Newton is dead; long live Apple?

By Vince "TC" Cavasin

Tiny victories won’t avert disaster for the visionless company.

I never kept it a secret: I’m a Mac bigot. I cut my computing teeth on an SE, squinting at everything from technical manuals to Prolog code to logic circuits on its diminutive monochrome display. I rued Larry Leibrock’s two-word answer to my question last summer of whether a Mac would work in the program: "Bad idea." Since then I have been reluctantly assimilated into the Wintel camp...but I still miss those silly little Mac features, like the virtual nonexistence of unexpected system hangs.

So I still root for Apple, although being a realist, I root in the way you root for the hopeless, stupid underdog that you know is going to lose anyway. And from this perspective, news that the company dropped the Newton from its lineup last week comes as a teasing reward; a tiny victory in an unwinnable war.

The war Apple is fighting, whether they realize it or not, is about finding vision; the Newton victory provided a tiny measure of focus, which is a prerequisite for vision, but it’s likely too little, too late. Apple has many other focus issues that it doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge, let alone resolve.

For example, it insists on supporting two operating systems—MacOS for the low-end, and the NextStep-based Rhapsody for the high-end—even while stating "We're not interested in splitting the Mac code base in any significant way..." in the Newton press release. The company plans to reintroduce PDA hardware, but it will run the MacOS—likely a modified MacOS, which will dilute the tiny bit of focus they obtained by killing the Newton OS.

Like an obsessive technology columnist, fretting over the value of every word in a column that practically no one reads, Apple can’t seem to just cut bait and throw anything out. And if they can’t effectively streamline their OS strategy—which is probably the closest thing to a core competency they have—how are they going to deal with the likes of Bill Gates?

Whether they admit it or not, Apple gave up trying to compete with Microsoft years ago, gratefully accepting the few niches which couldn’t tolerate BugFest95. But Bill has momentum on his side, and the only reason he refrains from crushing Apple is that they provide him with a perfect competitor; one that repels the justice department while commanding an unnoticeable fraction of the market.

How long can this go on? Bill can continue to hold his jackboot a couple inches above Apple’s head indefinitely. In getting to this point, however, he has created an irreversible tide of developers deserting Apple due to the shrinking markets for their software. And as the developer pool shrinks, so does expertise with the platform, further contributing to the death spiral.

But even ignoring software, what about hardware? The Mac has had an historic advantage here, but the new Pentiums are narrowing this, both in benchmark performance and technological sophistication. To make matters worse, the Pentium’s enormous volume advantage gives it a proportional cost advantage. When the Merced family (the revolutionary Pentium-replacement collaboration between HP and Intel) unifies PC and workstation architectures early in the next century, the volume and performance advantages will be so enormous that it’s conceivable that even a chip as widely-used as the Mac’s PowerPC won’t be able to compete. And somehow I doubt that Apple will have the vision or the resources to migrate to a new hardware platform over the next few years.

Can Apple survive all this? Maybe, if it acts quickly. Its best bet is probably to focus on the only emerging technology that has shown any promise as a Windows competitor: the Network Computer. This would require a merger with a major NC player, i.e. Oracle or Sun, both of which have been occasionally rumored to be considering such a marriage. Apple would bring to the relationship the familiar Mac user interface (which could be adapted to run on NCs), low-end manufacturing expertise, and the Macintosh platform itself, which could easily be marketed as an alternative to the Wintel NetPC. This would provide an excuse (as well as some capital) to continue developing the Mac, but it would certainly change under the influence of the new parents.