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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc.

AAPL 273.40

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3:59 PM EST

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To: rhet0ric who wrote (14237)	6/2/1998 3:21:00 PM
From: Eric Yang	Read Replies (2) of 213177

"if Apple becomes compatible in some way with Wintel, it may give developers no reason to code for MacOS, and users no reason to buy a PowerPC Mac." You raised two issues if such a convergence is attained 1) keep the developers writing MacOS code 2) attracting/maintaining users to buy Mac hardware If Apple ports Carbon and MacOS to x86 there would be no danger of losing developers! If current Mac developers want to sell to the PowerPC based Mac install base, they must write code based on the Mac API. If they want to sell to the newly created install base of PCs running MacOS, they will also have to write their code based on the Mac API. So either way they have to write Mac apps. The good thing is that if Carbon and MacOS X were ported these developers can simply write the application once and compile it to run either on PowerPC or x86. This actually gives some current Windows developers an incentive to write their code based on MacAPI. The reverse is not true...current Mac developers would not have any additional incentive to start writing applications based on Windose API. As for the hardware issue, its a bit more complicated. Even if MacOS were suddenly to become available on PC tomorrow. I think the majority of the current Mac users will still be buying Mac hardware. A user who switch to MacOS on PC would have to repurchase all the major applications that he/she currently own since the PowerPC version won't work on the PC. So I don't think there would be sudden exodus if MacOS for PC becomes available. Did I mention that PCs are slow and ugly? Ultimately Apple will have to widen the hardware performance and design gap to differentiate its hardware from PCs (via PowerPC, AltiVec, industrial design) while narrowing the gap of pricing and device compatibility (via USB, AGP..etc). If just 10 percent of the current PC install base tries our MacOS and a fraction of them become persuaded to purchase Apple's hardware, our OS marketshare can easily triple and the hardware marketshare can double. Eric

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