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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 dead now.
Rock on!
The myth that Apple Corporation has some sort of brilliant hardware engineering competency is over. It's the pretty industrial design and intuitive software that's their strength.
I love your implication that there is some sort of secret thing apple corporation knows about "motherboard design" that nobody else knows.
Intel designs motherboards with intel chipsets and auxilary processors for intel CPUs and they are great. If you aren't interested in gaming you'll also have an intel video adapter on there too - do you think they are just throwing crap together or don't know how to handle Intel processors as well as Apple?
Apple doesn't need to design or manufacture any of the hardware at all, other than the inevitable beautful chasis.
Whether or not Apple Corp restricts their operating system will not be an engineering or technological barrier, it will be an arbitrary one.