Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Charlie Springer wrote:

> I teach high school physics these days. Most of you may not be aware that in 
> the US public schools they no longer teach any computer programming or other 
> skills. The exception is an elective "tools" class in high school with MS 
> Office and MS certification in board swapping and software installing and 
> other trivia.
>
> I asked students this year if anyone knew any computer languages. One student 
> knew some C and HTML. Most agreed with a very sharp girl in AP Physics who 
> said "I use english with mine".

I have observed this, too, and, together with the huge drop in CS
students since the "tech bubble" burst, it leaves me with the worry
that the US is exiting the software field with the next generation.

> I was talking to a friend at Apple night before last about this and he said 
> he has a very hard time finding people who know any hardware.

...and so we may be on the verge of exiting the hardware business, too.

Even in large companies (like Apple), the fraction of software designers
who have any concept of what is actually happening in the hardware as a
result of what they write in a higher level language is miniscule.  The
inevitable result is designs with very poor performance characteristics.

My personal favorite was an OS designer who wanted to do a double-
precision integer divide in the *timer interrupt routine* to compute
the number of timer counts until the next interrupt.  (The notion of
keeping the timer queue [nevermind using a heap] in timer units rather
than "street units" had not occurred to him!)

Another designer thought that using three levels of indirection to
access the most commonly used variable in a procedure was fine!

> It is true about Apple pricing. It wasn't just because they could. Until very 
> recently they have had a company culture problem that prevented them from 
> ever figuring out how to get high enough volume to meet demand. They didn't 
> want to be a "commodity" producer. They avoided advertising because it would 
> strain production! They had the opportunity to sponsor a NASCAR team and 
> become "The Official Computer of NASCAR". This is the biggest spectator sport 
> in the US by far and the big companies know the value of being involved. At 
> Apple, they really didn't want "those kind of people" (beer drinkers and 
> Republicans) using their computers :-) Crazy, eh?

Calvin Klein has a similar approach, and it seems to work for them.  ;-)

"Think different" always struck me as 1) non-conformist in sentiment,
and 2) uneducated in grammar--a kind of meta-oxymoron.  ;-)

More seriously, Apple as a company has always had a "high margin, high
R&D budget" approach, in contrast to the vast majority of companies.
This approach allowed them to innovate at a faster rate than most other
companies, and to invest in things like styling that other companies
considered irrelevant.

As a customer, I hate paying premium prices for products, but I do
appreciate the benefits to the product line that can result over the
long term.  Apple has frequently been the first to bring a new
technology into the mainstream (at least as a minority platform).

Apple's value proposition, then, has always involved a bit of snob
appeal ("for those who can afford the very best"), and has thus become
a status symbol that helps maintain that image in a virtuous cycle.

If/when their motivation to improve their products and their customers'
experiences devolves into a "style-for-style's-sake" mentality, then
whatever benefits their approach has produced will cease.

-michael

NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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