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from the have-you-tried-programming-on-a-tablet? dept.
Christopher Mims writes at the WSJ that Apple like all ambitious companies occasionally strays from its focus. According to Mims the iPhone is just coming into its prime, the iPad is an immature platform and the iWatch is in its infancy, yet Apple continues to invest in one-of-a-kind feats of engineering like the Mac Pro, which ships in volumes that are a rounding error on pretty much everything else Apple makes. "Something's got to give," writes Mims. "Showpieces like iMacs with screens that have more pixels than any PC ever (and four times the average selling price of a PC) are impressive, but what is Apple trying to prove? Is it really a good idea for Apple to continue to put resources against being king of a last-century technology?"
According to Mims the world's best tech companies can be the best at two things at once, maybe three and even a company as mighty as Apple gets to be the best at only a handful of things. "In a world in which the cloud is increasingly the hub of everything individuals and businesses do, and our mobile devices its primary avatar, what on Earth is Apple doing running victory laps around a dying PC industry? Personally, I'd rather see Apple push the envelope on what's next."
takyon: Paywall buster.
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:36PM
You lost me there. Windows 95 was a major step back from Windows NT. All it had was that it looked a little better. Instead it doomed the PC to years of layered-on-dos disaster until it was fixed with Windows 2000. Win2k, with all it's bulk, might be worthy of that designation.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:05PM
I think he is referring to Microsoft's move from DOS/Win 3.x to a graphical OS.
The road to NT was a long one that was carefully planned out. Even though NT was technically superior to Windows 95/98/Me, Microsoft could not tell an entire industry running on DOS/Win3.x to suddenly switch. If Windows NT was their only offering as a successor to DOS/Win 3.x and lacked compatibility, it almost certainly would have flopped.
So they developed a common UI and API, Win32, that would work on both a hybrid DOS/32bit OS (Win 95) and their fancy 32bit hybrid NT kernel (NT 4.0). So as time progressed, more and more Win32 software was developed which was (almost) able to run on either OS architecture. Eventually win32 displaced DOS and Win 3.x. to the point where MS could safely switch to NT without disrupting the software ecosystem. That was around the time of Windows 2000 when they finally merged the Direct X multimedia ability of Win 9x into NT. Prior to 2k, NT had very limited direct X support making it unsuitable for PC gaming which was starting to really take off. But there were still two classes of OS: Consumer oriented 98/Me and the NT powered 2k which was aimed at commercial users. Finally MS released XP which bought NT to all users eliminating the legacy 9x code.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday July 01 2015, @08:04PM
I find it strange to be arguing for Microsoft here given how much I generally loathe their products but I must. While I agree with you that Windows NT was a superior operating system on the whole when compared to Windows 95, Windows NT required a computer with vastly more memory and was about as unfulfilling to use as Windows 3.1.
Windows 95 was very different. Under the hood, was not much different from Windows 3.1 where it mattered. It was essentially a 32-bit multitasking version of DOS (and pretty awful at that) which ran a GUI. The GUI was completely redesigned and far, far much easier and more intuitively easier to use than that of Windows 3.1. However, the graphics code that ran it was the same 16-bit code was was used with Windows 3.1. What made Windows 95 (and 98 and ME) very different from Windows NT was its support for plug and play, the idea that you can shut the machine, swap out hardware, and the operating system would not only detect the change but would identify what changed and look for a driver that would work. What was remarkable about this feature was not so much the difficulty in making that work was the fact that Microsoft had to test just about every conceivable hardware configuration from just about every manufacturer. It wasn't until the release of Windows 2000 that NT had advanced to this point.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.