Dramas, scandals, and bad press marked 1995 for the Mac community. In other words, it was a rather typical year.
Maggie Canon
Having covered Apple for 15 years, I can say one thing with some certainty: No matter what the miscues, mistakes, and boardroom battles, the company always seems to bounce back. So I don't really feel like I'm going out on a limb by predicting yet another comeback for Apple in 1996.
But if you want to know what else is going to happen in '96, you're in luck, because the MacUser Psychic Hot Line is ready to roll with some obvious and not-so-obvious prognostications.
Apple will marry money. The dark blue suitor IBM has been spurned once, but don't count it out just yet -- there are many good reasons for such a match. IBM needs to establish a viable consumer presence, which Apple's brand name could provide. At the same time, Apple desperately needs more manufacturing muscle, and IBM has both the chip foundries and the manufacturing might to provide it. Let's not kid ourselves, though -- this would be a marriage of convenience rather than love.
A more romantic pairing would be with the Italian suitor Olivetti. Olivetti wants a PC presence in the U.S., and it likes the Mac (it's already invested in Power Computing). Because Spindler is a European, the cultural clash might be less traumatic too. No matter who wins Apple's hand, though, a solid marriage will help Apple survive in a Windows world.
Power Computing will prevail. Although naysayers questioned Apple's choices of clone partners, especially the startup Power Computing, those pundits were wrong. Power Computing is off to an excellent start. Its products are on target, it's innovative (check out its Web page at www.powercc.com for a good example of using online technology effectively), it's hiring great engineering talent, and it's got a lot of appealing products planned for 1996. Now all it needs to do is make sure it can get parts!
There will be a surge in mergers. Another Apple clone partner, Radius, will merge or be acquired. Several storage companies will be bought out or merge with one another. Entertainment- and education-software companies will be the darlings of Wall Street, and several will be acquired (most likely by Microsoft) or merge with one another. Mail-order companies will consolidate. All natural for a maturing industry.
Apple and IBM will sing like canaries. The dream of a single computer that can run multiple operating systems will come true, as IBM, Apple, and whoever start building CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform, pronounced chirp -- get it?) boxes that can run the Mac OS, Windows NT, and UNIX (AIX). This could be the best news of all for Apple. Since Apple clearly has trouble building enough boxes to meet demand, an open standard without the constraints of licensing fees and contracts should fling the gates open for multitudes of hardware vendors to make CHRP boxes that would run a variety of OSs -- you'll get to pick. And now that it's been proven that supporting multiple OSs isn't more expensive than supporting one standard (as reported in a recent Gartner Group study), people should be able to choose the OS they prefer.
Copland will be later than sooner. Admittedly this one's a no-brainer, but it's disappointing nonetheless. In fairness to Apple, operating systems are so hard to do that they're practically late by definition. But Copland's tardiness could hurt Apple more than anything else next year, as Windows NT looms large over the landscape. However, you can expect to see some Copland-like interface features trickling down to System 7.5 sometime in late summer. And System 7.5? It will be able to run on the new CHRP boxes.
Windows NT will be the real threat. Apple will no longer be able to joke about NT meaning Not There. NT, with its multiprocessing, its multithreading, and its memory-protected services will be a much bigger threat to Apple than Windows 95 ever could have been. This is not catch-up time for Microsoft; it's catch-up time for Apple. This is not to say Apple won't respond -- it's got a new product aimed right at NT coming out in the first quarter.
Apple will break the speed barrier. The promise of RISC will be realized, as Macs with clock speeds of 200 MHz become available and the PCI bus makes graphics zoom, all for a fraction of the cost of just 12 months ago. And as fully native Copland code starts to reach users, even owners of the original Power Macs are going to see significant speed gains. And faster Macs are always good news.
Well, those are my psychic predictions for 1996. If you think I've missed one or if you have a prediction of your own, send me your e-mail at our Letters to the Editor address: letters@macuser.com.
