Stardate 20020726.0248

(On Screen): My favorite Mac faithful, Brian Tiemann, reacts to a common criticism of the Mac market by PC users:

There's something else that I'm afraid escapes me about the usual anti-Mac propaganda. It's this thing about "limited hardware vendors".

What exactly are people complaining about? What choice are they missing?

Let's see: Uh, the video card. And... well... hmm. Yeah, let's start with the video card.

Dude? What more choice are you looking for in a video card? The towers give you options for RADEON or GeForce3/4 cards that you can BTO, just like in the PC world. What other chipset makers are there these days? What are you missing-- the on-board Intel video that PC motherboards come with? Is that the "hardware choice" that you have in mind? Something "default" that you can upgrade from and feel all superior about? Or maybe it's those super-high-end 3D cards for rendering, or video capture cards from Matrox, or those $15K ones that drive SGI monitors. Dude, if you're in that narrow a market segment, you're not in any position to make fun of Apple. Even if the card you want isn't supported on the Mac, which it probably will be.

Brian is looking at an instantaneous snapshot of the PC and Mac markets, and doesn't understand that competition is a process. The reason I want competition today is so that I'll have better products offered to me tomorrow, because all the competing vendors will be struggling to find a way to differentiate themselves.

For example, I just purchased an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500. It's not just a high-power graphics card with superb 3D acceleration, but also has a built-in TV tuner and video capture capability. I had a previous card like that from Matrox, but the Matrox 3D wasn't as good.

But that misses the real point. Yes, you can get the latest GeForce 4 for the Mac. But how, exactly, did nVidia come to be making that chip? Apple has been offering nVidia-based graphics cards for the Mac since the GeForce2 MX, but that chip only existed because the GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 Ultra did well, and they were developed because the GeForce256 was a success, which was inspired by the commercial success of the TNT2, which followed the TNT, and there were a couple of other graphics chips before that.

nVidia didn't just appear out of thin air because Steve Jobs rubbed a magic lamp. The GeForce2 MX appeared as a result of heavy competition in development of graphics chips for the PC between nVidia, 3DFX, ATI, Matrox and two or three other companies. All of them pushed their designs forward because each was afraid of being left behind.

For the last year or so, there's been a bit of a lull in the graphics chip business, with nVidia being the undisputed leader. But with the release of the Matrox Parhelia, and the announcement of ATI's Radeon 9700, it's about to become a horserace again, and the state of the art is going to keep improving.

And the reason why all this happened is because PC users did the kind of picking and choosing that Brian mocks. It isn't even totally true that all cards built around the same graphics chips are identical in practical performance; there are issues involved there. And the companies offering those cards differentiate themselves with bundled software. But the real value there is that the graphics card companies were themselves concerned by the fact that they all were offering much the same thing, which means that they were eager to jump on new choices when they became available, in hopes of winning.

There was a (brief) time when 3DFX essentially owned the 3D accelerator market and sold its chips to nearly everyone. But because of this competition among card companies, when nVidia began to try to compete, there were companies willing to take a chance on nVidia's chips. Those same companies are now giving Kyro a chance.

But if Apple had been the only market for graphics chips, none of that would have happened. During that period of great ferment for nVidia which led ultimately to the GeForce 2 and market dominance, Apple got all its graphics chips from ATI. Fortunately for everyone, there was no such monopoly in the PC graphics business, and so competition by card companies opened the way for competition by chip companies, which led to today's powerful and cheap graphics chips.

You see the same thing happening in sound cards.

Okay, so that's the video card. What else is there that people want? Let's see now... hmmm. There's-- er, no. There's SCSI-- er, no, not anymore. Uh... Oh! Wait-- sound cards! Yeah, that's right! Sound cards!

Give me a break. Sound cards have become so commoditized that there isn't even any competition in the PC world anymore-- not that there ever was since the AdLib/Sound Blaster wars. Everybody's got a Sound Blaster 64AWE Live! 1394 Handjob Portblast 128 or whatever the hell these days, and everybody's machine sounds the same. Who is going to claim that choice in sound cards is essential to the computing experience? Again, the only choice involved comes down to whether you stick with whatever crappy anonymous on-board sound chipset your motherboard has, or whether you got the Sound Blaster of the day and plugged it in.

I'm afraid not. Actually, there are a lot of interesting things going on in the PC soundcard area r