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Dvorak Says Apple Move to Intel Will Harm Linux
Deep Fried Geekboy writes "John C. Dvorak is pretty quick off the blocks with a response to the news that Apple intend to switch to Intel processors. Thankfully, he doesn't gloat about having called this one correctly, but says that the move is likely to hurt Linux, as OSS developers increasingly target the Mac. Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
could he be right on this one too?
Harm? yes.
Kill? no.
This is redundant, but you can't kill something that isn't tied to the ownership of a company. Just like HAM radio, Linux will be used by enthusiasts who still like using it for a long long time to come. Sure, some perhaps many people will switch to OS X86, many will not.
In the long run I think the Apple move to Intel will help non-windows people in
general by creating a more dominant force of alternative operating systems on th
e Intel platform. We all win out by having more choice and interoperability between operating systems. You have to admit, its all getting better.
Why does anyone listen to this guy?
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
If anything, Apple moving closer toward commodity hardware may be the undoing of the Mac, but it's the attraction of Linux I believe is there regardless of Apple's existence.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just as likely as one of Roland Piquepaille's "[t]echnology [t]rends" actually becoming one.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Just because it's Intel does not mean it's gonna be x86, does it?
Oh and BTW - First Post. I think...
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. :-)
Thalasar
MacOS on intel doesn't mean it will work on beige boxes.
And why does anyone even bother paying attention to him? Just about everything that I have read him saying is wrong. You think that he would lose his credibility after a while.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
He also said the Internet would crash.
IANALG
I am glad that more people are seeing the reality of the situation. Apple is NO FRIEND OF OPEN SOURCE. They are one of the primary backers of the push for software patents in europe. Remember SCO, people. Just because a company uses open source software for their own benefit does not mean they would be opposed to killing it off permanently and going back to the good old days where they and they alone were in charge.
Yes... Harm and eventually kill.
About the gloating, anyway.
Check out his PC World column , which is full of obnoxious gloating.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
It's interesting to me that Apple didn't go with AMD.
if you flip a coin 7 times and it comes up heads 7 times, its more likely to come up tails on the 8th time?
well, only if you never took a statistics class.
john dvorak has also predicted, twice, once in the early 1990s, that people would stop buying 40 dollar video games.
does that mean his prediction about apple will be wrong?
oh wait, maybe slashdot.org is just a troll site designed to get a lot of flamewars and page hits by posting ridiculous garbage to the front page.
Apple will grab a lot of Windows users with this move, but many more Linux users will switch. Linux users will get familiar environment on their platform of choice. Plus, if they don't like OSX as much they can always boot into linux, this time, they can but their favourite x86 distro.
I wonder can you install Xp on that machine...
A lot of it depends on what Apple does. Right now, Linux can run on a Mac, so that's not a barrier. Linux will (and I'll go on a limb here) certainly run on the new Intel Macs.
So by "hurt", there's no net change: Linux runs on Macs, and will in the future.
If Apple makes its Macs (say that three times fast) as closed as they are now, then Linux will have nothing to worry about. Linux succeeds, as one developer mentioned, because nothing runs faster than on commodity hardware running with LInux running with Apache. Linux succeeds because of its ability to work very well with open systems. Apple will be a niche player - maybe they'll grow if WINE should run well under OS X with an Intel processor (and I'm hoping so, if for no other reason than I can play Half Life on a Mac finally), but I don't think that Linux will be threatened by a locked hardware base.
If Apple, say 5 years from now, decides that it's going to let the machine hardware become the commodity item and focus on its "special" hardware (iPod, etc) and software (Final Cut Pro, iLife, etc), then Linux will still be unharmed. Even if Apple says "OK, we're still going to sell premium desktop machines at +$300 compared to the competition for quality - but you could always just buy a Dell and pay us $150 for OS 10.7 and we'll be happy, since that still means you'll buy our other software too and you're likely to someday make an official Apple machine your next purchase", Linux will not be "harmed", since Apple can't stop Linux from being made. Linux will proceed along its way.
If by "harmed" you mean market share, then he may have a point. If Apple lets OS X run on standard PC's, then I can see Linux desktop share either becoming stagnent or shifting about.
My personal bet is that if the latter happens (OS X on standard machines), within 10 years we'll see a 50% Windows, 30% OS X, and 15% Linux, 5% other varients in the desktop market - in the server market it may be much as it is now, maybe with OS X and Linux overtaking the bulk of the traditional Unix route.
So, "harm" to Linux? The truth, as you may learn, depends entirely upon a certain point of view. What I've described is just mine. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
But even I know that Dvorak is an idiot. Like the cliche says, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
Forget the whales - save the babies.
This whole situation has basically been a repeat of NeXT. Does anyone remember when they released NeXTSTEP 3.0 for the i486? Well, they also changed their name from NeXT Computers, Inc., to NeXT Software, Inc. That was done to signify their move away from hardware back to being solely a software provider. That is what is happening with Apple today. They are becoming a software-only provider, while moving towards the commoditization of their hardware. Now the question we should be asking is who will purchase Apple Software, Inc., in five or six years and provide a full-packaged hardware solution again. At this point it would seem to be Sun, since they are amongst the only remaining vendors with their own CPU architecture. But perhaps we may even see a company such as IBM purchasing Apple in half a decade or so to provide the software for a series of high-performance cell-based workstations.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
should stick to designing peripherals...
why doesnt he come up with a Dvorak mouse for the Apple's or something?
It's machine versus man, man versus woman, and woman vs. your mother!
As for the move hurting Linux, maybe. But OSX has been hurting Linux on the desktop for a while as it is. Lots of hackers are switching; they get the power of the CLI when they want it, with no need to fuck around when they want to view video, plug in hardware and have it reliably work, etc.
You're a suburbanite.
He said in 12-18 months and that was almost 27 months ago. This is something of a nit, but you can't say "Windows will be less than %50 of market share in the next 5 years" then 20 years later say "I told you so" when it actually happens.
-- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
...predict that Apple was going to move to Itanium?
Umm... just because it'll run on x86 doesn't mean it'll run on average PC hardware. Tell me Dvorak isn't this stupid? I really don't think apple is just going to give up their proprietary lock, I believe this move is just to get in on more profit/cheaper hardware. I'm sure they'll still have their own proprietary system in place of the bios, which means all of us on regular x86, not mac x86, still won't be able to use it. And I *REALLY* dont' think you're going to see hundreds of thousands of people running out and buying a mac just because it's "Intel inside".
It's one thing for Dvorak to predict the Apple move to Intel; that's a meat and potatoes hardware business prediction that lots of other (non zealotous) people made as well.
But he doesn't have a freakin' clue about open source development. It's not an either/or proposition. People will continue to write software that can be targeted to OS X and Linux and [insert favorite *NIX OS here].
Yes, it may hurt Linux on the desktop somewhat, if Apple's Intel-based hardware is cheap and/or running OS X on generic hardware isn't a big PITA. But that's no real skin off my potatos as long as it helps hurt M$.
fnord.
Linux going forward may be the only OS that will continue to run on non-DRM and open hardware. Expect the Apple Intel boxes to be locked down tight, and MS is definitely going in that direction.
Longhorn and Mac OS X ( Tiger, Leopard) may still have many more appealing features, but from a freedom and open use perspective, you better start looking at that Linux box.
In this corner The winner from the last match Microsoft who beat out OS/2, and UNIX, amongst others, for desktop X86 Supremacy, versus up and coming superstars Apple OSX X86, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris amongst others.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
News at 11.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Because the largest volume of Linux is on servers and embedded this is a non-issue. It may hamper Linux on the desktop, but this is a very small part of the Linux community.
How many OSS developers will switch over and code for a non OSS API, Cocoa? Don't know but I'm sure their will be alot of us left on Open Source API:s.
OSX is unix. Linux is unix. Therefore Unix wins and Windows loses. In the end that is all that matters.
But GNU's Not Unix.
I don't need a signature.
It always amazes me how the Slashdot readers tend to think that Dvorak is the great anti-sage - the guy with all the wrong answers. I can understand not taking what he says as gospel, but his only real sin is the willingness to make guesses.
I appreciate reading his stuff, but I take his predictions with a grain of salt. He's very well informed and quite willing to disseminate his information. He's also usually pretty insightful, even if he isn't generally dead-on.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
People listen to him because he has an amazing grasp and understanding of the computer industry. He was able to call this one years ago. Indeed, he was correct.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Personally I do not think this will hurt Linux at all. In fact, I think it could help Linux to have some really well designed Intel boxes to run on - Linux can benefit as much from Apple's design constraints as much as Apple, you could be more sure a Linux distro would work on an Apple box because there was less hardware to test. Also Linux will still run on all sorts of Intel hardware that OS X will not.
I think a really interesting aspect of this Intel move is that now Apple has REALLY positioning itself square against Longhorn. The next release of the OS is due around the Longhorn release, and all the lower end macs like the Mini and iMac should be switched by then as well. So come time for Longhorn release will people buy Longhorn boxes or Apple boxes with a sort of "Longhorn" that's had almost two years of refinement, not to mention what's new in Leopard!
At first I didn't think the Intel switch was a good idea, now I'm kind of neutral. One thing I still find odd though - why Intel of all people? Why not AMD?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From TFA:
And then there are the numerous developers who simply do not subscribe to the notions of the Open Source Foundation and its rigid licensing requirements. They will quickly see profit opportunities for OS-X/86 development without having to worry about what has to be shared and what can be sold for profit.
Right, 'cause Apple's always been so liberal in its licensing policies. There is Darwin, but it doesn't include precisely the fancy UI stuff that Dvorak says is the main reason OS-X will be more successful than Linux.
Our webshop develops on OSX (save one die-hard linux laptop uber-coder), then deploys production on SuSE/x86.
Best of both worlds. Now, this could slow down KDE / Gnome development (why bother 'suffering' under X11 anymore?), but at the same time it might well _aid_ the GNUStep project as folks want to get their newfound Cocoa apps running under Linux. Even with Webcore.
</ObHandWaving>
Has USB/USB 2.0 led to the undoing of the mac? Has the move from SCSI to ATA led to the undoing of the mac?
Then how can anyone predict this will hurt the platform?
Be a man, mod the parent "Troll" or "Offtopic" if you must. "Overrated" shows you're too scared of meta-moderation, as your moderating is unjustified.
Sorry, I simply don't agree. While people may be more inclined to develop for the mac platform when it's using the x86 architecture, let's not forget why people will be more inclined to develop for the mac; because it's easier to do.
People will be able to develop truly cross platform libraries more reliably, on which people will write applications which will work on all platforms. I find it exceedingly unlikely that a developer would choose to develop solely for apple, when for a little extra work they can cover Linux too.
I disagree with his slurs against open-office too. The bi-monthly preview versions of open-office 2.0 are very impressive, not only in terms of functionality but also in the quality of its interface. I'm sure there are arm-fulls of features present in Microsoft Office that are not there in open-office but do I really give a flying fuck?
It's not the total number of features that matters; it's whether the features I want to use are there that really counts. I'd bet that almost all of the Slashdot community have not used any of the new features in Microsoft Word since the release of Office 97. After Office 97 no real value was added to the office suite, so why should I have to upgrade every couple of years?
Microsoft force upgrades because you can't buy Office 97 licenses any more. When your company expands you have to get the brand-spanking-new licenses of office and then because of possibility of incompatibility between the two versions it becomes sensible to harmonize the licenses across your business and this invariably means buying loads of new licenses.
In contrast, Open-office has all the features I want to use and they're organized in an accessible way. I can always get an older copy of open office so the same expansion issues do not apply. I think if most companies could start over with their office suite, most would adopt open-office. What's stopping market penetration by open-office is the hidden cost of converting all the documents to the new format.
Simon.
My main criterion for reading a columnist is, the person has to be capable of surprising me. That rules out a lot of the political dreck; I know basically what Cal Thomas is going to say about X issue, because Mr. Thomas is a completely predictable social conservative.
Dvorak is a weird case in which a business columnist has a lot of the same authoritarian leanings that right-wing columnists show on the Op Ed pages. The guy will always "side" with the bully on the block, and show disdain toward anything that doesn't fit the world view of guys with power ties. And he's predictable; for all that his opinion on any given subject is a troll, it's a predictable one.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
There will be no effect on Linux because Linux doesn't compete against Apple. People are on Linux because they want to be on Linux, not because either Linux worked on Intel or because Apple was on Power PC.
This is going to be a disaster for Apple because of the emulation required for the existing PowerPC chips. I will eat my hat if I'm wrong.
I understand why they did it, because they were falling further behind technologically, and frankly their backs were to the wall. I personally subscribe to the RISC philosophy, and think it is elegant and makes more sense, but Intel was simply better at executing, and this is a key example of where technology was the determining factor, not marketing.
But when they moved from Motorola to PowerPC, the PowerPC was fast enough so that existing software could be emulated with no loss of speed.
Intel will *not* be able to emulate PowerPC with the same speed, and users will no doubt suffer a performance hit, and incredible dissatisfaction, crashing because the emulation layer is buggy, etc.
We need Apple in this industry to keep innovation alive, but IBM messed up and unfortunately there's nothing Apple could do. Now, they'll be in the same death spiral as SGI because there won't be any market differentiator.
You know someone is going to hack OSX so that it will run on a Dell, come on, who do they think they are? There are legions of incredibly smart hackers out there that will defeat any mechanism they put on their OS to stop it from running on anything except an Apple. I will eat my hat if there isn't OSX running on a clone in 3 months after the release of the X86 version.
Anything that increases the Mac marketshare over windows has the opportunity to boost Linux in the short term. Any time you add people to developing on *NIX or BSD, you end up with code that can be ported back and forth easier then, say, some DirectX or MFC app made for Windows.
So in the short term, you end up with more projects that can be released under Mac & Linux.
In the long term... the key to success probably hinges on adaptation. If Linux distros continue on their own path with mixed up UIs, uneven standards, and so on, then the core audience won't grow as fast as if there's a consensus to make it appealing for newcomers.
I'm not saying 'Just make everything look like Mac', just that a succesful long term strategy probably involves watching and, when appropriate, adopting best practices from the similar OS that has a bigger marketshare.
He's just a jumped up keyboard salesman. No, wait..
You know, I just looked at the clock on the wall, and it's one of those LCD radio-controlled clocks. Between my computers, PDAs, clock radios, cable box, oven, microwave, etc, I don't have a single analog clock in the house! If any of these clocks break, I would imagine that they would just go blank - not stop on a particular time... In my case, a broken clock is completely useless to me, at least as a clock. It might be very good however, as a source for spare parts. :)
Just my blinking 12:00's worth
-RickTheWizKid
Could?
See post subject.
Is?
No.
Even a blind pig will find a truffle once in a while.
Even a page-view troll like Dvorak will occasionally hit the correct mark.
But only on the desktop, the server world will still improve. There are too many problems with linux desktop, ranging from bugs in 1394 that freeze the system, lack of professional applications and off the shelf software, limited hardware support thanks to uncooperative manufacturers. No this isn't FUD, I've been using various distros for about seven years now, and if it's not one thing, it's another. My main box is still, and will remain Debian Sid, plus two laptop too, but recently I had enough of it all and bought an apple. Yes, OS X has PITA issues too, but regarding non-development productiving, stuff just works. *sigh*
Although Mac developers may be not as numerous as Microsoft or Linux developers, I don't think having them working on a x86 platform could be a harmful thing. BSD and Linux is close enough that I rarely see drivers being supported in one not being supported in other. Perhaps as support for hardware grows for OSX, it would make those driver writers consider making that driver workable in Linux - but most likely someone would simply hack the driver in one to work with the other.
Frankly I am still betting that this will kill the Mac. It is very sad but that is my prediction. Emulation will not be fast enough for PPC. Fat binaries will be a huge pain in the ass. Sales of current machines will all but stop.
OS/X has some really performance issues in the server market. Threading is slow because of the mutant BSD on Mach system they use. Most of the MONEY in in Linux is still the server side.
I do not see a lot of OSS people moving to OS/X . Right now they just treat it as another Unix and I am sure that will continue. I wonder if Darwin will have an option to run Linux binaries now?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
to run the OS:
n s+with+Intel/2100-7341_3-5733756.html?tag=macintou ch
http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the+switch,+alig
However, [Apple Senior VP Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
So Macs are just going to be "less different" than other computers by using the majority processor. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Interesting that Apple's own page on the G5 towers touts how great it is over Intel with all sorts of benchmarks.
I don't do this for karma, I do it for cash. It's much better.
If you throw out enough stupid predictions.. one will eventually be 'fertile'.
Seriously, he doesn't seem to have a clue as to why people use Linux.. that being for servers. He doesn't seem to realize that OS X will ONLY (legally) run on Apple blessed X86 machines.
Ugh.. he is a moron.
Thats because all the linux users will suddenly say "omgwtf intel on teh apple lol" and stop using linux. Isn't it obvious?
Seriosuly, what difference does it make?
I personally think this is a very bold move. If Apple start chunking out computers with the same price/performance as Microsoft they will be in direct competition. The difference between a Apple Mac and a Windows PC will be the OS. Thats pretty close to start selling MacOS X to any PC manufacturer who meets certain hardware specs.
I dont think this will affect linux that much but it will really put Microsoft at battle stations if it flies.
HTTP/1.1 400
Apple running on x86 architectures will more than likely aid the big Linux distributions, by providing another viable more well known alternative to Windows. When people start experimenting with OSX because they feel more comfortable with it being more recognizable and come to see that alternatives to Windows can be productive, I think it could tip the scales for a lot of people to try Linux too.
Yeah, all of that inline assembler code will now 'just work'. X11 versus Cocoa has absolutely _nothing_ to do with porting efforts, does it?
Oh no, Dvorak certainly was smoking some powerful crack when he predicted this. It just turns out that Jobs was smoking the same crack.
Everyone is assuming that Jobs is speaking of only the x86 architecture, whether 32 or 64 bit. What if part of the deal is for Apple to test and if possible deploy Itanium for their high-end desktops and servers? 2-3 million Itanium units per year might be enough to get a positive feedback loop working for Intel on that product line.
sPh
Windows users don't tend to be processor zealots. I'm not even sure that average PC users even care what processor is in their box (Intel, AMD, etc.). Win users won't switch because they'll have to learn a whole new OS and a Mac will still be more expensive.
If Apple move to machines which can also run Windows, then OSX is doomed.
Consider this reasoning: most software runs on Windows. The average Mac user who's not a paid-up Penguin Jedi doesn't care about OSX being technically better than Windows; they'd care even less than about the PowerPC being better than x86.
The average person who wants to use a video/music/graphics package on x86 hardware will not want to reboot to OSX every time they wish to use the package. (This has been tried before; the DJing software Final Scratch was first launched for Linux, and proved unpopular for this reason.) And with most things still running on Windows first, only a few users would move permanently to OSX.
One part of Apple's business is selling professional software, such as Shake, FCP and Logic. With their own PPC hardware, this software was incentive to sell Macs; if OSX runs on generic hardware, the software becomes its own concern. And if it runs only on Apple's weird (but advanced) OS, it'll be at a convenience disadvantage to rivals which run on ordinary, everyday Windows.
I predict that, within five years, OSX will be "reinvented" as a compatibility layer on top of Windows. This layer will come "out of the box" with copies of Apple's software (be it iTunes or Final Cut Pro), and users won't even need to know it's there. UNIX purists and techies will cringe, but that's not where the money is.
I have been reading Dvorak's work since the mid-80's. Every once in a while he is dead on and eloquently states his case. The vast majority of the time, however, he is not. His columns in the mid 90s were so out of touch with the corporate IT world that I wondered if he even knew how computer use was changing at that time, let alone had the insight to offer a reasoned commentay. Thus, I do no rely upon his assessments of anything in the sphere of computers anymore.
My two cents....
First off, there's a difference between being right about something that you heard leaks about. Dvorak never came up with unique arguments for an Apple to Intel switch. All he gave were the same list of pros and cons that the Apple community has been arguing about for years. Congrats to him on hearing the rumors and the leaks before a lot of other people, but that doesn't make him a great visionary or insightful interpreter of the industry. His track record isn't very impressive in my opinion.
Second, Apple's switch to Intel really doesn't change all that much unless you're a current Apple developer. Apple's hardware is not going to get significantly cheaper, their OS is not going to run on non-apple machines. There's still going to be just as much proprietary-ness in both their hardware and software as ever. They've been making general strides towards open source with OSX, but I don't think that's going to function any differently now that they're on x86.
A mac will still be a mac, and a PC will still be a PC, they'll just happen to have the same processor inside. Like they have the same hard drives and ram and lots of other stuff now. If Apple was opening up OSX to any old dell or emachines box, then maybe there'd be significant migration from Linux. If Apple was entirely open sourcing the whole of OSX, then maybe there'd be significant migration. But not because they're changing processors in their otherwise the same computers.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The difference though, and why I think you can't compare the situation (while I did not own a NeXT cube I did work on them) is that Apple going forward is still very much going to be doing custom hardware - it's not like they are going to sell OS X for Dell, it's more like they have just switched one component on the motherboard.
I would love to see OS X for Cell, perhaps we will see that down the line. Now that everyone's going to have to carefully manage endianess for Mac programming they could put whatever the hell processor they like in new boxes and the binaries can just become a little fatter still.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As soon as the Linux community gets its collective head out of its ass and realizes that Apple IS the standard of nix's be it Linux or Unix.
Linux has had a few years to really get things going and for a while there IBM and Novell had a real head of steam but NO ONE - ang I mean NO ONE in the Linux community seems to be able to continue the momentum.
Listen if Jobs can come up with some sort of super-frickin'-duper translation layer from PowerPC to INTEL why the hell can't Linux to the same with Windows to Linux translation. But translation only as a means for transition. Not as a yeah I run Linux and I'm cool but I have all my comfy Widows apps running with CoderWeavers or VMware... that NOT a reasonable long term strategy... of course who in the Linux community has any sort of long term strategy? Anyone... well... yeah I thought so.
You see the Linux community is still fighting over Gnome vs whatever and the latest kernel mutations instead of practical implementations that would actually cause a regular Windows user to switch. Get it!?
Do you think for a second the public at large really knows about the power of UNIX that Jobs spouts off about at every opportunity. Of course not.
But they do recall the inx thingy, ah whats it called, you know the penquin thingy... oh yeah Linus the Peanuts OS!
If Apple every unleashes OS X to the masses for the X86 Linux will feel the pain as much as Windows will... if not more.
And you know I'm right!
The technology that wins in the market place is never the most elloquent, best designed, or the prettiest, or even the most standards compliant. Those are only secondary to the technology being the least proprietary.
Now Linux is not only the least proprietarty hands down, but it's very well designed and implemented, and very quickly coming up to speed on the GIU front. At that point Apple won't have anything to offer other than a pretty case, and more expensive hardware at which time they will be in for a very rude supprise.
Now to me, just because someone predicts that is going to die because of , even if they were right about , doesn't mean that ipso facto it's going to happen. Now I don't want to sound like I'm standing on the burning ship saying everything's fine, but as I developer I don't have any plans on moving from Linux to MacOS quite yet. I admit the move does change my perspective of apple, but I still think the Linux OS has enough advantages of it's own to warrant my sticking around. And unless I'm the only OSS developer out there that thinks this, a "flood", at least in the near future, seems a little unlikely.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/041c21e08f6413eaf4b57 88e3aaeda11/index.html
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Yes, those are the same people who have to have mobile phone covers that match what their wearing, that pay huge sums of money for personalised number plates and that have to hide being feeble minded under statements of "brand loyalty".
Those of us with intelligence & individuality recognise a computer for what it is - a tool and an entertainment device.
If it does both with speed, stability and usability, who the hell *cares* what bloody colour it is!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Dvorak strategy: make one bold prediction that no one thought of being possible. You'll miss often, but rare cases that prove you were right where no one deemed it's possible - will give you more good PR than all the misses. Net result is positive gain.
Why is it that about 90% of all /. agree that Dvorak is a dolt but we still see his fucking articles (read; opinion) posted as "news"? Man, this is getting fucking old.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
You're only as smart as your brain.
You guys missed a slight of hand there. Perhaps OSS is written "increasingly" for mac hardware. That doesn't mean that OSS is currently written predominantly for mac hardware. FreeBSD and all of the ported applications are written primarily on and for Intel hardware. This means that we are all going to be just fine. (What's this linux thing?) The move to Intel by Apple doesn't mean much for OSS at all.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Later,
Jason
The Mac architecture is and will continue to be proprietary. That means MacOS will not run on commodity PCs and Macs will not run Windows.
Current Mac users are whining because their existing software won't work on new models. That's because their existing software is proprietary and closed-source. In an open-source world, CPU architecture is a minor issue.
Linux continues to be the standard open-source OS for both commodity and Mac hardware. Why would this change?
> Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack
Well, he was smoking crack the 50 other times over the last decade (or two?) when he predicted Apple's switch to Intel. They suddenly switch and now he's a visionary? Hmmm...
For some reason he thinks that the new Macs with Intel CPUs will suddenly make the new OS X run on a any x86 PC. It will not.
There will still be Macs and PCs. Most games will still only run on Windows. (However, wine will probably ported to OS X).
Porting applications will be about as easy/hard at it was before. It has been years since most programs were CPU-dependant. The hard part when porting software is porting it between different operating environments.
not allowing OS X running on custom x86 boxes. They currently sell OS X for $130.00 That's 26% the cost of a Mac mini. My guess is that after all the applications are ported to MacIntel, they'll allow it to compete with Microsoft, not Linux. The side effect is that it will convince Linux users switch too.
in Apple making the switch. Like anything new, there is the initial bandwagon "gotta have it" crowd and then there is the pragmatic, "seen it, dont it" crowd. Apple on Intel. So what.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about Linux/Unix users switching to Macs in droves. If that's true, I don't see how Apple switching to Intel based system will stop that switch. It will almost certainly make the switch even easier to make. Let's face it, with a Mac you get Unix AND a great GUI.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Sure, many users will probably move from linux to osx. The question isn't whether this will happen; it's what kind of users will move. Users that complain and never read the howtos aren't the kind of users the linux community wants anyway.
I think this kind of purging could be good for linux in the long run.
Can we please have no more Dvorak articles, the guy is an idiot, he annoys atleast 90% of the people here with his mindless rambling. How did he ever become well known? The guy talks crap all the time & every time it gets put up on here.
Just stop it please! Run a slashdot poll on if Dvorak articles should be posted on slashdot anymore.
I'm sick of him & I'm sure many others are!
Both Apple and Linux serve niche markets, but they're largely different niche markets.
Apple sells expensive but proven and well-integrated hardware. Apple users generally don't want to get into the guts of their system and mess around with it. The Apple mantra is having a system that just works. It's all about the experience and the ease-of-use.
Linux is a tinkerer's OS. It's designed to run on everything from the latest 3.6GHz monster rig to a simple embedded device to a dead badger. It isn't particularly easy to use, but it's very powerful and very customizable.
There's only some overlap between Apple and Linux, and if anything, the switch to Intel will aid Linux. Not having to worry about architectural issues will make it easier to share UNIX-based software between Mac OS X and other UNIX-like systems.
If anything, I bet we'll see people do what's already being done - using Apple's excellent hardware to do Linux development - which will be even easier than before when Apple switches to an Intel-based architecture.
could he be right on this one too
There's a difference between being right and spouting the same clueless crap over and over for years and then finally having one part come true. Dvorak is still Dvorak!
Apple is out of business, period. No one is going to write software for what amounts to a new platform that's based on an old platform that still doesn't have enough market share to get much interest. Apple still has the best party, but nobody will come. iMacs will remain the (admittedly still best) platform for average people doing internet stuff and managing picture collections, until the OS gets too creaky or the lack of anything else drives them away.
Linux wins big, here. There are a LOT of Mac users who will be needing a new OS. If even a few of them switch to Linux, it will boost Linux's numbers way more than all of them switching to Windows would affect MS's. Linux will gain instant respectability w/ the people who make decisions (most of whom barely understand what it is, but what the hey.)
Ever seen the SNL clip of Dana Carvey doing Ross Perot as he leaves running mate James Stockdale (VP) out in the middle of nowhere after the 1992 vice presidential debate?
B D0E8469A-28FC-415D-9281-C97B5FA2CA3D%7D&siteid=mkt w&dist=
I swear, Dvorak looks like Phil Hartman doing Stockdale on this website:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7
Perhaps Dvorak just talks out of his ass like Stockdale did:
"Who am I? Why am I here? I'm not a politician."
IronChefMorimoto
"...it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack..."
Even the Sun shines on a crack-head's ass every once in a while.
Dvorak states "I'm on the side of benefit as Apple can now champion its design and aesthetic strategies in the world of Intel and allow people who prefer the Windows OS to actually buy a Macintosh for its design and run Windows on it."
Sorry, but I highly doubt these systems will use a standard PC infrastructure, including the BIOS. Almost certainly, Apple's x86 based systems will be OpenFirmware based with no adherence to any Windows OS functional hardware/firmeware requirements.
The only way I see this happening is via VirtualPC, Wine, or other virtualization software.
Dvork vs. Piquepaille, only on Pay-per-View!
SEE the obnoxious scrabbling for page views!
WITNESS the lack of any technical knowledge!
CURSE yourself for having read their articles!
POST on Slashdot about how they're losers!
Sunday Sunday Sunday!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I sense a song helped inspire that one. I could be wrong; it may be a popular phrase in some other part of the world. But Underworld is a band that wrote a song with this phrase, and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm not the only computer nerd who knows that.
(but you missed the obligatory "Oh, wait.." that would've given you a +5 funny)...
because John C. Dvorak did NOT invent the Dvorak keyboard. Dr. August Dvorak did.
I can't say that I've reached the same conclusions.
If the perceived "harm" is in winning converts from Windows to Linux, then I'll admit that it's likely true. After all, one of the primary motivations for migrating away from Windows is vulnerability. But I think that will prove to be a temporary relief as when MacOS gains a significantly higher userbase, we will find a variety of weaknesses and vulnerabilities that have been there all along only to be noticed when its popularity brings people looking for expoits.
All of this assumes some things such as OSX running on a generic PC compatible which I don't forsee just yet.
But right now, as a Linux user already acclimated to the environment, I have to say I like Linux better. (I'll qualify it by saying I like FC3+GNOME+Apps better... I'm a user and I don't really use the Kernel now do I?) The environment provided by OSX is nice and pretty and I can fudge my way around in it, but when it comes to hacking around and doing stuff, it's not for me.
So with my own experience as an impression, I would say that OSX isn't going to win too many converts unless the OSS community embraces the OSX platform better... and when/if they do, then it's a threat to Linux's growing use.
But companies who are already using Linux in areas aren't likely to dump it in favor of OSX any time soon even if all of the above has come to pass. The fact is that it's free and there's a lot of momentum there. I don't see it changing.
So I haven't read that the next Macs will be PC compatibles or that OSX will be released for PS compatibles. I think that's where this needs to start from. If it will come to pass as that, then we will see a lot of users moving from Windows... ESPECIALLY if the Wine project is adapted for MacOSX.
Why not make an XCode interpreter, or compiler, or whatever it is you would need, for Linux?
It will hurt Apple worse. Why?
Let's see:
Be tried to be just another operating system on x86.
NeXT tried to be just another operating system on x86.
Oh, but SGI came out with x86 machines, and they're doing grea... er. Yhe
And I hear that the latest thing in the Amigaverse is an amiga emulator running on x86! Everyone knows the Amiga is alive and kicking.
HP Unix, now there's a winner. They went and partnered with Intel, just so they could have their own Intel architecture, the platinum award winning Itaniumanic. Itanic.
Linux is barely a presence on the desktop, so any damage would be miniscule, and it is strong on servers - where Apple is weak. As for drawing OSS developers away from Linux, it seems unlikely. In fact, the opposite could be true. More OSS apps can be ported to the Max which could draw MORE developers into OSS projects than before.
Seriously, any fool can make hundreds of predictions and turn out to be right once.
Dvorak may have gotten the Apple switch to Intel correct, but he's suffering from the same mistake a lot of others I've seen talk about this lately.
Namely, he seems to believe that Apple will make OS X run on any x86 hardware.
They won't. They said they're switching to Intel for chips. They didn't say they're porting to standard x86 architecture. They didn't say you'd be able to run OS X on your current hardware. They said they'd use chips from Intel. Period.
So, going from the past CPU switches they've done, it seems more reasonable to me that Apple will either have Intel design Mac-compatible boards for them or do it themselves, using all the existing technology they use now (OpenFirmware, PCI-x, etc). They won't just start slapping together off-the-shelf hardware that will dual-boot to Windows.
They'll still be Apple. They'll still be Different. And unless they get their hardware extremely cheaply and give up their profit margin, their rigs will still be expensive compared to the cheap commodity hardware that Linux enjoys so much success on.
... And so it comes to this.
Developers don't target Linux for killer apps now... what makes this guy think that Apple going to Intel will somehow harm that? Hello, there is nothing there to harm.
GNU/Linux is top-notch, best of breed (gcc, reiserfs, bash, linux kernel, etc.) for developers and they'll always run it in some form and companies such as Apple will always capitalize on their work.
It works for everyone. Geeks get to have fun. Apple gets a new lease on life and in the end, the normal people in the world will benefit.
There will definitely be some who see OSX as more valuable now that it is available on this platform, but the real strengths of Linux are still unchanged. It's free (as in beer) and free (as in open). I think a lot of the attraction of Linux comes from those two things.
Just because he was right doesn't mean he wasn't smoking crack.
Right....
OS X will NOT be available for just any x86 PC. OS X is the reason people buy Apple hardware (largely), and Apple makes quite a bit of money on said hardware.
Chances are we will see some (unnessecary) custom hardware that will be 'required' to run OS X x86.
People will probably also get around this and be able to run OS X on their Dell (shudder), but it certainly won't be supported.
I fail to see how this will hurt the Linux community. Apple will be in the same positon it was earlier except they have switched to the dominant home-computing platform. If anything, hopefully this will help OSS in general. Perhaps now that processor issues are aside, maybe Apple could dump some money into the WINE project.
As has been said before even a broken clock is correct twice a day... let's not give Dvorak too much credit here.
Everyone keeps going on about how OS X on intel will be "familiar" to Windows users, enticing them to switch. I don't see it. It'll still be OS X. Maybe porting software will be easier since the chip architecture is the same, but the interface will still be different, the mode/method of operation will still be different, and it will still look and feel different than Windows v.whatever.
.02.
Apple will likely have a more secure OS, which will likely continue to attract users (and corporate IT types) and I think it will ultimately be cheaper to buy Apple stuff than it is now. On the other hand, there is still a huge base of Windows users who will still (for the most part) get most apps developed for them (first).
In addition, the Linux crowd will stil chafe at using Apple, since Apple is not OSS, though it is more OSS than MSFT. Also, the cheapo people in the crowd (like me) will still look for commodity hardware on which to install OSS *nices because we won't fork over for an OSS where you can't see all the bits and fiddle with same. Plus, there it is virtually assured that Apple will not guarantee/support their OS on everything that *nix can be run on.
Is this a revolution? Sort of, but maybe not. It'll piss off that Mac fan-boys, it'll inconvenience some MacUsers and MacDevelopers while there is a changeover from to Intel chips. On the other hand, getting Windows software to work on Macs will be much, much easier, and that should be a "good thing" (tm).
The idea that Apple has been building for Intel for a while (in tests) is encouraging, but it is no guarantee that you'll be able to go to Part R Us and buy a beige box and install OS X on it. Far from it.
Just my
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
That said, the Mac is acting - and will continue to act - as a retarding factor to Linux desktop adoption. Essentially, if you don't like tweaking, MacOS X is "desktop Linux" available today, and with Microsoft Office, QuickTime and all the rest. In this respect, RH got it right by shifting focus from the hobbyist/home user desktop. Me, I enjoy the tweaking, and consider it a fair price to pay to avoid being locked into anyone's proprietary software, whether Microsoft or Apple. Each to their own though; I gather some people actually use computers to do their real job, strange as that might seem!
Of course, as MacOS X is more-or-less a UNIX, it can be argued that any retardation it causes Linux is balanced by the invigorating effect it gives to UNIX-like OSs like Linux.
I think Dvorak is a whack job. He's said so many things I thought were retarded I never trust him about anything. None the less the slow movement of hacker to Macs and how that has affected their architecture of choice. But if I had to say I'd say this will hurt the Power PC about 400x more than it'll affect anything related to Linux.
the toothpaste is frozen
The existence of open-source software in Europe may be under threat if companies, including Apple and Microsoft, persuade the European Parliament to expand patent protection in Europe. Apple has, at numerous times in its existence, SCREWED OVER its business partners. There is absolutely no reason not to expect them to do something similar to the open source community once they have eliminated viable alternatives like Linux and FreeBSD.
Where are AMD's great, low-power, laptop chips? That is a big part of the reason they chose Intel I would bet. Plus Apple has seen what Intel has coming down the road, and maybe it looks better than what AMD has coming.
From reading the next story headline on the front page of Slashdot just now it would seem you had some good insight there about an Intel roadmap not visible to the rest of us.
A good point of the low-power laptop chip, which is pretty key to Apple.
So does this mean Apple zealots now have to become Intel zealots? Disquieting. I think if anything it shows you should always keep zealotry in check because you never know who might be your next dancing partner, so to speak.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're ignoring the fact that for the past few years, the Macintosh has been built on commodity hardware with the exception of the CPU and motherboard. The Macintosh userbase has actually grown since it began to compete using commodity hardware.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
It seems most are assuming that Apple will fall back on primarily being a software vendor, however I've only seen a few come to the realization that things might not be that much different than they are now. It is quite feasible that Apple will only allow Mac OS X to run on APPLE-MANUFACTURED computers. If for some reason the OS won't run w/o some proprietary code in hardware, it won't matter whether or not it's an intel chip - it won't run on anything other than what Apple sells. So, isn't that much the same (read: limited) as having it run on a PowerPC chip? Unless Apple allows the OS to run on other manufacturers' machines (which it probably WON'T, at least for a while), Linux will still continue to battle Windows just as it always has.
Care to define that?
I have yet to find a single compelling reason why Joe Twelvepack should be "attracted" to Linux.
the most, are going to switch over to what is far and away the most proprietary of consumer systems? Rrrrrrrriiiiiiightt Linux isn't just about Security, or ease of use, or intelligent design (all the things both Linux and OSX have over Windows) -- it is also more importantly about freedom (in terms of both beer and speech). Apple offers neither. So why again would people start jumping ship to pay infinitely more for a more proprietary system? I'm not saying it won't happen, but it seems to me the Linux community won't be giving up their freedom for Apple any time soon.
I would think that the distro's are much more likley to be hurt than the Linus' project.
The FOSS projects that run on Linux and other kernels will most likey get a boost when it becomes easier to port their software to another group of customers.
the only reason dvorak got that right is the law of averages. if he predicts enough things he'll eventually be right. that doesn't mean that once he does get something right he'll be more likely to get something right again.
I'm one of the (I think) rare Linux users that came from the Mac world and not the Windows world. I was a pretty typical avid Mac lover for many years, but finally got tired of Apple's lock-in strategy. I had an increasingly large pile of old Mac equipment that cost me an arm and a leg but that was incapable of running the latest, greatest MacOS. The first couple of years of my Linux use was LinuxPPC on Mac hardware. I switched at OS 9, and have tried OS X - it was nice, but for me the "free as in freedom" aspect of free software is what it's all about. If they really wanted me back Apple would be funding the port of OpenOffice.org to MacOS X, and working closely with the KHTML folks. All the pretty shiny things in OS X aren't enough to entice me to lock myself in to the Mac platform again.
...and almost equally important want access to the Intel's compiler for xcode.
Intel's compiler from the start gives a sizable speedup compared to gcc...
I was thinking about that yesterday. I wonder, will APple drop GCC? Or spend time trying to improve it to the level of Intels compiler? The hopefull among us could wish that part of the Apple-Intel deal was asking Intel to provide some improvements to GCC. But that's wishful thinking and it would probably be easier just to switch to xcode.
The binary portability document though still has a section on flags for GCC as they differ between platforms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm a Windows user, and as you say, I don't care what processor is in my box. This move will not cause me to switch to Apples OS. However, if I could run Windows on it, I'd love to switch to Apple hardware. They make most excellent hardware.
Our desktops (some Windows, some Linux, some Mac) will continue to be chosen based on the application software people need to run on them. This depends somewhat on the OS; and not at all on the CPU.
Except for companies that employ a lot of assembly-language-programmers, how could this possibly affect any corporate buying decsion.
All Linux has to do is be the first OS to run on CELL, and have an outstanding API toolset for handling threading. Give me the tools to execute out of order, and I will push them as hard as I can. -Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The switch from PPC to x86 for Apple is an issue only for Mac developers and maybe some of the users. No one else. A Mac is still a Mac, even when it's got an Intel processor in it. The only effect of going to x86 is that Apple won't fall behind on performance.
The assumption seems to be that a Mac is somehow more attractive to developers with an Intel processor in it than with a PowerPC. Why!? What difference does it make? If you're developing for Linux and decide to also support the Mac, you still have to go through the same porting process to support OSX that you had to go through before. Sure, on those rare occasions when someone has some x86 assembly they would need to port, it helps, but otherwise, it's a non-issue.
Porting to the Mac is porting to OSX. OSX is the same on both architectures. Apple switching to Intel doesn't make OSX any more like Linux.
Who's to say he wasn't smoking crack?
I'm not sure what the value proposition is here for a MacOS X against Linux. What value has Apple offered over Linux?
- Good power management support on laptops
- Commercial software like Microsoft Office and other content creation applications
- Good coherent desktop development environment and tools. Included with this are spectacular fonts (readability - most important) and spectacular device independent rendering engine.
What does Linux offer?- Very cheap. Will continue to run on commodity Intel hardware. The new Mac will almost certainly be more expensive with the OS locked down with hardware DRM.
- Much faster and more efficient in-kernel threading than OS X, and much wider secondary hardware support.
- Acceptable windowing environment and development tools (though certainly not better than OS X).
The one killer feature that Apple offers over Linux is quality laptop power management. This can be fixed. Wine runs MS/Office OK. The font issue has been mostly resolved and X on Linux is now nice to read with. Linux will most definitely be cheaper to deploy, especially in large numbers. While I don't doubt Apple is making the right decision by migrating off of PPC to Intel, neither do I think Linux deployments are in trouble due to this move.If the move of apple to the 386 line is really big on the server and/or workstation, i think we will see Dell/Compaq putting massive effort on Linux and interoperability of LinuxOSX just to keep jobs on his toes.
I think ultimatly this will happen if OSX starts hurting hardware sales from other vendors.
One thing im shure of. Apple will not go for full support of the whole range of i386 hardware out there in the windows style. They cannot afford it really. So this means theyll be locking other i386 vendors out of their platform (osX) which will, if the move is succesfull, force large hardware vendors to go against OSX with a viable, less monopolized unix based platform... namely, Linux.
NO SIG
So let me get this straight. Apple have announced that they are going to be using Intel in forthcoming models?! Surely this will see the demise in Apple's stronghold with it's flawless Apple architecture and its *MacOS*. Don't tell me, next Bill gates will be developing Microsoft Apple OS *MSAOS*??!!!!!! I'm sure he'll want a piece of the pie!!
One benefit of this shift will probably be faster emulation of Windows apps on Mac OS. The Virtual PC won't have to translate the Pentium instruction set anymore. It still has to handle other aspects of Windows, but I would guess the speed of Windows app emulation goes way up. So Mac users will get the benefit of Unix-core + reasonable Windows app speed. Any reason this wouldn't be true?
Lets look at what OSX is primarily used on...
Desktops used by anyone from Grandpa Smith to a high-end graphics designer or even some coders.
Now, lets look at what Linux is primarily used on...
Servers. And most servers don't generally even require a GUI. You don't need a fancy interface to manage apache or an SQL Server. Chances are you won't even be directly working at the machine but connecting to it with some client application while using your desktop machine that can run ANY OS.
Ok... so we have two systems that target two completely different areas. Sure there's the Mac OSX Server... but that hasn't made serious inroads simply due to pricepoint and features. It's UNIX, with a fancy UI... but it costs way more than an equivalent from Dell running Linux.
If Linux were a serious contender on the desktop... maybe. But it's not, never has been, and honestly probably won't be. The advantages to an average desktop user just aren't there (don't try arguing ideology, to the normal user that's meaningless). The focus of the developer community has largely focused on the server anyway... that's where the cool stuff is.
Saying OS X will harm Linux is like saying that the Segway is going to harm bicycle sales. Apples and Oranges (or rather Apples and Penguins)
I think it is running minute slow:
The Two Clocks
Which is better, a clock that is right only once a year, or a clock that is right twice every day? 'The latter,' you reply, '"unquestionably.' Very good, now attend.
I have two clocks: one doesn't go at all, and the other loses a minute a day: which would you prefer? 'The losing one,' you answer, 'without a doubt.' Now observe: the one which loses a minute a day has to lose twelve hours, or seven hundred and twenty minutes before it is right again, consequently it is only right once in two years, whereas the other is evidently right as often as the time it points to comes round, which happens twice a day.
So you've contradicted yourself once. 'Ah, but,' you say, 'what's the use of its being right twice a day, if I can't tell when the time comes?' Why, suppose the clock points to eight o'clock, don't you see that the clock is right at eight o'clock? Consequently, when eight o'clock comes round your clock is right.
'Yes, I see that,' you reply.Very good, then you've contradicted yourself twice: now get out of the difficulty as best you can, and don't contradict yourself again if you can help it.
You might go on to ask, 'How am I to know when eight o'clock does come? My clock will not tell me.' Be patient: you know that when eight o'clock comes your clock is right, very good; then your rule is this: keep your eye fixed on your clock, and the very moment it is right it will be eight o'clock. 'But--,' you say. There, that'll do; the more you argue the farther you get from the point, so it will be as well to stop.
Lewis Carroll: ca. 1850 In: The Rectory Umbrella, M.S. First published 1898.
source
I very much agree. However, in my case, and it may be the same with others, I'd be more likely to get a Mac if I knew I could boot it into Windows if I really had to run a particular app. Currently I dual-boot Linux and Windows on one machine, and use Windows with Cygwin on another.
I really like UNIX, but I have no religious association with the GPL. If OS X runs better than Linux, I'll use it instead.
Will users be more likely to migrate from Linux to Apple, or from Windows to Apple and Linux? I think Microsoft will lose market share to both Apple and Linux.
People want different things from Linux and than they want from Apple+OSX. Linux folks want freedom at a bargain. OSX folks exchange a smidge of freedom and some cash for a lot of comfort and Macness.
Also, when you decide to switch to Linux you generally keep your computer and wipe it. Switching from Windows to Apple+Intel will continue to mean a buying new computer. Which kind of switch is easier depends on the person.
The FOSS developer base should grow along with the user base. If Apple's user base grows faster than the Linux user base, or vice versa, so what?
sigs, as if you care.
Until Tiger came out I would agree that statement. Tiger changed long standix POSIX networking API's. I upgraded to Tiger and nothing but the very trivial of apps runs. Gnome to took forcibly removing gnome-vfs-ssl and replacing it with gnome-vfs. Gnome apps still take about 1 - 2 minutes to display on the screen after which they run fine except for gnome-terminal which doesn't work at all. There are no kde apps in fink for Tiger due to message passing being crippled in kdeinit. The apps compile but nothing except nedit, grace and gimp seem to run normally at all and gimp has slowed considerably. I've been waiting for the fixes in fink but they have been extremely hampered.
And according these benchmarks Nobody would consider OS X a superior server solution.
This move will hurt Windows way more than Linux. Linux will always be the low price leader.
Dvorak's comments are interesting, but I think his predictions of OS X harming Linux would have been much more valid if this all played out back in the late 90's, when Linux was just starting to gain traction in corporate America, and more I.T. people were trying it out for the first time on their home machines.
At this point, I don't think it'll make too much difference. Any "harm" OS X was going to do to switching potential Linux users has already been done since the releases of OS X 10.2 and 10.3. (I'm sure some people who formerly were just trying to get a really nice, Linux-compliant PC laptop set up opted for Powerbooks or iBooks running OS X instead.)
There are, of course, a lot of "if's" here. For starters, Apple really doesn't have very strong offerings in the way of server hardware. Those XServe 1U rack systems aren't all that attractive for the majority of corporate businesses. Apple changes around product lines and ends support too quickly for their hardware/software for corporate America, generally. Coupling that with the fact that an XServe runs at a max. speed of 2.3Ghz right now, while the *workstation* G5 can do 2.7Ghz, and the fact that OS X apparently isn't well optimized for some server-type apps like SQL (according to a recent Slashdot story, even!) -- businesses would probably rather stick with Linux on an IBM or HP/Compaq rack server or something.
Now, *if* Apple could leverage their new Intel based Macs into really powerful multi-processor blade servers and get the next version of OS X handling some of these server apps more efficiently, that scenario might change.
Apple hardware continues to go down in cost
Apple gains some more market share
PCI card and peripheral vendors want to work with Apple
So they have to make conforming hardware and write OSX drivers
Better hardware means Linux developers spend less time working around bad hardware. Better OSX drivers means more vendors working in the unix world -- or they open up their specs and let open source developers do the work.
Linux is still for fags.
Now, what impact on Apple's market share did their move from the Motorola 68000 cpu to the Power PC have? Two-fifths of bugger all. Did it impact Linux / Windows presence? No.
Frankly, Those people who think the Mac is the best thing since sliced bread will continue to use it and refuse to consider any other computer. Those who believe that using anything other than RMS-endorsed free (as in speach) software will continue to fervently put down any other possible solution as heretical. The majority of home and office uses will keep using virus infected Windows computers.
For an open source developer, the only real impact of this is "can I get a Intel / Mac/OS version running?" Will these people suddenly say "Hey! I don't want to develop Linux stuff any more!" - of course not.
President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said "We won't do anything to preclude that."
I can understand locking down OS X so it only runs on custom X-86 boxes, but wouldn't such a lock down prohibit windows from running on it. I think OS X will run on standard PC hardware (that is supported by it) and Apple will make a small effort to lock it down. After all, the base for it is Darwin which runs on standard X-86 hardware, a complete rewrite of Darwin is not profitable at this point.
Get ready to download an X-86 OS X torrent.
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
...even a blind squirrel gets a nut.
03.18.03
He was wrong. He was off by a year. Not only that, but he said that apple would switch to Itanium, which is he was right about, his point about Linux becomes moot.
John C. Dvorak is a pompous windbag. That is all.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
high tech wizardry breathes new life into the industry, save to the hard drive for the archives! 3030 with a global apartheid!
"somewhat could actually be most dangerous to the emerging Linux OS environment." I was installing linux back in 93. It emerged in the mid 90's. Linux is here now and better than ever. It's to the point of being a viable windows replacement for almost every average user.
How many does he get right - something like 1 out of 100? With as many as he makes, he's bound to get at least a few right.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
06.06.05
By John C. Dvorak
Today's announcement that Apple will be phasing itself to the Intel architecture comes as no surprise to this writer since it's simply a smart move. I also first started speculating about this back in 1984, suggesting that if the beleaguered computer company didn't switch from its proprietary 68000s and Mac OS system to something more standard, like 8088 based machines running MS DOS, it'd become an also-ran; got wind of this deal back in 2003 and expected it to have been announced this January. I missed it by just 21 years. It's not a secret that I have been suggesting that Apple do this through most of the 1990's and most recently in 2001 (see links below). So when I got wind of it actually happening and wrote it up in this column it seemed, at least to many Mac heads, that I was making it up in desperation. I'd invite the readers to go back to those columns and read what the Mac blowhards had to say about it.
Why did this take so long? Insiders knew about the meetings between Intel and Apple back in 2003 and further knew that Jobs was having problems with IBM. I, personally, had lunch with one insider, Job's mechanic, who told me "Big things are afoot" and "Jobs will switch suspensions soon". At first, I thought this was car-talk technobabble, but then I realized he may have been talking about the long waited switch to PCs. At this point, I started to try to imagine various scenarios in which Apple would produce PCs with Intel chips running Windows. One voice in my head told me that Jobs was particularly peeved by the fact that IBM got into bed with Sony on the Cell chip and put Apple on the back burner. Apple and Motorola had already gotten into a beef once Jobs returned to Apple and killed the clone deals. Motorola was hoping to make money from the cloners as a supplier of the PowerPC chip. After that deal was killed Motorola, it is believed, began to make things miserable for Apple and the relationship became strained.
Meanwhile, Intel, which is right down the street from Apple unlike IBM and Motorola, kept up the pressure to get Apple to switch. Once the meetings began in earnest in 2003 you began to see a decline in comparison advertising. Intel was never pleased by that old ad where the snail had the Intel chip plastered on its back. By the middle of 2004 all the crazy performance claims for the Mac dissipated as Apple planned its next strategy: moving to Intel.
The key here is that Apple and its BSD-UNIX kernel running on the Intel platform should outperform Windows by an extreme and I'd guess outperform the PowerPC running the same software too, despite the well documented issues with "context switches" on PowerPCs and Microsoft's head-start in optimizing Windows for the Intel architecture. So Jobs can change his comparison advertising from PowerPC versus Intel to OS-X versus Windows on the exact same chip. The publicity potential here is chart-topping. What Windows fan won't enjoy this show once it gets going?
I've never understood why the Mac nuts are in such denial over this platform shift. This change to Intel, coupled with adoption of the Microsoft Windows platform, will not only save the platform but potentially drive it into a position of dominance. What will be lost, of course, is the niche and mystique aspect of the Mac which many of its users seem to relish as part of some misguided superiority complex.
A more interesting scenario to me is examining the possibility that Windows users can switch to the Mac OS on their Intel machines. Is this going to be possible?
I have always believed that Apple could enter the PC arena with an Intel-based computer that could run OS-X or Windows and begin to take market share away from Dell and HP.
People are talking about this as if the x86 defines the platform of choice for linux users. PCs are the platform of choice because of their ubiquity, not because of the processor they run. Linux on x86 macs will have many of the problems that Linux on ppc macs have now. Granted many of the proprietary software issues will most likely go away, e.g. flash, but new hardware will still have the same kind of driver issues that you have today. Many people will continue to choose linux on PCs over linux on mac because linux on PCs will be much cheaper than linux on mac and linux on PCs has a longer track record. Things will work and have fewer glitches on known hardware. Now OS/X on PC hardware, that would create a much bigger dent in the linux marketshare.
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I am a developer. I use Linux, OS X, and Windows for development all the time. However, I run Linux as my primary OS because it's light(er)-weight and easier to secure than the alternatives.
Windows is insecure, plain and simple. You have no source code and there is all sorts of legacy code and other crap in there that you can't control. Except for the stupid licensing/activation it is a fine operating environment but I just can't trust it. That plus the lack of a nice scripting environment that Unix-like systems provide make it unusable as a primary OS.
OS X is slow, bloated, and somewhat insecure. The slow and bloated parts are just a problem with the design. BSD on Mach is wasteful and they do way too much object-oriented stuff that is inefficient (not that OO is bad, just their design which has Smalltalk-like issues). This goes way back the design of NextStep which had similar problems. As for the insecurity, it's the same problem I have with Windows. I don't have the source code to most of the system and there are is lot of legacy and convenience stuff in there that will eventually lead to insecurities just like on Windows (just wait and see when OS X is more pervasive). Although I trust it more than Windows, I can't live with its performance and that nagging insecurity feeling won't go away.
So I'm left with Linux. BSD is not an option because I need VMware to run Windows for development purposes. Linux can be a pain in the ass to work with but it is getting better and at least I have full control. For me this is mostly about security and performance. I know what's going on and can control all the details. This can be a huge pain and I try to mitigate the problem by using the proper tools but at least it lets me sleep at night. Also with Linux I can control what I run. I don't need an Aqua-like eye-candy system to do development on. I can chose to run GNOME, KDE, or something lightweight. I like that control because it keeps my system performance up in the places I need it (eg. I need to run VMware fast, I need to compile fast, etc.).
Non-developers have different needs of course.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Apple's marketshare & userbase remains pretty much unchanged. Result: Nothing much changes & Linux continues as before.
Apple's marketshare & userbase increases. Result: Joe Public finally realizes that there are OSes other than Windows that are worth using & Linux gets an increased number of interested users.
Either way, Linux is fine.
So.. it has come to this
Since when have Linus and the other kernel developers cared about user base? They have explicitly stated on many occassions that, bluntly, they don't give a shit. So suppose the "market share" (a term which doesn't even really apply to Linux) drops in half. So what?
What this might hurt is the organized Linux distributions like Debian, which cater to desktop users. Do I care? Does it matter? Does it even make sense that people would switch from a free system to a non-free one? No...
So maybe Dvorak is right, but his point doesn't matter.
I'm really itching to see this move go forward. There will, inevitably, be a project to allow Mac OS X binaries to run natively on Linux (analogous to Wine running Windows binaries). And vice versa, I expect to see the ability to run Linux binaries natively on OS X. It's gonna rock, people!
(Before somebody points out that just because it's Intel doesn't necessarily mean it's x86... I think it's pretty obvious that Intel is NOT going to start making some alien chip. This will most likely be a Pentium M based processor, perhaps with the Altivec core slapped onto it.)
It didn't crash on New Year's, it was just being cleaned.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This issue has been a topic of discussion between some friends of mine and myself, some are big Apple fans, some aren't, none are huge fans of windows.
:P ), after all the X-Box uses standard(ish) commodity hardware, yet you cant run X-Box games on your Intel Processor.
/., where can you.......
The reason for Apple to turn to Intel rather than AMD could be that Intel can also provide them with a custom chipset.
From that, all you need to is write [NuAppleOS] to only run on that hardware and bingo, you have closed hardware Apples and no change to the Status Quo (and I don't mean that you are "Rocking all over the World")
You want to run Mac OS - buy an Apple - doesn't matter that it is now a Green Apple (Intel Processor) rather than a Red Apple (IBM Processor) sure it may taste slightly different, but hey, its still Apple.
In a lot of ways this would be Apple building and X-Box (OSX-Box anyone
So really, no real change to the end user.
Also there is some thought that perhaps IBM seeing the HUGE orders for Cell Processors for the PS3 alone have had to tell Apple that they cannot fab enough PowerPC chops for them - also the Laptop G5 issues that seem to exist may have given Intel an edge when approaching Apple.
All speculation and hearsay, but if you cant speculate and repeat hearsay on
OSX is proprietary. Linux is open. Therefore Unix wins and Windows loses, we could very well see Apple turn into another 'beast' like Microsoft, not wanting to play fair, and Linux could also end up losing.
In the end, it's being open that matters, not Windows or Unix.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
The desktop market: yes
The server market: no
Linux does not have a big footing in the desktop market and may never have. But MAC OS X beat Linux as a server platform I do not see it happening.
I could be wrong
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Gloat gloat. 7 years ago I said the only way that Apple was going to make a big impact in the world of OS'es was to make Rhapsody available on Intel/x86. What I find interesting about Dvorak and Apple's words are they both seem to ensue the thought of no generic x86 solutions. The marketshare for apple x86 hardware will drop even more than PPC if they don't make the OSX available for x86 in general. Reason, nobody is going to buy high end x86 hardware (dual 64 or 128 bit) simply cause it has Apple's name on it. Not anyone I know. OSX will have to be available to the 1000s of other boxes in the Enterprise too. My prediction, this whole thing will go the way of NeXT, where x86 OSX (then NeXTstep 3.x and OS 4.x) is available to the masses that already own x86 boxes. If they don't, Apple will continue to be a niche hardware vendor and have gained nothing but another 2-3 years lease on life. I hope they do more than the mundane here, much more.
--- Old Time NeXThead
And in a shocking turn of events, Linux distros will now only work on PowerPC's!
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he's just trying to increase his opinion column's hit count so he gets a bigger bonus.
... unless it's to save on airfare.
My only question is why Apple isn't going AMD instead of Intel
Either that or they like the Portland nightlife better.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And where does this TOLD YOU SO, READ MY ARTICLES, I'M RIGHT, HA HA attitude come from?
..!.
This wasn't the guy that made the unusable-by-the-masses keyboard was it?
John, if you are reading this, when you come down from being high on yourself, realize that OSX has been running on Intel since Rhapsody. Its not some major revelation gifted to you by God. Most of those "superiority complex" type Mac-heads your talking about knew this. If anything, some of them feel cheated about Steve yanking x86 support so as not to cut into the PPC arch hardware sales.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
This is the same John Dvorak who was convinced his reorganized version of the standard keyboard would take off...
"Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
Crack smokers often make insightful comments, yet they remain stoned. Almost everyone has made a prediction that Apple would switch to Intel. Dvorak just published his article at the right time.
If I remember correctly, he stated on TechTV that MorphOS would be huge, yet the number of people using it has only just reached a four figure number.
Most of the computer-buying world comes late to the game, and has no vested interest in supporting American hegenomics. Apple vs. Microsoft is a David and Goliath scale-up joke, but so is Microsoft vs. Denmark, Microsoft vs. Sumatra, Microsoft vs. China, etc. Linux (or rather, the altruism that masks the motives) adapts to emerging economies faster, fitter and pre-feathered for flight.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Wow, Dvorak finally got lucky and hit the dartboard. Thank goodness he isn't letting this little taste of accuracy go to his head. It's good to see that John is going to keep entertaining us with wild-ass predictions, based on nothing more than ignorance and a few too many cups of coffee.
He certainly doesn't let facts get in his way. Take this gem:
That's gotta make anyone who's been to OSCON in the last few years laugh.
m.m.
is correct twice per day.
Dvorak has been predicting this for the last 20 years. He ain't no genius.
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If you read his article of April 2003, he pretty much only gets the move right and nothing else. Granted, with Steve Jobs keynoting at an Intel conference and then Intel executives getting front row seats at Steves MacWorld Expo keynote, it speaks volumes to what was going on behind the scenes. Everything else Dvorak said was wrong. The timeframe was wrong, so was that bit about putting both PPC and x86 chips in the box for migration, and also the migration starting at the high end.
;-)
If Dvorak even thought for a few minutes on this, he would have realized that low end systems won't rely on as many apps which would have difficulties with the big/small endian differences.
It was a good guess given the Apple/Intel buddy buddy'ing which was going on. Other than that, John Dvorak who?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
An Anandtech review concludes that the G5 is somewhat crippled by Mac OS X when used for multi-threaded server applications like MySQL. The reviewer recommends serving with Yellow Dog Linux over Mac OS X for this reason.
Presumably, the Intel version of OS X has the same threading and locking problems inherent to Darwin. Until they fix this, there'll always be a place on an Intel Mac for Linux development.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
There will be little to no difference.
Macs will not drop in price.
The Apple price premium is based on overall hardware specs, system engineering, and just plain downright market forces--they charge what people will pay. The price of one part, even the CPU, will not have a measurable effect on the total price. The biggest factor in chip pricing is volume, and this deal does nothing to change Apple's volume. They will likely see the about the same chip prices from Intel as they did from IBM.
Macs will not be a more open hardware platform.
There's more to a computer architecture than the CPU, and there's no reason to believe that Apple will simply shift their entire architecture to beige-box Wintel. The fact that they have to ship a physical box with the developer kit is a big hint to that. They will continue to develop their hardware in a closed, proprietary fashion--it won't be substantially easier or harder to run Linux on an Intel-inside Mac than it is to run it on a PPC-inside Mac, just different.
Apple will not license their OS.
OSX development will continue as before, no different except at compile time. Darwin will be open source, the rest will remain closed as always. Developing on the Mac platform will be different in subtle ways but not easier or harder for OSS than previously.
Dvorak is out of his gourd as usual. The success of Apple as a computer company has little to nothing to do with the CPU inside the box. Witness the [sarcasm]massive difference[/sarcasm] when they shifted from Motorola to Freescale to IBM.
Likewise the success of Linux has little to nothing to do with the CPU in the box. That's kind of the whole point.
Linux and OSS development will continue mostly on commodity hardware, with some hobbyists running it on Macs. Apple will continue to develop their line of high-end consumer electronic devices, based on integrated hardware/software.
i don't understand why this entire discussion is framed in the dialog of os holy wars. i use linux at work because it's appropriate for what i do (robotics, machine vision). i use a mac at home because it doesn't suck as a desktop os. in fact, after many years of linux / solaris / (*shudder*) tru64 / several generations of windows, my experiences with os x have been by far the most pleasant. things just work (tm). does that mean i will forsake linux? not likely -- linux is a /tool/ which is good when used appropriately, just like os x (and, i suppose, even windows).
The announcement was not OS X for Intel PCs, the announcement was Intel processors in future Macintosh computers!
Even if you accept the basis of the argument that an Intel-based Mac will mean more OSS developers target OS X, how does adding a ( pretty damn easy ) port to your development tree hurt Linux ??
Really, supporting OS X with your *nix-targeted OSS software is as easy as, well, supporting BSD, almost. A good configure script pretty much does it. I just built SVN on OS X. It turns out I didn't have to lift a finger. Of course, someone put a lot of work into the scripts so I could just type "configure" and "make", but... since you have to possibly worry about endian issues and maybe building 'universal binaries', it would seem having two distinct hardware platforms for OS X would _lessen_ the chance of OSS developers directly supporting it, rather than increasing that chance. And I still don't see how that "hurts" Linux- if I know I can use all of these programs I use under OS X on Linux as well, maybe I'll install Linux on that spare Wintel machine someone gave me, and make it actually useful, rather than installing a Windows OS on it?
More generally, though, he's right- we've already seen instances of OS X replacing Linux in University labs and businesses ( like the one I work at ), since it's a bit easier on the user. If the switch to Intel processors has anything to do with this limited trend, it'll just be in possibly creating faster/cheaper hardware. But unless Apple changes it's tune and allows clones, or is overstating the difference between the future Intel Mac and the "IBM PC" design, you're not taking your current Linux/Wintel PC and installing a future copy of OS X on it, at least not just yet...
Of course, it'd be interesting to see how different the "developer transition kit" machines are from "IBM clone" PCs, but it's entirely likely that 10.5 or 10.4.x for Intel won't look like what ships with those...
the positive side is more people will be using apple apps but the negativre side is fewer will be paying for hardware.
of course there is a debate whether piracy helps or hurts the growth and ubiquity of Windows.
But In this case i see it as a tearing down of quality. Apple products are synomynous with seemless hardware integration and elegant just-works software. A wine patch-job running on walmart hardware is going to lose both of these intangibles. It will still have all the same specs but the apple experience will be gone. It will degrade the brand image.
But in the mean time all of these applications will suddenly be available on Linux (and probably windows too). So suddenly high grade apps will be working on linux. this will I think spur linux developers to match that level of quality and bring about a renaisance in linux. The availabilty of the apple apps also finally push the quality of the linux desktop experience into the mainstream. Too bad apple may die as a result.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If Apple moves to the Intel architecture, does that mean that I can now format my windows and install MAC? How does it spell for all the games and gfx drivers out there? Can companies just port really popular older games to the MAC? Also is the MAC on intel going to be any better for gaming compared to Mac on ppc?
Where's my free iPod!? Until then, I'll settle for a kiss...
I'm wondering whether Microsoft will include drivers for Windows to run on the new Intel Macs. So you can't switch from Windows to Mac without buying a Mac, but you can switch from Mac to Windows with a simple install.
Perhaps one should keep in mind that Linux bigots are as entrenched with the OS of their choice as are Apple's OSX zealots. Ne'er shall the twain meet, it was once said, and I think that this will be another case of more of the same.
One should read Dvorak through the years, and I mean back to the 1980's when he was a columnist for Macworld and other magazines. He can be a blind squirrel that stumbles upon a nut, and he can be as infuriating as any writer who's ever analyzed computing. In other words, when his moth opens and shuts, gospel verses are not written.
First of all, one has to wonder if Apple is going to sell it's computers at the same commodity prices that Dell, HP and Lenovo/IBM do, or are they going to command a higher price than similarly powered Wintel or Linux machines.
The history of Apple suggests that they will try to leverage higher margins from their hardware than their competition, which was fine as long as they had a performance advantage over the rest of the pack. Now that they will be operating on the same CPU hardware, it is difficult to see them having a huge leg up. So where is the compelling reason to switch away from Linux to the BSD kernel and Apple?
That said, Apple is only doing what Sun did with the Opteron-based machines (Sun: Extreme Performance) with an eye more towards the workstation market. Anyway, if Sun's example serves as a guide, it hardly killed Linux.
It seems to have become fashionable to predict the death of Linux. Perhaps it will go by the wayside, but that won't be anytime soon. If anything, Apple itself should provide a writer lik eDvorak with that insight. Perhaps John is trying to join the Dynamic Duo that are Laura Didio and Rob Enderle?
The chips that Apple will ask Intel to manufacture will be negotiated just the way Apple did with Motorola and IBM. The computers Apple would make with Intel processors will probably not say "Intel Inside" because Apple will maintain their own branding. You will probably not be able to install Windows on the Intel based hardware, and the computer will definitely NOT be a commodity-priced PC beige-box clone.
Apple will not let Dell sell a crappy chinese-manufactured beige box that runs OSX. Apple products are NEVER commodities like Dell PCs. Business weenies always try to compare Apple computers to Dell as if they would compare a Volvo or a BMW to a Chevy. The reason is that none of them grew up with computers, and they cannot understand the difference between a Mac and a PC the same way they understand the difference between a Volvo and a Ford. How much excitement do you think it would create if Volvo decided to contract with Ford to make *engines* for upcoming Volvo models?
More on CPU R&D: Next year Intel may not be in the lead. Go look at the R&D (reported in the last couple of years) that IBM or Sun is doing with basic materials (IBM) or asynchronous chip architecure (Sun). This has more to do with the cycle of turning basic R&D into a product than anything else. At this time, Intel has the most advanced product. Later they will be playing catch-up. Please note that when the G4 powerbooks came out, Intel saw the 5-6 hour battery life of PPC based laptops as a SERIOUS competitive threat, and they started making more efficient chips and spending money to drive that performance angle further. First it was G4, then it was Centrino. Now IBM is nonplussed with chip wattage, so Apple finds a new vendor who cares.
How many times has Windows changed chip architecures? Arguably NONE: their software still demands i386 architecture shortcomings as a baseline. Apple software has fat binaries, native Java and heavy runtime dynamism to separate the programmer from the chip. This topic could go on-and-on...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
The issue seems to be that while the PPC line is (maybe) better than Intel now, IBM's losing interest in the plain PPC line (in favor of Cell etc -- revenue from Apple is a drop in the bucket by comparison), so it's becoming a dead end.
IBM has still not come out with laptop-appropriate G5s, for example.
I think Jobs expects Intel to soundly overtake PPC just because the PPC line (at least the flavors that are of interest to Apple) has peaked.
DNA just wants to be free...
No one from the project has said anything about this yet, but I would venture a guess that Mac-on-Linux could be ported to Linux/x86 from it's current Linux/PPC once Apple/x86 boxes start shipping (or I guess if a dev gets the Apple Dev Kit).
:)
They've already done a lot of work in getting a virtual machine (via a Linux kernel module) to look enough like a Mac that Mac OS X runs in it (I'm guessing it's emulating Apple's firmware??), and I would think that the Mac architecture isn't going to change drastically other than the processor, so theoretically it should be possible to replace the processor-specific bits and have a working Mac-on-Linux for x86. Which would be very cool
After all, this is the fella who said the mouse would never catch on. His batting average is getting dangerously above epsilon, so out he comes with another idiotic prognostication.
But hey, maybe he's right. I mean, we all know how all C doesn't work on PPC or anything, which is why OSS hackers always stuck with x86 platforms, since nothing can actually compile on a Mac. It's not like gcc ever worked on a Mac or anything, and nothing was ever actually ported. And now that OSX will run on every single cheap x86 platform and will be completely free of charge and open to any customization possible with just a recompile, why run Linux? Changing the machine architecture of course means all that, it's just a natural consequence in Dvorak-land.
Anyone keeping a scorecard of Dvorak's prognostications?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Since Apple's move will put them out of business, Window's market share will rise. It will be seen as a proof that no alternative system can survive.
People will say "Look, even Apple died, how long until that Linux thingy dies, too?" The idea of a user-friendly gui sitting on top of a unix-like open source operating system will seem disproved. Too bad we will never know how x86-Macs would have worked... because how is Apple going to survive the next 12 months when buing a PowerMac is ridculous?
I think that apple could become the next osborne if they don't proceed carefully.
For those of you who aren't old enough to remember, osborne killed itself when it declared the specs of the new osborne-2. Everybody waited with baited breath for the osborne-2, and sales for the osborne-1 dried up.
In short osborne went bankrupt before it could release the osborne-2.
Just like the osborne, sales will drop as people will wait for the intel version to be released. Hopefully there will be enough stored cash so Apple doesn't die during the transistion. Lastly, no I'm not trolling, I'm just pointing out a prescident.
"Every security scheme that is based on secrets eventually fails." - Steve Jobs
Mac on Intel is the same thing as Mac on PPC from the perspective of open source code. Mac is still closed either way.
If John means this will kill of PPC ports of open source - well Duh! but so what? That's tiny. I can sort of see his point though when developers start writing their own apps for Mac running on Intel as opposed to Linux on PPC or Linux on Intel though - almost.
I mean will Mac on Intel kill desktop Intel Linux? I can't see how - Mac or MS Windows are still closed source platforms. No one is really going to bother writing a new Linux desktop OS for Mac flavored hardware on Intel - at least not right away but that's no different than the zero people who're writing Linux for a regular Mac box today. It still makes no rational sense to bother writing Linux for a miniMac for example regardless of what hardware is under the covers. In fact Apple would have to be crazy to promote a lot of open source development for Mac on Intel in the first place? Why lose control over what is already a narrowly held platform?
the first and only times I've seen Mac OS in a business environment was when you could run MacOS on a third-party manufactured PPC machine. For that brief window of time it was economically viable to start buying "Apple" again, or at least their OS. If you think Apple hardware is overpriced in the US you should consider the fact that its far more expensive than that outside the US.
Partly I think you are labouring under the misapprehension that Apple (as a computer manufacturer) is somehow succeeding. With a market share of less than 3% outside the US they are continuing to tank in a big way. Apart from the Apple store itself (of which there are a grand total of 2 in my coutry) I'm not sure where you can buy Mac software here. Don't remember seeing any since the early 1990s on the high street.
Subject says it all.
If Apple is still to be tied to proprietary hardware, where's the news? So Intel sells a few more processors. That's nice for them, but doesn't do much for anyone else.
Oh, right. There is the matter of that one guy who can't wait to run Windows on his Apple. Maybe now he'll get his chance. Then again, where would he get hardware drivers?
NR
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
First... take your fingers off the 'Moderate' button and listen for a second. ;)
Now.... I think it's really cute how Dvorak (along with alot of other people) automatically assume the switch to Intel means commodity x86. We all know that Intel has the capability and history developing other chips... so why not consider that as a possibility? Apple has stated that they will not allow the running of OS X on other hardware... I personally don't think that's due to the lack of OpenFirmware or anything... I think it's due to the fact that Intel != Pentium4/PentiumM. My guess is that Apple has agreed for Intel to produce a slightly modified version of the PentiumM... that, or a mobo/chip combo with some extra trimmings. The chip might have more registers, a slightly different instruction set... god knows what. The bottom line is that switching to Intel does not mean that all of our Macs will run on standard x86 chips. Linux probably will be easier to port to the new Macs (if it requires any work at all), but it certainly won't kill of Linux development. If anything, it will make x86 development stronger (assuming, of course that they use a psuedo-standard x86... see above though.)
As usual, Dvorak is basing his prediction of an assumption based on an interpretation of a summary of the facts.
-maz
The real litigious bastards...
Blind pigs would be better for truffle finding, as they wouldn't be visually distracted by sexy female pigs walking by ...
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
How about a commitment from Apple/Steve that the entire MacOS codebase will be GPL-ed if Apple is unable to maintain it _themselves_?
This makes their x86 plan a little more credible. Do they really believe it will work? If it does, they're out nothing and they can keep the commercial rights in any case (it does belong to their stockholders, after all.)
This kind of move worked for TrollTech (different circumstances, I know.) It may not ever actually do anything, but it gives some assurance that Apple's wonderful technology won't either vanish forever or be looted and locked up in Redmond.
I truly don't expect Apple to survive, and I'm not happy about that. This would be a wonderful parting gift after the last 19 years.
Dvorak's was a dumbass when I read his shit in magazines a decade ago, and he's still a dumbass. Maybe he was right about the Apple switch. A monkey flings enough shit at a wall, some of it has got to stick.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
Oh, please. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The man predicted this move four years ago, long before even Apple knew this would happen, and his reasons for it happening were ALL WRONG. That's not precognition, it's dumb luck.
I think we are seeing the beginning of Apple moving
from a hardware company to a software company.
By moving to Intel chips, they are opening up the door to buying more and more off the shelf hardware for their computers. Soon, they will be out sourcing their computer hardware, and just be putting their name on it. They've already adopted standard hardware intefaces (pci, ide, scsi, etc) having dropped their own (nubus). They also will become a media company (ipod, itunes), and will probably be adding video soon.
Rather than using a C/C++ (or whatever) compiler that translates and optimises the target processor asm and ultimately the machine code.
You're a "dolt-flavoured" numbskull.
Why do idiots like you feel compelled to make some inane, uninformed comment about something you clearly have no idea about.
I mean: "the "flavor" of Motorola" - FSS!
Only thing it seems to me is that this will lower dependancy on the OS. It'll probably hurt OSX, Windows, and Linux, but they'll still be around. The Intel Macs will be capable of running Windows programs through Wine, Vmware, VirtualPC or something. But you still need to buy copies of Windows for those to run (and in the case of VirtualPC, pay the Microsoft tax twice), it's not like Apple is going to pull an OS/2 and put the functionality into the OS. OSX will have just as much if not more Linux compatibility as has had for the last few years anyway. I think this just diminishes the importantance of OSes since it'll be so much easier to port applications.
Honestly I don't think MS could care less. A lot of companies would probably say, why make a port for OSX x86 when they could just run it natively? So they'll probably continue sticking with Windows programs. Dell and Compaq might, but we'll see.
So ya'll better get ready when the K'zinti swoop down and eat us all later this afternoon.
Hey, wasn't I right about that Sun thingy?
I'd go into the professional psychic business, if it weren't for being infested with ethics.
KFG
Mac users are not processor zealots either. They only care about their MAC OS running.
Like the Windows Zealots who dont care what its running on.
Likewise the Linux Zealots who dont care what its running on.
The only people who "care" are the floaters.
Have a nice day!
Seems like Dvorak is always saying something will harm linux. Reading something he writes to that tune is like sticking forks in my eyes.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
A man who is right about one in about every 1,000,000 stories is not suddenly a better reporter when that one right article comes around. Dvorak got lucky plain and simple'
I remember correctly, most pundits, including Dvorak, were saying that Apple "should" switch. Jobs said he "must" switch. Also, people like Dvorak are saying they should switch to an all Intel architecture, which Apple is not doing. We will probably still be locked into Apple hardware to run Apple software, at least for the time being. Dvorak's reasons for asking for the switch were because they thought the platform would expand the mac OS further by being compatible with more hardware.
And since that's not what's going to happen, Dvorak is still for the most part wrong. It's just such a huge thing that that all the pundits are scrambling to put news out there on it, when they barely even paid attention to what is really being said.
While I think it would be a tremendous boon to the average consumer to unlock the hardware lockin for the mac OS, I don't think that will be something that happens any time soon.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This is the kind of stuff that really makes me wonder how many people just don't get it.
Imagine if a car company came out with a nice new sedan. This sedan is VERY nice. How much would that sedan hurt the truck sales of a competing company? If the sedan is VERY nice, then it is sure to have an impact on auto sales in general, but since it is not a direct replacement for a truck, its impact on truck sales is going to be limited.
OSX is NOT a direct replacement for Linux. The reason is that it will not run on STANDARD HARDWARE. If Apple were to actually create a version that ran on generic PC's then someplace in hell some imps would be making a snowman. Apple will not create a version for standard PC's because Apple is Apple. If you know the history of the company then you know what I mean. If you don't know the history then explaining it will take too much time. There are many books that have been written about Apple and its history. If you want to know the details, read a couple of them.
The value of Linux is that it is FREE, and yes I mean as in BEER as well as in speech, and you don't have to buy funky proprietary hardware to run it. This is why it is found on servers all over the place, as well as on more and more desktops every day. OS-X is expensive, both in terms of the OS itself, and in terms of the proprietary hardware you have to shell out money for in order to run it. Proprietary solutions, even if they are superior, always have a very hard time competing with commodity solutions. This has been Apple's problem for the better part of 20 years now. It wasn't Microsoft as a software company that sank the Mac, it was the PC hardware industry whose products became ubiquitous. Microsoft simply rode the wave.
As for the development argument, how many Open Source projects are there out there which target the mac exclusively? Answer, very few. How many in fact support the Mac as an afterthought, if at all, because of all the funky things that Apple has done which make porting to it more difficult than porting to Solaris or some other mainstream version of Unix?
I really do get the idea sometimes that people like Dvorak are in the business of making proclamations like this just to get attention. If they're right even some of the time then they'll be able to create an audience and a paycheck doing it.
I have an alternate prediction for everyone. My prediction is this: The Open Source projects that benefit the Mac will usually benefit Linux and vice versa. There will be a few that are Mac-only, or Linux-only, but only in order to replicate some desired functionality that is already present on the other system. Most of the Open Source development that is done for OS-X will be in porting stuff from Linux to it, and in the creation of new projects that can be developed on both platforms simultaneously.
We already see this with FreeBSD where everything from Apache to zsh is up and running because the work of porting between FreeBSD and Linux is usually trivial and writing conditional code to support both platforms is even easier. There are a few packages that don't exist on both platforms, or which exist on one platform as a kludge, but these are the rare exceptions. Linux and OS-X don't have as much in common as Linux and FreeBSD do, but they are still similar enough that supporting both is not a herculean task the way it is with Unix and Windows. Development on OS-X will therefore be a net gain for Linux since most of the stuff that is developed for OS-X will be developed for Linux at the same time and vice versa.
Besides, there is no guarantee that Apple's move to Intel is going to increase sales. It may result in faster computers, but it takes a lot more than that to convince people to buy your funky hardware so they can run your funky os.
Linux has one strike against it in that it is not windows. It is able to overcome that because it is FREE and runs on standard hardware. Choosing Linux is not a commitment to Linux, it c
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I'm working on a GL-based compositing window system to replace X, no bull. When I heard the news, I figured with OS X available for x86 my project would be rendered (no pun intended) irrelevent. It turns out that with the OS still limited to Mac hardware, this is not the case.
;) The rendering part has been complete for some time, I'm working on support for server-side objects, almost there... The thing is, it seems most people in the community don't want to work on "boring" projects like this one. However, once complete it will be anything but boring. Also, if I release it incomplete I won't attract anyone to the project, they'll see it as another Berlin/Fresco.
I wonder if Jobs realizes that if he could pull that off (make everyone's crappy old hardware work on OS X x86), he could take down Microsoft and the fledgling Linux desktop with one blow.
In other news, I'm about ready to release my project
Anyways, I'm glad Steve is giving desktop Linux a stay of execution.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Developers write to the OS and API provided by the OS, not to the CPU.
Why will it make any difference at all if developers are telling their compilers to compile for x86 or PPC? The application-level code still has to be dealt with, and the CPU isn't even visible to most developers writing most applications, particularly the critical-mass open source stuff that the "masses" would have to adopt to make this turnabout happen.
I'm not happy with the Apple decision, but for reasons other than these.
While I grant that the mac market share is small, please don't hold off from learning Cocoa just because of that. Much like learning any computer language, Objective-C is full of interesting concepts that will broaden your mind as a programmer.
While it won't put food on the table, Cocoa is a beautiful framework in many ways. The language is a natural fit for GUI development. Technically speaking, Cocoa is vastly superior to nearly all its competition. GTK+ and Qt (ye gods, especially Qt) are just blown out of the water.
Once you learn the framework, you might find that keeping a mac version of your application out there is much easier than you thought. If you struture your designs right (and by that I mean a good Model-View-Controller division) you can do a lot of work without writing any code at all.
Don't be so quick to dismiss ObjC/Cocoa.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I think you're confusing Dvorak with Bob Metcalfe. Metcalfe is a respected commentator and accomplished industry pioneer who was wrong once ten years ago. Dvorak is a Linux-hating troll who is wrong most of the time.
Have you read my blog lately?
Well, I think both will happen. First, since you'll be able to dual-boot, people might dual-boot Mac and Windows now, and since that'll only be possible on a Mac, that means people might leave Dell for Apple.
However, I also think people are leaving Linux for Mac, but that has NOTHING to do with the chipset. It's been happening for a while since Apple switched to OSX. I'm living proof, buying a powerbook I never thought I'd own. But in a way, this will help linux too - I, as an Apple owner, can now put on whatever linux distro I want. Hell, talk about Nirvana - I can *triple* boot Mac, Linux, and Windows. Gives me dirty thoughts just thinking about it.
If there's on linux distro that's probably hurt by this, it's obviously Yellow Dog. Still, great effort all those years, guys.
ok, but how could this possibly harm Linux?
My guess is that should Apple survive this stunt, they will concentrate on media which means strong DRM everywhere. Something that doesn't go well with OSS. A locked hardware is extremely unlikely to attract OSS developers.
To see how anything can be good or bad for Linux, we'd have to see what is 'good for Linux' anyway.
Something that increases the uptake and usage of Linux is good for Linux. The biggest problem today Linux faces is lack of application market. Well OK the biggest problem is lack of standards, so lack of applications is the second biggest problem. Any slashdotters who are currently on win32 right now know which apps have forced them to stay with win32.... games, ERP system etc.
So why are these apps not ported to Linux??
(1) Linux isnt a big enough market yet
(2) Porting is a royal pain.
How can we fix that?
One way to solve this problem is to have diverse platforms. If the market is fragmented between platforms, vendors will be forced to sell different ports of apps. This means more vendors will move to toolkits like QT and wxwindows and opengl which are portable. If youre code is portable, porting to another platform is easy. If your code is based exclusively on VisualC and MFCs, its tough to port.
So anyone porting apps to win32 AND apple, might as well hire one more developer and maintain a Linux port as well. You wont find many apps that are just dual-platform. They're either just win32 (the kind of apps that are killing Linux), or they're released under at least 3 ports, win32, mac and Linux. In many cases the company says what the heck, and releases BeOS, FreeBSD, OS2, Solaris and other ports too, since porting further is easy.
Apple forces the move from the first type of apps to the latter type. That brings us all kinds of games and business apps on Linux. Probably the second best thing that can happen to Linux (the first thing is STANDARDS!!!)
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
OSX uses the XNU kernel, a development of the Mach kernel, with the BSD-UNIX personality hardcoded in. It doesn't have the performance characteristics of the BSD kernels at all. On top of this sits Aqua, as eye-candy intensive a GUI as any out there, which places heavy demands on chip performance. Switching to an inferior CPU isn't going to make it faster, even with the higher clock speeds in performance terms the switch is likely to be a wash.
OSX isn't going to outperform Windows on the same hardware by any stretch of the imagination. The switch may well enable Apple to improve their price/performance ratio, if as is rumoured this was prompted by difficulties getting the next generation of PPC chips at reasonable prices in reasonable quantitites, but expecting OSX to outperform any other system on the same hardware is pretty ludicrous. Unless he means to compare OSX today with Longtooth in 5 years or whenever it's finally released.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Ok, I'm starting to get pissed. This guy plays us for fools every fucking week. He's just a troll....why do we let him be such an effective, and yes, profitable one? He puts out this outrageous bullshit all the time, and somebody posts it to /., we all come running to yell about it, and his advertisers and publishers laugh all the way to the bank.
In response, I suggest that when it's time to post the next Dvorak story, somebody make a mirror of the text (it may need to be offshore to avoid PCMag or whomever complaining about copyright issues) and post the links to that. And insist that people make their comments on /. instead of the PCMag boards. That way we can complain about him being such an ass without putting money in his pocket.
Sound ok?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Null pointer exception.
Made for Apple, by whomever, but not for the manufacturer to sell to anyone else. Apple can do that, as they have most of the way since the Apple ][ (excepting all the Apple ][ clones which required dubious ROMS, etc. and the brief period where Mac Hardware was produced by several firms before Jobs yanked the hardware production back in house.) With OS-X running on Intel, it would be pointless for Apple to compete with vendors who do it very well. Besides, as Microsoft has shown, the money isn't in the hardware, but the software.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As the saying goes, "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then."
He is just one of those people that spouts off all the time. He was bound hit one one eventually.
My ex-wife had an uncle that was into local politics. He would do something stupid shortly before election day so people would remember his name. Of course they couldn't remember why they remembered his name, but that didn't seem to matter much. Once he was found half naked and passed out drunk in his car that was parked in a grocery store parking lot. He won that election too!
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
I don't know why they say he doesn't gloat in this article; he does. But guess what? He has the right to. The Mac fanatics (I'm a Mac lover, but I'm reasonable about it) gave him hell about his prediction. He was right, so he deserves a little victory dance.
As for making the same prediction each year, I don't think so. He has made the same *suggestion* each year, but isn't this the first time he claimed it actually was happening soon?
PS I'm just trying to be fair to a guy everybody here seems to hate.
Currently hooked on AMP
As a newbie Linux user I believe that this will help Linux more than it will hurt.
- Less effort porting to MAC means more time spent developing new OS software.
- Once a user accepts that they do not have to live with windows for life, any OS choice is open.
- With a more viable Alternative to microsoft, format lockin will be harder.
I don't see how switching to the x86 will be any more of a temptation for Linux users. It's not like the x86 OS X boxes will be very cheap. Dev work won't be any easier - you're porting/writing apps for OS X whether it's x86 based or PowerPC, unless you're working at a very low level the CPU architecture will be largely irrelevant.
In essence, yes he's back on the pipe.
If you prefer to hear his opinions (though I don't know why you would :) rather than read them, Dvorak also discusses this with Leo Laporte in an interview / phone conversation in episode 8 of the This Week in Tech podcast. Leo seems to have a different take on this than Dvorak.
I think it could have a marginal impact on Linux. But I think it potentially a bigger blow to Sun since this will a hardware/OS integrated solution unix solution with Apple's seal of approval. Not to mention those sexy looking Xserve machines.
Mac OS X tries to do so much in the background that it makes my 700MHz 384Meg iBook feel overburdened. Linux doesn't do that. I don't think Linux will suffer too much with OS X being available for Intel chipsets.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
It's still there, but it's clear that it's on the way out. OpenDirectory has taken over where it can, and what remains of netinfo is pretty well burried.
Before you ask this question, you should ask : "Does ICC support Objective C ?"
I don't think it does, that would put it right out - no way would they drop Objective-C, they have too much built on top of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The underlying CPU means almost nothing to the vast majority of application developers. The endianness might make it easier to port Windows and Linux/x86 applications to the Mac, but I can't see OSS developers moving en masse to OS X for that reason. And if OS X/x86 ran on standard PC hardware, it could easily take a chunk out of open source Windows apps, but that's just not going to happen--See here, the last paragraph: Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
(Incidentally, the use of the word allow indicates to me that perhaps the hardware will be practically identical and artificial restrictions may be put in place to ensure the hardware is a genuine Apple box... then someone will hack OS X to run on generic PCs... and Apple will bludgeon them with the DMCA... I can hardly wait.)
Nice try Troll...
Let's be fair to this guy; he really had it right. And of course, as flame retardant, I have to state my Mac credentials: I am writing this from my dual-G5 Tiger box... I've never owned an Intel machine. But I'm glad and hopeful for this switch, although a bit worried at the same time.
Currently hooked on AMP
I think I speak for everyone when I say that Dvorak needs to shut up, as nobody cares what he thinks about anything.
The best mobile chips are probably made by Intel, in general. They are certainly the best selling and best supported ones. AMD doesn't really do this, yet. Switching from IBM to AMD wouldn't gain Apple much, because they'd still be weak in laptop chips, basically.
Geez, you just don't get it, do you? Can't see the forest for all the damn trees in the way?
You can ONLY buy a box that runs the operating system from APPLE. That is NOT COMMODITY hardware, no matter it's made up of commodity bits and pieces. The box comes from only ONE vendor, APPLE.
Consider OS-X running on an off the shelf PC box. Consider that there are hundreds of manufacturers (probably less than 100 of any real quality and providing any kind of support), which crank out 10's of millions of these PC boxes every year and suddenly, you can run all your OS-X apps on them.
BAM!
A huge market has opened up for Apple. The very market Microsoft has tried to keep Apple out of, direct competition on the same piece of hardware. Why the heck should Apple keep making hardware when there are Dell, Lenovo, HP/Compaq, etc, who do this very, very well and with intense competition could beat anything on the scale Apple could produce. Get out of the hardware business, the real money is in the operating system, software and support. Microsoft has shown that for years. Is anyone paying attention.
Move OS-X to commodity hardware and compete head to head with Microsoft, on the merits of the product.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now, all the MS bashers should be happy, as it would mean fewer copies of Windows being sold, but I suppose they will scream, as the seats will be to a commercial alternative, not to Linux.
That's life. Many businesses will continue to prefer an OS that comes with a company behind it.
--- Bill
22
According to Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, their machines will not run OpenFirmware.
This doesn't mean they will run a standard BIOS. Surely they will not. But it looks an awful lot like they want their solution to be an Intel showboat.
Also, given the fact that we have Apple on record saying that they will do nothing to stop people from running Windows on their new macs, I think that they're going to stake their Different-ness more on the speed and quality of their engineering.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I think OS X and then Apple will loose out on this switch, not linux (If I do enough predictions, some are bound to come true, Dvorak's did)
If the poor Macers are running win-compatible hardware they will be hammered by the MS marketing locomotive until they crack (I bet Longhorn will incorporate tons of new "you're-so-incompatible" software)
Techie mac users will go for Linux, while the idiots go for Whinedows.
Call me in three years when My predictions come true (this prediction business iz way cool, I'm gonna be a zillionaire by then)
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
The logic seems wrong. Even if OS X will steal market share from Linux, it will steal more from Windows. And stealing market share from Windows is a favour to Linux, which is much bigger than the loss of market share.
Dvorak did NOT call this correctly.
He predicted the shift, yes, but it didn't happen for the reasons he cites. Dvorak was overall ignorant to the inner workings of the Apple-IBM relationship that prompted this decision over the last year. Dvorak's reasoning is that he believes that Intel is a titan, and that monopolies are good, and that the market should reward them. Steve Jobs switched because he's playing hardball with is suppliers.
I think that this move will be more likely to help Linux than to hurt it. For one thing, this move makes x86-compiled Linux binaries more compatible with the x86-compiled OS X - therefore puts more Linux apps in reach of "casual" open source dabblers who are Mac-heads. Ultimately, this will more closely tie Linux with Mac Users, and vice versa. (not the non-technical subset of Mac users, but the hobbyist/power-user set). I *do* believe that cultivating WiNE for OS X, and other Linux x86 apps, are secretly part of this strategy. Partially to backfill the applications that the platform WILL lose, when it goes x86 - because face it, Adobe and Microsoft may be buying into this bullshit, but the reality is, most other ISV's are not going to recompile or put in the effort to port to x86. Particularly a lot of the shareware/freeware games and utilities (you may as well delete them now, and get used to their absence, they're gone).
I don't think that a whole lot of Linux users are switching to Apple because of the CPU. They're doing it because Apple supports Unix tools they're familliar with, in a much more powerful sensible and workable User Environment (OS X compared to Windows+SFU). This hardware change won't impact that AT ALL, unless there's a real price/performance difference betweem PPC Macs and Intel Macs (and I seriously doubt that, if anything, there will be a penalty in certain areas where the PPC Macs currently exel, like CD ripping, and MPEG encoding).
Above all, I doubt VERY MUCH that the PPC->Intel switch is intended to have an impact on the street-price of Apple systems. Jobs says this is purely about MHz ramping, and heat/power/performance capabilities. He's not going to put a celeron in the Mac Mini, and suddenly drop the price $200.
Linux-heads who are in love with cheap hardware, will stick with Wintel-compatible hardware, and run Linux.
And NO ONE, will run Linux on Apple-intel hardware. Because Apple-intel hardware will cost more than other brands of intel systems, and the features that make it WORTH more (nifty volume controls, sleep/wake/variable power/cooling management, color management etc) are tied into Mac OS X, and won't likely work as well with Unix.
The LOSERS here are Apple Customers who have legacy systems. Over the past 5 years or so, Apple has readily demonstrated their utter contempt for people not running the latest and greatest Apple hardware, by cutting off support for older hardware. Us PPC owners are going to be shit on a lot over the next few years.
Our only solace may be PPC Linux. That helps, not hurts Linux.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but in at most two years time I'll definitely have another dedicated Linux machine - one that used to run OS X.
Maybe I'm reading all this incorrectly, but I don't intend on running applications through a compatability layer, no matter how pretty a name it has. Sooo.. OS X on my Intel, Linux on my PPC. Anyone?
It'll be very interesting to see the specs on the motherboard Apple ends up with when they convert to Intel. Other than the processor, what other hardware features make Mac hardware better than similar highly-priced PC hardware?
now, for all those who predict linux is going to die are in for a cliched surprise. surprise! linux aint gonna die. the linux fans are in the same league as apple fans - enthusiasts to thier respective cause. which is why both are still a percentage against something as pervasive as windows. linux is still existing because of its idelogical freedom, choice - something people have respected - and the new converts are appreciating. so dont expect linux to conquer the desktop anytime soon, same goes to apple.
Difference, diverge(?) and choice is more important. Portable code is to. I can almost only see good things in it, sure it might consume some time from some developers, but we will have a much richer future, Linux might be good but hopefully it's not all there is.
If Macs had been Intel based I wouldn't have done it since Macs would be way more expensive than generic wintel boxes. I wouldn't have done it just to be on OS X since there's plenty of OSes I could port to and I don't use or need the Mac unique stuff in Carbon/Cocoa.
If anything, this is going to hurt Linux development on powerpc since most of the devolopers on that platform use Macs. I doubt they're going to go and buy AIX workstations from IBM in the future to develop Linux on. This is going to hurt IBM's embedded powerpc market too since general purpose workstations make nice development boxes if they have the same cpu. Just ask Microsoft what they used to develop on for their new Xbox.
You think Apple/Jobs are going to let their software run on any ol x86 hardware? NO! Jobsy likes his control, and by using proprietary hardware he can have it. People: It's just chips changing, not hell freezing over!
That was 26 months ago.
It would take the Mac user with the full brain to make the switch.
The half-brained ones would stay with their Mac.
The quarter-brained ones will switch to Windows CE
all the mac blowhards that made fun of me for using x86 for multimedia, eat this LMFAO. Dissed macs in 1996, and never looked back at the overpriced POS.
The quality of my work never changed, despite me going "ghetto".
Now all-a-yas will be on intel LOL. I'd like to give out a great big told-you-so to all the people that dissed me simply because I used an intel box.
Once I got wise I got a pretty black box and stuck a mac sticker on it LMFAO, no one ever knew the difference once my apps were open unless they were mac users. People in my studio there to record thought they were using a mac. Shows you how shallow and stupid the generalization and "mac-evangelism" are. Too bad you wasted your money all those years. LMAO.
Being a programmer, I knew the differences between RISC and Intel, and also knew that the result wouldn't be different.
Now you either get to repurchase all of your applications, and go wintel, or continue on mactel and pay 2x what you should for the same exact applications and hardware on Mac OS.
Now I am vindicated.
Thank you Dvorak.
l8,
AC
Do you think Apple will still use the "Blue Screen of Death" or switch to "Electric Candy Apple Screen of Death"?
I agree here - I think Dell is the BIG loser here. If not because the PC business is about to get competitive, then because Intel will now have someone else to give their advertising dollars to.
I read this from Apple's move - more than anything else they want to be part of that 'Intel Inside' thing. And if Dell starts dropping hints about AMD again, all Intel will have to do is say, "Well.. If you have to, I guess you have to..." - and Dell will blink for a change. Dell does NOT want Apple in this space even more than Intel wants to be rid of AMD.
What will be equally interesting is how Windows will be affected. More and more apps will need to be cross-compatible - will that in turn help Linux? Maybe. After all, if you are developing for a Unix kernel, why not share the love? On the other hand, Apple wants everyone to use Xcode - and is making it all but impossible to use anything else.
But keep in mind that Apple has no intention of letting people run OS X on anything but Apple hardware - Intel or no. In fact, it would be better to think of Intel Apples as simply 'Apples' - since it amounts to the same thing. Different processor - just as proprietary.
Linux will still be the secure choice for X86 clones - and they will almost certainly be cheaper than anything Apple produces.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Once upon a time Apple let Mac OS be placed on machines from other vendors. As far as I know Motorola was the only one who took them up on it. They developed a machine called the Star Max. It ran much faster than the Mac at the time.
The next year Apple decided not to renew the license for Motorola. Whoed a thunk it?
Do we really thing that IBM, HP, numberous embedded hardware suppliers, etc will suddenly swith to Mac OS.
This guy needs to pull his head out.
Now, let's be clear about something; just because he was right doesn't mean he wasn't smoking crack when he made the prediction. A thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters could produce Shakespeare, in theory, and the same logic applies to crack smoking tech predictors.
Give me a break. Linux integrates into a windows network much easier than a mac does considering Samba is incomplete on the mac. I just dont see it. Take a look at the length of time macs have been around, the length of time that windows have been around and then the length of time linux has been around. Which one proliferated faster? My guess is linux. My friggin grandfather called me up the other day to ask me a linux question, which tells me something.
Dvorak's on to something when he said people who prefer aesthetics could now buy a Mac to run Windows on it (though the reverse will most likely not be true, i.e. you can't run OS X on non-Mac hardware) - left unsaid is, of course, that some people will buyh these machines to run Linux instead.
Targeting a Mac will be easier, sure - some developers will probably buy a Mac and dual-boot (or virtualize) Windows or Linux on it, so there will be more Mac developers.
Thing is, most free software types won't consider OS X free enough - I'm switching back to Linux, personally; and a lot of OSS running on OS X share code with their Linux/Unix/X11 counterparts. Adium uses Gaim as its engine. Dashboard is based on WebCore, which is forked from KHTML - porting it back to KDE would not be too hard, and guess what, there is a GTK port. If efforts like gDesklets flounder, we can possibly port Dashboard wholesale to Linux.
Firefox and Thunderbird runs better on Linux (seriously. Try them on both platforms), and if Dvorak thinks OpenOffice is not user-friendly, he has not tried running it on a Mac yet. Oh, John, OO.o looks much better on Linux than on Windows too - if you're running the 1.1.x series, the Windows version does not have all the UI improvements that GNOME and KDE developers from Novell, Red Hat and others throw into it.
Lots of fun things are happening in the OSS world, especially on the desktop front - Sun and Novell are doing usability testing, Gtk# is making waves, in fact, F-Spot is the best photo-library tool I've seen, certainly looks faster than iPhoto and has cool things like Flickr integration built-in. Don't count us out yet.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
It's not per se bad for Apple to do the switch. But it is suicide to announce it 12 months in advance. Who's gonna buy a PowerMac now, knowing that this product line is discontinued and not compatible with the next Macs? Who's gonna buy software that is very unlikely to run smoothly (if at all) on the next generation of Macs? This will be a hard year for Apple, and we all know that in IT, the "year" between announcement and delivery can take 12-48 months.
And when (notice I didn't say 'if') Windows is ported to Apple x86 machines, you could TRIPLE-boot them to OS/X, Linux, and Windows. And who wouldn't want that?
In fact, I seriously suspect this is what Jobs has in mind. He might even be working in collusion with Gates on this. Jobs sells Apple x86 boxen with OS/X on them, Gates follows behind and sells a version of WinXP that runs on the Apple boxes, hackers port Linux and cry *woot!*, and Jobs and Gates both make gobs of money. Makes sense to me.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple boxes (especially laptops) outsell HP, IBM, and Dell combined by 2007.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Linux could use some healthy competition in the user interface department.
the sky is falling!
the sky is falling!
Apple is still going to be selling hardware, THEIR hardware, they have just made it so their OS is more adaptable to the existing hardware base. Yes a lot of people will jump to MacOS but wtf? They are still paying for something they can get for free, so lets let them do as they must. I will use my free os, that does all the fun and crunchy things theirs can do. Except I don't have to deal with drm in my apps and files.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
This is absolutely not true.
.app, but then it won't work correctly on Linux or standard BSDs. In the end, most OSS devs choose ease of distribution on Linux and BSD over OS X.
As a user of both Mac and Linux I can tell you that Mac has a severe shortage of OSS when compared to Linux. In terms of OSS apps, it doesn't really have any more than Windows. Trying to get native builds of my fav Linux programs running on my Mac has largely been an excersice in futility. Sure I can _somewhat_ run them via Apple's X Server, but this is _far_ from the quality I experience w/ these apps in Linux. For the most part, there is very little interest in OSS development for the Mac. The Darwin projects move along at a snail's pace (Just check their website, it's a little sad really). Fink is the only one that has any type of momentum, and it's consistently well behind the top Linux distros. It's not their fault, they're just understaffed.. due to the lack of interest.
Even though it is built on OSS, OS X is very much a proprietary OS that is based on the proprietary software model. It is not a completely open environment and thus will _never_ attract as much attention from OSS developers as pure BSD's and Linux. Trying to build OSS on OS X is like working with one hand behind your back. You're not completely blind, as you are with Windows, but still handicapped. The most difficult problem w/ creating OSS on the Mac is it's outdated library set and the lack of a native package manager. Need a newer version of a library that's on OS X to build your Open Source app? Sure you can package it as
Yeah there are a few great open source apps out for OS X/cocoa (Adium, Cyberduck, etc.), but there aren't that many. Plus they are mostly OS X specific and won't run on anything else, something OSS devs usually like to avoid as much as possible. Even though I use my Mac more often, I tend to do all of my OSS development in Linux because it's simply better suited for that.
Ever try running Open Office on OS X? It's slow and painful. It takes a spinoff like NeoOffice to get it working reasonably. No disrespect to the NeoOffice crew, I admire what they do. In the end though, you'll probably use MS Office.
If you get a Mac, don't expect to get all free software. Expect to pay for it.
Linux - because a Mac is a terrible thing to waste.
As a professional software developer who has written software for MacOSX and has also worked with OSS, I really don't think it will hurt Linux. Some projects may start to focus more on MacOSX, but others may swing more Linux.
;) Linux laptop took only 1.5x as long to run compared to the server. I am not sure if this is hw or kernel related, but I guess we will soon be able to see whose kernel really shines.
Why?
I got a job to write some software for Mac because I had a lot of experience with Linux and developing software for it (they knew MacOSX is unix at the core). ALL the software I wrote was developed and tested in Linux first, as I don't own a Mac, and then tested on Mac.
I was surprised by a few things. Lack of true GNU libraries lead me to create some macros so the code did not need rewritten. Small thing, sure, but a bit annoying. The other main thing was speed and filesystems.
The default filesystem does not support files with holes, which takes mmap i/o out of the program for writing to newly created large files in time-critical situations. I have not tried the "Unix" filesystem in MacOSX, so I can't comment on it, but that brings up the other issue about filesystems on Mac: the lack thereof. Yeah, I might be spoiled with Linux and all the different filesystems it supports, including my favorite: ReiserFS, and I could probably port the kernel modules over to Darwin, but I like already having them out of the box.
It is difficult to compare speed on different architectures, but my own desktop, running Linux, was slightly older than the Mac server. Mine was a 1GHz Athlon, the Mac 800MHz with 5x the RAM. The program was optimized very well and even fit Apple's own optimization guidelines for mmap and malloc. It ran 7x faster on my Linux box than the Mac server! Ok, maybe a fairer fight comparing it to the 2 years newer iMac workstation @ 1GHz G4, double the RAM. Mine was still 3x faster! Even my 200MHz Pentium (with MMX
Maybe these aren't the greatest examples (I have more), but they annoy me and have made me stick with Linux and development for Linux first.
Although, MacOSX x86 does make a crazy idea I had a bit easier: write a kernel interface API/modules that matches the Darwin kernel API but uses the Linux kernel underneath, thereby porting MacOSX to Linux!
Or do you just not have enough space for two/three boxes?
Apple switching to Intel will actually help Linux:
1) Now it should be possible to run OSX binaries under Linux using the GNUStep libs. Might require some Wine-like mapping layer, but it would be much easier to create than Wine.
2) The PPC gave Macs a certain 'cachet' of differentness for some geeks. That's gone now. Macs were the only readily available computer that was not based on an Intel (or Intel-derived in the case of AMD) architecture. So when it comes to choosing to spend more money on an Apple product or less on a non-Apple product, why should you bother to spend the extra bucks?
Personally, as someone who has a PowerBook, I actually prefer to use Linux/KDE for development work, so I often end up using an older Linux box when I'm doing development. But I do prefer the PowerBook for how easy it is to say, plug in my digital camera and download photos, play music, Quicktime movies, etc, so I use the PB for those sorts of things. However, it's always getting easier to do those sorts of things with Linux as well. Bottom line: My next notebook or desktop purchase will probably not be an Apple. I'll most likely end up going back to an AMD-based, no-name brand and run Linux on it.
Now, who is going to make a Cell based computer? I was hoping it would be Apple, but alas, that won't be happening now. If Apple wanted to make a bold move they would have gone with the Cell. As it is they've made a very safe, boring choice by going with Intel.
Even with a great CPU, OSX has been week on the server side. Linux will keep doing what it's been doing - providing high-performance, free server capabilities and a relatively weak desktop experience. Apple will continue to do what it's been doing - providing a fantastic user experience and weak server support. Apple will sell the nicest x86 machines for the highest prices.
Linux will be fine.
Dvorak right? Yes, it can happen. If you say the same thing for twenty years. Steve Jobs reason for porting was that Intel has better portable power, and maybe a better roadmap in the future. Possibly even DRM. One other benefit may be that it will make it easier for developers after they switch over. The PowerPC chip is currently superior to the Intel chip for Watt to Power ratio--the main shortfalls in speed probably have more to due with compiler optimizations. Intel's larger market provides for more optimization resources--so some of the deficiencies in the design can be overcome.
Moving developers to XCode will soften the transition. Dvorak is still a hack, and his logic and marketing sense are still flawed. Steve Jobs reasons are based more on the future of where technology is going, rather than the present that Dvorak harped on. Of course, I haven't bothered to read Dvorak -- I don't need to. To predict what he will say, simply go with whatever is the market leader -- then figure out what would most benefit that market leader. Like, once Apple moves to Intel, it should just move developers to C Sharp and Visual Studio instead of XCode.
But while this system may run Windows applications as well... other PC manufacturers will probably not be able to run OS X.
Overall, this will help Linux, because anyone moving an app or game to OS X on Intel will be moving it to UNIX on Intel. Current and future OS X releases will see better compatibility for running Linux applications (like X11 now). Dvorak will predict that the sun will rise tomorrow and that this is proof that Linux will fail.
Even though the broken watch can actually be correct eventually-- I am not going to use it to tell time. Dvorak and Enderle are examples of what I think has gone wrong with advertiser sponsored opinions. I've been better at predicting future developments then the two of those hacks put together--and I don't even have a press pass (not bragging, I'm just pointing out how low the bar is).
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
This makes me not want to pick up any more Macs.
dvorak is a boob.
and want to use what works. Linux being free has hardly caused many to dump their current platform and run it.
You won't have to worry about endianness issues between the OS platforms.
Also worth noting is that it's going to help Linux adoption overall as largely the same frameworks are in use for producing Linux games as MacOS X games- the endianness issues, etc. make it more difficult.
Now, it really WILL be pretty much the same thing when you make a game port for one or the other- it's just a recompile away... I like that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I don't see much overlap.
The Mac cult has lost one of it's main "superior hardware" arguments with this move to Intel. They always claimed their processor was intrinsically better. Now that can't be used as an argument of why the Mac is better. The most important piece of hardware of a Mac is now no different than that of a PC. I think its too bad. I mean, even if they would have went with an AMD processor it wouldn't have been that bad.
.
So . .
When it comes to similarly priced hardware how is a $2,000 Mac any better quality than a $2,000 PC? Most of the arguments are gone now. Am I correct.
Btw, this question is about hardware. Your post will be offtopic if you post about how the OS is the difference.
I predict here and now that it will be less than a month from the date of the release of MacOSX for intel before we are able to download a patch/hack to permit it to run on any PC clone.
dvorak is a tit.
I mean, really, think about the implications of switching from a 64-bit PPC down to a 32-bit x86 architecture. Performance will drop into the toilet as PAE has to be enabled and memory accesses involve multiple indirections, heap sizes for processes will suddenly have significantly lower limits, and the OS will not be able to manage overall memory usage nearly as cleanly.
While he may have demoed it on a P4 system, I highly doubt the boxen coming out in the future will have a 32-bit cpu in them.
And if they do, I will never "downgrade" my dual G5 to such a POS.
I hate to point out that people have already built super-computers with Macs.
With the speed bump that using the intel chips will give, look for them to get higher in the list.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Details, details! You could be right, but I'm pretty certain it was Dvorak since I don't recall ever reading a Bob Metcalfe article. Of course my journalistic integrity here is zero since I don't have a link, but I imagine Internet failure wasn't a completely uncommon stance in the mid to late 90s.
This is a strange one. One train of thought is that IBM could not generate the G5 that Apple wanted; whether it be performance, power consumption, volume of chips ... whatever. But that seems odd. Perhaps IBM wants to concentrate on their cell stuff ... but what about RS6000's? They still need PowerPC. So that seems wrong. However, what does anyone know about closed door sessions that Jobs sits in?
I used to like conspiracies, but now I don't believe that successful ones happen that often. However with this one, I wonder if there is some other advantage that Jobs is thinking of. My bet is that the Apple "Intel Inside" boxes will be very Apple-specific just as the current ones are; Apple ROM's, and copyrighted stuff. So cross-platform OS will not happen (Windows won't run on Apple hw, and OSX will not run on PC's). So I am grudgingly wondering if cross platform applications is what he has in mind. Here is more of a stretch ... MS is involved, and will provide and support some apps on either Windows or OSX, and gets a clip from OSX to "make up" for the "loss" of a Windows sale. And therefore MS provides a Win32 subsystem for OSX.
Sheesh ... there I go, in JFK-land.
I predict that you'll be able to run Mac, Windows, and Linux apps in overlapping Windows on Macintel. This is great for Linux apps (for starters, they'll start getting real usability criticism). It will also allow developers to target Linux as a platform and be able to run on pretty much any computer out there.
Unlike Windows and MacOS you can cheerfully include an image of an OS you know your app runs on with your software (possibly on a separate CD if there are licensing issues).
This may not be a bad thing for Linux really. How long has the concept of Linux on the desktop been out there? How close are we really getting to that reality? Perhaps Linux on the desktop isn't necessarily a great idea.
I don't think this will cause harm for Linux in the end. It's going to do two things:
1) Force the desktop development of Linux into thinking of a paradigm other than "not worse than Windows"
2) Encourage more resources to be spent on the server end of things
I think the smart enterprise linux companies should see OSX as a huge opportunity for them. Focus on the server market, and position 0SX as their Linux on the desktop. I think they are spending a lot of resources to make a desktop system when they have such a long way to go, practically speaking. Here they can leap ahead onto a platform that's quite solid and use it to enhance the viability of their server offerings.
So in the end, I think it will be good for Linux. Disruptive? Sure, but that's evolution for you folks.
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He predicted Apple would move to Intel 8 of the last 1 times they did so.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Can anyone tell me why Dvorak is saying that this move makes it easier to develop OSS for the Mac? Isn't is true that whatever the processor people would basically use the very same tools (gcc etc)? Developing for the Mac would have the additional cost of comforming to its OS APIs, standards etc. Just trying to learn something here.
(The National Enquirer is also right occasionally, too.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Because things in apple platforms just work.
Many people are getting tired to hack away to get a simple driver working in Linux.
Linux is great for IT in general, but he might not be that off after all.
Bye bye Karma.
Linux is still more for people who like to tinker with their system, while Mac is very much the opposite - for people who want it to "just work". So I very much doubt that Linux geeks will be drawn to OSX. If they haven't been already, they're not likely to be. Now, the Mac Mini is a hot little box, and that's a draw, but the chip it runs hardly makes a difference.
Microsoft, however, is likely to get bit by this. If OSX remains as stable and friendly on Intel chips, then the instability and lack of security, and configuration hassles and everything else that's wrong with Windows will become cleary a fault of the OS, not the hardware.
Coupled with styling, stable and friendly Mac devices are likely to beat Microsoft into the living room. Mac ought to present an alternative to the Tivo to speed things along.
As for the geeks, well, if they'd rather build a PDR rather than buy a Tivo, an Intel chip in a Mac isn't going to lure them away from Linux any time soon.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Face it, when people saw how eye catching AND easy to use OSX is, Linux pretty much lost any hope at becoming a viable desktop OS. I like Linux, and I would use were I to run one or more servers in a rack, but I am just not interested in it as a desktop OS any more.
Purely in terms of looks, OSX has it all over anything else available, and one needs to admit that aesthetics are a major component to a user interface. Combine the aesthetics of OSX with things like Quartz, and Core Image, along with the raft of software available, AND the ease of use, and you have an OS that, from a desktop standpoint, is a dreadnought to the Linux clipper.
Linux still may be cheaper, but there just isn't a distribution out there that makes it as easy to make my printers work, or burn DVD's. Oh, and did I mention metadata?
Linux was never a very serious option as a wideranging desktop OS, and Apple's announcement just confirms that idea.
seems like the Black Artists of BIOS could make OSX come up on any compatible x86 box. Isn't Intel still pursuing the successor to the failed Palladium concept?
Why didn't they chose AMD? As in 64 bits. That would have made me a lot more inclined to be interested in getting one of the new Macs.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
The performance of OSX as a server OS has been panned in benchmarks before now. It simply doesn't scale well. It can take about 5 times as long to create a thread with OSX compared to Linux.
Therefore you will always have Linux there as a non-Windows and non-Unix server OS.
First of all, why is 90% of /. surprised?? WTF?? Darwin http://developer.apple.com/ is available for some time, I've been running it on various X86 machines, including a dual-pentium3 Intel 440GX motherboard, and it makes a very dandy web/mysql/QTSS/mail server (FREE). I can name lots of software that just runs!
So why not for Apple to take X86 version into mainstream, and still offer Darwin (without the Aqua, CoreEverything, Quartz) for FREE!! (as in beer) ?? And should you be so lucky that your hardware is supported by the IOKit, why not run it? Or is it just the Linux world becomes more and more what they actually despise?
Speaking of FREE, how diffrent is FREE linux for an average user compared to Darwin; I can download it free after a FREE registration. So I don't pay (except for the bandwidth) in either case (story is diffrent should I become a developer)
--- 'Pain heals, chicks dig scars... glory... lasts for ever!' -- "Footstep" Falco
Well, given that Dvorak happened to guess once, I guess he figures why not try again? Too bad he wasn't guessing about doughnuts.
Where the hell did you guys get that info?
I was talking about that last night on IRC, and afaik x86 is limited to 32 bit architecture!
Why the heck would Apple, who's G5 is 64 bits switch to a 32 bit architecture?
Most likely they're going to use another Intel chip, like Itanium2 or something to come that runs 64 bits, not 32!
It doesn't make sense for them to DOWNGRADE their hardware. They'd be signing their death as a competitor for high end applications, which is what they are for most professional graphics and video applications.
Seriously people, think about it! Amd is 64 bits now, apart from the sempron line, and that's destined to disappear sometime in the future.
So yes, in my opinion Dvorak is smoking crack, because it's not OSX for x86! It's OSX for a non-x86, 64 bit Intel chip! Itanium2 might be it, or it might be something else, I haven't kept up with Intel's 64 bit attempts.
Also switching from the 64 bit PowerPC to a 64 bit Intel chip would seem more coding than switching to 32 bit, as they have OSX running on their older G4s and even G3s.
Remember that end of article about migrating to Intel? "It's going to be a lot of hard work"? It wouldn't be if they were switching to x86, Darwin runs fine on x86...
Doesn't someone else see the flaw here?
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Come people! Look at the obvious. The one thing that's holding Linux back is that Windows is running the desktop -- that MS is the monopolist. If Apple can take desktop share from Microsoft, that is great for Linux because it puts a Unix on the desktop. All of a sudden, server-workstation integration paradigm shifts. Unix firendly workstation applications makes Unix servers more attractive. The desktop is the battlefield. If Linux people want the desktop, then write the desktop that can compete with OS X. Until then, Linux needs Apple to win the desktop.
As for the server environment, Linux/BSD people will stick with Linux/BSD. Mikersoft people will stick with Mikersoft. Who's left to switch to OS X?
Ignoring, for a moment, Dvorak's predictions for Linux's demise, he does have a very valid point that Linux/Gnome/KDE advocates seem to be missing:
The problem isn't isolated to Impress; KDE and Gome applications tend either to mimic Windows equivalents, or have UI's with far too many menus, toolbars, tabs, sidebars, bells, whistles, and fruit baskets. GUI concepts change dramatically between releases (Gnome's file browser, anyone?), and there seems to be little or no documentation for many applications.
Unix-oriented developers tend to be both intelligent and arrogant; the assumption is that if a program is good enough for a geek, it's good enough for everyone else, too.
That isn't to say that Windows applications are any more consistent; even Excel and Word have annoying differences in menus and options, and programs these days are a web of menus and options. To change a program's behavior (on Windows, KDE, or Gnome), do I look for "Preferences" or "Options" or "Settings" or "Configure" in the menus? Something so simple, and yet so inconsistent.
Being "right" doesn't always (or even usually) mean you'll succeed, and just because FOSS developers think they have the moral high ground doesn't mean users are going to flock to their door. KDE and Gnome need to give people a reason to use them, by providing more intuitive interfaces and a better understanding of user's needs.
All about me
Apple will loose a significant number of users in this transition. I can see, however, that apple will have an advantage with hardware sales. Powerbooks will be infinitely more attractive if they can run x86 Windows and Linux, and Apple hardware will be infinitely more attractive without proprietrary apple technology (Nubus, Apple desktop bus, 'processor direct slots', apple serial, apple ethernet connectors, proprietrary expansion card connectors, un-upgradable form factors, poor quality components, custom power supplies that failed routinely, powerpc, apple monitor connectors, opendoc, quickdraw gx, objective c). Providing Apple can deliver machines at the same price as their PC equivelents, they could be a very significant PC manufacturer. As a former apple developer, it enraged my the way apple would lead you down a blind technical alley, then cut you off. Apple should concentrate on what is does well - product design engineering, and leave making hardware to companies that have some concept of minimum engineering standards.
Macos will be the big loser in my opinion. The performance deficiencies will be even more glaringly obvious alongside NT and Linux when running of the same architecture. The Mach kernel is tired. Perhaps the intention is to ditch OS X at some point in the future, and concentrate on added value products that sell with subscription services like itunes. I can't see that macos makes financial sense any more. Over 70% of people (sample size 2200 - mostly academic users) actually regarded it as a retrograde step when evaluating its usability. It would be interesting to see if new (not experienced users) also regard its usability as inferior to old macos.
I don't think apple will loose so many of the remaining mac developers this time though. Software will be much easier to port with the current design, but whether or not it is worthwhile to do so financially is definitely open to question.
Why don't I see people here talking about how this may harm Apple rather than help it?
SGI and Be come to mind. Both switched to Intel, both had sales that cratered, because buyers found the value in having a different CPU, not the operating systems. Nevermind the early pre-announcement (don't expect a retail MIntel until December) that will destroy sales.
Linux programmers wanted Macintoshes because it was an easy way to get a PowerPC system. Now that Mac will be x86 based, Linux programmers won't spend a premium for what they could already get from Dell, or put together from scratch, cheaper.
It definitely won't hurt Linux, and it definitely won't help Apple. Look for Apple to contract in the next couple of years with layoffs, and with marketshare. Why buy an Apple when you can buy a Dell and get the same performance cheaper?
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I would buy the new mac hardware just to be able to have the benefits of all the platforms on one machine. 1 machine having OSX, Longhorn and Linux, I think that would be a coders wet dream.
So in a sense this may actually help Linux rather than hurt it.
L7
If this story about not allowing people to run MacOS on non-Apple hardware is really true, this will mean that, apparently, Apple is chronically disabled in its capabilites for marketing strategies and will never get it right.
Just look at the recent developments: first, they release the MacMini. Now, it'll adopt Intel chips - which translates as - don't buy a MacMini, because Mac OS X will run on Intel. But look closer: no, you won't be able to install it on standard hardware, only Apple hardware.
How fucked-up can your World Dominance strategy get?
Steve Jobs only seems to target the North-American and the European markets. He doesn't really get it that the PC-clone markets are everywhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and that in all those fringe markets, as well as all the important ones, there's a Windows OS in a PC-clone.
Apple will, once again, miss a window of opportunity. Apple just never learns, it always wants to be the sofisticated desert for the rich people of Suburbia, never the staple item for the masses, sitting on filthy shops in São Paulo or Beijing. Always the dame, never the fun-giving whore. Steve Jobs is clueless...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Just imagine. You buy an intel based MAC because it looks cool and works well. But through a VMware package users will be able to run those few Windows applications they can't do without.
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Dvorak point brings up the Linux desktop issue... I use the Linux OS everyday, and for all kinds of tasks: servers, desktop, routers, embedded. Our company uses Linux embedded OS for our main products.N ovember/004358.html
who is now working for Novell.
However, for Linux to truly succeed it must succeed on the desktop. Linux fans: let's be honest, gnome and KDE are neither cool, innovative or good in comparison to Windows or Mac OS - regardless of what style of windowing system you like.
To fix the issue Linux developers must move quickly. First, X sucks - it lacks the underpinnings that allow OS X to do thing like expose, and other nice 3D effects. The answer to this problem is to move to a pure openGL based render system (which is what OS X does) - such as Xgl being worked on by David Reveman - http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2004-
Secondly, as a community we must *decide* on a GUI api - not have the 50+ ones which are available now. Perhaps this is gtk 2.0, maybe something else. But professional developers, and software companies which have to support products dont like making software which looks crappy b/c every developer is using a different system for drawing buttons and handling user activity.
Everything else is beside the point: window managers, kde, gnome desktop environments, etc.
But, without the two above problems solved, there is no way for Linux on the desktop to be significant.
If the Linux user-base is only ever Newegg whiteboxers and business servers, then Linux will have failed to ever make a significant impact on the desktop market. This is what Dvorak is talking about. He outlines why Linux has not done so already. He claims that Linux on the desktop needs to improve a lot. His point with regards to Apple is that developers who write desktop apps will probably prefer to write them for OSX instead of Linux, once the Apple x86 migration is done. If that is true, then clearly Linux on the desktop will not improve as much as it needs and it will indeed remain limited to said whiteboxers.
As I was reading all the reaction to Apple's recent news... I was thinking...
ok, so the PPC has been adopting parts of the CISC architecture and the x86 has been adopting parts of the RISC architecture... and now Apple moved to x86. So they're sort of encroaching on Windows. What if Microsoft moves to PPC? They're using an IBM PPC chip for their XBox which is very promising. If that takes off and they move to PPC, I don't think I could stop laughing.
Why is everyone so impressed that Dvorak predicted the migration of Apple to Intel chips? Apple considered the possibility of MacOS on Intel at least as early as 1994 (Project "Star Trek"), and the economics made it inevitable.
On the other hand, Dvorak has a long history of being wrong and/or stupid, just like he is here with his predictions concerning Linux.
Having taken the time to RTFA, it's obvious to me he's making it up as he goes. Linux PPC work will will slack off as it's platform moves to legacy status, but otherwise a MacIntelosh won't make a bit of difference to Linux. Addressing his comments:
Run Windows On A Mac: I seriously doubt it, unless the only thing preventing Windows from running on - say - a G5 is the CPU. Apple isn't going to submit a Mac for Windows certification, isn't going to sign one of those #@$!% OEM deals with MS, and the only effort at making a port work at Redmond will be on someone's lunch hour.
Obviously harmful to the computer makers in general and to Microsoft: Assuming a Macx86 won't run Windows, the current market inertia will continue. A Mac will remain a nicely made boutique system. For developers, it ain't the CPU, it's the API.
x86 Competition: The rest of his piece assumes that there's a significant number of x86 developers who work with desktop Linux applications because it's the only non-MS game in town, and they'd love to get out from under the GPL if only they could. This is the fantasy of a (arguably) paid MS shill. So the people working on Open Office, Abi Word, GNU Cash, et al are going to drop everything and run to Apple's API because of an ENDIAN change? At least now we have solid proof Dvorak hasn't written a line of code since he last ran BASIC on a TRS-80.
Made On A Mac (tm)
Luke, help me take this mask off
I should have written "even though it looks slow on paper".
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
...would be pretty offended about being compared to Dvorak, as would the psychics who publish in the Equirer
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
A few things to note. Dvorak is right and wrong. This is the only time apple could of made this transition. Right now they are sitting on like $5 billion in Cash (from iPod sales mostly).
If you listen to the TWIT Podcast, Leo and Dvorak were speculating about this on Sunday and Dvorak was preaching about all these people who would buy these new macs, and dual boot windows and osx. this is BS. dual booting is a PITA, and joe user from mac OSX won't give a hoot about dual booting.
Now on to why this will help linux. There is going to be a down turn in demand for apple's ppc equipment now that everyone knows they will be moving to intel. Linux runs great on most macs, and between a slow down in sales and a possible price reductions from lack of demand, plus the number of Macs available for resale during and after the transition, will be a nice base of machines to run linux on. A Dual 2 ghz G5 would make a great Web server that would be capable of a lot of load.
Dvorak makes reference to the crazy interfaces in Linux apps. I don't know if they are any harder, but different is harder sometimes. Also with Gnome's focus on usability and HIG I thing if anything It is getting easier to use than windows and even OSX in some instances. Is there room for improvement?... of course there is.
Emulating a Mac OSX PPC works (slowly) but still works. I wonder if emulation of Mac x86 hardware will be possible on PC x86.
Jeff
Reality is that x86 OS-X will put the final nail in x86 Solaris' coffin. IF there was any doubt whether or not x86 Survive or not, now we know it as a fact that x86 Solaris is dead.
With Linux, OS-X and Windows available on x86 NOBODY needs Solaris!
Even crackheads can be right sometimes, especially when half the planet saw it coming. As far as killing Linux, in case no one noticed, *EVERYTHING* is going to kill Linux, if you listen to Dvorak.
/. even bother printing his name anymore, let alone linking to his useless articles?
Apple switch to Intel: Death of Linux
Bitkeeper Drops OSS Support: Death of Linux
SCO Sued IBM: Death of Linux
Firefox gets popular: Death of Linux
Linus Torvalds sneezes: Death of Linux
This guy is a useless hack with absolutely no credibility. Why does
The Internet did crash. I have seen many problem tickets for it.
A little competition improves any product. And Linux seriously needs a bit more competition on the usability front. If geeks end up liking MacOS better than Linux, what will likely come out of this is an OS that has the best of both - whether it's based on Linux or the Darwin core. There is no reason that free GUIs can't be as good or better. (And the rest of the OS is free anyway in Darwin, so no need to re-invent that.) But, the two most annoying things about that process are that 1.) most Linux developers are copycats - if they've fallen in love with MacOS, they will copy everything to the last detail, without trying to improve it much. 2.) Apple likes to sue copycats.
The solution to both problems is the same - innovate!
So with this success, Dvorak's crack-smoking ratio dips down to like 0.85. So he's not smoking crack as much as he used to, but I wouldn't take away his pipe if I were you.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
i for one am very happy apple threw in the IBM towel for to many years has the argument raged about ppc vs x86. and finally as it should have, our open ISA, well supported, x86 processor has won. against all technological odds the CPU that allows BSD Linux and freedom and choice come into existance has become the only ISA we need to care about. regiisters? ha they were just buzz words! now, hopefully we can return to the glory days when john carmck assembly code optimized doom and quake engines and unreal can now run well instead of creating a retarded inefficient cross platform c++ compile anywhere engine. muahahahaha!
Let's sing along with Frank:
Must be a slow news day
We know that OS-X will only run on a Mac, even if it has a x86 chip in it. So how long will it be before someone takes PearPC (maybe CherryOS 2.0) and emulates the Apple Open Firmware so that you can run OS-X on non-Apple approved hardware?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Apple's processor switch is interesting in that it kind of levels the playing-field. The world will shortly see it is possible to deliver a virus-free very high performance, very user-friendly operating environment on Intel platform.
This will surely start chewing Microsoft ass as soon as Longhorn will not be able to deliver without breaking just about any application out there in trade for security. And since OS X is basically Unix, performance-wise Linux can get even, but without the user-friendlyness and eye-candy.
So Linux will stand to suffer, and IBM is all about Linux these days.The future is in beta
Depth in the roadmap. Remember how in the good old days many personal computera were strangled out of the market because they were stuck in a dead-end CPU line ? All the 68k machines (Apple back then already made a good move of jumping ship), all the 8-bit stuff (Apple failed to keep the Apple II line alive because there was no good successor to the 6502), etc. Intel may occasionaly tumble on their roadmap, but you know for a fact that 15 years from now they'll be making IA-32 compatible chips that are gonna have up-to-date performance, whatever that means then.
Reliability in delivering volumes. Apple is a small player that has to manage lots of things vertically. They have had inventory problems and want to minimize risk in this department.
Range of products. It is known that at any given time Intel will have a resonnably good laptop proc AND a reasonnably good economy desktop proc AND a reasonnably good performance desktop proc AND workstation AND server, etc. And since Apple wants to cover all of these markets they are comfortable with someone who can deliver everywhere. As the cherry on top of the cake, Intel happens to have a popular line of chips for mobile devices, and Apple likes to sell those too.
Ok, I suppose this is more of a question then a comment. But it seems to me, there is nothing stopping Intel from creating a chip of any architecture.
When a chip manufacturer invests their 2 billion to create the latest chip, they are investing in the technology that allows them to create chips at the .11 micron scale NOT x86 specifically, but any chip at that scale. We used to have a joke in Digital Design, that you first chip you make costs 2 billion, every other chip is free.
So why can't Apple give Intel an architecutre and say "Make this" just like anyone would send a PCB out to be printed by a company that does that?
So, assuming Intel can produce RISC chips if they want to (which seems logical to me), I think it makes more sense that Apple is looking at Intel as a chip manufacturer as opposed to buying Pentiums. Because Intel has proven it can produce tons of volume, Apple will not run into the same problems with production that they are having with IBM. Intel will also be able to use their shiny chip building plant, to make an entire new line of chips thus increasing the ROI for Intel.
I see this as a win-win business decision, not as an architecture change for Apple.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but so far I have not seen anything saying "Apple announces move to x86/Pentium platform for OS X" all I hear is Apple is changing chip vendors (aka the people who make the chips).
He has no reason to gloat, no matter what he wrote.
Dvorak, along with a lot of other tech writer know-nothings, have been pulling this Mac-on-Intel fantasy out of their collective asses for the last 5+ years, even before the Apple-IBM alliance from two years ago. Just because the switch to Intel finally happened doesn't mean Dvorak and his ilk are privy to any insider secrets or deep insights. It just means that you throw enough crap on the wall, some of it will eventually stick. The most honest thing a horribly inept tech writer like Dvorak can do is resist crowing as he knows that he was just blowing hot air the whole time.
Really. Look over the rest of his writing. He's consistently so far off-base that I'm surprised he's still in print. I'm surprised he ever gets mentioned on Slashdot especially where most of us know better than to take what he writes too seriously.
As a long time Mac user, I seriously couldn't care less what chip is running the show, as long as I have OS X instead of Windows. The only bad thing about Apple's announcement is that it gives guys like Dvorak a chance to do an I-told-ya-so and boost their credibility for absolutely no valid reason whatsoever.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Good thing you backed it up to a floppy!
why do people think Linux is the only OS that has OSS software available? over 50% of the programs I use on my WinXP laptop are OSS and I know there are tons of OSS and freeware apps for mac too currently.
Unless Apple goes out of their way to lock out free software, they will have made the best Linux platform from a easy-to-install perspective. Their big trick, compatible homogenous hardware, will mean that as long as Linux supports the new Apple stuff, you are looking at a nifty PC that will work with your whatever distro, because all the hardware will be standard.
I'm looking forward to Apple becoming this kind of brand, even though I don't really think it will help them. But then, I'm not fully informed.
Companies are in business for one reason - to make money dispite what anyone thinks. I think the main reason for this move is Apple sees an opportunity to get more users by having hackers come out with a way to run bot OSX and Win on the same machine. Virtual PC sucks and is very slow. If I could have a Powerbook that runs both XP and OS X, I woul have 1 laptop. I would use XP by day and at night run OS X at home. Hell, I could even have a shared partition for documents and such. I really can't wait for this! This is actually going to be great for not having to have dual machines for all I want to do. Linux, OSX, Win, Solaris, *Nix all on one box!
www.IBuyMacs.com
Personally, I'm waiting for a comment from Simon.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I am a long-time Mac user switching from Mac OS X to Linux. I still boot into OS X every once in a while, mostly because I haven't figured out how to retrieve my settings and data out of some OS X apps I used to use.
This came after years of nagging little frustrations with Apple's hardware and software (like the fact that because iMovie and iDVD have no MPEG support, only MOV, in order to work with movie files from my digital camera I had to buy QuickTime Pro -- and then keep rebuying it as they break compatibility yearly with older versions). Or how when you have a directory on one drive, say "MP3s", and you want to copy it over to your main drive, if there's another MP3s directory there, it won't ADD the new MP3s to the pile, it will DELETE all the main directories' MP3s and replace them with the new ones! I've lost PILES of stuff doing this before I learned that file management SUCKS under OS X. Sadly, Windows Explorer kicks the Finder's ass.
I get OS X app crashes as frequently as my family does on their Dells, maybe more frequently even. And I'm running the 1.5 Ghz PowerBook with 1 Gig of RAM, the 128Meg video card, and a faster HardDrive option, so I shouldn't be maxing out my hardware. In fact, my PowerBook is *not as fast* as my brother's Dell which is at least a year older. But I blame this at least partly because of all the "eye candy" in OS X, as Ubuntu on the same hardware absolutely screams.
Apple continually shows themselves to be cut from the same cloth as Microsoft, and it is only the spin from Apple Corporate (and our own desire to deny the truth about Apple and keep them on a pedestal) that keeps us from judging them fairly for their actions like we do other corporations. When MS screws over a vendor, we Slashdotters froth at the mouth and attack rabidly. When Apple blatantly rips off third party vendors, bankrupting them in the process, we turn a blind eye. One word: Konfabulator. Despite the nonsensical arguments and support of the Mac Faithful, Apple DID steal their product. Amazingly, NOBODY CARES. We always give Apple a free ride. It is quite dishonest to do so, and letting Apple get away with stuff like this only encourages them to do it again. There is no balance of power between the customers and the company -- the company has near total control. What Steve says, we believe. We never question. Do we? I don't see any examples of us Mac Faithful taking Apple to task for any of their slimy business moves.
There are so many examples of why "Life As An Apple User" is not perfect that I can't even begin to describe them here. I don't hate Apple. Apple's not bad, but they're like another Microsoft. Their stuff is okay. I hate the insanity of the posters on here who take it as a religion or their life's mission to lie to people in order to promote Apple. It makes no sense, and a LOT of the propaganda I see on here is flat out LIES. but nobody calls the liars on it either, I suppose because the lies are all in favor of Apple. Suffice it to say that you should take ANYTHING you read on Slashdot about the legendary greatness of Apple with a grain of salt. There is a deep-rooted bias with many of the posters here (which is why if this story wasn't a day or two old I'd be modded down to -1 almost immediately, free speech and quality of this post be damned). The reality doesn't match up to the advertising hype. OS X is a very good system, but it has it's faults. But that's NOT the impression I get from reading this site. It has enough faults, in fact, that after years of Mac Zealotry myself, I've finally switched off the system, and I'm much happier here.
I don't know what most people are doing with their computer that they can't figure out how to use Gnome or KDE, and that they need the imaginary handholding of OS X to enable them to do their work, but I've been using Ubuntu as my main desktop for a while now, and I'm having LESS headaches or brick walls to run into than I did on either OS X or Windows.
Unpopular opinion here, but it's the truth. Sosumi.
Coz Dvorak misses the fundamental fact - Linux's desktop market share is too inisignificant to make a dent into Linux's overall market share - majority of which is on server side. AND Linux on Servers is an area where neither MS nor Apple are in a good position to compete - MS due to licensing/cost issues and Apple due to licensing, hardware support and scalability issues.
No.
To quote the cinematic masterpiece White Men Can't Jump, "Even somtimes the sun shines on a dog's ass."
'Nuff said.
Unless Apple opens up "Mac OSX" to be "PC OSX", there will be no affect at all to Linux... other than being ported to another platform on which to run it instead of the intended OS.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
If I predict a volcano is going to erupt for fifty years and at the end of that fifty, it does erupt, does that mean I predicted it would happen? Or does it simply mean I kept making the same statement over and over again, despite the actual conditions in said volcano; and the volcano happened to develop internally to a point where, by coincidence, what I'd been saying did in fact become true.
For the most part OSS software is platform neutral so OSS will work as well on OS X as any other platform. Apple doesn't make it any easier for themselves though which is a mistake on their part. Instead of randomly changing established Unix and OSS standards with no real reason they should embrace them. If they have a valid reason to change them then return the changes to the community and explain why their changes are better.
I think most OSS developers will continue to use a fully OSS platform though. Not having access to all the code involved just isn't what most OSS developers want.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I love reading Mac topics on Slashdot.
I find it truly hilarious that on a forum dedicated to spreading the gospel of Open Source, the most closed source of all companies is treated like a saviour. (Even old Bill hasnt tried to stop us yet from fiddling in our own computers likw Jobs.)
Why is it that Apple gets a pass when Microsoft would be blasted? Because they managed to create a niche market in which people are more than happy to overpay for a machine that 'looks' cool?
Fine, markeintg for MAcs is like marketing pop music.
Why dont we just change the logo on top to read:
'Open source is good unless a close source product is cool.'
Talking Apple in the slashdot forum truly is like the elephant that no one want to acknowledge.
No one even whiffs at the closed source aspects of their business because theyre convictions only apply to Microsoft.
If I was Gates, Id give Apple a few billions instead of SCO. He could eat at way at open source and have geeks on his side because we know that 'cool' is more important than open source.
Derek.
I use OSX on several machines, FreeBSD on a couple of servers and I have a Debian Linux development box as well. I love all 3 systems, each has it's strengths. I am a graphic designer and got into *nix through OSX.
OK. We're hardly gon'na miss OS/X, but we may miss those cheap Mac boxen for running Linux on. Maybe Linux users will have to switch to Intel as well.
(P.S. I am a shell script!)
Has anyone considered why they choose to go with Intel over AMD? The answer is likely Vanderpool. If you could run OSX, XP, and Linux all at the same time running over Xen, wouldn't you jump at the chance? This should be a reality within 2 years.
I'm wondering how exactly Apple could do any more damage to GNU/Linux? Linux runs on every platform worth mentioning (and some that aren't, like toasters) and runs well with the exception of Apple equipment. It's because of that damned Apple ROM. And since that's what makes a Mac stay a Mac, I don't see how shifting from one arch to another is going to change anything. They're going to stop producing PPC-based units.
Selected quotes and comments:
There's nothing magical about the switch, aside from the fact that Apple equipment will have more bang for the buck. It'll still have Apple ROMs, and unless Apple decides to license it to Microsoft, those machines aren't going to be running Windows. And who would be stupid enough to pay more for an Apple, and toss OS 10 to pay $300 extra for XP Pro? Sure, people do stupid things, but they generally don't when it costs them money.
How is it harmful to Microsoft? Apple is only swapping processors, not selling OEM versions of OS 10 to Dell. How will it be harmful to IBM-compatible makers? Am I missing something here? Do Apple buyers really care what's under to hood? Is Apple planning on selling sub-$500 PCs with no OS at WalMart?
Advanced, from the developers standpoint, as Apple exerts some overall control and planning. Advanced from a feature standpoint? KDE has all the features from every modern GUI. That's probably a drawback, but to be pedantic, Linux distros have the more "advanced" user interface, and it's pretty slick, too. Apple's strength is that it's comparatively simple, yet still very functional.
The operative word is "functional", "intuitive" works well in the Apple world, but it only gets users so far. "Intuitive" doesn't work as well as we thought, as evidenced by all the adult ed and community college courses covering those purportedly obvious interface designs.
Well, Linux desktop environments ape the features of everything else out there, so by association, I guess we could also say that Windows and MacOS lack "modern intuitive menus and commands"? I'm looking at Impress right now, and it's like PowerPoint, but with less menus and buttons. I don't follow.
By the same logic, isn't MacOS 10 "broken" on the desktop? Linux desktop environments and Open Office have almost nothing to do with
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
This sounds to me like an appeal to popularity -- if you're not running some OS, you're insufficiently popular. The reason to run particular software should hinge on something significant, like how we ought to treat other people.
But this means we have to pay attention to software freedom, not mere popularity.
Free software is worth fighting for because it allows you to treat other people nicely and respect their freedom to share and modify the software. MacOS X continues to be non-free, parts of that OS are proprietary. Sharing it is a problem, not because it infringes on Apple's copyright, but because it means giving your friends and neighbors something they can't inspect (and therefore can't trust by default). They couldn't even hire someone to tell them what the proprietary parts of the OS do. You will become a bulwark for a proprietor, encouraging others to put their data into the metaphorical hands of an organization that treats us as a market. That's not what friends do.
Digital Citizen
True, but OSX will already run on a PC under pearpc. And now the main thing that made it so slow, the need to emulate a ppc, is no longer necessary. (of course you will have to emulate for the existing apps, but supposedly Rosetta will handle that)
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
this text is not here
sum.zero
Personally I dislike the MacOS/X kernel. I don't know how it works internally but it doesn't seem to know how to put processes at idle or to shift priorities to the foreground process efficiently.
On my Linux box I have typically hundreds of processes running, including various terms, browsers, editors, mail clients, whatever, and unless I'm actually running a compute intensive process like some scientific software, the CPU stays at a few % activity level. When a compute intensive process runs it captures 95-98% of the CPU.
Unlike on my iBook. Even when I'm just looking at it doing nothing the CPU meter typically indicates something like 30% activity level. Running `top' requires an extra 15-20% of the CPU, and if I'm trying to run something CPU intensive it can't capture more than 70-80% of it.
Why ?
This is why people have proposed stupid hacks like `cunning fox' which are just a convenient GUI to stop and start Aqua apps, in order to give the front-running application most of the CPU.
Now the question. Could one run Aqua on top of the Linux kernel ? if so would it run things more efficiently ? What would be required ?
If you hated windows and didn't want to pay for a mac your alternative was an open source *nix.
If Apple moves to Intel, it may be possible to install OSX on an intel box.
I am a gnu/linux fan, but for hassle free use there is no way it can compete with OSX and OSX has all of the unix goodies too.
This might help "wine" and similar projects. Think marketing: buy this mac and run your M$W apps too.
Let's assume, for the moment, that Dvorak's implied assumption--that this switch means that OS/X will become Yet Another PC OS--is true. If that's the case, it means that OS/X will be exactly where BeOS used to be.
Remember BeOS? That rather nice proprietary, Unix-ish operating system for the PC? Remember how it failed to draw away the Linux developer community?
The thing that keeps open-source projects alive is developer interest and most developers don't go for pretty menus. Or at least, they prefer source availability to them.
Also, if OS/X does become Just Another PC OS, that'd be the death of Apple right there. I think the Apple folks are smart enough to know that.
Dvorak's conclusions in this article make no sense. As has been pointed out in previous comments, Linux can't be "killed" by this change because it is not owned by anyone. It could be "hurt" by a major industry change, but not killed.
Of course it won't even be hurt. Apple won't be releasing OS X for non-Mac machines, so the situation will be relatively unchanged. Buy a Mac, get OS X. OS X users will have some new advantages, and PowerPC Linux users could see their platform lose mindshare, but otherwise I don't think things will change as Dvorak suggests. Linux will still appeal to the same people it appeals to now, and more dstros will run on the Mac.
These are the real thought-provoking changes, as I see them:
And I should mention - OpenOffice.org is far from "UNIX-like" and requires no UNIX commands. I'm not sure what parallel universe he was in when he used it. Contrary to what he says, OpenOffice.org is bad news for MS Office. Office 2003 Standard costs over $350, and Pro costs over $450. I'd rather put that kind of money into another half gig of RAM and stick with OOo for word processing. Frankly I think a lot of other people will make similar decisions in the coming years.
Dvorak seems to think Linux will be killed not by lack of users, but by lack of developers. That is to say, all those developers who wanted to sell *nix apps but (a) didn't want to deal with Linux's GPL and (b) didn't want to deal with BSD on PPC now get the best of both worlds. They can sell *nix apps for OS X on Intel without dealing with the GPL at all.
I'm not sure how his logic actually works, but that seems to be his thinking. IANAD (I Am Not A Developer), but I don't think commercial developers have been avoiding Linux because of the GPL; I think they've been avoiding it because it's got a small user share compared to Windows and because those users are used to getting their software for free.
People will buy them if they are shiney!
(Apple created the gold standard mp3 player, why not create the gold standard PC? I say they will continue to design machines the same way - Intel chips will allow for smaller machines with more power (see: Mac Mini shortcomings) - uncrackable, all you need, powerful, easy to use, stable Macintosh PC. Maybe it's a move to use more open source developers. x86 is well documented and used - liked by many open source developers. Open the hardware for the Mac and create a universe of Linux distributions designed for each PC/Notebook/Tablet/MiniPC model. Standard hardware makes development a breeze, doesn't it?)
Get your Unix fortune now!
Lack of hardware support will REALLY harm Linux. Take the airport extreme card, for example. It doesn't work on my laptop w/ Ubuntu Linux. I love Ubuntu, but if I can't go wireless I am increasingly less motivated to use it.
Who moved my sig?
Wine runs on FreeBSD on x86-32, so it will run on OS-X on x86-32. Developers might just start targeting Wine and cover Windows (wine is a subset of the Windows APIs), OS-X, Linux, HURD, and all the BSDs.
Is it just me, or does "Cocoa Ducks" sound like one fuck of a cereal?
I don't understand this line:
It will still be difficult (a bit less maybe) to develop cross-platform apps with all the proprietary hardware in place.
What hardware is proprietary? Pretty much just the MB, otherwise you have USB, PCI, video cardds people are used to, etc. etc. etc.
I don't think many people had problems with Mac development because the hardware was too proprietary.
As for price, a $400 Mac mini sounds pretty good and fits right in that range you were talking about.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, what Anita Coney doesn't understand is that software gets COPIED and DISTRIBUTED. The car analogy doesn't work because you don't copy your car and sell the copies. OSS doesn't work if it's encumbered by patents because you can't copy and redistribute without a licence.
What is the point of a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about arguing with each other? Making slashdot owners rich! Hurrah!
First, he spends about 2/3rds of the article trash-talking open source applications. They're not intuitive, he claims, and thus haven't been accepted much. Somehow macos is going to kill them (even though he claims they aren't accepted?)
But in the last third (last 4 paragraphs) is where he actually makes some arguements, instead of just trashing open source applications.
First, he makes two claims obviously false claims. First, source apps haven't targeted macos, but suddenly will. Simply wrong. Lots of open source apps have been ported to os-x. But even more rediculous is the notion that macos on intel support will be to the exclusion of linux support. Utterly stupid. There's a very strong established trend for multi-platform support on almost all major open source apps. Suddenly everyone's going to abandon gnu autoconfig, automake and libtool? Yeah, right!
Then in the 3rd to last paragraph, he talks about the GPL's "rigid license requirements". Ok, compared to BSD or public domain, maybe? But compared to Apple's macos? Or any other proprietary software. The GPL's source code release requirements are only "rigid" to one group of people... the proprietary software vendors, who would really, really like to appropriate all that free code, if only they themselves wouldn't have to play by the same rules.
But Dvorak claims everyone who's believed the GPL was a good idea in the past is suddenly going to see profit opportunity and abandon the GPL. Doesn't seem too likely. This is an old, well worn fear/unknown argument that seemed believable years ago when Red Hat, Caldera and others companies started selling, going public, etc. Hackers worldwide weren't suddenly overcome by greed then, seems unlikely now.
But the fear is really laid on thick in the last two paragraphs. Apple's going to benefit (probably), so somebody is necessarily going to suffer. Suddenly linux is going to have a new "enemy", and together Apple and Microsoft are going to destroy linux.
Yeah, like Microsoft hasn't already been trying as hard as they can? And Apple hasn't already been trying to draw people to macs as agressively as they know how? All of a sudden, because Apple's switching chips, BOTH Apple and Microsoft are going to try to attract new customers where they weren't before.
It's all so silly. If these are the best argument Dvorak can dream up for the impending doom of linux, open source and free software... well, I think those of us who use and depend on linux on a daily basis can sleep well tonight, without nightmares of fear, uncertainty and doubt whether the rest of the linux world suddenly shun linux in favor of macos when we awake in the morning.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
.. the other way around.
look, apple seems to 'be on to something' with their glomming of fancy API's onto a fairly solid and sold comp-sci base (BSD'nix), but the same exact glomming is still going strong in "La La Linux Land", as if that were all Open Source was all about..
hackers. do not put down your compilers. the reason OSX is 'able to do the CPU switcheroo' in the first place, is because of _your_ tools...
if nothing else, Apple pulling a bait and switch on a few million yoinks (powerbook'ers, gads!) demonstrates:
a) source code is valuable, because source code which is shared freely changes everyones standards, rapidly, by 'sharing the standard bearing' among a group of people who care: coders scratching itches.
b) source code is easy, its the hardware thats hard.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
It's obviously true that Apple will want to put out their hardware on Mac-standardized hardware so they don't have to deal with the many-splendored array of hardware options that face Windows users. Let's think this through.
It doesn't seem impossible that various vendors will start to create "Apple compatible" hardware replacement options, built specifically to work with Apple's designs. That is the world of competition.
With this level of standardization, it isn't much of a jump that someone will produce another OS that can be installed onto a system assembled from these standardized components. Imagine how much that would simplify system configuration. I think that the Open Source community would find that target to be irresistable.
If the use of such a Linux were to proliferate, it would increase the demand for these parts, thus significantly increasing the market for them, making them more competitive and cheaper. Eventually this would result in a major subclass of highly compatible, low-maintenance hardware and software systems.
The downside to this is that it would lock vendors into being largely copycats, with Apple doing all of the meaningful innovation. I'm sure Apple would love that. For everyone else, there will still be Microsoft.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I used to run Mathematica on a 386 with no 387 coprocessor (during the 386 phase when coprocessors were $400 not $100). It worked as long as you were aware that any floating point operation was equal to 0 (i.e. 2+2 = 4 but 2.0 + 2.0 = 0). Since I did mainly symbolic stuff it wasn't a huge issue.
Mind you later there were drivers which came out which let you fake having a coprocessor so you wouldn't even have this limitation (though floating point math was still really really slow).
Not sure what this means for a GUI but I imagine a similar scenerio might hold.
How long before someone creates a VMware-style Windows-hosted emulator to run Mac OS X?
First off, people don't use the Mac just for the interface, they use it because of the hardware as well. The idea that Mac will be switching to intel chips will kill that. What's the point in buying a Mac if it isn't any faster or better than a normal PC? The interface is overrated. The latest Gnome and KDE desktops are just as good, better actually, because of the extensive customization available. What can I customize on a Mac? The wallpaper? Everything on a Mac is preset for you, and there is no changing anything. You buy what they want and use what they want. What sort of crap is "you will not be allowed to run Mac OS on a PC"? "Allowed"?? Don't overrate the threat - there isn't one. -ron
Internet failure is always just around the corner. As more and more users hook up with even faster connections than before, if the backbones don't keep up (like my ISP isn't right now...) then the entire internet could slow to a crawl and stall out under the weight of the spam and automated virus break-in attempts from zombie machines with 6 megabit cable connections running 24/7 infecting more and more PCs. =)
Debian Sarge is better that all the mac cats
"... Why is it that when it comes to software you demand complete freedom..."
Because software is like speech.
(IOW, you actually answered your own question.)
... ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Füh--- Hey, wait a minute... I'd thought that was a Windows meme!
Ignore this signature. By order.
I disagree with you, but I wish I could mod you up more than once.
A lot of commentators _really_ are speaking out of their ass on this one.
For example, one of them notes that Apple may face a challenge since Darwin doesn't support as many drivers on Intel x86 as it does on PPC. This is a _very_ important point. What do you think most Linux kernel development is? It isn't mostly scheduler algorithms and such. It's drivers, drivers and more drivers. Look at most of the patches for the Linux kernel. Most of them are to support the amazing diversity of hardware here in the x86 world.
If Dvorak and Co. sincerely believe that OS X will, one day, run on any and all x86 hardware, they first better realize that that day won't be very soon. It takes a lot of developers and a lot of effort to support the whole x86 world, especially with the standard Apple has set for stuff that "just works." I believe (and everyone else should too) that Apple will very much limit the KIND of hardware OS X can run on, so that Apple will remain the primary hardware vendor of Apple machines.
Vaughan-Nichols, for example, writes:
"The part of Mac OS X that talks to drivers is based on FreeBSD. No, the BSD operating systems don't have as many developers as Linux, but their best people are the equal of Linux's best."
The issue here isn't that FreeBSD doesn't have a lot of drivers. The issue is that Darwin _is not_ FreeBSD! Darwin is "based upon FreeBSD," and the Apple developers will have to track FreeBSD development. And FreeBSD development is not nearly as rapid as Linux, and even LINUX is behind the curve on supporting third-party hardware. Meanwhile, Linux driver development is starting to be driven by the corporate world too: you see Intel, HP, and other companies contributing programmer time to these drivers. It would be a strange day indeed if these big companies started throwing their weight behind Apple's experiment instead, and pulled a 180 on this.
The only thing I do agree with is that this should be an impetus for developers to start unifying and throwing their weight at the desktop. This is already happening in a lot of ways, and will only continue. I see a lot of innovation from apps whose implementation has been simplified by high-level programming: I'm talking about PyGTK and Mono apps.
I realized that myself and have begun throwing my brainstorming and programmer time toward trying to make Linux Desktop better for all of us. To put the user interface argument to sleep, I think Keith Packard and anyone else with low-level graphics programming understanding should continue pushing for a move to a direct-rendering-enabled X server, so desktop developers can use the fancy effects Mac OS X has had for a few years. And we should continue innovating with apps like Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy, while keeping strong staple apps like Galeon/Epiphany and Evolution running as strong as they are.
And that's just the GTK/GNOME world. There's lots of really amazing and wonderful innovation happening in KDE world too. Have you ever used AmaroK? Best music managing program I've ever seen (way better than iTunes). And it's only been in serious development for a year or two.
As for the suggestion to "just pick one desktop," I think that's ridiculous. Don't destroy a desktop: simply continue unifying the toolkits. Fine-tune the engines that allow QT apps to look and feel like GTK apps, and vice versa. Get some agreement on both sides about things like Open and Save dialogs. And, of course, make this unification OPTIONAL, since I, for one, don't mind having some apps using the Plastik theme and other apps using SmoothGnome. But don't rm -rf * years of development only because you don't like to have a choice.
I think the times are really exciting for Linux developers. We have a chance to put together a serious desktop for developers and for users, and we will be competing alongside the biggest players in the industry. I think we can do it. It's not as grim as it seems.
How could intel inside a mac harm a kernel?
I really wish journalists (and slashdotters) would make a distinction between 'linux' and 'commercial adoption of linux.'
Even if all of the developers 'leave linux and start writing osx apps' - linux will still be successful with it's target audience. Who is the target audience? Beats me, but I'm pretty sure it aint the type of user who uses OS X.
Who's Dvorak?
Will Mac's have the "Intel inside" sticker now? Those are...great.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
The article just said "in fact Unix/Linux users are switching to mac" and thats all!
Probably even saying to mac instead of to OSX meant to Linux@PPC.
He's talking about using Macs for web servers and stuff.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The glee in the antitrust division at DOJ would make up for it . . .
hawk
Adding a separate Altivec VPU doesn't sound plausible, especially since such a beast is not currently being manufactured. FWIW, OS X 10.4 is officially supported on several G3 Macs (Blue G3, Pismo, Kihei & Kiva iMac, iceBook). OS X is designed to handle a lot of alternate paths.
It doesn't matter what CPU Apple uses. The Intel switch won't get them more marketshare or less, either. Properly spun, no one will care what processor it's on.
I'll care, 'cause I'm a techie and I've coded 8080's enough to hate little endian. But I'm the miniscule minority.
So while they may take marketshare away from HP or Dell (or for that matter lose it to them), that trajectory won't be any different than if they didn't switch.
What would stop MS from getting Windows in a state where it can boot on this hardware? This isn't something MS would spring on us immediately. They'd wait until x86 Apple hardware is all over the place then proceed to knife the crap out of Apple's baby.
Adding ObjC support to the Intel compiler is probably the least of their problems.
PPC Macs will be around for a while still, and Apple will have to support them. Since the Intel compiler doesn't do PPC, this means Apple will have to either keep using GCC, or use GCC together with the Intel compiler. And the second option brings up compatibility issues: exactly how well do the two compilers play together? Apple will want to ensure that developers can write cross-platform code without too much hassle.
So my guess is that GCC will stay around for the foreseeable future, in some capacity or another. But I could be wrong, of course: a couple of weeks ago, I was mocking the very idea of an Intel-based Mac. Maybe you should ask Dvorak what he thinks.
He is famous (sort of). He is connected. He has a soap box on a major commercial website. Therefore, what he says is truth and wisdom. You, by contrast, are some schmuck on slashdot. You think that just because you know something about computers you are better than him? Smarter than him? Your words more meaningful, correct, or relevant? A resounding NO! I say to you!
If Dvorak thinks changing from PowerPC to x86 will make it easier to develop FOSS on the Mac, then by the power of Hades let it be so! If Apple is abandoning PowerPC/Cell, mere months before vastly powerful multicore (nay, polycore!) cell PCs appear, in favor of a platform that has no multicores yet and is a laggard in the 64 bit arena, it is not up to mere mortals such as yourself to inveigh Dvorak the Truth Giver with your driveling claptrap. It is only through his god-like celebrity vision that we mere slashdotters, reprehensible scum that we are, the very feces of society, fit only to be flushed into the sewer with muck and slime, it is only through his arbitrary received wisdom that we have any hope of understanding this Holy Platform Change.
The biggest problem with emulating a mac on pc hardware or emulating a pc on mac hardware is the vastly different CPU architecture. One future technology that will be available by the time the new macintels launch is the x86 virtualization from both AMD and Intel.
So on a mac you could run a virtual Longhorn and a virtual linux at native speeds.
Now on a white box implementation running longhorn you should be able to run a virtual mac and linux. I know OSX is only suppose to run on mac hardware. But you could emulate any hardware ment to secure the OS. Some may say it won't be possible...
But There is no way to keep this from being broken. The best you can do is make it difficult. Essentially you can't have a secret if you provide the answer... A working system being the answer. This is why every single attempt at copy protection and media encryption has failed and is destined to fail.
So I'm looking forward to running the best OS and having all the others available at native speeds...
CRASCH
> Hacking aside, Apple is committed to locking down OSX for x86 to
> Apple-branded hardware.
Three options here.
1. The new x86 Macs only run OS X. In this case there is zero change in new adoption and a slow bleed away since Apple will always be behind the tech curve. The PPC chip was their only ace in the hole, they run stock IDE drives, year old video cards, etc. Since they only introduce new hardware twice per year that also means that they will usually be six months to a year behind on the CPU.
2. The new Mac hardware is a stock Dell compatible PC capable of running Windows. This means it will be a good universal box capable of running OS X, BSD, Linux and Windows. Appealing to some, but always overpriced and underpowered, see above. More interesting will be the instant porting of OS X to commodity hardware. This will be resisted at Apple but pretty hard to prevent. By not selling it though, they are creating a massive pirate community instead of paying customers.
3. Option two but with a pervasive DRM system to eliminate running on clone hardware. Massive backlash as Apple is perceived as going over to the 'dark side'. The Apple faithful will of course drink the kool aid and remain faithful, insisting DRM is now good because Steve said so. In a sane world it would invoke the Justice Dept's Anti-trust division's wrath but we all know that won't happen.
Democrat delenda est
I know a lot of /. readers will hate to hear this but, so what? I love the ideals of Linux, but it SUCKS. It's too hard to install, and there are WAY too many "packages" and other crap that the average user doesn't have time to figure out. I've used plenty of distros, including the latest UBuntu. It's come a long way, but it's NOWHERE NEAR the ease of turning a Mac on, and having it work. Honestly I'm sick of computers being too hard to use. THIS IS 2005! THE OS IS BORING! COMPUTERS SHOULD JUST WORK!!!! If Apple can bring their ease of use to cheapers machines, than that's what we should be using. Linux, you had your chance, and you failed.
How is this overrated? Don't you understand how journalism works? Do you think the commercial aspect is in the periphery instead of the forefront? Surely you don't believe journalists are pursuing the truth, or have some sort of altruistic drive to accurately and objectively inform some abstract public?
If you do, I can recommend some up-and-coming tickers on the stock market...
Come on, this guy is a genius, they should consider him for Nobel prize this year.
Will they check for a mac flag?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all the hardware drivers in Darwin, and thus open source?
If so, they should not lock it down, but rather say that anything other than Apple Mac is unsupported. After all, the API would be the same, the CPU would be the same, and isn't that all that an application should care about?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually, I think that Apple has a good reason for wanting to ensure that the hardware is locked to the software and vice versa -- the same reason that they are going to the PC in the first place. OS X is much slower than Linux PPC. I mean, you can get benchmarks where Linux beats Windows XP and vice versa, but there's almost nothing that OS X has, performance-wise, over Linux.
Which means that if people were able to put Windows on their Mac, or if they bought a PC and tried OS X out on it, then people would realize how much worse of a deal Macs are -- not just in hardware, but also in software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Dvorak is smoking a few things, at least.
I fail to see why a real programmer cares about the CPU. They care about the compiler and the support libraries. About the only thing that OSX is going to impact is the GUI.
Unless Apple can get their hardware costs down so they can compete with a free OS on a generic cheap (and possibly old) PC, they're not going to push out any existing hobby desktops. If they sharpen their pencil a bit and get around to fixing kernel inefficiences, maybe they can compete in the server market. I don't see the situation changing for the professional desktop.
This isn't M$. If you can code, you can develop on linux now and port easily enough to OSX, and you can just as easily do it the other way. If you need a GUI, that is where you'll get your split. OSX may support X11, but I doubt KDE & Gnome with all the trainload of dependencies will work too well in a subservient mode.
The biggest threat to Linux adoption is Linux.
With a core audience of geeks, it dooms itself to stay in the geek ghetto by blowing off usability.
Consumers don't want to hear the ol' geek line "If you don't know how to use Linux you don't deserve to use Linux."
I believe Linux has the potential to be the most popular OS ever, destroying Micro$oft and Apple both.
But 'tween here and there a lot needs to change.
For starters, there needs to be one window manager that's clearly designed primarily for consumer audiences. Consumers are curious about Linux, but a lot of folks just walk away when they learn that they have to choose between a dozen different flavors.
Which one is right for them?
It will be the one that decides it wants them more than the others do.
You can ever try out Kino if you wish. Whatever. The best thing about Linux is that you can take it with you to almost any platform you touch.
Open Source Sushi
The Mac OS was built around a Unix kernel not unlike Linux, but with a very advanced and slick user interface. The normal Apple menu structures and way of doing things are what the majority of both Mac and Windows users expect to see. The operative word is "intuitive."
... remember 'Autopilot' from Openoffice 1.1? They call it 'wizard' in OpenOffice 2.
Gnome: Your applications are in yoru applcations menu. OK, applications isn't the best name, but it looks pretty obvious that this is where you find stuff
OSX: Your main applications are in the dock. The rest are under purple smiley face thing
Gnome: Firefox Web browser
OSX: Icon on dock for Safari. Thing in Applications menu called 'Safari'
Gnome: File Browser
OSX: Purple smiley face thing. When I start it it's called 'Finder'. I don't want to search for anything, thanks, I just want to look at my files...oh wait, that's what it does. Look at my files. Why is it called finder?
There are the odd pathetic Linux distro where GUI apps don't result in say, menu entries, which is pretty weak in 2005. But there's plenty of other distros that do. Fedora and Ubuntu would be two of them.
The Linux world suffers from a lack of modern intuitive menus and commands. Anyone who has played with the Open Office Programs such as the Powerpoint clone called "Impress" soon finds themselves lost in a jungle of menu structures and naming conventions.
Agreed in some respects
I can use Windows and Gnome quite comfortably...to change what a file opens with in those OSs, I can change its properties. To do the same, in OSX, I have to 'Get Info' on the file. What does getting info have to do with changing what program the file opens with? Doesn't the file already have 'info' inside it?
I honestly don't believe OSX to be the great UI everyone thinks it is. I think people's minds are colouded by its very pretty visual appearance, a dislike of MS, and an assumption that Linux doesn't care about UI (a lot of Linux users/developers don't, it depends on your distro).
OS X is a closed system, and it's not as developer friendly as many users would have you believe. From breaking APIs to 'broken by design' macisms, you'll have as much or more to bitch about in OS X than Windows. Some examples are the co-opting of OSS projects to breaking thinks like runtime linking just to be different than other platforms. Why would you want to force all runtime linked code to remain memory resident? hello! Linux is a truely open platform, and it'll work on a lot more hardware than OS X on intel.
However, most people just want a web browser , word processor, and media player... and there is no accounting for taste. I personally enjoy totem over the lockin with quicktime to limited formats, and the few things like fink on OS X are clumsy at best. Take for example the gcc 4.0 built libs on the last OS X release.
Apple will prevent OS X running on clone hardware (i.e. that are cloning whatever hardware method is used by OS X to determine that it is running on "Apple" hardware). Apple did not say no other OS could run on Apple hardware, only that their OS will only run on Apple hardware.
This guy predicts things all the time and is generally always wrong. I remember in the 90's he used to predict Intel would make their own OS to compete with Microsoft, where is it?
They're switching to Intel because they've been abandoned three times before. First with the 680x0, then with the Motorola PPC, and finally with IBM. Now they simply want a nice safe partner. Intel may not be exciting, but they'll be there for the long haul.
MacOSX, Linux, Freebsd, Solaris (soon open source too), BeOS (ressurected, has a new name, forget what it is), UAE (Universal Amiga Emulator), all on one hardware platform, finally. Those are the ones that interest me. Might be good.
And doggone it, if the shuttle was fine with O-Rings the *last* 5 times it launched, it'll be fine with 'em this time too!
Tweet, tweet.
How long do you think it'll take for someone to make a Linux emulator/compabililty library for OSX?
Mac users will be able to run non-free binary-only software compiled for x86 Linux, just like FreeBSD users.
There are some big 3d animation packages wich aren't available to Mac users, only x86 windows and x86 linux.
The new Mac OSX will use Intel P4 CPU and drop the Open Firmware; the Sun right now has workstations and servers using AMD Opteron and running Solaris 10 X64. Sun sells hardware and software as 1 package, and Apple will do exactly the same time. Does anyone try to install XP on Sun AMD machine? I don't know but I don't think anyone will do it because Solaris is way more better than Windows. Same for Mac.
Default your Oracle EBS with success !
Even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
It would be like Jessica Simpson revealing something factually accurate about an upcoming tour of hers and then offering her vision of where the music industry is headed. You don't treat both pieces of information the same way.
Why would anyone move to the Itanic? The Itanic I failed so badly you could not even really buy it. Itanic II has failed so badly that Chevrolet sold more Corvette convertibles than Intel sold Itanic II chips in 2005! I would hardly say buying any Itanic system is a worth while investment from a collectors standpoint...
FWIW Intel lost 20 billion last year in projected Itanic II sales that did not solidify...
Your Average Joe
Depends on what you call "OS X". Darwin is freely available and running on Intel now. The only thing you can't get for free from Apple is the GUI, which can be replaced with GNOME or KDE. Tom Yager discusses: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/03/23TCtige r_1.html
Coincidence != irony.
I don't care what Dvorak thinks. I gave up on him in the early '90s.
Then you might be talking about hurting linux market share. It would mostly hurt RedHat, and would do so by targetting buyers of commercial software for Linux. If I was Apple I would only be marginally interested in getting the OSS developer running on a Mac.
I work at a company that delivers Linux based engineering apps. All of our competition does as well. Our customers buy RHEL instead of installing SUSE or Debian or whatever. Why? Because that's what we support. Same goes for our competition. RedHat has done a good job at getting buy in from developers of commercial software for Linux.
Now, release OS X on x86 and add RedHat EL compatibility. You very well might get my customer's interest. These aren't your low end cheap hardware users. These are users that have moved away from Sun Workstations to get better price/performance. Even when running Linux they are buying $6000-$20,000 boxes, they need beefy boxes.
Apple will have a hard time breaking into the engineering market if they sit back and say, port your software to OS X. But if they say they are RHEL compatible, then there is no porting to do. They may just grab some customers, which are already accustomed to expensive hardware. Ultimately in this market, higher performance machines would grab some business. They might also get some converts that like an easier to maintain system.
FOSS != freeware
Apple can sell whatever they want so long as it is licensed Freely. Until then, they are just another enemy.
Luke-Jr
i wonder if this is just a ploy by Jobs to get IBM off of their stupid asses and start being players in the CPU marketplace. IBMs' dropping the ball on the original PC, OS/2 (remember, Gates wrote v1.0), and now pissing off Apple by not evolving the PPC chip as fast as they could be might make sony, ms, and the other console company (sorry, can't recall the third one) rethink their option to use the PPC in their products.
It won't kill off Linux, but will seriously damage Longhorn 2007/8. Since Microsoft has a big stake in Apple, wouldn't it be surprising IF Longhorn = OSX86? Now that's a horrid thought.
This is possibly cause for concern. Open Firmware is considerably more robust and extensible than the traditional PC BIOS stuff. Network boot stuff, for example, Still Doesn't Work Right on the PC.
I sure hope Apple has a plan for firmware that works better than what IBM, Dell, and other PC vendors tolerate for firmware enabled functions like network booting and re-imaging. This stuff Just Works on the Mac today, thanks to Open Firmware.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
n.
Volunteer
n.
A term used to describe a Free Software Developer, often employed in a lame attempt to silence legitimate criticism of a severe and often usability-related flaws of the supposedly superior software: "John Devorak should stop whining incessantly about how OpenOffice is cluttered and maligning the work of people who have given him a gift. He has no right to complain about the work of volunteers".
self-defeating
adj.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
For the love of everything you hold dear stop republishing the views of Dvorak.
A stopped clock tells the right time twice a day - spouting enough rubbish predictions year on year means you eventually get something right.
All of this is Dvorak promotion.
But it will harm Windows even more! OS X isn't necessarys for existing linux users, it's better suited to persuade Windows users!
...but their VAIO notebooks have done exceptionally well for them at least for a period; they were no.1 by revenue in 2001 (no.2 by shipments) with consistently higher pricing than the competition.
That Sony are now ~no.6 (by laptop shipments) is partly due to price, but also because their competitors (HP, Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Fujitsu) now produce nicer notebooks that compete with Sony on weight, ergonomics and aesthetics. There wasn't that same competition in 2001.
I don't care beause OS X is not Microsoft and because OS X is still a Unix.
If, and I stress if, the claim turns out to be true, it'll be bad for the OSS thing, yeah, but not for the MS Windoze vs. Unix thing or the MS Windoze vs. Everybody-Else thing.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Until OSS developers can purchase Apple clones, being locked into one vendor's hardware is nearly as reprehensible as being a locked into one vendor's software. Lets face the facts: Apple hardware is overpriced. Paying a premium for the Apple experience may appeal to some. But it will never capture programmer mindshare even when based on an Intel CPU.
I can a) keep Mail open without having a window cluttering my desktop and still get a notification when a new email comes in, and b) keep iTunes open and control it from the Dashboard widget while the main window remains closed
I think on Windows, this is called "minimize application to Taskbar Notification Area".
Quite the opposite I would think... disgruntled Mac fans who would never switch to MS are coming to Linux. Just because MacOS will now be available on x86 doesn't mean it becomes free. Well, not if you don't count the warez versions that will hit the torrent sites any time now.
Meh.
"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
- JCD in the SF Examiner, 1984
"UNIX is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body."
- JCD, 1985
"Folks, the Mac platform is through -- totally,"
- JCD in PC Mag, 1998
.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Obviously we don't know any specs, but based on their history it seems likely an Intel based box put together by Apple will feature specs roughly equivalent to the high-end available from other makers. But it will have two things that set it apart from those others: a prettier box, and support that is actually worth your time to call if you have a problem.
Support? Yea, but as soon as Mac support discovers that you're running Win on their box they'll say, "Hmm. . . Mr. Smith Mac guarantees the quality of their entire package. If you decide to put a lower quality operating system on our suprerior quality hardware that voids the waranty." Click.
And besides I've always thought the weird non-standard case shapes and designs kill upgradability.
So could somebody please tell me why they would want Mac hardware? If you want a pretty case there are all type of cool aftermarket/custom cases out there for standard non-mac boxes. Mac hardware is hardly upgradable. Mac has a monopoly on Mac hardware too (read $$$$). And NOW their processor isn't even unique.
Mac hardware is an all-around bad choice compared to similar quality generic hardware.
Have you used Mac support? Most tech support seems to take as their goal figuring out why they don't have to help you; Apple support actually seems to consider helping you an acceptable, even desirable outcome. I'm assuming I'd be calling them on a clear-cut hardware issue, and that I'd be able to dual-boot back to OSX. My real point is that with any computer maker other than Apple, I would never, ever bother calling their tech-support line. I can think of no cicumstance where I would imagine it might be productive to do so.
Weird case shapes and designs can kill upgradeability, true. Last time I did a really significant upgrade to an existing box rather than getting a whole new one? Early 90s. Though in support of your point, it was a Mac and a hacksaw was involved. These days I'm partial to laptops anyway.
If Mac makes PC-equivalent hardware, they won't have a monopoly on it, nor do I think that's what's responsible for their current high prices. Rather, it is that they only sell high quality hardware. You can't get an el-cheapo no-name box that runs their OS. And you still won't be able to. But I don't want an el-cheapo anyway.
I'm not saying I'll imediately run out and buy an Intel Mac. Just that even for a box to run Windows on, I expect they'll be definitely worth considering, and I welcome their addition to my choices.