Apple may soon have real competition in the computer realm. HP is said to be shipping some of its computers with SUSE Linux installed. If HP licenses a flavor of Linux, and starts to build an HP-branded OS on top of it – then, if they begin to sell the “whole widget,” – there may at long last be an actual Apple competitor in the world.
Once upon a time, Hewlett-Packard was the class of the tech world. If they can revive the innovative corporate culture from the seventies, they might be back.
I, for one, will be glad to see that happen. Apple needs an actual competitor. Without competition, complacency is almost guaranteed.
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On another note, Wired published a piece today that indicates they don’t really grok Apple. Not that there’s any news in that observation, but this piece is telling.
It seems there’s this company making a dongle that lets a PC think it’s a Mac. They’re afraid Apple will raise some big legal stink, so they’re nervous.
Anyway, the point of the whole Wired piece is that Apple can’t really stop the cloners.
Well, duh.
Here’s the thing: Apple doesn’t even WANT to stop the cloners. Cloners validate the supremacy of Apple’s platform. That’s a good thing. Cloners also spread the good word about the technological advantage of OS X; another asset. The problem is, the cloners could start to take sales away from Apple if they are allowed to profit from Apple’s intellectual property. For that reason, they have to be kept small and illegitimate.
Apple knows there will be clones. It is unavoidable. At the same time, Apple has to protect their property. Homebrewers who build and hack their own Macs will never meet an Apple attorney.
If you decide to turn a profit by stealing Apple’s R&D and selling their technologies and trademark, you’re going to have a buttful of Apple lawyers. If you think there’s a snowball’s chance in Scottsdale that Apple is going to license OS X, you’re very, very, dense.
I also think Apple has some stuff in the geek-dungeon that will blow the cloners into the weeds in January anyhow.
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A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one. – Henry Ford.
Five years to the day they captured Saddam and an American General found it wry that he was hiding across the river from all the Palaces that “he built with money he stole from the Iraqui nation.” Now it is the foreign companies that’s doing the stealing. Good example for the Apple cloners.
@Nxxx
Huh?
I think it will be a very long time before any Linux system is competitive with OS X in Apple’s target market. Regardless of whether HP is building the whole widget.
I quite agree that it will be some time before there is “real” competition for OS X. However, the Rip Ragged criterion for being competition is being in the same game.
If HP actually built the hardware and software their computer would be in competition with the Macintosh.
That would make them the only other computer maker who builds the whole widget. Competition.