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The Back Page - Bryan Chaffin & Rob Enderle Duke It Out In Heads Up Debate
by
- May 7th, 2004
There are times when I really, really enjoy what I do for a living. OK, let's be honest, I almost always enjoy what I do, but there are times when that enjoyment transcends the every day pleasures. Today, or rather this last week, is one such example. We've rolled our new design, we just rolled out our fabulous new comment system, and I got to debate one of the worst analysts in the market.
I am talking about Rob Enderle, of course, head of his self-titled "The Enderle Group." Long time TMO readers will recognize the name from the Apple Death Knell Counter, where he is the current reigning record holder with no fewer than 4 (recent) pronouncements of impending doom for Apple. He's soon to get his 5th entry, too, but I can't talk about that yet.
A new Mac Web site called MacNewsWorld.com, part of the E-Commerce Times empire, asked me if I would like to debate Mr. Enderle. You betcha.
I honestly didn't think Mr. Enderle would be so inclined, however, as I have said some rather frank (i.e. mean) things about him in my frequent deconstructions of his writings in the past. Mr. Enderle, however, is apparently bigger than that, because he agreed so long as we avoided personal attacks.
Fair enough.
The format was simple: MacNewsWorld asked us three questions, to which we responded. We were then given each other's responses for a rebuttal.
MacNewsWorld published the first round today in a piece titled, "Mac Death Match, Round One: Chaffin vs. Enderle." This installment deals with the first question, the ever popular "PowerPC or Intel" question so often debated in the tech world. From the article:
Rob Enderle: Apple's last financial report indicates its PC revenue is growing at five percent in a market that is growing between 16 percent and 20 percent, depending on whose numbers you trust and the region analyzed. The company steadily has been dropping share -- granted more slowly recently -- for the last decade. Much of what makes up its computers comes from others. The PowerPC comes from IBM; the OS kernel comes from FreeBSD, and other vendors manufacture much of what it sells. Very little Apple intellectual property (IP), as a percentage, makes up the Mac today.
[...]
Bryan Chaffin: For better or worse, Apple is married to the PowerPC platform. There are various and sundry reasons for this, but the primary reasons are the issues of legacy and entrenched development, the need to control the whole widget, and the real issue of processing power.
[...]
It's like shooting fish in a barrel...with a shot gun. The rebuttals come later, however, and I am not going to give anything away, so go stop by MacNewsWorld and read all of round one.
In the meanwhile, I salute Mr. Enderle for having the guts to do this, especially when I have so often ripped apart his arguments in the past.
began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko's guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).
You can send your comments directly to him, or you can also post your comments below.
Most Recent Columns From The Back Page
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The Back Page Archives
Observer Comments
Fri May 07, 2004 1:40 pm Subject: oh the jokes
I WILL read the article right after posting this, but stopped dead at the photos of each of you and had to laugh. It was pretty obvious why they didn't bother to identify which one of you was which!
Only a moron couldn't pick the Mac user and the PC user out from THIS lineup. I don't mean to generalize (ah hell... yes I do!), but given the choice of who to have a beer and talk Macs with-- the hip young guy or the used car saleman-- it's no contest!!! Rob's exactly as I pictured him, and Bryan, well... I thought you'd be more on the geek end of the fashion spectrum. Rob just looks sooooo 1970s! Dig that groovy mustache...
Still smiling... Now on to the article!!! Go Bryan!
-Ken P
Fri May 07, 2004 4:21 pm Subject:
QuoteBookman wrote:
Enderle is dead wrong about the Power PC; if all 3 major gaming consoles are moving to Power PC, and in XBox's case that would be a direct rejection of x86 in favor of Power PC, his economics of scale argument goes down the crapper.
Not only that, but he was factually wrong on at least one point. The Next boxes that Jobs sold were based on Motorola 68k series processors. The NeXT Cube and NeXT Station used 68030 and 68040 processors only. While NeXTSTEP was ported to x86, Jobs never sold x86 based hardware. Also, I'm not sure what he's talking about when it comes to IBM making X-Box processors. I'm relatively certain the current X-Box uses a Pentium III processor produced by Intel plants, while the X-Box 2 is supposed to use multiple PPC 970 processors, which are obviously not x86 based.
And one sticking point few seem to realize. OS X does not use the FreeBSD kernel. It uses the FreeBSD system (meaning the base utilities) paired with a Mach kernel.
This is like hunting squirrels with a bazooka. It almost makes me pity Enderle. Almost.
I liked your quote about plug'n'play; I've got a good friend who's just starting to get interested in computers and is toying with "The Switch". His barely year-old Toshiba died a gruesome death and it left him a little frustrated. We gutted the laptop and then dumped its RAM, hard drive, and combo drive into a rev A iMac in his lab. That little computer took the PC components without complaint and recognized everything without needing drivers. We then upgraded the thing to 10.3 and he got it to map the university network and to do Windoze printing. The cincher was when sasser shut down our department but his new system was blissfully unaffected. He's saving for a Powerbook now and is looking forward to the next major hardware refresh.
Mon May 10, 2004 11:23 am Subject: Just read Round 2
+
Bryan, you are talking to a wall, and a particularly dumb wall at that. You are countering all of Enderle's statements with quotations, yet he keeps spouting the same FUD. His saying that the Popular Mechanics article saw the G5 "trounced" is a lie, as your quotation from the article clearly shows. Furthermore, his saying that PM claimed Apple "cheated" is contradicted by the following, also taken from the article:
QuoteBut in a way, the controversy over Apple's use of SPEC benchmarks, the discarding of the "fastest computer" claim and the adoption of new tests may call into question the idea of benchmarks themselves rather than Apple.
PM is questioning benchmarks here, not Apple. Anyone (meaning Enderle) who could read that article and spew such FUD is not a person to listen to reason. His mind is made up before he even hears you.
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