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Mac Game Devs Speak on Intel Move
An Anonymous Reader wrote "InsideMacGames has posted a response to the news of Apple using Intel processors from both original Mac game developers as well as people who work on porting Windows games to OS X. Some negative and positive feedback is expressed, though it seems there's more uncertainty than anything else at this point. Can the fear of a Wine-like VM solution gutting the biz be balanced by faster CPU speeds?" From the article: "We think Apple's move to Intel is great. For one thing, it demonstrates that Apple is really serious about giving Windows-based computing head-to-head competition. For another, it lays the groundwork for the future of personal computing in a digitally connected home. And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."
"And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."
What about those games tooled towards DirectX... it isn't the architecture screwing us here...it is the lack of DirectX for OSX that is screwing us.
The name of the computer was osborne not amstrad.
Here explains the osborne effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne
Apple has always known about this, and has been very aggressive about not preannouncing ANYTHING, so as to not hurt sales of existing products. [snip] But if they didn't preannounce, then the developers wouldn't have time to get ready for the transition, which could potentially be worse.
As you state, unlike a new product like the Mac Mini or iPod Shuffle, they can't wait until the last minute to let the world know about it. They have to tell the developers about this well in advance, and I'm certain it's not feasable to put every single Mac software developer in the world under an NDA.
But if I can speculate, I would assume that, with technologies such as Rosetta and their Universal Binary system, your average user won't even know, or care, what the underlying architecture is, as the overall user experience would be identical.
I see this more akin to General Motors stating that next year's Sunfires and Cavaliers would be using chassis x instead of chassis y. As long as the experience is still excellent, the end user won't really care much, and won't hold off on buying their cars. Of course, I'm speaking about average joe users here, not the typical Slashdot crowd who actually understand these under-the-hood things...
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
"Apple writes all the drivers for OS X in the video department."
I doubt that. Even given that, my point went right over your head. You see, Mac users can't just buy off the shelf PC video cards put them in their macs, even if the mac had drivers for it. The ROM on the card is set for little endian, when macs use big endian. Making Mac cards more expensive (only difference being the rom and the box it came in). IIRC, there are ways of working around this, but they require a lot more patience than I've cared to have.
With the switch to Intel processors, the graphics cards will be physically identical in every way to the ones Windows uses, making using them easier. This means, the premium charge you had no choice to pay for being a mac customer will be gone. As people/companies write drivers for cards, one will be able to use those cards instead of the stock one that came with the mac.
Burn Hollywood Burn
OS X already works on Intel. Yesterday's demo was delivered using Tiger running on a Mac/Intel machine (3.6 GHz Pentium 4). Jobs even confessed that all previous versions of MacOS X have always been compiled for Intel also. (Of course the existence of project Marklar had always been rumored, he just confirmed it).
Xcode 2.1 was also released yesterday, providing cross-compilation and production of "universal" (fat) binaries. The developers got a copy yesterday at WWDC, and it's a free download for the rest of us. Of course we don't have the hardware to test the Intel binaries, but some of the developers will get Mac/Intel prototypes in two weeks to start testing their apps, and correcting the platform-specific issues.