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Dvorak Thinks Apple Will Switch to Intel
SeanTobin was among several users who noted that Dvorak's latest column discusses the possibility of Apple going to Intel for future macs. Yeah, this rumor pops up pretty often, but I wonder how long before we'd get binary compatibility between other x86 unix OSs.
He's an idiot!
Takes something with a shred of truth (the people being at said conferences) and blowing it into something "newsworthy".
For one thing, Dvorak thinks Apple will use Itanium. Not exactly binary compatible with other x86 unices...
Between this article, and this article; I expect to wake up monday and find out this weekend never happened!
It would most likely be a still apple-only proprietary system. Perhaps the BIOS would be different, or something. Who knows.
If they started using x86, it would mean possibly cheaper CPU's but also hotter ones (temperature) and less performance per-Mhz.
I don't see this happening anytime in the near future. They abandoned their x86 versions of OSX long ago. Doesn't seem to me like they would be willing to spend all the time, effort, and money on something that they don't really need to do.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
There's no mention of Apple's most likely upgrade path in the next 12-18 months, the IBM PPC 970. Uh... hello?
What is this? Bizzaro World?
[/comicbookguyvoice]
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
If Mr. Dvorak had bothered to do the slightest bit of research before writing another baseless artice, he would know that Apple is switching to IBM processors, not Intel.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Next month, Dvorak will have exclusive information on the release date for Duke Nukem: Forever!
MacOS on Intel platform opens up lots of interesting "what ifs." Would you be able to order your Dell with XP or MacOS X? The real question then becomes, what would happen to MacOS support (i.e. MS Office for MacOS) from Microsoft once Apple and MS were competing on the same hardware platform.
Since OS X runs on a BSD base, would MS change its tune regarding Linux?
Could be an interesting time!
I say we combine the standard rumors. Apple is being bought by Intel! Apple will go out of business shortly after using Intel chips! Or, perhaps, for maximum efficiency of rumor: Apple will go bankrupt, be bought by Intel, which will then be bought by Microsoft! Excuse me, my tinfoil hat needs adjusting.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
You can tell high-level languages are the standard when someone proposes to switch a whole architecture to the x86 platform.
Remember the times the x86 was pointed at because of its lack of registers ? Recently read an pentium to-the-metal optimization guide, and discovered you had to recode your optimizations backwards to port them from p3 to p4 ?
I can't possibly understand how a switch to intel processors can possibly benefit Apple...
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Dvorak needs to say these things every now and then to maintain his position as public enemy #2 (after Bill) to Mac users. As I recall, he had some interesting predictions on those newfangled "mouse" thingies as well.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
people, this is the same idiot who claimed the mouse would never catch on... the same pin-headed moron who said Apple would never last and he predicted Apple's death for about a decade or so...
Apple will go with Intel when Osama bin Laden converts to Judaism.
Dvorak is suggesting that Apple will switch to Itanium, which according to the roadmaps is nowhere near being ready for the desktop. At present, Intel is jamming larger and larger caches into Itanic until it will float against other processors in the server space, giving it an otherworldly transistor count not ready for the desktop in THIS decade -- the fabrication is simply too complex (read: $$$$), the power requirements are through the roof, and the compiler technology for IA-64 is many years from maturity. The Merced core for Itanic is absolutely useless, and I won't even get into the questions about whether even future generations will be viable.
A better 64 bit choice, particularly for Apple, will be IBM's upcoming PPC 970, which doesn't require massive retooling.
I wonder how long before we'd get binary compatibility between other x86 unix OSs.
Using an Intel CPU doesn't mean they have to repeat all IBMs mistakes from the past. They have the oportunity to design a BIOS from scratch that doesn't have to be backwardcompatible. It can become a lot better from that. I hope, that if they really go Intel, at least they bitch realmode and go in protected mode as fast as possible. While an OS that runs on both platforms does not come for free, it shouldn't be a problem to reuse userspace code on very different hardwareplatforms, as long as the CPU is the same. Of course it requires a reasonable OS design. I bet it won't be a long time after such a Mac has been released before you can run Linux on it with all the binary executables you already have for x86. Even WMWare might work, which would be kind of interesting. I wonder how long time it will be before MS ships a Windows that runs natively on Mac. I also wonder how Apple feels about that possibility.
I however still wonder why anyone would design a new architecture with an obsolete CPU. A much better decission could be to use AMDs new soon to be released x86-64.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Such a wild conjecture probably has more validity than most Dvorak articles anyway.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
This wouldn't be the first time that the Mac has changed processors. (680x0 -> PPC) It's unlikely that Apple would keep the crappy PC style architechture though. Take a look at the base 1 MB and the terrible interrupt controller cascade. Apple wouldn't want to inherit this, plus if they stay far enough outside the PC, they can maintain their individuality.
I can picture geeks buying x86Mac hardware to run Linux on as it should be more stable than current x86 hardware. I can also picture x86 virtualization software (VirtualPC) being useful. Apple no longer has to deal with the low clock speed stigma.
This sounds like it would be a good thing.
Here is how the Inquirer reported the story on friday: April fools day comes early?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Dvorak is the grumpy old man of tech journalism. His MO is to take his own oversimplifications and biases, mix them with rumors everyone else was talking about months ago and add a dash of self-promotion. He's almost as bad as Geraldo Rivera or Olliver North.
And I smoke crack.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
1) Jobs' ego. Jobs has said on the record that he'll resign before he builds an Apple box with an Intel chip. (I honestly don't remember where that rivalry originates.)
2) Developer opinion. Dvorak is primarly a PC man -- I think he missed much of the outcry that occurred when we switched from 68K to PPC. For that matter, there's still bits of Carbon that date back to 68K, such as setting and unsetting the A5 world register for callback routines. Also consider that the killer apps of the Mac world (Adobe products, Quark, etc) are just now becoming native to OS X. The outcry if we had to switch to a new OS would be massive. There's also the fact that the PPC ISA is backwards compatible with the 68K -- all existing apps for Apple would have to be emulated. Can you say "fuck no," children?
3) Architecture differences. True, you can recompile the Darwin microkernel for Intel. There's a lot of differences though in the hardware -- for example, Macs directly work with the INT# lines on the PCI bus, they don't have IRQs. It would be incredibly costly for Apple to eschew the current standards in PC motherboard design and make their own chipset.
4) IBM. The PowerPC architecture is not slow in and of itself -- it's just a spec for a RISC instruction set. The problem lies in Motorola, who no longer relies on Apple for business now that their wireless division supports the company, and who has been dragging their heels on their PPC line. IBM's new PowerPC 970 is a desktop version of their Power5 server processor (including its unusual pipeline design) planned to debut at 1.8GHz on a 0.13 micron process. Yum.
There's also the point that Dvorak is known as a rumor-spouting gasbag... and one who has a chip on his shoulder for Apple. The guy used to write for MacWorld until he had a falling out with Apple management, and has become notorious for his anti-Apple bias ever since.
He makes a point that they could release a dual CPU machine with an Itanium and a PPC chip, but this would be slower than a single CPU model for most things (dual CPU where each CPU is a different architecture is tricky and leads to performance hits). Since all Apple's current top of the line models have 2 PPCs, the new machine would be slower than the old ones.
On the other hand, the PPC 970 is comming into production, a 64-bit PPC with 2GHz+ clock speeds. 64 is twice as big as 32, so marketing can claim it's as fast as a 4GHz Pentium 4 (actually it might be almost that fast, since the P4 is famous for high clock rates and low performance per clock). Being a PPC, this chip is also backwards comaptible. Oh, and it has 2 AltiVec units, so all that AltiVec code Apple has been pushing for the last couple of years should really sing. A 900MHz FSB reduces the old memory bottleneck present in current PPCs. I'm not sure how much the PPC970 will cost, but I doubt it will be much more than Itanium, and it's far more attractive from Apple's point of view. This Dvorak guy seems to have forgotten that the Apple IBM Motorola alliance had 3 members...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
People are really letting their imagination run riot, aren't they? I mean, only yesterday we discussed Microsoft going open source, and now Apple switching to Intel. What's next? Sun embracing C#? ;-)
In a development that will shock both the PC and pharmaceutical industries, PC pundit John Dvorkak will be "switching platforms."
Long known for his schizophrenic pronouncements concerning the Macintosh platform, sources close to him have confirmed Dvorak's musings have been caused by an adverse, though subtle reaction, to his psychotropic drug regimen.
"Yeah, he's said some crazy things in the past," quotes Dr. Sanghar Mumji, Dvorak's long-time psychiatrist. "You've got to cut him some slack though. Psychiatry isn't an exact science."
Industry analysts predict the dawn of a new day for Dvorak. One analyst, wishing to remain anonymous, remarks, "John has got a long road back, but I've got faith in him. I hear he's working on a Newton story."
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
still its interesting to speculate. TO keep up its tradition apple woul dneed to specify a reference platform considerably different than the usual bios driven, low end crap we are trapped in the intel world. So it would not just be a mac running on PC box. The interesting thing would be if PC manufactureres adopted the refernce platform on their high end units. by adotping a full featured platform with uniform specs there might be a breaktrhough in PC compatibility with its drivers making the world more mac-like
then we might have dual or tri-boot computers. (linux,mac,windows). Its hard to guess how that would shake out. I have no idea. one the one hand a lot of mac users might give in and become PC users now that the barrier is less. on the otherhand the reasons to use linux might vanish. Or maybe everyone would discover that the mac is the prefect compromise beteeen unix and ease of use. any one want to speculate? lots of room for disagreement
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm no mac user, but I can't see the benefits of using an Intel chip in a mac.
Personally, I'll take my high clocked hot as hell Athlon over a Mac anyday.
The x86 chips are fast now a days. The gap has gotten a lot smaller in the performance per Mhz between them and Apple's PPC chips. And, via brute-force (lots more Mhz) they outperform the PPC chips.
However, this doesn't seem like a forward step IMO.
Plus, Dvorak said "Intel" and in this case he meant "Itanium." Was my misunderstanding. Either way it's a load.
You know, I bet if Apple DID release MacOS for the x86 chips, it would do pretty well. I'd run it (for some stuff) and I bet it would get a lot of support. Unfortunately, it would probably also mean the demise of their hardware line, and it would be a lot of work. Of course, if it failed, Apple would probably go out of business.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Apple has clearly stated it believes in a laptop future. There is also no way they can drop current Mac application compatibility.
Current speculation in the Mac community is the use of the IBM PowerPC 970 processor which should debut soon at 1.8Ghz. IBM have clearly stated it will support AltiVec instructions - previously only implemented by Motorola with IBM having no plans to use this technology themselves. Couple this with the rumours that some Apple OEM partners claim to have seen PPC970 based motherboard designs...
And then we have Dvorak who goes out on his own to claim a switch to Intel Itanium with a PowerPC inside for backwards compatibility. Quite how the hardware and OS would cope with two totally different processors is quite beyond me but surely the important question is how this would fit with a laptop.
The Itanium processor is not available in laptop form. It's current form requring around 100W vs the PowerPC 7455 (G4 processor used in PowerBooks) mere 20W range and you'll see that just isn't happening. Put both in the same box as Dvorak suggest? The heat and power consumption alone would make it impossible.
[)amien
On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080.
Not surprising given that Z-80 was a faster, cheaper, more capable version of the 8080.
Dvorak needs to study his history.
Dvorak?!
It's time for Johnny-boy to retire or switch careers..
Yes, I am talking directly to you, Mr. Hot Air Dvorak.
Steve Jobs would be shooting himself in the foot, the
ankle, the shin, the kneecap, the thigh, and uh.. you
get the picture.. if he switched architectures so radically.
Think of it.. if there was a switch to Intel, the PowerPC
*emulation mode* would need to run present-day apps
*faster* than the current G4. Otherwise why switch
anytime in the next two years it would take for all
major Mac OS X apps to go native? Quark would
throw their hands in the air and give up
Much greater chance that the IBM 970 Mac will debut at the
January MacWorld, if not before.
There are millions upon millions of gameboys worldwide that have used the z80 processor. Nintendo used them up until 1998 (with an 8MHz z80-esque processor made by sharp). There was still a market for them, possibly a larger market then the 8080 processors. The z80 passed test of time, while the 8080 just disappeared into oblivion.
heres a website with a lot of info on the z80
If Dvorak were to work for Apple they would be bankrupt by now. Apple would always operate on rumors and not business decisions.
Think of the average consumer walking into a retail store. Doesn't know the difference between a PC, MAC or a motherboard and a CPU. If you tell him that this Windows computer runs an Intel processor and so does the Mac but the PC is cheaper which would he buy? Why would a techie buy a MAC if they can get a desktop with the same/similar CPU for less and be able to run FreeBSD or Linux?
Apple needs to reduce the price of the Itaniums by producing larger quantities. If Apple wants to use it, they'll also have to lower the power consumption since Apple will have to sell it in Powerbooks. Never mind the potential software and OS incompatabilites.
Buying an Itanium leaves nothing for the lower budget consumer. I'd like to see them sell try t get the laptops still in the $1200 - $1500
range with an Itanium when they first enter market. And what of the iMacs?
As a Linux switcher to OS X (and for the folks who are making their Linux apps compilable on OS X - thanks!), I can see the good and bad of this. Right now, my main desktop/laptop are Mac boxes, but I still have another 3 machines in the house still running Windows - my wife's work machine (soon to be retired after we move and she doesn't have to work), my Game box (because Raven Shield probably doesn't run under Wine), and my Linux server for my web server/mail server/etc.
I would love to switch my Linux box to a Mac OS X server box, mainly just to play around with another OS I haven't tried yet, and because I think it will be easier to maintain. For $1000 for an unlimited server licence, I could deal with that. (Yes, I could just go 10 for $500, but I'm evil that way.) The problem is that even finding an old Mac (like a G4 cube) is around $1000 even on Ebay.
The good part about OS X on Intel is that the machines would be damn cheap. I could probably take my current Windows P-800 machine and turn it into a decent - not great, but decent OS X server box. Cheap boxes with a great OS would be the true "Microsoft desktop killer" we've been waiting for. The operating system (OS X) is tried and true now, it's excellent, stable, and kicks Microsoft's ass all over the place.
But the problem in moving to the Intel platform is threefold:
1. Performance. Going from the PPC with all of its registers to Intel's platform will cost some performance - especially if some sort of PPC emulator is used to make all of the old apps run.
2. Drivers. Right now, Apple can ensure that every video card that's qualified to run on a Mac will run, and run without a problem. I've stuck all sorts of hardware into my Mac so far, and it all works flawlessly. Apple will lose that ability.
3. Cheap hardware. Yes, Apple's hardware costs more. And it depreciates a hell of a lot slower than just about any other PCs out there - look at my Cube situation again. These machines are like a rock - they run and run and run. A Compusa employee I once knew mentionted that he hated it when people came into his store and bought a Mac - because he never saw them again, while the Windows guys were in every few months because they "had" to upgrade. So you'll have hardware that won't last as long or as well.
Unless of course, Apple basically brands their own Intel based PCs and ensures that OS X only runs on "certified" machines. Remember - they make money from hardware, not software (though, if OS X became popular and runs on all Intel systems, they could become the next Microsoft in many ways, only with a decent desktop and server system).
I honestly don't believe that it's going to happen. Apple will most likely shift to IBM's new Power970 line - it's the most like the PPC, so no translators/emulators. IBM has a vested interest in making these chips fast and plentiful for their server systems, unlike Motorola which is making PPC chips for - well, pretty much Apple.
Anyway, there's my $0.02. And of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Wow, If I was American, I'd want to distance myself from that racist, ignorant comment fast. I hope you only speak for a "select" few low life, narrow minded, ...
You reflect poorly on yourself and your country.
- ALl they would hvae to do is port darwin, and recompile the rest. That's not the momentous task you make it out to be... in fact, it's one of the reasons for using a microkernel in the first place.
- Developers would NOT be writing for a "new OS". They would be compiling for a different target architecture.... not the same thing at all. Look at linux, and all the apps that work in ppc, linux, alpha, etctera.
- The PPC was not 68k compatable.. they had to emulate the 68k completely.
I have a book here called "Dvorak predicts" from 1994 which states inter alia 'Apple will die if it merges', 'Apple needs to make a run-time Mac', 'the real Unix operating system is an archaic command line', 'Unix has no advantage except it's easy to program', 'Unix is old fashioned in its design and OS/2 or Windows NT architectures are the wave of the future'.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Apple merged and did not die, there is no rt mac archiecture available (excepting some good hacks that no one would use for business critical processes), unix based servers dominate the internet and MS are scared stiff that an old fashioned unix-like os is going to fillet their business.
Mr Dvorak is as entitled as anyone else to make his predictions, but that doesn't mean he is any good at it.
It makes sense for Apple to drop Motorola as their processor vendor of choice. Motorola has made it known to the public that they are "refocusing on their core business" that means they are trying to take back share in the communications business (read: Cellular phones and infrastructure). Nokia has been beating the pants off of them for years and Moto has decided to take back the market it invented.
Processors are not in this strategy. So, what does Apple do? Obviously change CPU vendors. I thought Apple would go with an AMD hammer type chip. It fits nicely into their desktop/server strategy. The problem is the APPS! Apple has got to get the rest of the software guys to re-compile their stuff for the x86 platform. A daunting prospect at best.
But wait, there's more. IBM has a Power 4 drived 64-bit chip that has respectable performance and DOESN'T require that Mac developers recompile their apps! Everyone wins!
What do you think Apple is going to choose?
Info on PPC970 here.
-ted
Somebody ought to ask Dvorak if he is running a Chang modification on his PC.
For those who don't know the story, back in the days of the 286, a Taiwanese company claimed to be able to run 286's much faster than anyone else, it was called a "Chang modification". Dvorak touted it as a breakthrough technology. Of course anyone who understood technology realized the claim was ridiculous. It turned out all Chang was doing was reprogramming the timer chip so that it didn't keep time correctly - thus making benchmarks look more impressive.
In other words Dvorak's technical knowledge level is absurdly low. The man has great contempt for anyone who does have technical knowledge; he thinks we are inferior 'droids' to be ruled by assholes like him. He truly is the prototype of Dilbert's abysmally ignorant Pointy Haired Boss.
Dvorak really is dumb enough to think that Apple would change to Intel; the change from the 68000 to the Power PC almost destroyed Apple. Switching processor architecture destroys your software base - you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were. That is the reason that Apple was in so much trouble after the processor change. Another change would be suicide.
And yes, I know that things are written in C these days, and we all know C is 'portable' so the change over 'running in place' period might only be 6 months to a year today. But 6 months to a year of additional progress lost by Apple would pretty much be the last nail in the coffin. Such a change would expose them to the ruthless pricing levels of the PC industry which Apple could never survive.
* Scientists will soon develop a safe and efficient cold fusion mechanism
* Microsoft will soon source for Windows under OSS license
* A vaccine for AIDS will soon be available
Have a nice day.
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
This is, after all, the same Dvorak that suggested Microsoft be nationalized by the federal government because operating system software was too important to allow private industry to manage.
Until the Itanium gets cheaper and demonstrates clear advantages over the P4, I don't see anyone adopting it in a widespread manner.
I was duped into believeing Dvorak might have a few good points to make, but it was really all an attempt to get his page Slashdotted and sell lots of banner ads. For once, shame on you people for actually R'ing TFA!
Check this out, Blockquothe the Article:This goes on to speculate Apple will use Itanium chips. Without even getting into endian issues (which make buses and shared disk & memory slow and a pain in the ass), this is a huge transition from their current invenstment in PPC-only motherboards, and I imagine it will be power hungry, hot, and probably noisy, considering that current Apple chips needed a special case for cooling and Intel's chips are still known for running hotter (Sidenote: I'm unsure if this applies to the Itanium).
And let's not leave out price? An Apple box with (by then I'd assume it to be) a G5 AND an Intel Itanium? This would sell for $16,000 with no hard drives at minimum. Itanium is too expensive, and at this point designing a dual-architecture mobo is just not worth the trouble. A high end machine to run Photoshop? Guess again, most Mac users don't use Photoshop or anything of the sort, and Apple sure doesn't center their design process around anything Adobe does. And does anyone remeber Marklar having anything to do with dual architecture? I thought it was a software port of the closed-source elements of OS X?
Never trust a guy named after a weird keyboard layout.
Interesting story to note, however: Apple has already made Intel x86 compatable machines! Check out Apple Technical Note 1076, last updated Oct. 1st, 1996. Most notable: Apple created Intel PCs on PCI and NuBus cards (which were at the time fast enough to be a reasonable design) and actually shipped one bundled with the PowerMac 7200. From the Technote:Apple might be researching this whole Intel thing, and they even have prior experience in the area. I believe, however, that any such effort is a backup plan, so when IBMs yields are low enough to make the 970 too expensive and Motorola starts pushing clock speeds into the high 2.7GHz range while each new chip they release gets progressively slower, Apple isn't up shit creek without a paddle.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"Folks, the Mac platform is through..." - John C. Dvorak, 1998
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The concept of an itanium notebook, considering their current power usage (current power... geddit?) is almost laughable.
Powerbooks are a huge part of Apple's market now, and even if their desktops fared the equal of a PC in pure grunt, would still be a major source of revenue.
Pick an option - Itanium all through the line including powerbooks, or PPC Powerbooks and Itanium desktops. It doesn't seem likely to me.
Then again, Itanium XServes doesn't sound quite as far-fetched.
Dvorak didn't say Apple would switch to Pentium.
First Dvorak says Apple wouldn't have to rationalize lower closkspeed (MHz myth) anymore if it switched to Intel. Then he suggests Apple will choose Itanium? Last time I checked Itanium 2 was no faster than a G4 in clock speed. Dvorak should inform himself about Intel's products if he wants to be credible.
Apple-OS (Any flavor) rocks because apple knows what they will be working with down to the last transistor - Other-OS is generally made to work on a wide range of machines - This is why windows 95 was so awful - bad device support
Apple on i386 = not so good
This is the most ridiculous thing in the whole article. Obviously he has forgotten the 68k emulator after the PowerPC changeover, as well as the Classic environment on OS X, both of which have worked perfectly in my experience.
Furthermore, I think there is a higher proportion of old Apple machines still running than equivalent old PC's. I saw an SE/30 doing a fine job as a mail server not that long ago. How many people are still using 286/386 vintage stuff?
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I speak with some of the higher-end devs from time to time, and they seem to believe that the next line of macs, or if not, the line after them, will be using the PPC 970. I see no real reason to doubt this, and I find it to be a wonderful thing as well, seeing as how IBM has been developing some nice chips lately, and they supposedly have the patent on a new chip technology which will do the same work as current chips but use less electricty. (Ergo, less heat)
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
ITANIUM?!! No, I don't think so John. The Itanium gets it's raw horsepower from all the cache it has. I just can't see this thing as a viable desktop processor. Hell, even as a server chip it looks dubious compared to the upcoming competition.
My bet, if anything, would be on the Opteron.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
So don't be surprised if there's a follow-up to this saying as such.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Hey Dvorak, will that happen before or after Apple goes broke?
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
My absolute favourite was in 1999, his prediction that Compaq and Intel were going to merge. He laid out some really bad logic, and I wish I had the article here to quote some of it.
Please, post some other ones I missed...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
OK, when you say "I'd run it" was that "I'd run it legally by going to buy a box on a shelf at $129.95" or "I'd run it if I could get somebody to give me a copy, or if I could download one from Kazaa."?
Regardless of the way you'd answer, a lot of people would answer the second way. So what's the benefit for Apple?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It seems like Apple switching to Intel would be a support nightmare. Between people hosing their system by running BSD or Linux binaries and people swapping in PC hardware, it could be very, very ugly.
Apple will undoubtedly choose to go with whichever processor will provide their users with the best balance of price/performance. The fact that they have stuck with PPC for so long is merely a coincidence.
Much like SGI using MIPS processors (although they did end up buying the company), and their official stance being whatever provides the best performance (be it Intel, MIPS, Sparc, PPC) is what they will in turn use.
OS X being direct descendant of OpenStep/NextStep, is a very portable OS (If you will recall it ran on x86, PPC, and Sparc Hardware). The only reason that I can argue that Apple has not gone to x86 compatible hardware up to this point is Microsoft's influence. Microsoft will not continue with Office for the Mac if it is going to lead to people choosing the Mac OS over Windows.
There is already some talk about Microsoft dropping Office for the Mac because of "low sales figures", which is fine by me as I tend to use OppenOffice.org anyway. Frankly as soon as Sun realizes the market for OpenOffice.org on MacOS, they will start marketing it under the StarOffice name and provide support, all at a price that Microsoft can not even begin to compete with.
If Apple does choose to go to an "x86" processor, it would be more than likely an offering from AMD (in the form of a Hammer) than Intel. Any thought of the Itanium processor is merely wishful thinking on the part of Intel (remember these things cost nearly $3000 per processor, and Apple has joined the SMP revolution).
If you were to see OS X on "Intel" hardware, I would expect that you would see it in a strange combination of technologies. For example, you would likely see is special PCI card which would be the boot media (Kernel in Flash) with special system identifiers in ROM, to insure that is is a Apple authorized installation. This would be the configuration of the "Clones". The "real" Apple hardware would have these components integrated into the mainboard. The real Apple hardware would not support booting Windows (much the same as you can not boot AIX on a Mac (except for the ANS) even though it is a compatible platform on which to do so. Obvious omissions from the firmware are noted.).
Has no read MacWhispers post title New PowerMac Motherboards To Use PPC 970???
Apple has bids out for PPC 970 mobos. Doesn't sound like they're switching to x86.
I'm not even going to bother reading the comments below. Apple's system is based on the PPC. Switching to x86 chips would be stupid. They're still trying to get developers and consumers switched to OS X, and to ask people to move to a completely different architecture so soon after a major OS change would be suicide.
Please, once and for all, Apple is not moving to the x86. It's a stupid rumor and only flames those idiots who say "I'd use OS X when it comes out for x86" and "I'll buy a Mac as soon as they use the faster x86 chip."
How about a post saying BSD's dead? Vi's better then emacs? RMS say something great/stupid?
Like most people so far in this thread, I agree that Dvorak's prediction is a bit absurd...but does anyone have an explanation for the seeming development of a relationship between Apple (or at least Steve Jobs) and Intel hinted at by the three things Dvorak mentioned (Intel sales conference keynote, Pixar switching to Intel, Intel executives at Macworld)?
It makes me wonder, and I haven't read any alternate theories.
How someone with horrible design skills like this, can be a writer at a major computer magazine is beyond me. He could at least have the sense to pay someone to design it for him . .
You have to admit, Dvorak has a pretty sweet gig. Somehow he's figured out a way to get paid to be an uninformed, foaming nutwad. Even years on, when his predictions have turned out to be no better than (if not worse than) random guessing, he's still making it work for him.
KDE is far from being enough clean to that step. Gnome on the other hand is not finished enough.
KDE already runs on OSX
Under X11 emulation, that's far from being native
apple's using a huge load of kde code already
You're probably reffering to Safari. KHTML is not a huge load of code. Just take a look at Apple Cocoa and Carbon code, differences will
KDE is the best desktop enviroment in terms of architecture, customisability, flexiblity, applications , ease of use, i18n (over 80 languages!).
I'm a linux user, so I should be bashing OSX and Aqua (when it would be fair), but KDE has a long way to go.
Like first, spring cleaning of Menu and KControl, lack of support for handycaped persons, as long with other incosistances
Gnome on the other hand has this things but lacks of applications and being finalized on some points of usability. Maybe 2.4 or 2.8, but 2.2 has a way to go too.
So replace X11 with Quartz and you have one blazing system!
Replacing X11 with Quartz? Problems arise with hardware support. Apple uses Nvidia and Ati only so making some functions hardware accelerated is no problem, but it would become much larger problem with introducing larger ammount of different vendors. (I think XFree5 plans address this problems in the way Quartz does, hardware accelerated with soft emulation just like MesaGL-DRI-GLX are doing now)
As for the best, everybody has it's best. But to stay on topic. Apple's OS is the only reason to buy Apple machine, making it Intel based it would just bring a benchmark confrontation with other OS that run on the same hardware. Making it KDE this topic would become much more viable than CPU-only benchmark topic
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Consider:
- Apple spends a lot of time and money and wastes a lot of goodwill doing "680X0->PPC II" by going to X86.
- Apple chooses "wrong" and goes with Itanium instead of Opteron.
- Apple chooses "wrong" and goes with the Opteron.
- Apple either has to do another major switch to the "winning" x86 64-bit architecture, or just go back to the 64-bit 970 PPC.
So the safest bet is to eliminate risk, reduce costs, leverage legacy of a clean modern ISA, and just go with the logical next step: IBM 970.but Dvorak is an excellent composer... have you heard his Cello Concertos? I had no idea he did the "switch"!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
...and I mean that quite literally: by churning out his monthly doses of pseudo-controversial pabulum, Dvorak assures PC magazine a minimum number of readers, comprising the hapless dolts who (God help them) take this sort of crap seriously and those who, out of morbid curiosity, can't help but wonder what the shyster will say next.
It truly saddens me to see Dvorak stoop to this level of prostitution - it wasn't always this way. Although the man has never exactly been what one would call a visionary, during the eighties he was at least a respectable commentator. In fact, during his heyday, Dvorak was one of the industry's most influential columnists. Today, he rarely makes anyone's list of major industry pundits, and the reason is simple: Dvorak has become a professional troll.
Today, Dvorak's columns come in three principle flavors: banal, inane, and inflammatory. Whether the specific content that appears in his articles is determined by Dvorak's own fancy or the ebb and flow of PC magazine's monthly sales is uncertain, but what is clear is that Dvorak's writing has now sunk to a level such that it maintains only grammatical superiority to the output of the average slashdot troll. Although I must add that with his latest contribution, I feel I may be doing our resident troll population a disservice.
Is Dvorak even a commentator any longer? Frankly, it's becoming rather hard to tell; the man's headlines could just as easily be the titles of random crank bbs posts. "Apple should discontinue the Macintosh," "IBM is a doomed company," and now the almost incomparably über-trite "Apple to switch to x86!" I wonder, was his postulation of Itanium as Apple's choice CPU a tacit acknowledgement of the comical premise of the whole piece? After all, God knows that Apple has tons of headroom in Macintosh pricing at this point, so absorbing the obscene cost of Itanium hardware should be a piece of cake. Heck, who wouldn't go for an $8,000 iMac, right? Even Dvorak's bullshit threshold should've been tripped on that one, especially after the PPC 970 announcement. All of this is just further illustration of the extent to which Dvorak has decayed as an industry columnist. What's next, "BSD is dying?"
I'm sure that I speak for more than a few people when I say that I now read Dvorak for the same reason that one might read the Star or the Enquirer - purely for the entertainment value. It's been a very long time since I've read his work for anything else. But then again, I'm beginning to suspect that keeping us reading is the only point after all. Perhaps it's time to apply that classic Internet admonition to Dvorak's writing as well: don't feed the trolls.
If Dvorak actually posted this crap to /. his act would be see through: just another troll. But for some odd reason slashdot goes out of their way to post a story that can do nothing but inflame the readers.
Reminds me of a comment I read here sometime:
Rob: I'm bored I think ill start a flame war.
Users: We will take that flame war!
Just an observation. The person writing the article is the real story. Apple switching to Itanium has less credibility than Apple going back to Moto 68000's and doesn't really even warrant a response.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Dvorak has time and time again shot massive holes through his credibility when it comes to the topic of Macintosh and Apple. I'm surprised he's not so thoroughly embarrassed by this point to avoid the subject completely. It's likely he only put this column up to kick up hits to his column which is precisely why I'm not going to it.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
From what I've gathered, Steve Jobs was at the Intel conference representing Pixar, not Apple. As you may remember, Pixar recently began to drop their Sun-powered render farm in favor of a cheaper Intel-powered one. This had nothing to do with Macs vs PCs, Motorola vs Intel, etc.
;) ), and those customers would drop Apple if they thought it was "just another PC."
Similarly, while Apple and Motorola certainly haven't been getting along for a good while now, it doesn't make sense for Apple to switch to a CPU with an entirely new instruction set. Regardless of whether or not OS X runs on x86, all of the Mac OS X software would have to be ported.
What's more, Apple would lose a lot of their customer base, because there's a certain air of eliteness that comes with using a Mac (or, at least there is in the minds of some Mac users
And yet more still, it would be like SGI's Intel boxes: nobody wants to pay through the nose for x86 (c'mon SGI, $30 thousand for an Intel box? No thanks), especially when they can get it for cheaper by ordering it from Dell, HP, or building it themselves.
No, I think Dvorak is just being his usual idiot self. Besides, hasn't Apple already announced (maybe not officially) that they're going with IBM's 970 PPC processor? That would certainly make more sense, since Mac developers wouldn't have to port their software to a whole new architecture, and would only require a new motherboard and some small changes to the OS to handle the 64-bit pointers and such.
Agreed. Although if he had said Opteron instead of Itantium, I might have half belived it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Back in 1983 I was working for Convergent Technologies, a company that originally specialized in Intel-based workstations. (I think they may even have coined the word.) Dvorak reported a rumor that we we're working on a Motorola 68000-based portable computer. He discounted the rumor, since everybody knew that we only did Intel boxes.
Dvorak was wrong in two different ways. First he or his source combined two different rumors. There was a portable computer, but it was based on a Hitachi 6303. There was a 68000-based computer, but that was a completely separate project.
Which I was hired to help document. The MegaFrame actually used both 68000 and 80186 processors in its Unix config. (It could also be configured as a workstation server using only 80186 processors.) So in fact we were not only not committed to 80x86 architecutre, we were into two other architectures.
(The 6303 was also a Motorola architecture, being based on the Motorola 6800. But that's completely different from the 68000, because Motorola decided to make a clean break when then went from 8-bit to 16-bit processors. Unlike Intel, which made the 8086 vaguely backward compatible with the 8080. Which is part of the reason Intel's chips are standard and Motorola's are dead. But I digress.)
Dvorak's other error seemd particularly stupid: the assumption that all programmers targeted specific CPUs. Which might have actually been true in the homebrew micro culture he came from, but was never true of programming in general.
Actually, Dvorak might be a very smart guy, behind all the stupid stuff he keeps saying. A lot of computer pundits are people who have some Big Insight that's either completely bogus or only valid in a certain context. They hold onto these ideas for years, against all logic. I guess they'd lose too much face by admitting they're wrong.
One example is Vernor Vinge, who used to be one of my favorite SF writers. But now he considers himself a computer expert, based on a lot of second hand knowledge, and some practical experience with things like client-server computing. The way his pseudo-knowledge dominates his stories completely destroys my ability to enjoy his work. Which is a shame -- in many ways he's grown a lot as a writer.
Another example is Neal Stephenson, who's still one of my favorites, despite all the non-sequiturs in books like Snowcrash. (Come on people, do you really think that you can design seriou VR in machine language???!!!) The Big Idea that really drives me crazy is Stephenson's belief that a Turing Machine is something you can actually build. (Neither Radio Shack nor CDW stock infinite-length tapes. I'll apologize if anybody can point me to a source.) So far, his work is original and creative enough to make me overlook crap like this. But give him time!
I would think that if you were an early PowerMac adopter in March 1994 you would not be too disappointed when Apple released an operating system (MacOS 9.2) which did not support it in 2001. MacOS through 9.1 supported all PPC based Macs.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
NeXTSTEP was running at most on 4 architectures at the same time (M68K, Intel X86, Sun Sparc and HP PA) and most of the applications are compiled to fat binary with one app having binaries for all architecture. This has been done and it's almost 10 years ago by the same engineering team in Apple now.
NeXTSTEP, now Cocoa, is a very clean framework that properly abstract the ysstem services so few applications needs to use anything low level in the system. The API is consistent across architecture and applications relying on the API can easily be compiled and run on any architecture.
It's possible for Apple to switch to another architecture once more then 90% of the apps coded to Cocoa spec rather then Cocoa/Carbon mix. At that time, it's just a matter of compile and run.
OS X is gaining momentum and getting 3rd parties supprt. It would take another two years for enough apps to ported to Cocoa to archive the critical mass necessary to make the "switch."
Dvorak will convert to Qwerty.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
Apple doing dual PPC/X86 machines for backward compatibility?
who are we, AMIGA?
let's just throw a 68040 in there too so i can run OS6.
and Itanium? won't those cost a little much for an iMac?
he completely leaves out the IBM solution when mentioning the Moto fued. Power4 baby, that's the future. maybe G5s in the iMacs and iBooks to throw Moto a bone.
but Intels? why would they invest in an architecture which from what i understand, is hitting a ceiling in performance?
haven't they made changes which make the itanium more like a PPC in the way it operates? well, we're already there.
Evil is the money of all root....