[HN Gopher] Steve Jobs tried to convince Dell to license Mac sof...
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Steve Jobs tried to convince Dell to license Mac software
Author : ksec
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-10-06 05:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnet.com)
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Volume PC sales is about margins so you can't pay a fee two
| multiple OS vendors as that would make Dell be at a competitive
| disadvantage.
|
| Also, isn't Dell the guy who said Apple should be liquidated and
| funds returned to shareholders in the mid-90s?
| tombert wrote:
| It's interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing
| OS X (and other software) became Apple's main business model. I
| wonder if in this universe, Apple is basically the Google of our
| time (everything is a cloud service, massive ad tracking, using
| metadata as their revenue generation), or if they would be more
| like the MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google).
|
| While I don't really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it
| seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more
| popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. OS X was
| (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out
| there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and
| presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix
| might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's.
| LordKano wrote:
| My favorite Apple related What-If is What If Gassee hadn't been
| so greedy when Apple was interested in buying the BeOS?
| jeffbee wrote:
| This would certainly have destroyed Apple, right? BeOS
| despite its cult followers was really almost useless and JLG
| would not have initiated the projects that made Apple a
| success after acquiring Next.
| linguae wrote:
| I agree in the sense that BeOS wouldn't have saved Apple,
| though this has less to do with the merits of BeOS and more
| to do with Apple's circumstances. Even with the purchase of
| NeXT, there was still a considerable time period between
| December 1996 (when the purchase of NeXT was announced) and
| March 2001 (when Mac OS X 10.0 was released) where Apple's
| customers still had to use the aging classic Mac OS (and
| even then Mac OS X didn't start getting widespread adoption
| among Mac users until the Jaguar/Panther eras). More to the
| point, Apple's operating system strategy wasn't the only
| issue Apple faced. NeXT's OpenStep API and OPENSTEP
| operating system weren't enough by themselves to turn
| around Apple; it was Steve Jobs' leadership and the
| successful launches of products such as the iMac G3 (1998),
| the iBook G3 (1999) that kept Apple afloat until Mac OS X
| was released. I don't know if Apple would have survived had
| Gil Amelio remained in power or had Jean-Louis Gassee took
| control.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Oh yeah. I think about that all the time.
|
| I'm thrilled that we have unix with nice GUI that runs
| Photoshop. That was always my dream machine as a kid.
|
| But boy, was BeOS awesome. The most responsive OS I ever
| used. The priorities were set straight: user input is king,
| so is audio and video.
|
| And the aesthetics matched my taste remarkably well. I always
| thought NeXT was hideous by comparison.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Mine is if Apple actually bought Bungie (which they
| reportedly missed out on my three days), Halo would have been
| killed and Bungie dissolved, and who knew what would have
| happened to Xbox and the console market.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had
| this gone through._
|
| Half a phone convo:
|
| Hi, this is Steve Jobs. If you engage in licensing with Apple,
| I will port my Unix-based OS to your brand of generic PC
| hardware.
|
| What? Yes, I sorta know I can already do that without _you_
| licensing anything from _me_.
|
| Why am I talking to you? Good question, you see ...
|
| Yes, I know about Linux.
|
| But anyway, so how about it?
| bityard wrote:
| > I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop
| OS's
|
| Microsoft is pouring buckets of money and human capital into
| WSL2. Today, it's their way to drag cloud developers away from
| the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows
| ecosystem. But tomorrow, maybe developers and server admins
| will demand more Linux compatibility and, who knows, maybe they
| will reach a point where the only way to improve performance is
| to "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux
| kernel. The open source community has already proven that much
| of it can be done via Wine.
|
| One of those things that doesn't look terribly likely now but
| might prove obvious in retrospect.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Are they really, is there anything to back up the claim WSL2
| is a huge team internally? Because the way I see it WSL1 was
| much more novel and likely required a dedicated team to
| manage the kernel API to windows API shim layer, but now with
| WSL2 it's just a gussied up hyper V integration.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Probably not a huge team, but I guess the number of people
| involved has easily 3 digits, as MS needs to pay the
| developers, marketing people, manage the releases through
| Windows Updates, collect feedback, check compatibility etc.
|
| At the scale of MS a "major" Windows feature can't be
| cheap, even if it looks simple.
|
| Seriously, look at how difficult it is for them to port the
| old style control center or improve notepad.exe.
| spoonjim wrote:
| You're right that at MS scale teams are bigger, but also
| dollars are even proportionally much easier to come by.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| My hunch is that the monumental amount of work to make
| virtualized GPU support and zero-copy hardware accelerated
| graphics work from WSL2 to the desktop (a technology called
| "VAIL", which hasn't shipped yet) is in order to support
| Android apps on Windows, and that's always been the goal of
| this team and a series of high profile projects.
|
| WSL2 is actually the third iteration of this technology,
| not the second, and I believe has the same original goal
| and they've dedicated a large amount of engineering effort
| to that goal.
|
| Here's my case:
|
| Windows 10 Mobile had "Project Astoria", which involved
| working with app developers to port apps to Windows Phone.
| This involved library support and translation layers to
| enable APKs to run on Windows.
|
| WSL1 abandoned the approach of requiring developers to
| modify apps, and used "pico processes" with kernel driver
| and Windows kernel's support for alternative subsystems to
| Win32 to map Linux syscalls to Windows equivalents. This
| enabled binary compatibility for most apps, but fell short.
|
| WSL2 switched to the lightweight Hyper-V integration (now
| using the host compute system APIs to manage lightweight
| containers/VMs) but added deep driver integration with
| graphics to enable machine learning and hardware
| accelerated graphic workloads to work within Linux using
| vGPU drivers and RAIL respectively. And soon VAIL, to
| enable full fidelity graphical applications (i.e.: Android
| apps) to run on Windows without compromise.
|
| That's a lot of engineering time on 3 high complexity
| projects over a span of at least 6 years, publicly.
|
| Link to a talk on X11/Wayland and VAIL: https://xdc2020.x.o
| rg/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/...
| easton wrote:
| VAIL and WSLg are available now in stable builds of
| Windows 11. I think VAIL was originally designed to be
| able to connect to containers that ran Win32 apps so that
| they looked natural, but since containerizing Win32 apps
| and their 30 years of legacy cruft was considered too
| good of an idea to finish, it was repurposed for this.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| I think I disagree on both points. VAIL is not available
| yet, that I have seen, and I don't believe it was
| intended originally for Win32 apps.
|
| I don't think VAIL has shipped yet, and getting that
| working correctly and securely, as it involves sharing
| memory between the WSL2 VM with a Linux kernel and the
| host Windows kernel, seems to me the most likely blocking
| issue for why they haven't yet released Android app
| support on Windows. See this comment on the readme of the
| WSLg repo:
|
| > Please note that for the first release of WSLg, vGPU
| interops with the Weston compositor through system
| memory. If running on a discrete GPU, this effectively
| means that the rendered data is copied from VRAM to
| system memory before being presented to the compositor
| within WSLg, and uploaded onto the GPU again on the
| Windows side.
|
| As for originally being intended for Win32 apps, I do
| wonder if "Vail" and "VAIL" are different projects within
| the OS division. The Linux/X11/Wayland and vGPU interop
| part of VAIL requires different expertise and deep
| knowledge of the Linux graphical stack.
| easton wrote:
| I mean, I'm using it on stable Windows 11. The README
| says it shipped in build 21xxx which is 1000 builds
| behind Windows 11's number. I can check though.
|
| And for the other parts, the interop bits are new, but
| the deck from when the WSL2 devs presented this
| specifically said it was a great solution because it was
| already being used for Azure Virtual Desktop (hosted
| Windows VMs).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _My hunch is that the monumental amount of work to make
| virtualized GPU support and zero-copy hardware
| accelerated graphics work from WSL2 to the desktop (a
| technology called "VAIL", which hasn't shipped yet) is in
| order to support Android apps on Windows, and that's
| always been the goal of this team and a series of high
| profile projects._
|
| Unfortunately, Google's anticompetitive moves with
| SafetyNet will ensure that many Android apps will only
| run on Google-blessed hardware and software platforms.
|
| WSL 1 & 2 are amazingly innovative platforms, as is WINE.
| Microsoft has undoubtedly created untold value for
| developers and their shareholders with WSL. The
| anticompetitive limitations implemented in SafetyNet,
| however, serve to stifle such innovation, and prevent
| many Android apps from running on other platforms.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| > Microsoft has undoubtedly created untold value for
| developers and their shareholders with WSL.
|
| If there is a larger purpose around WSL, VS Code, and "MS
| <3 Linux" messaging, it is definitely this. They have
| really changed their reputation among developers.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In my opinion, Microsoft is the same Microsoft they were
| two decades ago. The company is still as efficient as
| they were back then at destroying what goodwill they have
| with developers[1].
|
| However, I can't ignore that they've certainly created
| value for engineers that use Windows to develop software
| that runs on Linux, similar to the value created by
| WINE's developers. It's just a shame that similar value
| and innovation are stifled by the limitations set by
| Google's SafetyNet when it comes to running Android
| software on other platforms.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779342
| pjmlp wrote:
| WSL was born from the previous Android on Windows
| project, known as Project Astoria.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| I agree, WSL2 is the third iteration of Astoria.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Which Android apps is anyone interested in running on a
| Windows platform?
| gumby wrote:
| I use a different set of platforms, but there are a
| couple of iOS programs I run under MacOS.
|
| In general the experience is worse than using a real
| macos app but it as terrible than running in Web
| browser/electron (e.g. Slack, Spotify), or a macOS app
| that looks like it was written under duress by someone
| who didn't give a shit (e.g. WhatsApp)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux
| kernel.
|
| In every category imaginable, the NT kernel is better
| designed. Async IO, better power management, pageable kernel
| memory, stable driver API. I'd much rather KDE shell on NT
| kernel.
|
| I get that Linux is popular, but no objective evaluation
| would claim that Linux kernel is better in any metric other
| than "how open source is it?" Spend some time to read the NT
| docs and get familiar with the design and you'll see.
|
| This may be a hard pill to swallow, but in many areas linux's
| design is still very much "my first kernel" (I will give
| credit where it is due though, it is slowly being patched
| piece by piece, slowly). Whereas NT was written by a team
| who's done it a few times and avoided a lot of pitfalls (eg:
| synchronous by default IO, really??)
| jen20 wrote:
| > NT kernel is better designed. Async IO
|
| This was true until io_uring, but io_uring is far more
| useful for far more purposes than overlapped IO.
| shrubble wrote:
| Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997. Hotmail was programmed in
| C++ and Perl--both of these programming languages had
| already been ported to NT at that time.
|
| It took them 7 years to get it stable enough to run on
| Windows Server, and they had to rewrite the entire stack to
| do it.
|
| Until then, they were running the service on Unix.
|
| https://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Live-Hotmail-Was-
| Pow...
| jborean93 wrote:
| I think the parent comment is talking about the NT kernel
| rather than the Win32 subsystem that is Windows. Today NT
| really only has 1 subsystem (Windows) but it definitely
| can support multiple ones, it even had one for Unix
| (really more a POSIX layer) back in the day.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Two subsystems for POSIX, really. There was the original
| POSIX subsystem[0] that shipped in NT 3.1 thru 4.0, and
| the third-party OpenNT that became Interix[1] after
| Microsoft purchased it.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| When I first used Interix back in the late 90s I had this
| dream that someday I'd see a version of NT that booted into
| text mode and ran an all-POSIX userland. That's never going
| to happen now but, architecturally, NT could totally pull
| it off.
|
| Edit:
|
| Microsoft wouldn't ever open-source NT but, damn,
| GNU/Windows NT would be a sweet OS to use. (Make it
| license-compatible with ZFS and it'd be awesome.)
| anthk wrote:
| So, ReactOS. It even has some BTRFS support, and crazy
| enough, it works with the original Windows 2003/XP
| kernel.
| baq wrote:
| POSIX or not, a gui-less private build is most likely the
| backbone of azure.
| vetinari wrote:
| Not necessarily private; Windows Server (without year-
| number) is GUI-less. Windows Server (with year-number)
| you can choose right in the installer, if you want
| "Desktop experience" or not.
| monocasa wrote:
| Even Windows doesn't agree with that. They started with a
| syscall wrapper for running Linux binaries, and ended up
| running a full Linux kernel next to the NT one because that
| was faster.
|
| There are absolutely parts of Linux with all the
| architecture and engineering rigor of a favela. Real big "I
| want a new room and have two sheets of corrugated steel, a
| neighbor's wall, and an afternoon" energy.
|
| There are also major parts of it that have benefited from
| decades of 'this tweak that won't be driver ABI compatible
| increases efficiency in this use case by measurable but
| single digit perf'. And yes, there's politics to getting
| that merged, but the barrier is way lower in Linux. You try
| a lot of that in how Microsoft builds software and at best
| you put a target on your back because you just made a lot
| of work for another team. At worst that amount of
| differently siloed work just kills the idea in the first
| place.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > They started with a syscall wrapper for running Linux
| binaries, and ended up running a full Linux kernel next
| to the NT one because that was faster
|
| Actually, it was because NTFS semantics do not match ext
| semantics and lots of linux apps expect the latter. MS
| was clear on that...
| monocasa wrote:
| No, it's not NTFS versus ext in the sense you mean. The
| Microsoft messaging on this is misleading at best.
|
| It's that the NT filesystem stack puts the FS cache
| between user space and the FS driver, whereas on Linux it
| sits between FS driver and the block device driver. What
| that means is that on Linux, you get caching of blocks
| containing FS metadata for free, but on NT it has to be
| manually performed. That kills perf when looking at a lot
| of metadata.
|
| When they say NTFS is to blame, they mean the NT
| FileSystem stack.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > You try a lot of that in how Microsoft builds software
|
| And yet on same hardware, windows gets twice the battery
| life and idles at about half the power. Maybe NT's way
| _IS_ better afterall?
| monocasa wrote:
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Windo
| ws-...
|
| Same power efficiency.
|
| And did you come back here an hour later to get another
| quip in?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Same power efficiency.
|
| Are we looking at the same graph?
| https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=1807102-RA-
| DELLXPSB...
|
| windows is idling at less than half the power! Idle power
| matters since most laptops spend most of their time idle
| waiting for the comparatively-slow humans to press keys
|
| > And did you come back here an hour later to get another
| quip in?
|
| And "quip" is a questionable (bordering on implied ad-
| hominem) word choice given that my only fault is
| disagreeing with you.
| monocasa wrote:
| > windows is idling at less than half the power! Idle
| power matters since most laptops spend most of their time
| idle waiting for the comparatively-slow humans to press
| keys
|
| The min use under Windows is slightly lower, the average
| is higher, and most importantly of all, the battery life
| (the metric we actually care about) appears about the
| same.
|
| As the article says "Overall, the power use between
| Windows 10 and the four tested Linux distributions was
| basically on-par with each other." and "Beyond this data,
| the battery life of this Dell XPS laptop has been about
| the same as seen under Windows 10 with the testing thus
| far. So overall it's a pleasant surprise with not having
| tested any other Kabylake-R laptops and wasn't quite sure
| if the Linux power efficiency would be able to run on-par
| with Windows 10 at this point."
|
| So it would appear that your new claim (that Windows gets
| twice the battery life) is without merit.
|
| I wish laptops were like a phones, where race to idle is
| key, but they're not. The upper levels of the software
| stacks both on Windows and Linux aren't there yet.
| tombert wrote:
| > In every category imaginable, the NT kernel is better
| designed. Async IO, better power management, pageable
| kernel memory, stable driver API.
|
| I can't comment on most of these things since I don't know
| much coding about them, but I will definitely grant you the
| stable driver API. Drivers are a huge pain in the ass in
| Linux, and until DKMS it was pretty common for upgrading my
| kernel to break my wifi card, which was really annoying.
|
| > I get that Linux is popular, but no objective evaluation
| would claim that Linux kernel is better in any metric other
| than "how open source is it?"
|
| I mean, that's a pretty big feature. Didn't Linux get
| multicore support well before Windows almost entirely
| because Linux was open source and popular on servers? When
| something is open source, companies (or people) don't have
| to wait for a specific monolithic company to decide that a
| certain feature is worthy.
|
| > synchronous by default IO, really??
|
| I will totally admit a lot of ignorance as I don't work in
| kernel spaces, but hasn't Linux had Async IO in the form of
| `epoll` for like 20 years? It's not the default but I feel
| like it's pretty commonly used.
|
| -----
|
| Of the things I _do_ like about Linux (outside of open
| source), it follows the "everything's a file" mantra from
| Unix. It makes it fairly fun and easy to arbitrarily glue
| applications together (admittedly at the cost of
| performance sometimes).
|
| Also, I like that you can choose different filesystems more
| or less arbitrarily. I don't have a Linux laptop anymore (I
| run macOS), but I when I did I was running ZFS on root with
| Ubuntu, and ZFS is pretty awesome. As far as I'm aware,
| with Windows you're basically stuck with NTFS.
| dralley wrote:
| >I will totally admit a lot of ignorance as I don't work
| in kernel spaces, but hasn't Linux had Async IO in the
| form of `epoll` for like 20 years? It's not the default
| but I feel like it's pretty commonly used.
|
| As an API, epoll is kind of... suboptimal. Of course,
| lots of great things have been built with it, but there's
| a reason it's being replaced with io-uring, which is a
| lot more similar to Windows iocp.
| monocasa wrote:
| Eh, it's io-uring is pretty different too, which is why
| NT just added a clone of io-uring.
|
| https://windows-internals.com/i-o-rings-when-one-i-o-
| operati...
| Fnoord wrote:
| It really depends on your goals, your use case.
|
| In begin of AMD64 a lot of Windows software was single
| threaded 32 bit still, while on Debian with APT you had a
| working 64 bit environment. It was mostly userland which
| could not handle the amount of max cores found in even
| consumer grade multicore AMD64.
|
| Even recently many games did not take advantage of
| multiple cores, while AMD has been strong performance
| wise multiple cores, Intel was best single core until Zen
| 3 recently. Windows would be unable to perform well (use
| max cores) on AMD64 by AMD.
|
| You can see it now too. Intel gets slight performance
| boost with Windows 11 compared to 10 while AMD loses
| performance. Which AMD said they will address in October.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Windows NT was born with multicore support from the get
| go, hence why the unit of execution is threads not
| processes.
| tombert wrote:
| Fair enough, a quick Google has confirmed I was wrong!
| This is what I get for repeating things without
| researching them first.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| NT was multicore much earlier (1994 [1]). Linux had
| SOMEWHAT working SMP support in 2.0 in 1996 [2]. But
| really I would hardly count it as real, what with BKL.
|
| [1] http://www.os2museum.com/wp/nt-3-1-smp/comment-
| page-1/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel
| dmitrygr wrote:
| NT had async io at release in 1993 [3]
|
| epoll() was introduced in Linux 2.5.44 [1], which was
| released in 2002 [2]. Epoll is not a wonderful API.
| Linux's _real_ reply to NT 's anync io is io_uring, which
| only appeared in Linux 5.1 [4] in 2019(!!) [2], and is
| still wildly evolving
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoll
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_hi
| story
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_uring
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > I get that Linux is popular, but no objective evaluation
| would claim that Linux kernel is better in any metric other
| than "how open source is it?"
|
| There's probably many areas where Linux comes strongly
| ahead - a much wider array of supported architectures, and
| even on the windows supported ones Linux scales much better
| by the virtue of being deployed from the smallest embedded
| computers to (all of) the largest supercomputers.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Linux supports a larger number of architectures than NT
| ever did, but NT was originally implemented on a non-x86
| processor to insure portability. The MIPS, PowerPC,
| Alpha, and IA64 ports of NT are all dead, but they were
| all supported in the past. The speed that Microsoft
| brought up NT on ARM illustrates the portability too.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah one of the features of NT is its hardware
| abstraction. Even though those other platforms have
| fallen by the wayside I would presume that abstraction
| layer is still there.
| samuellavoie90 wrote:
| Microsoft's next step might be to 'Extend'; add feature to
| wsl2 that aren't available outside of windows. (To lock in
| WSL2 Users, and since they have the manpower they can outpace
| any other linux distro on features)
| nicce wrote:
| I started to use so much WSL that I finally ditched Windows
| totally. I doubt that they can add something so special to
| keep users which Linux community can't
| avtar wrote:
| I don't know who out there might want to deploy their
| production services using WSL2. The appeal of using WSL is
| to develop and test apps in Linux distributions that might
| be in use in production.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| _> Microsoft 's next step might be to 'Extend'_
|
| Damn, gramps, let it go - 90s are over.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Or they would be bankrupt ? Mac OS lost to Windows and if Apple
| was about software instead of hardware they would probably miss
| iPhone and iPod just like Microsoft.
| tombert wrote:
| Entirely possible, or bought out by a company like Sun
| Microsystems; it might have been a way for Sun to try and
| penetrate the desktop market instead of mainframes and
| servers.
|
| Pulling on this thread, if the iPhone didn't exist (because
| Apple was solely software), I think there's a chance that the
| big player in the mobile space today would probably be
| Blackberry. They were doing extremely well before the iPhone,
| and if Apple hadn't disrupted the entire smartphone industry,
| I don't really see why that would haven't continued. I wonder
| if that means that smartphones would still have keyboards?
| Fnoord wrote:
| Another what if scenario would have been if Apple bought
| Sun instead of Oracle. We'd have ZFS on Apple devices say 5
| years before APFS was rolled out.
|
| As for Blackberry: and Nokia. I know Nokia was not very
| popular in US (for smartphone), but elsewhere in the world
| they were. In Europe it is Android which replaced both
| Nokia and Blackberry.
|
| Android was coming regardless of iPhone. A major thing
| would be if OSK would be as good as it is on Android if
| iPhone would not have existed.
|
| But Nokia was ready for the masses with N9 were it not for
| burning platform memo.
|
| Symbian also had and used capability based security. iOS
| got it much later, and Android plays catch up on security
| and privacy with iOS.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I think there's a chance that the big player in the
| mobile space today would probably be Blackberry
|
| No chances.
|
| Going from BlackBerry to Google or Microsoft was seen as a
| great move. The opposite was basically unheard of. BB could
| never attract any talent.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Even though what they had paled in comparison to iOS,
| Android was almost ready and probably would also have
| overtaken Blackberry. Unfortunately for them the release of
| the iPhone and the 'slab' form factor meant they
| practically had to start over.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sun was playing with OpenSTEP and gave up on it.
|
| Java and Java 2 EE are deeply related to those endeavours.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes, around that time it was possible to build OPENSTEP
| apps in either Java or Obj-C.
| tombert wrote:
| Wouldn't that kind of confirm my point though? In this
| theoretical universe where Apple is going bankrupt
| because there's no iPhone, but they _do_ have a decent
| operating system they 're wholly dedicated to (in
| addition to Sun's previous interest in the system
| before), might have made it attractive to an executive at
| Sun.
|
| I'm not saying it would have worked out any _better_ for
| Sun, just that they were one of the bigger players in the
| tech world in the late 90 's/early 2000's, and I could
| see trying to break into the desktop space seeming
| valuable to them at the time.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sun gave up on OpenSTEP and ported their applications to
| Java.
|
| https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywh
| ere
|
| No way an executive would rollback on that decision, a
| couple of years afterwards.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Remember that this was on the heels of NeXTs failure as a
| hardware company and then their failure to capture any real
| market as a software company. At the time Jobs was probably
| thinking that it would be quick infusion income to get a
| major supplier like Dell to license OPENSTEP/Mac OS X or
| whatever it was at the time, even if he had longer term
| visions of getting back to hardware (in the consumer space
| this time, not higher ed/corporate as was the NeXT strategy).
| cronix wrote:
| Does it count as "popular" if you aren't even aware you're
| using it? I suspect 95+% of Apple product users do not know the
| GUI is interacting with 'nix, and even fewer have opened a
| terminal and interacted with it directly. The GUI is not 'nix.
| It's an interface to it.
|
| Edit: removed asterisks before *nix as it triggered markdown
| blacktriangle wrote:
| it's a bigger issue for developers. The fact that I can do
| *nix style development, then run some script that wraps it up
| in a nice .app bundle and ship that off to users means that
| its popularity very much matters.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If Apple had switched to an OS-licensing model, I think it
| would fix both of the issues I see with MacOS right now: a lack
| of communication between the users and designers, and their
| lack of incentive to work with other manufacturers.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| _> playing a game of catch-up with Google_
|
| It's not like something came out of Google recently. If
| anything, Google is desperately trying to catch-up with Amazon
| and Microsoft in cloud and Apple in consumer etc. They are
| entering a long path of gradual decline.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| He tried to pitch to Sony as well
| thought_alarm wrote:
| This would have been a re-badged version of OpenStep, then named
| Rhapsody, well before OS X roadmap was plotted out, let alone
| released.
|
| NextStep/OpenStep had support for x86 since 1994, so it was all
| ready to go if Dell wanted to play ball. But it wouldn't have
| included any support for Classic Mac software.
|
| In other words, it wouldn't have supported any software at all,
| except for the few OpenStep devs still hanging on. But perhaps it
| would have been a good way to help kick-start OpenStep
| development.
|
| Apple's original plan was to ship OpenStep as the next generation
| Mac OS, while running classic Mac OS software in a VM. This OS
| was eventually released as Mac OS X Server in 1999
|
| But this plan was hugely unpopular in the Mac community.
| Microsoft and Adobe told Apple that there was no way they would
| port Office and Photoshop to OpenStep, and that killed the
| original plan.
|
| This forced Apple to go back and tightly merge classic Mac OS and
| OpenStep, with the Carbon APIs and a ported version of the
| classic Mac Finder.
|
| And thus, Mac OS X was conceived.
|
| Three years later it was released.
|
| Two years after that, it was good enough to use.
|
| Two years after that, it was running circles around an aged
| Windows XP.
| leoc wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ is a
| fairly good article covering the attempty to woo Adobe and MS.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > _Two years after that, it was running circles around an aged
| Windows XP_
|
| One could argue that XP is still running. Quietly plodding away
| unseen on some pretty critical systems.
|
| I'm sure that counts for something, no?
| anthk wrote:
| So does DOS, but still Slackware on a Pentium ran circles
| over DOS on functionality and stability.
| mariodiana wrote:
| The article is too polite to tell the story of how Jobs really
| used Michael Dell's "sell the company" remark to motivate the
| troops:
|
| https://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs
| ridruejo wrote:
| I'm half way through the book and found it quite good if you are
| interested in strategy, private equity because it talks about
| relatively recent events. There's also a recent a16z podcast with
| Dell, Martin Casado and Andreessen that I enjoyed
| https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/cloud-wars-company-wars-pla...
| yelnatz wrote:
| Michael Dell went on John Calacanis' podcast last week too,
| discussing the book. It was a pretty good listen.
|
| Jobs wanted a cut on every PC sold if the deal went through.
| That was too much for Dell since they were selling so much PCs
| already, so it fell through.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/googles-game-changing-...
| vondur wrote:
| I believe one of the founders of PowerComputing (one of the
| original Mac Clone Makers) was an ex-executive from Dell.
| PowerComputing was really putting the hurt on Apple's sales
| of computers for a while.
| protomyth wrote:
| It would have been interesting if it ended up like Microsoft
| today that sells their own hardware (e.g. Surface) and licenses
| out the OS. I just cannot see Apple giving up hardware of their
| own at any point. I doubt whatever went on with OS X would have
| transferred to the iPhone or iPods before it.
|
| Truthfully, it would certainly relieve a lot of pressure on Apple
| surrounding the Pro models. There are certain models that Apple
| always look like its reluctant to build and the Mac Pro has been
| that model. It would also have made the virtualization story a
| bit better.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I can't see that working very well. Dell computers are profoundly
| ugly. Mac OS X was a decent operating system but it would have
| hurt the Mac brand to have it running on the dull gray boxes that
| are Dell computers. Just seems like a last ditch strategy to get
| some revenue for Apple.
| toast0 wrote:
| At the time, you could buy licensed Mac clones; so this seems
| like it could have been an attempt to get wider distribution
| with a bigger computer builder. Macs were not very pretty beige
| boxes at the time, so other not very pretty beige boxes
| wouldn't be a big deal.
|
| Based on the terms discussed, and that wikipedia says the
| licensed clones were ended because of unfavorable terms for
| Apple, I'm getting the impression that Jobs was trying to find
| a bigger partner and also make the deal work well for Apple,
| but was more interested in a good deal for Apple than a
| sustainable partnership for both companies. This deal didn't
| happen, and the licensed clone program was ended, and Apple
| returned to being the only maker of machines running Mac OS,
| which mostly worked out for them.
| outworlder wrote:
| Dull gray? Weren't them still beige during that timeframe?
| nekoashide wrote:
| You're looking back with all the knowledge and information
| today, the NeXT computer was for all it's glory just a black
| box. At the time Apple did not have anything like what you see
| now, that didn't come until the 1998 iMac and only because of
| Ive.
|
| Steve Jobs would have literally done anything to save Apple,
| you only need to watch the 1997 Macworld Expo to see how far he
| was willing to go. Those people absolutely hated Gates and you
| can guarantee you would have seen Michael Dell on that stage if
| it had gone the other way.
|
| With that said Mac Clones were a thing, Jobs even tried to keep
| those deals going but they did not make sense at the time.
| Apple for all its worth was both a hardware and software
| company and the clone makers would have been competition
| anyways.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes the NeXT was a black box but it was visually striking.
| Nothing else looked like it. It appeared to be from the
| future. But you're right at the time Macs were just beige
| boxes, and pretty dull looking.
| lizknope wrote:
| The NeXT Cube and Slab were some of the prettiest black boxes
| I have seen.
| drewg123 wrote:
| If they could have worked out a deal to license MacOS X in the
| late 90s, it would have been a real game changer. Its too bad
| Jobs would not give Dell reasonable terms.
| elromulous wrote:
| nit: did macos x even exist in the 90s? Or did you mean macos
| 9?
| techrat wrote:
| MacOSX was released in 2001, so it would have had to have
| been System 7/8/9 by that point.
| jandrese wrote:
| Work porting System 7/8/9 to Intel would have been
| completely wasted.
| flenserboy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
| jbverschoor wrote:
| If that's the case, that would be fun.
|
| Give Dell an outdated OS, and launch a brand new OS
| yourself
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I think at that stage it was still NextStep morphing into
| Rhapsody/OS X
| wtallis wrote:
| Mac OS X was a work in progress during the late 90s. The
| Apple/NeXT merger was in 1996, there were developer releases
| of Rhapsody (with x86 support) in 1997 and 1998, and Mac OS X
| Server 1.0 was released in 1999. But the first public beta of
| Mac OS X with the Aqua UI was in 2000, and OS X version 10.0
| was in 2001. So any deal negotiated in the late 90s to bring
| Mac OS X to Intel PCs would have taken a few years to come to
| fruition, but Apple did have a usable x86 operating system to
| base negotiations on in the late 90s.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| OPENSTEP was running on x86 even before the merger. The
| work would have been mostly to make it look and feel more
| like what Mac OS users were familiar with, and adding the
| ability to run "Classic" Mac OS applications.
| wtallis wrote:
| True, but OPENSTEP on its own would not have been of much
| interest to Dell given the very small software ecosystem.
| The promise of _also_ inheriting the Mac application
| ecosystem made Mac OS X far more marketable.
| guessbest wrote:
| Mac OSX Server wasn't very popular. I'm guessing since Dell
| made very respectable servers in the 90's this was an effort to
| put a kind of NeXT server on Dell hardware, or at least an
| early version of Mac OSX Server.
| NetBeck wrote:
| Jobs still reached an audience through iTunes. It paved the way
| for the iPhone to be untouched by carriers. Verizon rejected the
| first iPhone, but Cingular agreed to Apple's terms.[0]
|
| [0]
| https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-01-28-verizon...
| raman162 wrote:
| Jobs was pretty bold asking Dell for a royalty of every Dell PC
| sold.
|
| I'm curious what a world like that would have looked like, where
| you can choose between OS X and Windows when purchasing a
| computer.
| [deleted]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you mean exactly as M$ft did ?!? "bold" ?! do-tell
| tombert wrote:
| I'm not exactly a huge fan of MS, but at least when MS
| basically got a royalty for every Dell sold, there was a
| reasonable certainty that a vast majority of them were going
| to actually use Windows. It was the only OS pre-installed,
| meaning that unless the person was a geek (like basically
| anyone who hangs around HN), they were probably going to use
| Windows.
|
| If there were two operating systems installed, there's a good
| chance that a majority of people would still only use
| Windows, and Dell would be paying a license to Apple that
| only 10% of their customers actually used.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| Let's not pretend that a sizable bunch of devs did not
| install Win 10 on their Intel macbooks. Apple was quite
| good at hardware at the time.
| toast0 wrote:
| Those were tremendously bad terms, especially given what
| happened with the licensed Mac clone program which was ended,
| apparently shortly after these discussions with Dell.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Iirc he tried the same with Sony VAIOs around that time.
| leoc wrote:
| He was also trying to get big ISVs including Adobe and (believe
| it or not) Microsoft to port their applications to Rhapsody,
| basically a cross-platform Windows NT/OS X version of Cocoa.
| https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/
| wil421 wrote:
| Sony VAIOs were the MacBook pro's of their day. I har a couple
| of them and so did my brother. All were very nice computers
| even with the garbage OS that was Windows Vista.
|
| They had some cool models in the 2000s.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/6/5385716/sony-vaio-iconic-p...
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| In a testament to how powerful product placement can really
| be, the image of James Bond using a VAIO laptop while sitting
| on a boat is still burned in my brain.
| tylerscott wrote:
| VAIO were a solid computers (at least my memory of them).
|
| I would have killed to have Vista on my VAIO. I had Windows
| ME on it! Despite that fact, it still sits among my most
| beloved computers that I have owned. It was also the first
| that I had purchased new whereas all the previous ones were
| hand-me-downs.
|
| Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
| wil421 wrote:
| Love my VAIOs if I had put an SSD in my last one I probably
| wouldn't have bought a Mac until much later.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| In a number of his keynotes he regarded Sony products as the
| industry standard for quality.
| wil421 wrote:
| Yup and Sony had the pebble keyboards first!
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