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Will Apple Drop OS X for Windows?

By David Walker | February 16th, 2006 Interest Level: SMOKING HOT


apple with windowsIf you know the name John C. Dvorak, you know what it means to be a polarizing person. People I know either love the man or think he’s the Spawn of the Evil One. While I fall in neither camp, I do find his articles interesting if nothing else. However, a recent story of his has truly caught my eye this time and it’s likely to just polarize people even further. A psychology professor from Rutgers University, Yakov Epstein, approached Dvorak with the idea that Apple would ditch OS X in favor of MS Windows. Amused at first, Dvorak considered the idea further and is now convinced that the professor may just be right.

The conclusion was drawn off of four observations. First, the Apple Switch ad campaign is over and no one switched. Secondly, the iPod has lost it’s firewire connector in favor of the PC centric USB connector. Third, the iPod was designed to get people to move to Macs and this also did not happen. The fourth and final point is the recent move by Apple to Intel processors. These observations alone aren’t conclusive, but Dvorak thinks a few other factors play into the theory. For one, Apple’s threatened lawsuits against Mac gossip sites over a musicians’s breakout box that hasn’t shipped yet. The idea is that Apple used the “saber-rattling” to scare the community off from the real deal, which would be the Windows conversion. Also, a recent comment at Macworld Expo that MS Office will continue to be developed for “five years” was odd, but may fit well into the theory of Apple running Windows. Additionally, major Mac supporters like Adobe have yet to port their products to Apple x86, even though the move has been anticipated for some time.

There is some historical precedent in the industry for this kind of move. IBM ditched OS/2 in favor of Windows due in part to poor 3rd party support for its OS. Is it possible that Apple is tired of the extensive work it takes to maintain an OS? Plus, Apple has always eyed Dell as a competitor, even though they’re not on the same playing field. A move to Windows would make the battle a legitimate one. Might we see an “Apple-fied” version of Windows Vista on Macs? It’s an intriguing question and not necessarily one that can be easily discounted. The next few years could be quite interesting in the PC industry.

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  • djoxygen
    David Walker said: Very good points. The Dvorak article, though speculative, does bring up some interesting fodder for discussion. I'd personally love to see Apple move to Windows, if for no other reason than to see a great hardware company put Dell in it's place. Unfortunately, OS X will never have the 3rd party support necessary to convert a significant portion of the PC community.





    I'm always stumped why anyone would want (or expect) Apple to use Windows as its primary OS...





    Is the available hardware for running Windows today *that* much of a mess? Especially after the Intel transition is complete, it'll be pretty much the same except for case design, and it's not like there aren't any choices for pretty cases for current Windows-running hardware. ATI has unified its video cips across the 2 platforms. I'd be surprised if PCIe and Intel mobos in Macs won't bring nVidia to do the same.





    Is it because there aren't any Windows applications comparable to other Apple software like Final Cut Pro or iLife? I personally the Apple stuff better, but I always thought the primary reason to run Windows instead of any flavor of the Mac OS was because of the vastly superior choice of software. Likewise for 3rd party hardware, although with every passing month, hardware is less and less dependent on proprietary drivers, and with more open source and hackable/extensible software coming online all the time, even those dependencies are diminishing in importance.





    If all the other hardware makers can't "put Dell in its place", how will Apple be able to do that? With all software and OS the same, Apple will have to compete on price just like all Dell's other competitors, and they'll have no better chance at knocking Dell down a notch than anyone else in the Windows market. Razor-thin margins do not equal cutting edge design or market-leading quality.





    What you *will* get, once Windows can use EFI, is Apple hardware that'll have the option to boot Windows (whether through hacks or officially sanctioned). So if anyone really wants to pay the premium price for pretty Windows-running hardware, you'll have the option. But you'll still be subsidizing the development of OS X, iLife, etc... because without all that stuff, I'd wager even fewer people will "switch" to Windows on Apple HW than will switch to OS X on Apple HW.
  • David Walker
    djoxygen said: Dvorak is a clown. If Apple hardware runs windows, how will Apple differentiate itself from Dell, et al? Especially if they plan to continue charging the prices necessary to maintain the 27% margins that have made my IRA so happy.




    Point by point:





    1) Switch campaign. The silent switch campaign is the one that's working. It's more commonly known as the iPod. With holiday market share numbers hitting 5%, Apple CPU market share has roughly doubled from its bottoming out a couple years ago. Why continue to spend money shouting at people who aren't listening when the Trojans have taken your horse inside the walls on their own.





    2) The iPod lost its FireWire connection for different reasons. a) Even though Apple slimmed the interface down to the "dock" connector, the chipset is too big to allow for sleek models like the Shuffle and Nano. b) FireWire has little advantage now that every Mac and Windows system has shipped with USB 2.0 for the last few years.





    3) iPod not creating switchers. See #1. Apple's in-store research has shown that this claim is as inaccurate as most of Dvorak's writing.





    4) The Intel switch. When you can insantly double or quadruple the *potential* speed of your systems, outsource the hardware design, and save money in the process, while continuing to charge your historical premium price, why wouldn't you? Of course you have to continue to differentiate yourself somehow (i.e. OS X).





    5) Lawsuits. This is pretty tenuous reasoning. There are too many other products in Apple's pipeline to attribute saber-rattling and scent-throwing.





    6) Office. As others have already pointed out, the most logical explanation for the 5 year limit on Office:Mac development (assuming that "deadline" doesn't get yet another extension) is that an officially sanctioned equivalent to WINE from either Apple or Microsoft will allow many Windows apps to run happily on an Intel Mac without a copy of Windows anywhere in sight.





    7) Adobe. The larger the app, the longer the port. When Adobe went OS X native with version 7, they were out on stage with Steve talking about how they converted 95% of the code in 2 weeks or something. Apparently that last 5% was pretty tough, because they didn't have Photoshop 7 on the shelves for a long time after. And let's not even start to talk about QuarkXPress.





    Very good points. The Dvorak article, though speculative, does bring up some interesting fodder for discussion. I'd personally love to see Apple move to Windows, if for no other reason than to see a great hardware company put Dell in it's place. Unfortunately, OS X will never have the 3rd party support necessary to convert a significant portion of the PC community.
  • djoxygen
    Dvorak is a clown. If Apple hardware runs windows, how will Apple differentiate itself from Dell, et al? Especially if they plan to continue charging the prices necessary to maintain the 27% margins that have made my IRA so happy.




    Point by point:





    1) Switch campaign. The silent switch campaign is the one that's working. It's more commonly known as the iPod. With holiday market share numbers hitting 5%, Apple CPU market share has roughly doubled from its bottoming out a couple years ago. Why continue to spend money shouting at people who aren't listening when the Trojans have taken your horse inside the walls on their own.





    2) The iPod lost its FireWire connection for different reasons. a) Even though Apple slimmed the interface down to the "dock" connector, the chipset is too big to allow for sleek models like the Shuffle and Nano. b) FireWire has little advantage now that every Mac and Windows system has shipped with USB 2.0 for the last few years.





    3) iPod not creating switchers. See #1. Apple's in-store research has shown that this claim is as inaccurate as most of Dvorak's writing.





    4) The Intel switch. When you can insantly double or quadruple the *potential* speed of your systems, outsource the hardware design, and save money in the process, while continuing to charge your historical premium price, why wouldn't you? Of course you have to continue to differentiate yourself somehow (i.e. OS X).





    5) Lawsuits. This is pretty tenuous reasoning. There are too many other products in Apple's pipeline to attribute saber-rattling and scent-throwing.





    6) Office. As others have already pointed out, the most logical explanation for the 5 year limit on Office:Mac development (assuming that "deadline" doesn't get yet another extension) is that an officially sanctioned equivalent to WINE from either Apple or Microsoft will allow many Windows apps to run happily on an Intel Mac without a copy of Windows anywhere in sight.





    7) Adobe. The larger the app, the longer the port. When Adobe went OS X native with version 7, they were out on stage with Steve talking about how they converted 95% of the code in 2 weeks or something. Apparently that last 5% was pretty tough, because they didn't have Photoshop 7 on the shelves for a long time after. And let's not even start to talk about QuarkXPress.
  • But I don't think it will happen. What I do think is more feasable is that the next version of OS X 10.5 or maybe 10.6 will include a licenced version of the Windows API. Allowing you to seemlessly run windows apps in OS X. and possably a reverce agreement for Windows, running the OS Xapps nativly in Windows.... but that is just my uneducated opinion.
  • Apple does have a two button mouse. It's called the Apple Mighty Mouse.
  • hgupta
    When the mac has a two button mouse, we will know he is right.




    Why doesn't it have two buttons anyways?
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