a powerful, new OS and Rhapsody may just fill the bill. It's certainly well concieved to make inroads.
And lastly, there's the chip technologies. The new third generation 750 chips will offer amazing speed and price/performance, and will be tailor made for laptops. I agree that Apple's more powerful machines will easily appeal to niches such as the graphics and scientific community, but it's the possibility of other uses of this speed that intrigues me. Programmers are clever people. The one thing I've learned is that you can't give them too much ram or too much processor speed. They'll always figure out something to do with them both. The venerable Mr. Gates (whose supposed to tell us about "The Road Ahead") stated around 1984 that,"We'll never need more than 64K." I said they were clever, not necessarily visionaries. If some broadly useful or desirable application becomes possible due to this processor technology, then anything could happen. Take RealAudio for example. Here, some clever programmers got around the incredibly slow transfer rate of current modems, by clever encoding and user side processing. As a result, I'm listening to a radio talk show right now from half way around the world and could listen to an archived show dating back for over a year. And it sounds good. Amazing.
If you are interested in a straightforward description of the evolution of the Power PC chips, up to and including the 750, I recommend this treatise from the people at Newer Technology. It's written in plain English and is quite interesting.
www2.maccpu.com
Sorry to be so long winded. I get carried away.
Glad to hear those Wintels are stayinp up. I wish crashes on no man.
Regards,
Scott |
