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Pentium-Based Macs The Future of Apple?
seek3r writes "Found this interesting article on BusinessWeek.com regarding Apple's potential switch to Intel chips. I wonder what the implications this might have for Apple with regards to market share and software support. Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?"
I think it was the lack of competition in the Mac arena that left Motorolla high-and-dry when being compared to Intel now. I know you can't just measure MHz to MHz, but competition in any arena is better than none.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
In terms of hardware site fanboy numbers, sure. But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
One thing I respect about the PowerPC chips is that the power consumption is drastically lower than for x86 chips. Drastically. It would be a shame to lose that and have everyone using 100 watt processors a couple of years down the road.
[*] Those few people are disproportionately loud.
I bought my first PowerPC-based Mac during that short, happy time when we could actually claim, without a hint of guilt or fear of reprisal, that G3 chips were "pentium crushers."
Unfortunately, despite my love for the mac platform, and my desire to claim that our hardware is "just as good"... it's not. RISC vs CISC stopped being an issue when Intel chips became RISC chips pretending to be x86's. PowerPC's still do more per clock than Pentiums, but the differences in clock speed, bus speed, and sundry other ephemerals has finally gotten to the point where for 90% of tasks, intel chips are just faster.
Don't get me wrong, I don't plan to switch until they pry my computer from my clenched, arthritic hands... but I can no longer look a computer-newbie in the eye and tell him that "Macs are just as fast". Better experiences, maybe... but as fast? No.
Of course, for most people, we're close to that point where chip-speed stops mattering... (maybe 1-2 more cycles of Moore's Law ought to do it.) How many people think about the speed of their computer while surfing, emailing, word-processing, or any such thing? (I know, I know, it's a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they're _true_.)
I think, business-wise, a switch to intel would be near-suicide for Apple. But Motorolla is dead in the water, desktop-computer-wise. Perhaps this theoretical IBM chip is the future... who knows?
basically it'll mean we won't have to pay exaggerated prices for Macs to be able to use OS X!!
You will never see MacOS X running on a generic x86 "beige box". Apple developed MacOS X for the sole purpose of selling hardware, that's where they make all their money, despite charging for Jaguar. (Sun are the same with Solaris). In addition, the "just works" ability touted as a major Mac selling point would cease to happen once they could not guarantee with any certainty exactly what hardware their OS was running on - this is the real problem faced by Microsoft, most Windows crashes boil down to needing to have drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware supported, and being unable to prove them all.
An x86 based Mac will have sufficient custom hardware on its motherboard that you will still only be able to run MacOS on Apple hardware.
This article chronicles some of Apple's challenges.
But on the topic. So Apple has 3 choices:
1. Wait for Motorola to get their act together. All the code optimization in the world won't make OS X as fast as it could be. Jaguar, for example, made my B&W G3 REALLY responsive compared to 10.1.5. But it occured to me, that's probably the last speed boost from software. You can only go so far.
2. Get the new IBM chip working. Hey, fine, it'll probably work. But it'll take a year or more to get it ported, documented, and in production. It won't be cheap, most likely. It will most likely be fast and powerful, but Apple walks a fine line WRT price.
3. Get Intel working. Hey, fine. Port OpenFirmware to an Intel-type mobo, then ship a computer that runs NONE of the software outside of the core OS. Wait for developers to buy one of these new machines to recompile their packages. This is where proprietary software bites you on the ass - you can't just wander between architectures with your source tarball and hope for the best. Oh, and of course, Classic won't work, and you're going to be stuck with whatever devices are already "cross platform". YOu can't just pick up a device from CompUSA and expect it to work.
The only plus I see to OSX/x86 is that the possibility for cheaper hardware might mean more people picking up an OS X box, and maybe some more drivers will be written. I'd buy one in a second, except... the majority of stuff in my Dock probably wouldn't be "ported" in the first year. So if it's under a grand, say, what good does it do me? No MacSQL, no EV Nova, no Remote Desktop... I need that stuff.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Apple makes its money on hardware, so no matter which processor is in the box, buying a Mac will be necessary to run OS X, and it will still cost big bucks.
-A
That would be the dumbest thing they would do.
Unless this is mandated by law Apple should not touch this stuff with a 10 foot pole. They would gain leverage in the marketplace by offering computers free from this crap.
If they did this rip -> mix -> burn would have to be changed to rip -> ask for permission to play -> ask for permission to play -> burn? (are you of your mind, you can't do that)
If Intel pushes this palladium crap they deserve to be driven out of business, I don't care how damn many GHz these chips would run at, I'd consider any DRM enabled chip to be defective.
Let's go over this one last time. First, Apple will never release OS X to run on a generic Intel PC. If they did, they'd sell about 100,000 copies to geeks who don't want to buy Apple hardware. When those geeks find out that there's no software for OS X/Intel, they'll gradually move back to dual booting Linux and WinXP, leaving OS X as an interesting oddity like the copy of BeOS they installed once too. I mean, you can only watch the genie effect or transparent Terminal windows on top of a screensaver running on the desktop so many times before it gets old.
Let's not even get into the nightmare that it is to support every piece of crap cheapo PC hardware combination like MS has to. Apple does not want that, period.
Why will there be no software? Look at how long it took (and is still taking in many cases) vendors to update their software for OS X. Now imagine Apple pissing them off by telling them to recompile and retest under OS X for Intel. Sure, that part probably won't be as big as moving from OS 9 (unless they've got a lot of endian or other hardware specific code), but recall how long it took vendors to switch to PowerPC native code. Ain't gonna happen. Let's imagine: OS X Intel comes out; Apple tries to convince developers to support it, but they (wisely) wait and see how it goes. Nobody buys it, and software vendors see that it's going nowhere, so they don't bother with it. No software == no point. Good luck!
Furthermore, what's the incentive to port to OS X Intel if (a) it's a relatively small, untested market, and (b) more importantly, they already have a Windows version that works fine? Along these lines, for Apple to provide any sort of VMware-like Windows emulation under OS X Intel would be suicide for the platform. Application vendors would just tell their customers to run it under Windows/VMware. What then is the incentive to develop a version for OS X Intel?
For Apple to move their own hardware to Intel would also piss off a lot of people. They pulled it off once with PowerPC, but that was truly necessary. It went amazingly smoothly, but it was really a couple of years before PowerPC native apps starting showing up in numbers and the newest PowerPCs were fast enough to emulate the old 68ks as fast as the last ones. Does anyone really want to go through all that again? It would be a couple of years before Apple would even hope to be up to par with Windows in performance! Not gonna happen.
Sure, I don't doubt that Marklar exists. It does give them that last desperation option, when there's no hope for anything else. But perhaps more importantly, it serves to improve the OS X codebase simply by making it platform transparent. The one instance where I could possibly see an Intel-based product from Apple would be XServe. Just a thought - but if you're not likely to be running PhotoShop or ProTools or Quark on a server, perhaps an Apple branded unit with Intel would work out with all Apple server software.
The only intelligent thing Haddad says is in the second to last paragraph, where he essentially acknowledges that software would be the biggest roadblock. Developers will likely balk at the prospect of porting to yet another platform, and "without software support, the Mac would truly be dead." Exactly.
Of course, the most likely scenario lies with the rumors of the Apple/IBM collaboration on a next generation PowerPC chip. That's where I'd put my money. Nobody knows if/when G5 will ever come out and Motorola doesn't seem to care about the non-embedded market. Hopefully IBM can bring Apple back to the days when PowerPC really did crush the Pentium. We'll see.
Say hello to zMac.
Back when the G4 was designed, things were looking bad for Apple, so Motorola retrenched into the embedded market.
True, but not completely the reason. Don't discount the effect of Steve Jobs' killing of the Mac clone market, which shrank Motorola's market for selling its non-embedded PowerPCs to one vendor. This angered the company far more than the press would have you believe, since Steve Jobs single handedly kicked Motorola out of a market and left them with a huge stock of unsold systems.
If Motorola were really worried about the non-embedded PPC market, they would've allocated additional resources to the project long ago. There are plenty of smart people working there.
Yeah - look at the way Jaguar and Porsche suffer from being confined to a tiny part of the overall car market.
That analogy is flawed because Jaguars and Porsches are a lot faster than the average car.
Mac people are like the guys who buy jags, mgs and so on. Sure it will always be a small part of the market but that doesn't mean Apple can't make money doing it.
To carry the analogy further, Macs are like niche cars that can't use the same fuels, oils, or tires as "normal" cars. That's the problem that Apple has: In order to be successful, they have to convince software publishers to create Mac titles. Those companies have to be convinced that it's a financially sound decision to hire Mac software engineers, Mac support staff, and to buy Macs to be used for development, testing, and support.
Apple is always on the hairy edge. If there were fewer Mac titles, they'd lose market share. Then there would be fewer Macs and the incentive to develop Mac titles would be less -- which would mean even fewer titles. I think you see where this is going.
I wish Apple well, but the only way that I think they have a chance in the long run is to bit the bullet, change CPU families, and create Macs that perform as well as PCs at similar price points.
If they try to become a software house like Microsoft by selling OS-X for generic x86 PCs, they will probably be destroyed by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually viewed Apple as a competitor (rather than a faux competitor that keeps the FTC off of their backs), life would get ugly at Apple. Microsoft would likely not produce a version of Office for OS-x86 (clever name, eh?). Microsoft would discourage Windows developers from creating titles for OS-x86. Microsoft could withold support or even actively sabotage titles with "service packs" to punish software publishers who released OS-x86 titles.
Just my $.02 on the subject.
Also, while the guy is right that the transition would be a big pain for the developers, in the long run it might make things easier for them, because most of them keep a seperate branch of x86-optimized code because they also sell it for Windows. Post-transition, these two branches would be able to have much more in common. That might make things easier in the long run.
Alright--here is a reason for not making the transition: the upcoming desktop Power4's from IBM. I am almost certain these will be in Macs sometime in 2003, and when they are, most of our beige pc keyboards will be covered with drool.