Clues That Apple's Bought Another Processor Design House 183
According to Ars Technica: "Apple's gigantic bankroll may be burning a hole in its pocket. Almost two years after purchasing PowerPC designer P.A. Semi, Apple appears to have snapped up ARM design house Intrinsity. According to a report that first appeared on electronista, a number of engineers at the company have indicated that they are now or soon will be employed by Apple. Some of them have even gone as far as to change their LinkedIn profiles, with one reverting it, possibly out of fear of drawing the wrath of his new, secretive employer." Updated 20100404 1:15 GMT Brian Dipert points out the earlier coverage at EDN, from which both of the above reports draw.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
When will most people agree with your silly argument? Never.
Apple isn't Microsoft. Because Microsoft has a monopoly in a few areas of computing and caused great damage doesn't mean that any other company achieving a lot of success in different areas of computing will cause damage. Apple's influence over the industry over the years has been generally a good one.
Speaking my peace! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya know, say what you will about Microsoft, Apple, Google etc... they are doing what businesses do and people are willing to pay or sacrifice freedom and/or privacy for what they offer. They got there because of marketing. I don't understand people who gripe about someone or something more successful or powerful than they are and/or what they support. If you're have the energy and insight to gripe, use that energy to find a solution - here's mine! Why not push for hardware manufacturers to not only provide open source drivers, but also put Tux right on the box as Linux compatible? Hell, why not build hardware specifically for Linux that can be used with other operating systems? Maybe I'm too much of a "noob" to really know what I'm talking about here, but it makes sense to me. You build it, they will come.
OSX on ARM (and I don't mean a tattoo) (Score:4, Interesting)
OSX will build on ARM without a problem and the ARM CPU would be better than the Intel Atom in a netbook.
However, as the world inside the Reality Distortion Field now knows, netbooks will never sell because no one really wants them and anyway, as a failed product, they have been replaced by the magical iPad.
Ideally, you are reading this post a) on your iPhone or b) while waiting in line to buy your Really Big iPhone.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
They (Apple) just haven't gotten to the market share level they need yet to take over the world as it were.
...and its hard to see how they would get to that market share without the massive leg-up that Microsoft and the Wintel platform got from IBM (the big evil monopolist of the day) back in the early days of personal computing. MS managed to inherit IBM's customer base and ride the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme (and eventually left IBM in the dust).
Remember, MS still has a virtual stranglehold on the corporate sector, which Apple hasn't even tried to penetrate - and if anybody shakes MS loose from that, my bet would be Google rather than Apple.
Also, unlike the early 80s, we now have the concept of standards-based computing (and the internet, which is a force for standardization which wasn't relevant to PCs in the 80s), something which only MS are big enough to ignore. Plus, even if the will had been there, 1980s PCs didn't have the horsepower that goes with the extra layers of abstraction required for most standards.
Yes, native apps for Apple are non-standard (although OS X is also POSIX compliant) and the case of the iPod/Phone/Pad (but not their "real" desktop/laptop computers) is locked to Apples "App Store". However, it seems quite probable that as internet connectivity improves, native apps are going to become increasingly irrelevant compared to browser-based applications (for which Apple offer one of the better, more standards-based, platforms, and which can be run without restriction on the iProducts). Aside from the proprietary binary API, Apple's OS is built on open-source projects like Webkit, Apache, PHP/Python, Samba, CUPS the GNU compilers and the BSD toolkits, and can build and run most of the popular FOSS applications.
So, maybe we'll see a competetive market split between (say) MS, Google and Apple. That would be vastly more healthy than the almost complete Wintel monoculture that had developed by the end of the 20th century.
Remember - Apple helps Linux just by existing and having a significant market share: if a Website supports only IE, then only Windows can access it; if it supports Safari then its very likely to work on Linux browsers. If a USB peripheral supports Mac, then it probably uses one of the standard USB protocols (rather than requiring a custom windows-only driver) and will probably work on Linux. As long as there is more than one platform with market share, standards are more likely to be observed. Heck, even MS is now being dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5...
Of course, it pays to be vigilant against a new monopoly and keep half an eye on what MS, Apple, Google are up to (especially if there's any danger of a merger) but if you think what Apple's doing bears any resemblance to the birth of the Wintel monoculture, you presumably weren't paying attention back in the 80s.
"Can't name my employer"?!?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder who the employees are going to put as their employer on their resumes! This whole "can't name my employer" sounds like a bit of BS to me. Also wouldn't APPLE have to do some filing with the SEC regarding the purchase of a design house? It's not exactly the same as buying a stapler!
Re:OSX on ARM (and I don't mean a tattoo) (Score:4, Interesting)
Blame Asus for using an obscure Linux distro, doing a half-baked job of optimising the key applications for a small screen and then Osbourning it by announcing a new model every five minutes, or blame MS for reviving XP and dumping it on the netbook market at silly prices...
For the consumer, all Linux distros are obscure. The problem was really that Microsoft rereleased XP for these devices, and suddenly everyone expected to be able to install pirated versions of software on them just like they do on all their other Microsoft-based computers (no, Photoshop will not be useable on a 7" screen even of you didn't pay for it or the copy on your home desktop). The trick with the iPad is it doesn't look like Microsoft Windows. It doesn't act like Microsoft Windows. If it doesn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, people will not expect to be able to steal Photoshop and run it like, uh, a duck.
Re:what evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
You may recall that, at one point, NVidia had a neat technology for hardware-accelerated onboard sound called SoundStorm [wikipedia.org] based on technology designed and licensed by an obscure company called Sensaura. Then Sensaura were bought up by the big competitor Creative Audio and NVidia were forced to drop SoundStorm from their next generation of chipsets.
It looks like the purchase of Intrinsity by Apple will have the same effect in the mobile phone system-on-chip market. Currently, anyone can buy the low-power Samsung ARM chips designed by Intrinsity for mobile use, but now they've been swallowed by Apple there won't be an improved version. Any future Intrinsity SOCs will be Apple-only. Do this for a few more companies, and...
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
But Microsoft only got where it is today (dominating around 95% of the computer market) by selling IBM vaporware in 80s? Wow. How about by kicking Apples butt in the '80s by producing a workable OS that would run on cheap computers? How about by producing windows 95 which answered the advantages of apples ui, while still allowing backwards compatibility (a word apple fears and despises)? How about by producing arguably the best and most stable operating system of its time in Windows 98 (after the first service pack maybe, but still)? Lets not talk about Windows ME, that was depressing. How about by producing the most stable and successful operating system again with Windows XP? Sure, they stumbled with Vista, but then Windows 7 is again the best and most stable operating system (beating OS X by a wide margin in my book). Please note I am posting this from my personal MacBook.
I like apple products, but don't be ignorant by trashing the company that holds over 90% of the computer marketshare. They didn't get that by pure luck and chance.
IBM's PC (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that depends if you mean the personal computer as a generic concept- which existed for a number of years before IBM released theirs- or the later meaning of the term "PC" as "IBM PC compatible".
No, I really specifically meant IBM's PC machine.
But IBM only released *their* PC a number of years after others had done so already, and it was clear that they weren't going away.
Yes. Small machine targeted at individuals have existed before the PC.
The huge difference: all these previous machine were either home-made kits or small proprietary series.
IBM's PC was the first which :
- had a large scale success (thank to the IBM name written on it)
- was opened-up (probably because the initial intent from IBM was to make it easy for 3rd party to create compatible peripherals) and ended up being more a platform than a specific machine from a specific constructor.
- thanks to the 2 above (and efforts from Pheonix BIOS to provide an alternative for the last non-open part), a whole ecosystem of cheap no-name clones arose.
- Thanks to all 3 above, the whole platform met a gigantic success, becoming the "de-facto standard", controlled by no single corporation in particular, to run your softwares on it (and the monopolist role migrated to software thanks to microsoft piggy backing with the whole MS-DOS scam).
There were a lot of other personal machines at the same time. But they were all proprietary and not open.
Sure, as you point out, they were "IBM" and part of their success was due to this.
But in the end, if the PC won against the Amigas and Atari ST, it was not because of superior qualities or capabilities.
It was because Commodore and Atari weren't only battling against IBM, but against Compaq, and countless of other clone makers, all trying to sell their clones cheaper than the concurrence.
And I think too that the whole result were accidental for IBM.
I only suspect different motives: not that IBM was playing catch-up with the other personal computer manufacturer, but that they envisioned their PC as a glorified terminal, a client to connect to the enterprise mainframe (which will definitely happen to have an IBM stamp on it).
That's probably why they chose to go for an inferior architecture (8086 and 8088 at an era when 16/32 processors like the 68k were starting to appear) and a rather limited OS (so the PC doesn't pose a menace to their "big brain" business) designed (stolen) by an idiot who couldn't properly plan memory mapping for the next decade.
And that's why they probably choose to make their architecture more open and were tolerant toward clone : their core business was mainframe and in the end it shouldn't matter that much who produces the terminal, as long as it connects to their big iron. (and why not let the IBM brand associate with the brain and the clone name only with the "glorified terminal" dumb machine ?)
Only the history happened slightly differently.
I worked there years ago; some historical irony... (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
1 - How small are your arms, the thing is 9" wide, that's not overly large as far as a tablet is concerned. It seems that you have more issue with the tablet form as opposed to simply the iPad.
2 - The edges are rounded, that doesn't mean the whole back is rounded. Unless you're pushing on the edges of the device it probably won't swing back and forth.