SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.