ADB – How would it have been better for Apple not to have developed the Apple Desktop Bus standard back in 1987 and benefitted from USB-like features such as daisy-chaining keyboards, mice, digitising tablets, printers, etc etc off the one cable connector bus, while the rest of the industry struggled along with parallel ports, serial mice and different PS2 connectors for keyboards etc for all those years? When USB finally came along, Apple themselves were the ones who in 1998 adopted USB across the board and dragged the rest of the industry kicking and screaming away from the mish mash of horrible old legacy ports.

NuBus – How would it have been better if Apple had not adopted the Texas Instruments NuBus standard way back in 1987 and benefitted from plug and play ease of use and 32-bit performance while the rest of the PC industry choked along with 8-bit and 16-bit ISA and then EISA buses with all their dip switch, IRQ line, I/O address and DMA channel hell and incompatibilities and configuration nightmares. Again, when PCI came along and finally matched the plug-and-play advantages of NuBus in the mid 90’s, Apple changed all of their systems over.

LocalTalk (AppleTalk was the networking protocol that ran on LocalTalk and also ran on Ethernet) – Apple also led the way with LocalTalk, very cheap networking technology that was built into every Mac at a time when complex expensive Token Ring cards and thick heavy coax cables and transceivers made life hell for PC users. Again, when Ethernet was released, Apple adopted the standard and built it into every Mac. Likewise the AppleTalk protocol itself was a revelation in automatic peer-to-peer discovery of other devices on a network. Imagine not needing to dedicate a PC to sharing a printer to every user on a LAN or being able to file-share between computers without needing a file server. Again, once TCP/IP gained popularity, Apple led the way adopting it while Microsoft dragged it’s feet.

-Mart

Ron,
your argument is nonsensical.

The disadvantages of incompatible external connectors like ADC, ADB, Nubus or the LC slot bears no relation to enhanced and customised CPUs and VLSI chips.

There is no incompatibility to worry about as PA Semi is an expert in customising the very same ARM processor architecture that Apple already uses in the iPhone/Touch. Likewise Apple has designed their own ASICs and other custom chips since the days of the Apple II.

-Mart

The disadvantages of incompatible external connectors like ADC, ADB, Nubus or the LC slot bears no relation to enhanced and customised CPUs and VLSI chips.

There is no incompatibility to worry about as PA Semi is an expert in customising the very same ARM processor architecture that Apple already uses in the iPhone/Touch. Likewise Apple has designed their own ASICs and other custom chips since the days of the Apple II.

-Mart

I’m nowhere near as concerned as you.

While Apple has some history of failures when they go it alone more and more of their success is now tied in to hardware that uses more and more custom chip design and manufacture.

The iPods and iPhones are almost totally reliant on custom chips. Even the processors used in them are incredibly short run designs by the standard of AMD and Intel.

We now have OS X running on these designs. When Apple bring out a device that will compete with the netbooks (and it won’t be a netbook as we now know it) you can be sure that it will have a large number of custom chips and probably run on an ARM processor. Remember that Apple also own a chunk of ARM an have done for many years. There are already Apple branded ARM chips in the current iPhone.

So chip design and manufacture is not a new area for Apple and is of growing importance. While the Macintosh currently relies on more standard chip designs our iPods and iPhones need the hardware design skills Apple is recruiting.

Internal devices don’t have that burden. They only need to work well on their own. Apple has designed custom ASICs for use in their computers for many years. This is not a totally new step for them.

The potential for Apple if they execute well is very large. iPhones, iPod touch and maybe the new media gadget will all benefit from this by becoming smaller, thinner, lighter, less power hungry and easier to manufacture.

The downside is that they could get stuck with an outdated design. This is the reason they are hiring the pros, the best of the best.