Where were you when Apple declared war?

ComputerWorld ^ | July 12, 2011 | Jonny Evans

[Swordmaker]

"Speed is the essence of war. Take advantage of the enemy's unpreparedness; travel by unexpected routes and strike him where he has taken no precautions." Sun Tzu, Art of War

It was January 2007 when Apple [AAPL] went to war. The original iPhone wasn't just the world's first thin client Mac, it was then the company began to define the future of mass market mobile computing. It was when it swore to fight tooth and claw to dominate the vision.

[ABOVE: No more Mr. Nice Guy.]

World iWar

Today, you have Apple involved in an increasingly bitter global dispute with Samsung, litigation against HTC and Motorola, Kodak, the lousy Lodsys lawsuit and more. Apple is also taking on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over essential patents for apps.

Apple is prepared to litigate to defend its position. That's in addition to its other battlefronts, for example: user interface excellence, world-class design, simplicity and self-expression.

Apple is attempting to retain control over patents which handle how mobile applications request sensitive information, such as contact, diary or other personal data. In order to do this it has had to refuse to provide a royalty-free license for two patents which are core components to the W3C's Widget Access Request Policy, a specification closely tied to HTML5.

Cupertino's refusal to allow royalty-free licenses to its '007 and '77 patents has driven the W3C to seek out 'prior art' with which to invalidate Apple's patents. Or find another way in the event a case to invalidate cannot be found.

[tacticalogic]

Anybody who tries just glitz without underlying value fails. Remember most PC users trying to pimp-up their PCs with plastic in the face of Apple's design successes? Remember Apple's own Mac Cube? It was very nice and glitzy, but it cost far more than equivalent Mac hardware. Not many people have that much money to shell out for looks.

I suspect that may also be somewhat responsible for the demise of the XServe. Nobody wants to pay a premium for a glitzy machine that spends it's life in a dark room.

[antiRepublicrat]

I suspect that may also be somewhat responsible for the demise of the XServe. Nobody wants to pay a premium for a glitzy machine that spends it's life in a dark room.

The XServe got rave reviews from admins. It was very well designed, easy to do anything without tools (that wasn't as common when the XServe was introduced). And compared to Windows servers, the licensing made them much less expensive.

You keep your server room dark when you're in there? Do you keep night vision goggles in the man trap? I like walking into the server room and seeing all those nice Sun systems racked up, or the cool looks of the EMC and NetApp racks, rather than the ugly hodgepodge of the x86 server racks. It makes the server room look neater, and I'm a server neat freak (channel and label that cabling!). I'm not alone in this.

[tacticalogic]

The admins aren't paying for them. If they were all that, why did the discontinue them and stop renewing service contracts?

People buy servers and operating systems to run applications. What good is a free OS that won't run the apps you need?

[tacticalogic]

I like walking into the server room and seeing all those nice Sun systems racked up, or the cool looks of the EMC and NetApp racks, rather than the ugly hodgepodge of the x86 server racks.

If you're that impressed with Mac servers, why did you buy Sun?

[antiRepublicrat]

The admins aren't paying for them. If they were all that, why did the discontinue them and stop renewing service contracts?

Apple is moving away from high-powered local servers and into providing cloud services. Note the recent billions of dollars of investment in the infrastructure to support them. The XServe is simply not on the strategic roadmap, not worth the R&D and support investment for the small role Apple sees it playing. Whether this approach is a good one is debatable.

There is rumor that for those people who absolutely have to have a rack-mounted Mac, the next Mac Pro may be rackable.

[antiRepublicrat]

If you're that impressed with Mac servers, why did you buy Sun?

I didn't buy it. This particular enterprise actually has little use for what Apple offers in the server room. There is no Oracle 11g or MSSQL 2008 equivalent on the Mac. Horses for courses.

[tacticalogic]

This particular enterprise actually has little use for what Apple offers in the server room. There is no Oracle 11g or MSSQL 2008 equivalent on the Mac.

That isn't all you can't get the equivalent of on a Mac, and you aren't the only one the didn't need what Mac was offering, by a long shot.

Mac doesn't want to deal with the back end, they want to own the front end, make you figure out how to make the integration work in the middle, and convince you it's worth it because it looks cool.

[ReignOfError]

And, yes, the 20th Anniversary Mac was just for show, a "here's what we can do" vision thing. I was surprised Apple didn't make it a limited edition in the first place.

They did, just not limited enough. They made 12,000, and had to cut the price from $9K to $2K before they finally unloaded all of them.

[Swordmaker]

Agree, except part of the Air's aesthetics was its extreme portability, an actually useful feature. The problem was then it was far too slow to be even a main road warrior machine. But it was a technological feat just to get it that small in the first place, much less worry about performance.

I have to disagree with your slowness characterization of the Macbook Air. When the Macbook Air came out on January 15, 2008, at 2.9 pounds and .76 inch thick, it was far faster than any other sub-notebook on the market at 1.6GHz... and it would run Windows XP, Vista, and later Windows 7. The offerings from the other companies at the time in the same class were generally 1Ghz or slower. Although not a speed demon, with 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a Intel P7500 Core 2 Duo processor, it easily competed with main stream notebook computers.