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

To: Randy Tidd who wrote (11824)	4/20/1998
From: Zen Dollar Round	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Many people suggest that this is what Apple should do -- let a bunch of clone makers worry about the hardware, and focus on the software instead. If Apple had a MacOS product that ran on Intel hardware and was priced along the same lines of Win/95, they could compete directly with MicroSoft for the PC desktop. From a technical point of view, however, this would be a huge mistake. One of the reasons I hate using PC's is that the hardware is totally nonstandard and all the add-ons are similar yet different. So getting a machine put together is actually fairly difficult. And writing software for these machines can also get very complicated because you'll never know what kind of hardware is beneath you. Precisely. Far too many people forget about this very real problem in the PC world, and "Plug and Play" is only beginning to address the problem. The Mac has had plug and play since its inception, and I'm afraid allowing Mac clone makers to engineer their stuff willy nilly would have been a huge backward step in ease of use. Apple had a great idea with the clone makers by controlling the motherboards they used, certifying system designs, and getting fees for both the Mac OS and hardware design. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to make up for the dollars lost to the faster and cheaper clones, apparently. While I was disappointed at the decision to mostly quit the clone business, I also believe there is no way Apple would have shown a profit the last two quarters without doing it. Perhaps in the future, with Rhapsody running on Intel and PowerPC chips, they can license clone makers once again and continue to grow profits.