Re: Why Apple should let HP build its workstations

We will see pigs flying and Rush Limbaugh working in a soup kitchen before Apple licenses OSX outside of Apple. Never, never, never going to happen.

Server market is growing because everyone is moving to cloud and/or off site computing resources. At the enterprise level what they are running is Oracle or SAP or something of that nature. Basically very intensive database applications. On the other end are the gazzilion servers used to pony up Facebook pages et. al. While neither of these are specifically related to the issues of the group on this board, you will all benefit from the momentum that these applications will drive.

I seriously wonder where workstations will be headed. In the past both because of the PC industry and Linux in particular, the previous workstation market completely collapsed and was replaced by PC's. In my previous life working in semiconductors I started on mainframes then switched to Apollo workstations (at 60k a crack), moved on to Sun workstations and finally to Dell/HP PC's and servers running Linux. The death knell for "traditional" workstations was obvious when I did an analysis for a company I worked for that "ONLY BUYS SUN" I was told. At that time for a paltry 250K I could purchase 5 Sun workstations with the combined performance of X or for 25K I could buy 5 Dell rackmount servers with the performance of 2X. Linux and high end PC's killed the custom server market. Apollo who? Sun who? SGI who?

I look at what I'm using for my work today and things become interesting. I do a lot of 3D work and need lots of rendering resources. For the moment I have my own rendering servers as well as a good workstation and my MBP. There are companies that are offering cloud rendering capabilities but for my meager needs the overhead and cost is still too high. I expect that to change. It would not surprise me that in the future a moderately performing desktop with a good high speed connection to cloud resources will be all I need. For my 2 cents what is limiting me now more than anything is not iron it's the horrible upload data rate to the internet. If I had upload/download speeds of 50Mbs at a reasonable cost I could dump all of those noisy, hot, expensive machines right now and just use the cloud when I need it.

From this note the direction. Less on the desktop, more on the web. I would switch to that in a nanosecond if it was available today at a reasonable cost but it's not. That I believe is simply a matter of time however.