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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HerbVic who wrote (29203)	10/8/2000 10:37:13 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

HerbVic, On Mac OS X, I'm just playing conservative. Given the fact that the hardware development side of OS X was fairly late in the cycle, I doubt Apple will ship an OS that doesn't have a full bevy of drivers available. My first question is whether Apple will launch OS X independent of launching new hardware. I would think not, although that's just a guess. While I don't believe there will be another public beta, I would be surprised if there were no more private releases to developers for 3rd party testing. However, stranger things have happened. Typically, Apple does big launches in January or July/August. Since January seems unrealistic, I would lean towards April-June at the earliest, with MacWorld in July being the historical precident for slipped Apple software launches. There is a real question of the best mechanism for launch: 1) Ship shrinkwrap first, w/ BTO option on Apple Store, and then move to standard SKUs in the channel in later quarters. 2) Ship BTO option in Apple store first, follow with standard hardware SKUs in the channel, and then the shrinkwrap version last. 3) Go for straight hardware SKUs and shrinkwrap, no BTO option. The dedicated hardware skus are the safest from a support standpoint, since they guarantee the hardware platform, allowing Apple a few months to catch catastrophic gotchas. The BTO option is a way for Apple to offer the OS to new computer buyers, but not deal with upgrade mess. The shrinkwrap option is what leads to "software sales" and generally marks a successfully launched OS product. The real question is how Apple manages the transition in terms of SKUs, since Apple has to avoid doubling the hardware skus out there (which are already proliferating like mad). Obviously there a far more permutations for this launch than the three above. This launch will be the most difficult Apple has ever attempted, although not dissimilar to the PPC launch. For those of us that remember, that launch, while successful, was fairly painful in many ways.

To: HerbVic who wrote (29203)	10/11/2000 1:12:33 AM
From: FruJu	Respond to of 213176

I don't understand why you expect OS X to not ship before April~. I haven't bought the beta yet, but my second hand impression is that OS X is finished except for fleshing out with drivers and a few debugging loose ends. You don't expect it to be bundled by the end of January after the MacWorld SF party? HerbVic, Don't know if you've got the beta yet as I write this, but after running it for a couple of weeks now, I would be very surprised if Apple ships it before April (more likely May at the WWDC). There are still many bugs in the Classic compatibility environment, lots of features are still missing in the Finder (and it's still buggy), there are no printer drivers for any inkjets, lots of people still complaining about missing features of OS9 (e.g. you have to reboot every time you change network connections). Lots of bugs in the Carbon environment as well. If I recall correctly, Apple officials at MacWorld Europe intimated that they didn't expect a full release until March, so the January date is already blown out. What really worries me (and the reason I'm not getting into AAPL stock yet) is that OSX really is radically different from OS9. It is not a simple upgrade - Apple has thrown away many of the user interface characteristics which have made MacOS the "people's OS", and instead turned it into more of a "server/CIO OS" - characteristic of OSX's Unix roots. Since Apple is effectively betting the company on OSX's success, I'm holding off until I see better direction and more responsiveness to user demands from Apple's development teams. If OSX turns out to be a radical departure from OS9 with a radical change in the user interface and missing features, why would people bother to buy Macintoshes when you could get the same in a cheaper, better supported system by buying Windows 2000.