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G4 Powerbooks Predicted For January 2001
Spittoon pointed out this ZDNet article claiming that development proceeds apace on G4 portables for Apple's PowerBook line, and that if all goes well, they'll be shown off at Macworld Expo in January. I could live with ads claiming that "The new PowerBook is a supercomputer" in exchange for knocking a couple notes off the price of a G3 PowerBook ;) Slot-loaded CD / DVD drives are long overdue in notebooks, anyhow, so I hope at least that part of the story pans out.
I wonder how the mac keeps it going? Anyone out there a Mac developer? Is it just an easy port?
I've done minor development under MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
In my experience, the MacOS development environment is just cleaner. APIs "feel" neater, simpler, and more cleanly packaged, and the developer help pages on Apple's site are extremely useful.
Under Windows, the API has a fair bit of bloat and isn't as neat, and digging through the help files is annoying as all heck, because they aren't sanely organized and often skimp on important details.
Under Linux, I'll spend a few days of research to write a few hours' worth of code. There isn't any unified API - there are several competing APIs for window managers, and a patchwork of micro-APIs for other aspects of the system. It's great fun to dig into, but it's not a cakewalk.
Just my personal experiences and opinions.
No, the clock speed of a chip is a quantative measure. A synchronous chip runs at its quoted speed (unless you overclock it :-)
"Clock speed" means different things on different architectures, as there are *different ways* of clocking a chip.
You can have a single square-wave clock (single-phase). This is a bugger to design logic for, because eliminating race conditions is difficult, but allows you to push your circuits a little harder because you don't have to worry about keeping non-overlapping multi-phase clocks non-overlapping.
You can have two non-overlapping square-wave clocks with a duty cycle lower than 50% each (two-phase clocking). This makes functional units *much* easier to design, but you have to add enough padding between pulses on alternate clocks that clock skew won't cause them to overlap anywhere.
You can have four non-overlapping square-wave clocks with a duty cycle lower than 25% each (four-phase clocking). This is very hairy to design logic for, but if you can pull it off, the resulting logic is a bit more forgiving on timing constraints and can be clocked a bit faster than might otherwise be possible.
Now, this is relevant because the shortest possible pulse _length_ under any clocking scheme is roughly constant, but the number of pulses per full clock cycle is the number of phases. If I can make clock pulses 0.5 nanoseconds long, a single-phase clocked system would be running at 1 GHz, while a two-phase clocking system would be running at 500 MHz, and a four-phase clocking system would be running at 250 MHz - while doing the same amount of work.
So, comparing the clock speeds on two architectures that use different clocking methods islike comparing apples and oranges. It just doesn't work. Compare performance instead.
A lot of it quite honestly comes down to psychology rather than rationality. There are enough developers who enjoy being Mac users that they want to develop for the Mac as well. A case in point is the game industry, where developers very much want to make Mac games even though the company's support for them is imperfect at best (even though there are big problems now, mainly in Apple's level of secrecy, it's a lot better than back in the day when Apple actively dicouraged game development because they didn't want companies to think of the Mac as a toy).
Another reason is the same reason that anyone supports niche markets--there's good money to be made. Microsoft's Mac Office products give them huge profits. The Apple userbase is a pretty nice subsection of computer users: loyal, affluent, experimental. Apple users generally reward quality products.
You wondered why people spend so much time doing mac ports instead of *bsd and linux ports. There's a lot more money to be made, especially in the consumer arena, porting to mac instead of the freenixes. The freenixes may be awesome, but they have a much smaller share of the consumer market and people who use them are less likely to pay for software than the average mac user.
My suspicion is that there's more porting of server-type software (see IBM, SGI, etc.) to Linux than there is to Mac. The audiences are different.
That said, Apple has had and still has problems getting developers because of their size (or lack of it). Apple's all-in-one hardware+software package is both its greatest benefit and biggest problem for developers. The transition to OS X will definitely be a very interesting test, as a successful transition is very much dependent on developer support.
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Make mine methylphenidate.