Apple Co-Founder Talks Android Superiority vs iOS

[palladin9479]

This drama has played itself out before. It was many years ago and the PC market place was divided with multiple competing standards in play. This company called Apple launched this personal computer known as the Apple Macintosh IIC, about the same time IBM launched its own Personal Computer known as the IBM PS/2. The Apple platform was closed and required "Apple only" components, even the Keyboard / Mouse / Video connectors were proprietary. You needed a license for anything / everything. And while IBM made its own HW for the PS/2, it also made it an open standard that other 3rd party manufacturers got in the game with. IBM chose MS DOS and later Windows as its OS of choice. And while the OS itself was closed, the standards it worked on where open and anyone could write a driver for their particular piece of HW.

And we all see what happened over time. The Apple IIC and later IIE were better PC's hands down but the IBM PS/2 was a more open standard. Over time more and more applications were developed on the PS/2 and eventually it became the gold standard for HW and its OS "MS Windows" became the standard for the world. The only difference is that now Apple has quite a bit of money and is throwing as much as possible at "hip" advertising hoping to prevent any other open competitor from becoming a standard.

 

[nottheking]

This looks like it was a case of "Yeah, I'll admit what I really think. Wait, was that to be PUBLIC? Let's pretend I never said that!"
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]The Apple IIC and later IIE were better PC's hands down but the IBM PS/2 was a more open standard.[/citation]
Not QUITE how it was... Really, the PS/2 was far, far ahead of its time. Back in 1987, this was the time when you had the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST crowing over "affordable gaming PCs with superior graphics" and the PS/2, in capabilities, blew away any console that would be made until perhaps the Sony Playstation.

But yes, the Macintosh was a very closed standard; while IBM DID try to clamp down on the PS/2 for fear of other makers pushing in their market, (as was going on with the PC, with makers like HP and Compaq making inroads) many of the actual elements were definitely more open... AND superior.

So while the PS/2 itself wound up being a commercial failure, and IBM went from industry dominance to a backseat behind HP, Compaq, and later Dell, everyone took and used the ideas and standards pioneered in the PS/2, which was almost certainly history's most revolutionary personal computing device: even putting the first PC to shame. I mean, it brought us all these ideas:

- The mini-DIN "PS/2 connector." This small, durable plug allowed for keyboards and mice to be handled with much more ease and less mess, helping pave the way for anyone to easily plug in their components; it's still the main standard today, 23 years later.
- The 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive: At a time when those fragile 5.25" disks were common, the PS/2 brought about the death knell of them, replacing them with the exact floppy disk design that would endure countless superior replacements (LS-120, ZIP, CD-RW) until USB flash finally started displacing it almost 20 years later.
- The VGA connector: the idea of a single, flexible monitor port that could change which monitor and resolution it put out. (both of which changes were largely impossible before)
- The VGA standard itself: a programmable GPU that could support arbitrary resolutions for reasons other than backwards compatibility, and brought in ideas like double-buffering, effects which were lacking on things like the Amiga and both 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, but modern gaming basically RELIES upon.
- Dedicated RAM modules: With the IBM PC and other systems, there was a base set of RAM soldered to the motherboard, and further expansions ate up precious ISA (think 80s PCI-express) slots, that were slow and high-latency. The PS/2 replaced this mixed system with a bank of RAM-only slots on the motherboard, a standard we still see today.

All told, the PS/2's architecture succeeded both for being open enough for others to scavenge it, and also for being incredibly revolutionary.

 

[palladin9479]

Well I was more referring to the Apple II systems using a PPC CPU which was superior to the Intel 8088/8086 / 80286 in use at the time. Also Apple's OS has a much better GUI and interface then DOS / early Windows. As a platform the Apple II was better then the PS/2, but as a set of standards the PS/2 won easily. In the same sense I see it as iPhone vs Android / everyone else. Apple's iOS is superior as a platform then the Android (currently) but its closeness will prevent its evolution. As more and more applications get ported to the Android platform, as more and more phones are designed with Android and as the OS itself evolves, the platform will start to resemble what happened to the PS/2 platform.