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June 10, 2005
Apple/Intel: Wise move/disaster?
Apple, it seems, is going to have trouble managing the hiatus between the existing PowerPC chip, and the Intel line, one year away at the low end, and two years for higher-end models. Over on The Register, early indications are not good. They suggest, in fact, that Apple sales are going to drop off, as users delay purchasing.
More than half their emails to the editor took that line. Others, however, indicated that there was never a better time to buy a Mac. We've been talking to some local retailers, and they report that there is some increased interest in the G5s, on the apparent reasoning that either this will be as good as it gets, or Apple's going to run out of stock of the things. Hmm! Don't know about that. There's a reasonable chance that Apple might be forced to discount, so we'd wait a little while yet before doing anything.
The key factor, in all this, in our opinion, is the performance of Rosetta, which converts PowerPC code to Intel code on the fly. One of our programmer friends has pointed us to a couple of links which indicate the news is good and bad.
His opinion?
Since all graphics/interface stuff will be recompiled as native code and not emulated, you can expect the end user experience to appear snappy, even if some of the underlying things are running 10 times slower. For example, recalculating a spreadsheet might be 10 times slower, but these days how many spreadsheets take more than a fraction of a second to recalc anyway? Really for end users it's the display and scrolling speed that people tend to use as the judge of "snappiness" of an interface anyway.
Posted by cw at June 10, 2005 05:36 PM
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Comments
We went through it with the 68x00 to Power PC and we survived. If you want a high end machine, upgrade now and when it's time to upgrade again the Intel based Macs will have either proved themselves or not. If you're after a low end machine, if it does what you want today it does what you want.
The real issue is how well the transition is managed, How many development houses write for the Intel based Mac and how much they support it.
The transition to PPC was handled pretty well with lots of hype building up to it. As far as that goes we'll have to wait and see.
As far as I am concerned, I'm a bit sad at the moment but I'll get over it. I'm certainly looking forward to the next generation Powerbook if all works out well.
Posted by: chriscurnow at June 10, 2005 08:17 PM
Im more wondering what the future of the Mac OS?
Apple hastn rulled out the installation of Windoze on the apple hardware. Two options.
1. Apple becomes a hardware company running windows.
2.Apple becomes a software company and allows OSx to run on any intel bassed machine.
I cant wait to see any moves made by apple.
- Matty
Posted by: Matt Shadbolt at June 11, 2005 12:37 AM
You can bet Jobs' plan is to remain an integrated supplier. Apple has not intention or interest in becoming a hardware supplier.
Allowing OS X to run on any intel based machine would kill the concept of Apple OS. All of a sudden you'd have all the problems you have with Windows. Incompatible cards. Trying to get drivers to load in the correct order.
Nope, Apple is about user experience. Making a machine that you get out of the box, plug in and it works. Apple is proud of that tradition. That's not to say they haven't made a huge mistake here or that they won't be able to manage the transition. But you can be quite certain that their plans are to remain as they are.
Posted by: chriscurnow at June 11, 2005 10:05 PM
I wonder if allowing Intel (and AMD) to control supply of compatible instruction set processors is a form of anti-competitive conduct having the effect of market distortion and is not in the public best interest.
Posted by: Stuart Norton at June 12, 2005 03:00 PM