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Does New Development For Mac OS X Make Sense?
DLWormwood wonders: "As a long time Mac developer, originally as a hobbyist and then a professional, I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform. With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance. (If it wasn't for the poor past performance of VPC, I would not have gotten my first Mac programming job.) Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'"
Apple is much more than just a processor. What really differentiates Apple from the Windows world is the OS. Not to get into the argument about stability, OS X is much more intuitive and overall an easier to use operating system.
I don't think that you will come into a situation where a help desk would tell a user to switch into Windows or run VirtualPC because I doubt that Macs will ever come with those pieces of software installed. Working at a helpdesk is not about telling users what they should do, it's about helping them do what they want to do
I think that now that Apple is switching to Intel they will have more flexibility in pricing and will probably continue to grow their market share. I'd say that the prospects for Mac developers will be better than ever in the future. If you need another opinion check out this article.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I don't think there really is a price premium on Macintoshes... but now we'll be able to see for sure.
I bet Apple products will be about the same prices as Dell, yet deliver more features and a lot more innovation.
Look at what happened when Aopen tried to make an x86 mac-mini competitor-- it was $100 more, without the OS, making it really $200 more expensive than the mini.
But I agree-- developing on the Mac platform is the best its ever been... the OS X API is complete (Though I'd have liked EnterpriseObjects back) and frozen in panther (interesting that they did that, and made a big deal out of it, cause it means they planned to move to Intel 2 years ago.)
Its a great time to write apps for the Mac as the Mac becomes less of an isolated fringe platform and more of a mainstream alternative to windows.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Don't forget the new buyers: I've already heard people say "Hey, if I could install Windows on it, then I would be willing to buy a Mac, because then if I didn't like it, I could always switch back."
The issue for developers isn't that bad - after all, apple appears to be making it fairly easy to produce cross platform code. If you were going to develop before, why not now? It will be many years before there is a significant number of apple intel systems to run PC stuff quickly. If you were going to write for the apple PPC last week, your situation hasn't changed much and won't for the next couple of years. You will write with standard PPC tools, or use the latest version of Xcode (or similar) which produces fat binaries, and runs on both platforms without a performance hit.
Interestingly, the major improvements in Tiger, such as core video and so on, move all the graphically intensive stuff into the GPU. The cleverness of this is that the lack of the altivec units aren't such a big issue if you use the OS X core API's - everything is done in the graphics card, altivec is much less important, and this means that emulation of the PPC code will work fairly fast on their software emulator (rosetta). So your legacy code isn't going to suffer too much, and newer code even less so using the core API's even if you don't use fat binaries, which you will.
Of course, you could just write for windows, but then you are going to miss a large number of apple users and watch other developers make money in that market whilst you compete in the win32 sphere. Your choice as a developer I guess.
Eventually, the powerbook I am writing this on will be a legacy piece of hardware because the number of people using PPC will be too small to be worth developing for.
However, a similar situation exists for old windows boxes, not because the processor has changed, but because the hardware requirements are too high for big new apps to work on it.
This process will take many years to occur, and won't be a problem for developers unless all new purchases stop for apple.
If this happens, you will get alot of warning over the next 6-12 months that its time to bail from apple.
As a user of apple computers, after the initial concern, I am much less worried about making new purchases because the obsolescence of the current models will take years to occur. It really isn't so different from the transition of OS 9 to OS X. You can still run stuff in classic mode. And my current power book is still a magical 12" laptop that does what I need, and will be good for a few years no matter what, and for which I'll still buy new software for (if its good enough to buy). So the market will still be there.
I don't think that many apple fans will jump ship, even if they are not happy - after all, what is the alternative? Go back to windows? Get your apps working under linux (like iLife, Keynote, etc?). Even if you feel abandoned by apple, the alternatives are still either a malware ridden platform or alot of hard work and a significant drop in the eye candy factor.
In the longer run, its going to be more a case of alot more dissatisfied windows users jumping ship and the apple user base growing, in my opinion.
My 2c worth
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Take your fear of people figuring out how to run X on beige boxes... Apple doesn't care about these folks. Simply by having not purchased a Mac, this portion of the market has already proven that they are unwilling to have ever paid the Apple premium so, in effect, Apple will virtually never loose a sale to this crowd.
You're wrong. I'm a UNIX geek turned OS X geek. I own a Mac (several, in fact). I own them because I adore OS X and because Apple makes laptops that sleep beautifully and instantly. I suspect the latter is more a function of OS X than it is of the hardware, but we'll have to see.
In any case, if a beige box (or PC laptop) ran OS X for $1500 less than my Mac cost... would I do that? You better believe I would. I'm not in it for the hardware. I'm in it for a UNIX with an awesome UI and great UI development tools, and that's what OS X is to me.
I sincerely doubt I'm alone.
Random and weird software I've written.
Maybe this is a misconception, but I thought that at some point the ancient x86 instruction set and registers were "set aside" in favor of a more modern RISC-style processor core, and the old x86 stuff is supported as a kind of pass-through layer on top of that. I understand that's the case with AMD's Athlon, anyhow.
This has been correct for everything since the Pentium Pro. CISC is a bad way to do a CPU, and everyone knows it. You can think of the x86 layer as a sort of machine code compression that actually increases how much code you can keep in cache at one point. A byte of x86 goes a lot farther than a byte of PPC.
-twb
Got a mac SE in 89 at the age of 11, gave it up in 94 for a pc, just for the game and tinker-factor.
I am one of the biggest closet mac lovers in the world. Till my mini this year i hadn't touched one in a decade, and now im happy.
Smalltalk, Obj-C, HONEST TO GOD FUCKING DESIGN!
Windows programming is a combination between brute force and kludged hack, with just almost no technique or architectural finesse. Get it done, and hope it works. When is the last time you saw a windows app that people used for 5 years without an update and said "yeah it works great". It's like disposable software, not disposable like a funcam, disposable like an adult diaper, you just can't put up with the same one for more than a day.
Linux. Love the theory, but 500 people each with their own pita view of how an OS should work... sucks. Love everything that goes on below the gui, and it makes a great server, though they redefine library hell.
OSX. This is what happens to software when people keep consistent design principles. Compatibility is secondary to consistency, and programming doesn't mean learning a new way to malloc memory for EVERY G-D interface you try to use. It's like all those MIT guys I knew made an os with all their theory, and kept with it, even when the marketing pricks masturbated on them with their quick-to-copy new features and API's, that were so badly designed that 5 months later they became "legacy" (do not fuck with me on this, look through the windows com+ and ATL specs, or anything involving OLE), and had absolutely nothing in common with any other api in the system.
Just cracked open XCode, and for the first time in years I'm looking forward to coding again. Everything is intuitive, 1 theory of operation to rule them all.
Maybe it's an american thing, but why the hell do people buy from companies with such a horrible history of design? Jesus, the only time Ford had a semi-reliable engine was when it was designed so simply that every 10k miles you could rebuild half the engine yourself and get it working well again that way, consumer-products shouldn't be brute forced.
Seriously, I've been a windows, then linux junkie for the last decade, but can any of you tell me there is any consistent design going on anywhere in there? Till dec 2003 you had to hardcode all the driver init hooks into the linux kernel with ifdefs, explain to me how that makes any sense. Well, another decade from now maybe Mach 1.0 will be out and another ridiculously long software milestone will have been reached.
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