Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: rhet0ric who wrote (14240)	6/3/1998 12:00:00 PM
From: Eric Yang	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

The danger is that, instead of developers using the Mac APIs, they would use Win32. They would tell their installed Mac base to buy a PC, use their existing apps on MacOSX/Intel, and transition to Wintel to use new apps. I don't think developers can make that kind of argument since existing apps (with PPC code) CAN'T run on MacOSX/Intel. Let me demonstrate this using graphic designer market as an example. Let's suppose that MacOS X and Carbon have already been ported to run on Intel. Based on your argument, Adobe would stop making Mac version of Photoshop, develop Photoshop using Win32 API...essentially making Photoshop a Windows only application. Current Mac users would therefore have to: 1) buy a whole new set of PC hardware 2) because of (1) I must replace all their current Mac/PPC software such as Freehand..etc with either Win/Intel or Mac/Intel versions. 3) And after buying a new PC (1) and spending more money to replace ALL the software (2) what do I get? Adobe Photoshop running on Windows with all the ugly interface of Wintel? Yuck! Software developers simply cannot make this argument. This is no different then a developer telling user to switch to PC today. I still don't see how Carbon/Intel would give a developer any additional incentive to move to a Wintel only platform. On the other hand, I think there are quite a few software developers on the Wintel side today that would like to port their applications to run on the Mac and take advatage of the better user interface etc. However they are concerned about the ability to recover their investment due to the smaller marketshare. With MacOS/Intel the 90% PC install base suddenly becomes potential market..giving them an incentive to port the apps. They can write the apps using MacAPI ONCE and compile it as either a Mac/PPC app or compile it as Mac/Intel app. This would allow them to sell it to the existing Mac install base as well as the potential to sell it to every PC with MacOS out there. Again, at this point Carbon/Intel amounts to nothing more than a speculation. There have been reports of Apple rep in Japan saying that it is taking place but it's still not much more than rumors at this point. I am in no way saying that it WILL happen, but personally I think it is a sound strategy and Apple stand to gain a lot from it. If our OS is really as good as we say it is, the best way to demonstrate that would be for it to run on the same PC hardware that Win95 runs on. Eric