Apple switching to Intel, by John C. Dvorak

[MisterMe]

Originally posted by arden
Hence the reason Apple pulled the plug on its clones. If IBM had done the same, we'd be having Apple-IBM wars, and who knows where Microsoft would be.

If Motorola does drop off the map, where will Apple go, fully IBM?

(BTW—add a / to your post, please! )

Not quite. IBM PC clones contained no IBM parts. Every Mac clone contained a Macintosh Toolbox ROM provided by Apple Computer. To that extent, Apple controlled its clones. Without that control, Apple could not have killed the clones.

 

[binaryDigit]

Originally posted by arden
Hence the reason Apple pulled the plug on its clones. If IBM had done the same, we'd be having Apple-IBM wars, and who knows where Microsoft would be.

If Motorola does drop off the map, where will Apple go, fully IBM?

(BTW—add a / to your post, please! )

Keep in mind that the IBM clone market was significantly different than the Mac clone market. IBM never made motherboards for other manufacturers. The other guys just had a very well documented design to work with and came up with their systems on their own. So in reality, there was no "plug" to pull. Back in the day many of the machines that came out were DOS compatable, not PC compatable. This meant that they could run MS-DOS, but were not necessarily fully compatable with the pc. These eventually went away as compatabillity became more important and any new fangled features. Now what IBM _did_ do was to realize their mistake with the original pc, and they made major changes to the architecture and setup a scheme where manufacturers would have to license the new bus and bios to come out with clones. This was the PS/2 line. Many of the major manufacturers staged a revolt (led by Compaq and HP, they were commonly referred to back then as the "Gang of Seven") and came out with their "open" next gen architecture, the EISA bus. So the lesson (which Apple apparently learned) was to keep your cloners on a short leash, or else they may come back and bite you in the rear.

And if Mot did drop out (which I don't think will happen completely, more like role reversal, IBM will become the primary source, Mot just a manufacturing source), then IBM could fill the role. They have the capacity and they have their POWER-RS/6000 line to encourage them to continue progressing the whole POWER/PPC family along. That's the good thing about IBM, they have a vested interest in making sure POWER/PPC remains strong and viable, whereas Motorola didn't have actual big money SYSTEMS that depended on their chips. They didn't know if they wanted to be a cell phone company or a mainstream cpu company or a embedded cpu company.