<p>Have never given security software a thought with Apple products,if you don’t have it with Windows, you are toast</p>
<p>I’ve been using macs for 25 years. They have always been about user experience.
They are more popular than they were twenty fiber years ago, because people decided that having something that was easy to use, wasn’t one of the seven deadly sins.</p>
<p>Of course Apple didn’t invent the smart phone.
But they couldn’t have managed it better if they tried.
I had a Blackberry before I had an iPhone & I had a palm pilot before I had an iPod touch.
But using the above devices just whetted the consumer appetite for something that was fun to use and did what you wanted it to.</p>
<p>Why is that so hard?</p>
<p>Wow, 25 years of Macs. Must have toiled through some lean years! I hope you bought some stock when they almost gave it away. Did you get a Next cube too?</p>
<p>My first memory of a Mac was that one that seemed inspired by Peyo and Smurfette. My dad bought it because our school had the same model. We did not care much for it nor the Lisa he had in the garage. The best and most fun computers we had at home were two souped-up Amigas from Commodore. Real multitasking and almost unlimited memory made those computers do things the IBM boxes and the Mac could only dream about. It was so funny to hear the German and Russian developers my dad brought home to teach us always talk badly about Windoze. </p>
<p>Our first laptops were a Gateway, a cute blue computer I forgot the name, and a really small one made by Fujitsu. Probably weighed a lot less than my mom’s cell phone which had the size of a brick.</p>
<p>I remember the Lisa as my business partner bought one to do development on. Those were the good old days working with very small memory models.</p>
<p>There are a few websites with articles on the new MacBook Pro Retina models driving 4 monitors natively. One of them shows it effortlessly driving over 15 million pixels from a small laptop.</p>
<p>I was able to write an entire real estate analysis program which generated all sorts of “rules of thumb” numbers in what in retrospect seems a pathetic amount of space. It isn’t just the amount of memory, but the extreme advances in memory management, from essentially seamless virtual memory to clearing out memory for use to usually simple management of processes. </p>
<p>I looked at the Zune. I looked at the Archos. I preferred Ogg Vorbis to low quality MP3. And so on. No compelling reason to switch; Apple covered the basics well enough even though there were significant annoyances: hard to get songs on and off an iPod without synching to iTunes (like it’s on that iPod and not this one) or frustrating using more than one iTunes library (not fixed for years). The big thing was the store: the subscription model sucked because, as Jobs said, people want to own their music and, even today, the iTunes store is better and easier to use than even Amazon’s music store (and much easier than Google’s, with all its limits). </p>
<p>I’ve been thinking the MS announcement really changes things, but not Apple vs MS vs Google. They’re making hardware. Google is apparently going to do the same thing with its tablet. (And the speculation is this announcement’s timing is more Google driven than iPad; Google goes in a week or so.)</p>
<p>What does this mean for the industry as a whole? It means the software makers are vertically integrating, trying to control their own supply chains and competing against their own licensees. I don’t know what that means for MS licensees or the many companies that depend on MS licensees but I doubt it’s good. Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball has a terrific piece up today about this. Here’s a small bit. It begins by referring to an analysis of revenues and profits for MS and Apple:</p>
<p>"There we have it: four short paragraphs that explain why Microsoft has turned its guns against PC-making OEMs. This move was driven by the iPad, but competitively it directly pits Microsoft not against Apple but against Dell, HP, Toshiba, et al. The intention is obviously to slow the iPad down, but the radical shift in Microsoft’s strategy is about the fight over the profits that remain after Apple’s. The math no longer works out for the Windows you-sell-the-hardware-we-sell-the-software model. It works for unit share (cf. Android), but it doesn’t for profit share. Nothing works sustainably in business without profit — profit is the oxygen companies breathe. …</p>
<p>… Microsoft Surface is not fundamentally about Microsoft needing to control the entire integrated product in order to compete with the iPad on design. It’s about Microsoft needing to sell the whole thing to sustain its current profitability."</p>
<p>Jon, as usual, is dead on. And Google is moving that way. This portends huge change in the PC industry, in the phone business, in the tech industry as a whole. As software makers integrate, they will create markets (see Apple accessories) and destroy markets (can’t add anything to the retina Mac Book Pro). So we may see lots of accessories for Surface but no ability to add, which means all those companies that make expansion and upgrade products are fighting for space in a squeezed desktop world.</p>
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<p>Google bought Motorola so they are in the phone hardware market. Google also has their ChromeBook which is a cloud-based laptop but it hasn’t done that well. Are they doing their own tablet or is Motorola doing that for them?</p>
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<p>I don’t know that Dell or HP has a choice - they can grumble but they have to use Windows at the end of the day.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that Newegg will like that.</p>
<p>There is the external expansion business but I don’t think that electronics suppliers will want limits to their market.</p>