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

To: Alomex who wrote (29229)	10/9/2000 8:43:58 PM
From: HerbVic	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

All minor on the screw-up rictor scale. No score on the processor. Two systems. Roughly comparable performance. One has a heater and a high clock rate. The other is a model of efficiency with a lower clock rate. Neither is a screw-up as a choice for desktop or laptop. Hmmm... well the Intel might be considered a screw-up for laptops. HerbVic

To: Alomex who wrote (29229)	10/10/2000 12:37:12 AM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 213176

>>While I might relent and say that one-button mouse maybe, just maybe, is a matter of personal preference, the CPU is another story. Read on: Who, in 1981, could have predicted that Motorola would lag the mhz race in Y2K? Or even 1984 for that matter? I'm not talking 1981 or 1984. By 1989 it was clear Motorola had lost the race. That was the time to say "betting on Motorola once seemed sensible, but no longer so. Let's pick up the pieces and move as smoothly as possible to the intel architecture".<< Alomex - The CPU horsepower issue is not as simple as that. I do not believe that it was clear in 1989 that Motorola had "lost the race", nor do I think it's clear now. Yes, the fastest G4 is currently at 500MHz, and the fastest Pentium III is at 1 GHz. But those numbers don't tell the whole story. The most recent issue of PC Magazine has an article about the G4 500 MHz dual-processor Mac. They talk about the various deficiencies of the Mac system board, such as the pokey 100 MHz bus, etc. Then they run some tests and compare the Mac to a PC with dual 1 GHz Pentium IIIs. The Mac actually outperforms the PC on several tests, and is close on the others. So even with a slower bus and operating at half the clock speed, the G4 holds its own. I do believe that Motorola needs to get speeds up, and that Apple needs to pay attention to system architectural issues like bus speeds, but I don't believe the evidence supports the idea that Motorola has lost the race. - Allen

To: Alomex who wrote (29229)	10/11/2000 1:47:31 AM
From: FruJu	Respond to of 213176

I'm not talking 1981 or 1984. By 1989 it was clear Motorola had lost the race. That was the time to say "betting on Motorola once seemed sensible, but no longer so. Let's pick up the pieces and move as smoothly as possible to the intel architecture". Motorola lost the race with the 68K architecture in 1989-1990. That's why Apple brought in IBM to pump in money and develop the PowerPC - which jumped ahead of the Intel world again. Remember that even as late as Q3 1997, the PowerPC 604e shipped at a faster MHz rating (350MHz) than any Intel x86 chip (Pentium II @ 300MHz). Where Apple went wrong is in letting the AIM Somerset alliance dissolve that same year in 1997-8. The subsequent loss of IBM as a research partner in high end desktop CPUs and tying themselves to Motorola by the reliance on Altivec in the G4 is now coming back to hurt Apple, just as it hurt them when they relied on Motorola before in the late 80s. I agree with you that as we talk today, Apple can not rely on Motorola to produce high performance CPUs. Just today Motorola "announced" their 1GHz SOI G4s, but at the same time issued such ominous quotes as "we're still learning about this process" and that it "will allow us to get to 1GHz". No time frame, no promises for delivery, no sign even of the 750MHz G4s they "announced" at the same event last year. Apple execs should be hunkered down in their executive suites discussing how to extricate themselves from Motorola's ineptitude. In fact, they should have been doing this for the past year when it became clear that Motorola was losing brain talent and funding for the PowerPC. Yes AppleTalk was brilliant. But at some point Ethernet won. Did Apple pick up the pieces and move on? No. In fact Apple was the last major manufacturer to support TCP/IP. This is simply incorrect. Apple shipped MacTCP as an operating system component back in the early 90s when DOS and early Windows machines still had only third party hacks like Trumpet WinSock. In fact, MacTCP was one of the reasons that Macs were particularly succesful in universities because you could hook them up and use them for FTP/POP directly off the Unix servers while DOS and Windows machines sat off on their own because there was no standard TCP/IP support. (I happen to know this because I worked in the university networking department in the late 80s, early 90s and saw this happening firsthand)