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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
Mac, Unix make Apple tops for next-gen home machine

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
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Yesterday, I told you that my vision of the "next big thing" is a new home-computing architecture that grows up from a game console. And I promised that today I'd name my choice for the company best able to make this a reality.

It's Apple Computer, the only company with all the skills--and the incentive--needed to make this happen.

Over the past five years, Apple Computer has become an even more marginal player in personal computing. (Of course, it looks like personal computing itself has become pretty marginalized lately, at least if hardware sales are any indication.)

APPLE NEEDS something to spark some growth, and while its strategy today is more solid than it has been in years, the company still can't overcome its biggest problem: Windows is already in most of the places Apple wants to be. If Apple is to grow, it needs to find something new--and that's what I am offering.

The next big thing won't be a single item, though I've already described it as a game console that takes over the home. People are looking for ways to improve entertainment and communications, perhaps bringing things like computing and home automation along for the ride. This will likely require multiple devices, from multiple vendors, all working together.

Apple is, perhaps, the only company that can make this happen. The pieces may not all appear with an Apple logo on the box--I suspect the home-entertainment companies will be big players in this as well--but Apple is uniquely qualified to develop this architecture. And the Apple brand name is one of the few that could make it successful.

Today, Apple is releasing the first major update to Mac OS X. This 10.1 version is faster than the first release and has some other improvements as well. These will be widely discussed elsewhere, so I won't go into them here.

THE KEYS TO OS X are that it's Unix inside and Mac outside. This combination of stability, support for industry standards, and wide developer support coupled with Apple's Aqua graphical user interface and emphasis on graphic performance makes this a truly great operating system. Unfortunately, in a head-on competition with Windows, the very people who need OS X most are least likely to see it.

Apple's new OS deserves better--and turning it into the engine that drives home computing, both clients and servers, seems an appropriate task.

I should, however, remind anyone who has forgotten that Apple has tried bits and pieces of a "consumer electronics strategy" in the past. My first digital camera and serious personal digital assistant both carried the Apple brand. There have been many internal design projects aimed at consumer devices, few of which made it past the prototype stage and none of which were successfully marketed.

While Apple is my choice for "best able" to make my dream a reality, I won't go so far as saying "most likely." Another possibility--suggested by a reader based on yesterday's column--is IBM with a PowerPC and Linux entry. I am not sure IBM wants to do a consumer device, but such an OS/processor combination is very close to what Apple might do.

MICROSOFT IS, of course, the odds-on favorite--should it see a need. My bet here is that Windows can't be made to do the job, so we'd need something else. Microsoft can hardly be expected to agree with that, so it would be up to them to prove me wrong. Maybe its Xbox videogame console is a step in that direction, maybe not. UltimateTV and Microsoft's other interactive television projects are certainly an architecture for home entertainment, but only the barest beginnings of one.

If Apple should decide to take this direction, it already has many of the pieces. I've already talked about the operating system. I am not sold on the PowerPC chip as the center of all this, especially for inexpensive client devices. However, since OS X is Unix-based, porting to another chip (or building a machine-specific variant) shouldn't be too challenging.

Apple already knows all about home networking and the forthcoming 802.11a standard, which will provide the bandwidth necessary to send high-quality where needed. Apple also has the design skills necessary to build a server capable of supporting a variety of data types and media streams. Maybe Apple and the ReplayTV folks can get together to challenge UltimateTV.

This is the barest beginnings of a concept. It's not something I am willing to bet very much money on, yet it's something I am certain will happen in some form at some time. The pieces are quite together to make this a reality today, but if Apple (or some other company) took on the challenge, the technology should come together about the time it's needed.

We need something to get people excited about computing again--and spending money on it--and the home is a vast and mostly untapped market, provided customers are offered more than "just" a PC.

Should Apple use OS X as a springboard to a whole new way of computing? Should Microsoft ditch Windows and start over with a new OS? TalkBack to me.

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