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Comment by pj | Hacker News Reader

Apple lost the personal computer war (EDIT: of the 1980's) because of its proprietary hardware created under the leadership of Steve Jobs. Not letting anyone else make a computer that would run MacOS was a big mistake for them.

I don't see anything new or shocking in the behavior with the iPhone or ipod, either from Apple, or the user community who has purchased them.

Same song, new day...

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Apple only lost the personal computer war if you assume their goal was high volume/low margin market domination. I would argue it was not then and still is not Apple's goal. The iPhone will almost certainly remain only a small subset of the overall SmartPhone market however it will remain one of the best and make Apple more money than companies with larger market shares of the SmartPhone market. So I'd agree this is a repeat of what has happened in the past but I wouldn't call it a mistake. I think Jobs knows exactly what his company is good at doing.

This video of Jobs talking about NeXT's target customers is interesting here, and I'd say that the target demographic hasn't changed very much since then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY

If we're talking about the '80s and '90s, there can be no real question that Apple screwed up badly. How and why are still legitimate questions, but the only reason Apple lasted until OS X was because Microsoft needed them as a token competitor. They were constantly on Death's doorstep, and I don't doubt that if MS wasn't under anti-trust watch, they could have finished Apple off then.

If we're talking 2000s, then that's a totally different story.

I would not call making record profits in the same quarter when others report loses the lost war. Unless you are talking about market share. Apple indeed does sing the same song, only it is: "we choose profits over market share".

I edited my post to clarify. I was talking about the PC war of the 80's. Apple nearly ceased to exist as a company and Microsoft even gave them some money to keep them alive...

I don't see anything new in the behavior with the iPhone.

Modifying hardware on a desktop is much easier then on a phone. That the hardware is proprietary isn't nearly as big of a deal here. Its all embedded, can't really be upgraded anyway.

Using a different OS isn't that big of a deal either. PreOS won't run on it, Android won't fully support iPhone's features, and why should Apple waste resources making their OS run on hardware they don't support?

Now, if you wanted to complain about the App Store policies being bad, thats a valid complaint. But not proprietary hardware.

The proprietary i'm talking about with respect to the iphone is the app store. Not just anyone can write for the app store, you have to go through Apple.

The point I'm making is that they are control freaks, always have been and it's not new. They want absolute control over their brand.

I'm okay with that. It's their company. But I don't like their closed-ness, so I don't buy their closed products.

I actually did buy a macbook pro though, precisely because it was more open than a PC -- it'll run windows or mac OS and that I like.

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