All Hail Apple, King of Hardware

When you look at PC hardware not much has changed in the last thirty years.? The main PC box is broadly same size and shape as it was in the days of the original IBM PC, it just stood up rather than sitting squat, and the hardware inside computers has changed even less with computers still using the old x86 architecture with motherboards sporting the same layout and bus types.

Aside from a few minor innovations along the way such as faster processors, USB, PCI Express and such, things have stayed static for two decades.

The only real changes have come about in the last few years, beginning with the introduction of black towers, all-in-one PCs and moving on to tablets and ultrabooks.? If you look at where these new innovations and hardware types have come from though you?ll quickly find Apple behind every one of them.

Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, the fantastic design of Jonathan Ive and the work done by Apple?s senior engineering team has transformed the way we use computers.

The latest of these innovations is the retina display.? This isn?t a screen that can give you super-dense resolutions, though they can be used for that.? This is a display aiming to bring print-quality text and images to the computer for the first time, some twenty years after the explosion of DTP and the move by the publishing world to a digital medium.

Now everyone?s jumping on the bandwagon with Samsung being the first to demo a prototype 2560?1440 pixel display in a luxury ultrabook, Asus launching a convertible Android tablet with a super-dense 1920?1200 screen and display manufacturers can?t make the things quickly enough for businesses or consumers, both of which are clamouring for this next big thing.

It?s not all about the retina display though.? Apple?s shunning of technologies such as Blu-Ray and their initial reluctance to employ USB 3 aren?t just decisions that should be dismissed from high-minded technologists.? These are decisions to be watched very carefully indeed.

Most modern PCs come with a Blu-Ray drive but with most video content now delivered via a download it?s looking like Steve Jobs was right to declare the Blu-Ray disc essentially dead before it even got out of the starting gate, certainly with computers where it?s not even used for backup.

Who is it that?s pushed processors towards low-power and efficient ARM models?? Again it?s Apple who made this move and despite their own adoption of Intel chips on the desktop, it can be argued that the only reason Windows 8 now runs on Arm is because the iPad does as well.

The crux of it is that we?re now riding on the crest of a wave of innovation in design and in new technologies that?s been entirely created by this single company.? They did it initially to claw back market share and to stave off bankruptcy, but now they do it to solidify their position as the largest technology company on Earth.

It seems odd then that other companies haven?t seen the light and followed suit.? Sure the profit margins in the PC business are very small and gambles are gambles, but that could have been said when Apple launched the iMac fifteen years ago, just look at them now.

I love innovation in hardware and I hated those dire years during the 80?s and 90?s when we had almost none whatsoever.? I?m very happy then, as a Windows guy, to hold my hands up in praise to Apple, for helping all of us to live in a brighter world.

Source: http://www.thelongclimb.com/2012/09/04/all-hail-apple-king-of-hardware/

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