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

To: Robert Mayo who wrote (10115)	3/25/1998 11:20:00 PM
From: rhet0ric	Respond to of 213176

I could go on, but I wouldn't want to spoil your fun actually doing a little research on the subject. I don't want to get into a flame war. I've done a fair bit of research, and I'm familiar with all of the sites/pages you mention. Mackido is one of my favorite sites. I use a Mac myself, and prefer it to Windows. But I also work in a multi-OS environment, and I see every day the relative advantages and disadvantages of different OSs. (Right now I respect Linux more than anything else). As far as Win95 versus MacOS go, I believe that each of them have their areas of superiority. With WinNT verus MacOS, though, while the MacOS still retains the advantages it has over Win95, NT's superior architecture and capabilities as a server put it in a different class. If that weren't the case, why did Apple launch the Copland project? And if they didn't screw that up, why did Apple kill it and buy NeXT? Why is Apple furiously working at taking the modern OS features of OpenStep and integrating them into the MacOS? I believe that when Rhapsody is fully mature (which includes the integration of its features into MacOS), Apple will once again have a lead over the best Microsoft has to offer, but not until then. If you look at a long-term historical graph of AAPL, you'll see a serious downtrend beginning in August, 1995--in other words, at the introduction of Win95. The current uptrend is very recent, and still full of question marks. Like you (I think) I'm betting that the trend will continue, and part of that will involve delivering a better OS. I really think it's important, as an AAPL investor, to be as dispassionate as possible about Apple and the Mac. It's easy to be emotional about them, but it's dangerous to let those emotions guide one's investment decisions. rhet0ric

To: Robert Mayo who wrote (10115)	3/25/1998 11:40:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 213176

Robert, We have seen this "we are the best" from day 1 when Apple had 100% of the market and they fatuously greeted IBM to the market. Now there is Corporate hubris for you!! A few years after that time this 'superior' platform went on a downward versus the WIntels. So did IBM. They both got kicked off the face of the earth by the Wintels.(I differentiate IBM from the other WIntels, as they too were kings and made bad decisions to shoot off their feet) It makes me think of the snooty lady next door who looks down her nose at all the other 'nouveau riche' neighbours. Apple blinked, as they say. It missed the change and Gates saw it. Gates in essence made what the world wanted as a standard item at a low cost and the huge fabricative powers of all the assembled competing WIntel makers brought down the prices. Apple would be King today, but for Jobs, Scully(especially Scurvy Scully) and faded techie Amelio. Scully looked at the Apple "brand' as a free standing entity that needed no technical capability to make it's way forward. After all coke vs Pepsi is no technical tour de force, it is advertising. And that was the start of the end. Scully had no back ground in tech. He sold sugar water and he should have stayed in it. Choosing him was the single critical path error Apple made. With a strong tech who allowed a licensed cloning system that had a progressive feedback of more $ as the system got larger, APple would have tapped the massive parallelism that allowed the WIntels to breed like flies. Amelio was a techie, but older and rooted in old tech and when he got cloning going it was with a flawed model that made the low end clones too expensive to compete with WIntels and the high end clones with such a small royalty($100 I heard?) that they competed with Apple. they needed a royalty from, say $50 to say $500 over the product range to allow for cloning under license for the good of Apple. So that was the beginning of the end. A few bad choices. The Newton started too early, before they had good enough fast CPU's to do the job. Now it would be fine, but the cash is lost and with it goes the opportunity. Apple could not even get a buyer for the Newton tech at any price(except fire sale surplus offers), and yet Newton is very good now. The history and the funny cartoons from the too early release with weak software and slow CPU did it in. Now we have the Apple glee club, we are so good, so fast, so much better than Wintel. It might be true, but why does the market not react that way? New desktops are rare. All sales are old desktops going upwards in Apple. Unless Apple gets new desktops, fresh new ones at 25% per cent per year it will keep losing share. It is now profitable?, I have yet to see what funny balance sheet moves were made to show this profit. Apple will not go far higher on price until it shows some share gains, as larger share goes to future potential and thus a higher multiple. Right now with the expected drop in profits after Apr 15 the stock may indeed have reached a plateau, or may even fall. Bill

To: Robert Mayo who wrote (10115)	3/26/1998 4:03:00 AM
From: IanBruce	Respond to of 213176

Robert: "Surpass?" You're kidding, right? Robert, Thought you might find this amusing. It's an editorial by Richard Hart, the host of CNET's television show, CNET Central. Bear in mind that Intel is a big investor in CNET. Product demo disasters 1/22/98 "In every episode of the CNET Central television show, we present a seemingly effortless two-minute product demo. What you don't see are the hours of trial and error that precede these demos. If you did, you'd probably think twice before buying another computer product." CNET, "the Computer Network", is staffed by dozens of dedicated, highly skilled, technically savvy individuals - yet it takes "hours of trial and error" to get shipping products to work with Windows 95? "Let's start with Windows 95, for example. Let me confirm what I'm sure you already know: on the PC, it's still very much plug and pray. Our bitter experience installing and uninstalling applications and drivers every week for these demos allows me to say this with complete confidence." This paragraph is just priceless. "This weekly routine makes me want to thank Apple for Macs, because this part of demo hell doesn't apply to them. On the Mac, installing the Wacom Display Tablet required nothing more than double- clicking an install icon and plugging in the tablet. No such luck with the Windows-flavored products." Full text is at: <http://www.cnet.com/Content/Voices/Hart/012298/?dd> Ian Bruce New York, NY

To: Robert Mayo who wrote (10115)	3/26/1998 10:45:00 AM
From: Alomex	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213176

"Catch up?" "Surpass?" You're kidding, right? See: [list deleted] Did you even read the articles? The first one is not a comparison of OSes. The second one has to make punny excuses to aviod a comparison with NT 'cuz "it has evolved less than Win95" (!?). Then it goes into a pointless comparison of irrelevant semifacts such as "seemlesly porting to PowerPC". What does portability has to do with measuring an OS? Plus the port was everything but seemless, and in fact it was so difficult that even today MacOS 8.1 has emulated 68x00 code. The third article claims to be a fair comparison of the two operating systems. It has four sections, the first one talks about ease of installation, the second one about ease of installation, the third one about ease of installation and the fourth one about ease of installation. I don't know what Mac people do with their boxes, but I spend, literally, 99% of the time running apps, and 1% installing new apps and/or hardware. (Sort of claiming that a dodge neon is better than a Mercedes because it is easier to remove the gas cap.) Thanks Bob, you just helped us illustrate how incredibly weak are the claims about MacOS superiority...