The 'hard' bit with hardware

I had interesting conversations last night with a guy from Asus and a guy from Microsoft at a training night for a large retail company.

Strangely, despite all the criticism of Apple's latest laptops being glossy of screen, every laptop in this large retail store had a glossy screen, and the Apple examples only comprised about 12 per cent of the stock I checked out.

ASUSTek (Asus is its PC brand) makes Windows-based PCs, but as you may know, the manufacturer headquartered in Taiwan is also one of the main manufacturers of Apple equipment.

Asus manufacture's Apple's Intel-based widescreen MacBooks and also some iPods, according to internet sources. Presumably they're learning a lot from manufacturing Apple stuff - last month ASUSTek's vice chairman, Jonathan Tsang, told the New York Times.

"Our goal is to provide products that are better than Apple's."

ASUSTek was founded by former Acer employees and recently formed a partnership with Garmin to release cell phones later in the year.

It's a bit like saying "Our aim is to provide better products than our own Apple-badged products," but I think Tsang means in other ways. Design.

Before the MacBook, Asus built Apple iBooks and PowerBooks. Last year, leaks from Asus  added to the Apple Tablet rumours that have re-emerged recently.

This may all seem strange. Apple followers (myself included) like to believe that Apple is different (as it is), but iSuppli reckons at least 70 per cent of laptops sold worldwide in 2006 were already manufactured by companies based in Taiwan, mainly Quanta (which had 30 per cent of the market in 2006), Compal, Foxconn and ASUSTek.

Most of the actual manufacturing for the Taiwanese companies is, in turn, done in Mainland China. The laptops then emerge onto the worldwide market, after suitable rebranding and perhaps a little customisation, with Dell, Alienware, Voodoo or Gateway badges, for example.

The cores of the Asus-badged machines, of course, are designed and manufactured completely by Asus. One can only wonder if the Apple-badged machines emerging from the same factory influence Asus' own designs, although to my Apple-jaundiced eye, the Asus laptops I looked at yesterday still looked pretty much as ugly as all the other PC laptops on offer.

At least, like Apple laptops, I would imagine Asus notebooks have the same integration of parts as Apple's premium 'Designed in California' products.

For Apple's products, it appears virtually impossible to figure out if companies like Asus have any influence or input in turn back on Apple's designs. Apple does outsource some engineering work, after all, although the extent is pretty hard to gauge.

But with Tsang's stated intention to out-Apple Apple, it's hard to imagine much engineering collaboration going on between the two companies, isn't it?

In fact, the statement seems a little provocative, if nothing else, but the web of relationships that exists between Chinese and American executives is an exceedingly complex business I know very little about.

This whole supply chain malarkey, by the way, is discussed in this W P Cary article.

Looking at the supply-chain model, Apple appears as just another 'flagship' company dealing with the same manufacturers as all the other companies.

In that case, three things actually set the Apple machines apart: that Californian design and 'Apple look'; the pricing, and the operating system.

Apple's premium pricing becomes a little more understandable, I think, once you consider the huge input Apple maintains in its own hardware design. That input is there all over again for Apple OS X, not to mention the software engineering involved in the iLife suite, all those utilities Apple supplies on every Mac and other applications that fall between the two categories, like Text Edit, Preview and even the currency-converting Calculator and Apple's Dashboard widgets.

However, if the promise of Windows 7 is realised, Asus may well get the OS it desires to further its competitive aims. Win7 sounds like it's lean and mean and fast and, perhaps more importantly, can run on lesser PCs, unlike Vista which had some hefty hardware requirements at launch.

Apparently, in response to the enormous legacy software overhead Microsoft has to cater to, Windows 7 even contains an XP subset. It's hard for Apple fans to even consider such a backwards step - can you imagine having OS 9 inside OS 10?

No way - although it did happen for a while after OS X's original launch. Would any Apple user want to go there again? Although I'm sure there are still some Macs happily chugging away on OS 9. One advantage of Apple carrying its user baggage with it is that the legacy requirement doesn't sink the ship by becoming too unwieldy.

Interestingly, I overheard one of the retail guys at the event saying that at least everyone has to upgrade their PC every three years. Apple PCs typically go for five, but by then you will have been hankering for more speed and capability for at least two of those years.

Anyway, soon we'll be able to look at Windows 7 and Snow Leopard side-by-side, both stripped-down, faster systems from major software companies.

In the meantime, I will soon have a 3GS to play with and a unibody MacBook Pro 13 to speed test.

- Mark Webster mac.nz