When will Cadence and friends have to bite in the Apple?

This is a personal opinion and no attempt to sell anything but a
fantastic idea.

Apple Computer has just launched the two missing links in their product
portfolio: The Mac Pro and the new Xserve. Both dual Xeon Woodcrest
with dual cores. The Xserve is only 1 HE high and you can fit a bunch
of them in your computing center. Add the Xraid storage and you have
all you need.

This may look like a commercial or spam, but I am just amazed at what
Apple has been able to do during the last year. I have been a PowerBook
user since late 2003 and even if I haven't upgraded from Panther to
Tiger I am very satisfied.

If you look at the spec's on the new machines, they give a good value
for the money. Apple has always had a strong hold in movie and audio
business. But why not now add EDA to that?

This time it is really about the hen and the egg. When the big EDA
vendors turned to Linux supporters it was as a result of pressure from
customers who wanted to move away from expencive and slow hardware from
Sun or HP. Apple isn't cheap, so don't expect companies to come rushing
for it like they did with Linux, but it isn' slow either. Not anymore,
nor will it be slow again, ever. The move to Intel make that for sure.
If AMD should happen to become faster/better again sometime in the
future, well then it is no sweat any longer to switch processor. Apple
has little acceptance in corporate environments like semiconductor
vendors. Price/Performance has always been good, but the price has
always been high. I would rather guess that my company would stand in
line to get a bunch of those $100 laptops instead. Price, sadly, most
always wins.

Apple has the advantage that Sun and HP had, but lost: Hardware and
operating system from one and the same vendor. Well, they haven't lost
it quite yet, but they are trying as hard as they can to lose the rest
of their business. Looking into the crystal ball I would say that the
strategy that Apple has now will make them not go away during the next
10+ years.

And Apple give you all you need to merge, there is a full blown X11
server in OSX. A hard-core Mac-user would frown at it, but, hey, it is
something to start with. Qt is running natively on MacOSX so if Cadence
get the Motif-parts replaced they are up and running. And for the
business-suits: MacOSX is BSD and not GPL, which mean you can keep the
source closed if you want to. With Qt and BSD the way to a native
integration on the Aqua desktop is short.

I would say: "Oh, Brave New World", and tomorrow reality will catch up
with me in the office ....

 

The Reality that will find you no matter where you hide is this:
Apple has a mere 2.5% of the desktop market, and is unlikely to make much of
a hit in the pizza box server space.

They ain't got no traction outside of their own captive (read: legacy) market.

 

But unlike the rest of the P.C. biz, the users in that market actually pay
for licenses. That's why the Apple versions of Photoshop et al account for
about 50% of Adobe's revenue.

--
Edward Dodge

__o
_`\(,_
(_)/ (_) --- ---

 

They _used_ to have no traction outside their own market.

I assume that with "pizza box server" you mean those 1HE 19" server
rack computers. If you look at the specifications for the new Xserve
"pizza boxes" from Apple, you will see that things have changed.
Instead of one PowerPC G5 running at low speed and radiating lots of
heat, you have 4 cores in 2 CPUs of Intels brand new Core technology.
These things even have FB-DIMM which the rest of the server market also
ramps up these days.

Apple now offer complete office support from the little, cost-effective
mac mini on the office desktop to the engineering number-cruncher
workstation to the Xserve backbone with Xraid storage.

Apple is about to put themselves in a position where they can offer the
same as any other computing solution provider, and the integration is
better.

 

And you think this differentiates Apple - how, exactly?
News flash: every Xeon server using the Blackford chipset is using FBDIMMs.
And everyone is or will be selling Woodcrests, and by next spring will be
selling Clovertowns, in their servers.

zzzzzzzzzz

There's no product differentiation here, and the market is quickly becoming
commoditized. Apple has never successfully competed in a commodity market, and
I don't see that changing soon...

/daytripper (been hearing the same old cheerleading for two decades, now ;-)

 

Well, the question is if you are a leader, a fast follower or a
wait-and-see mentality company/guy. You can _always_ wait another year
and you will have better equipment for the same price. The real
news-flash is that not only has Apple switched to Intel in 210 days,
they have also learned to utilize the FBDIMM concept during that same
time. There are server manufacturers out there who have longer
experience with Intel who are less successful with their FBDIMM
introduction. The news-flash is so new (this Monday) that there have
been very little possibility to find any weaknesses in the current
Apple Hardware.

Hardware, OS, Storage and applications from the same company, when did
you get that from one and the same company at the prices that Apple
offer? Of course, you may buy linux pizza boxes cheaper, but is the
Total Cost of Ownership cheaper?

The last 2 decades of Apple history was overpriced graphics hardware.
The change first came with introduction of MacOSX and now with the
change to Intel architecture. I don't expect Apple to replace the PC
tomorrow, but when you can run MacOSX _and_ Windows on the same
hardware then why not? Time will show.