Tech Parody

tech , computer history
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The Next Web in 2017 reminds us that Apple made a bunch of parody music videos to mock Microsoft in the 90s:

[…] when Apple allowed third-party manufacturers to clone the Mac back in 1994,

[…]

This is when Garr and a small group of fellow Apple employees decided to record a series of parody songs to mock the competition and celebrate the “new era” of Macs.

I have seen Think We Are a Clone now back in the days, pre broadband internet, where I got te QuickTime file through some way. It is so much imprinted into my brain than when the original Tiffany song is played the first thing that comes to my mind is this parody.

Hindsight is 20-20, and that whole “allow the clones” strategy really was a bad idea as it let competition eat into the higher margins high-end market. Apple had transitionned from Motorola “CISC1” to PowerPC “RISC2”, claiming that RISC was so much better and did beat the Intel Pentium (and therefore Microsoft Windows). Little did we know that in 2006 Apple would ditch PowerPC to transition to Intel Pentium™ successor, the Intel Core Duo™, becoming compatible with Microsoft Windows, going back to “CISC”.

Nowadays CISC vs RISC is irrelevant to some extent. The dominating architecture, Intel 64-bits (truly AMD’s) is still considerd CISC, because it’s still compatible with the good old Pentium.

About the clones, Steve Jobs, after NeXT3 took control of Apple a few years later, cancelled the program, spending a big chunk of money buying back from the biggest licensee, Power Computing.

These videos are the kind of things Apple would never let happen from their employees on their campus, and if someone did do it and put it up on YouTube, I’m sure they’d be in trouble. A completely different company culture than from the 90s.

Let’s take a seat and enjoy:

  1. Complex Instruction Set Computer: Mostly inherited from the original design for CPU. It was coined to contrast with RISC. That instruction set is part of what make software compatible from one CPU to the other. The Pentium supporting the instrcution set of the 8086 make that old software can run on new Pentiums. ↩︎

  2. Reduced Instruction Set Computer: An instruction set design that reduce the number of instruction, and therefor the complexity of the chip. This was touted as the holy grail of performance but time told us Intel could manage to work around this. And then RISC architectures brought in more complex instruction sets. The whole debate CISC vs RISC is moot, and is a very reducted view of CPU architecture. ↩︎

  3. It was a reverse acquisition, Apple paid NeXT $400M so that NeXT could take over. Not just Steve Jobs, but the whole software engineering: macOS is a decendent of NeXTStep. ↩︎