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

To: Michael Feldstein who wrote (21283)	12/18/1998 6:43:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213185

Adam and others, I have a couple of technical questions I'm hoping you could answer. First, if you exclude YB, how much smaller might the Mac OS be once the APIs are slimmed down to Carbon? Wise words: Software never gets smaller. Carbon does not significantly shrink the number of APIs supported by the Mac OS, and the APIs are replaced by new ones, both for old and new functionality. Significantly smaller? Or will Apple have to replace those APIs with new ones that are roughly the same size? Always bigger. Standard File goes, but now there is Navigation Services. Old printing goes, new printing arrives. Quickdraw becomes Extended Quickdraw, based on PDF. The support code for the old APIs is smaller than the new code for the new APIs, always. the problem with the old APIs is not size, it is in architecture. And if you add Carbon to the rumored nanokernel (again, excluding YB), how small might the MacOS get without cutting functionality? As small as WinCE? Never. Then again, i don't think WinCE is going to be as small as WinCE soon. RAM is cheap. So cheap that ATI can put 32MB of it on a video card selling for $200 next year. The trick with Mac OS is that the current version can run well on a machine with 32MB of memory. That is a very cheap amount. I think you can see where this line of questioning is leading. Mac OS is going to stay Mac OS. There is no indication of technical work to support a "Mac OS Lite". If there was such a thing, they would have to let their developers know 6-12 months in advance, and they haven't yet. I would more likely believe that Apple would start using Palm OS for handhelds, and Mac OS for portables and desktops, and Linux and Mac OS X for servers. Apple may someday become a multi-OS company...