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Is Apple & Community Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?
kbeischer writes "John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch. In the editorial, he links to an older article on BOZO (bitter obstanate zealot order) users causing market share loss. All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?"
This is ridiculous.
Let's take a step back:
Apple is now less than 2% of IBM's PowerPC business, and less than 3% of Freescale's.
IBM is focused on the server market, embedded markets, and gaming console marketplace. Not desktop and portable (especially), areas where Apple desperately needs processors.
Freescale is, and has been, focused on the embedded, communications and automotive markets, and the fact that some of the processors were also good for some Apple products was almost incidental.
PowerPC in the desktop marketplace is going nowhere fast, and IBM has shown that in spades for the last two years. Its renewed focus and commitment to the game console market eclipses any priorities Apple would ever hope IBM to have.
So, Apple made a tough choice. A choice its been planning for, just in case, for over 5 years.
The Intel (vs AMD) move was one of convenience and political expedience. Intel gets a big PR win, Apple gets its point across. Once the x86 architecture switch is complete, the hard part is over, and Apple is free to use other products from, e.g., AMD, as do many other x86 vendors. And Apple hasn't forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace in the least. The message now is simple, and has to be kept simple: we're moving to x86.
Further, PowerPC support WILL continue for an indefinite period into the future. The Mac OS X product lifecycle is now about two years. Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will ship likely around MWSF 2007, and will support PowerPC. It will have a lifecycle of two years, for a total of continuing support for four years from now. Apple has been providing security updates for the previous version of the OS from the current one since Mac OS X 10.0; therefore, we can assume security updates and fixes for a minimum of six years. And that's just from what we know now; the support may in fact last longer than that.
At some point, support for older hardware is dropped from the current version of the OS (e.g., G3s). What's the difference whether the hardware that supplants it contains an IBM PowerPC G6 or an Intel Pentium 6?
Further, this crap about software companies - already using Xcode, mind you - arbitrarily dropping PowerPC support from their applications early is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Aside from which, the 68K -> PPC transition, as rocky as it was, is often viewed as the quintessential success in hardware transitions.
I'm sorry if some people really want people to panic and stop buying all PowerPC hardware, and possibly commit mass suicide. But with the CLEAR commitment of Freescale and IBM to literally everywhere but the desktop(/portable) market in terms of the features and performance Apple needs, I can't see this decision as anything but a good thing.
There've certainly been Bitter, Obstinate Zealots around in the Mac community for a while now. They're the ones who've railed against every move that Apple has made that shakes their world view. The amount of flamage directed from the "old guard" at OS X went on for years. Putting the application title in the menu makes the system completely unusable! What idiot came up with the Dock? Where's my control strip? If the trash can isn't on the desktop it's no good! And -- my God -- the Finder isn't perfectly "spatial" anymore! Wah! Wah! Wah! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law!
... that's blind zealotry.
Jesus Christ, people, give it a rest.
You know what? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they've actually, y'know, put some thought into this decision and aren't just doing it because they think x86 chips will look prettier in those brushed aluminum cases isn't blind zealotry. Saying that, yes, you'll be willing to look at Intel Macs when they come out isn't blind zealotry. But rending your clothes and beating your chest and screaming, "No! Never! I'll keep my PowerMac until you pry my cold, dead fingers from my mouse, and goddammit, my mouse has only one button!"
Mr. Kheit, for your long and distinguished service in saying "Hell No, We Won't Go" to every single change Apple has made, I award you the Big Red Clown Nose of Bozo Punditry.
(And, don't worry, Dvorak fans! I have faith he'll reclaim it soon.)
I wrote: "G4 core has always been close to twice as fast clock-for-clock than the Pentium 4"
But do you remember how [the G4] took a year to scale from 450 to 500 MHz?
Don't try and snow me, man, I'm not making a dramatic or surprising announcement here, this is a totally conservative prediction.
It's shipping at 1.67 now. That would already be faster than a 3 GHz P4 except for the damn 166 MHz bus. There is absolutely no risk in predicting better performance from an e600 than from a 3 GHz P4, because Freescale doesn't have to do anything extraordinary to make that happen.
The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4. That still means it's slower per clock than the e600. And the e600 will run existing Mac OS code native, not under emulation.
Remember, we're talking about what use Apple can make of the Pentium M or the MPC8461. Not what the Pentium M can do in a laptop that already exists running software that's already compiled for it and optimised for it, because that's not what Apple has.
Maybe this is their last gasp. Maybe they'll process-shrink it to 2 GHz by this time next year, I don't know, but when someone starts talking about the "G5 Laptop" as if that or the Pentium M are the only options... well, hell man, that's just not the case and you know it.
Mot/Freescale has, since 2000, shown the classic symptoms of a company trying to compete in a capital- and R&D-intensive industry without sufficient resources.
And yet despite that they've managed to keep clocking up the short-pipeline G4 and keeping the core within spitting distance of Intel's MUCH more expensive effort. And what's been holding them back? A frigging socket!
Now they've come up with a damn good solution to that, Apple pulls out. And you're telling me that's their fault?
Intel has been plowing along with a variety of architectures, one of which was bound to not suck.
Intel has precisely two architectures right now. The P4 core, and the old P6 core. Everything they're shipping is a variant of one or the other of these. Whether they call it Celeron or Pentium 4 or Pentium Mobile, it's one or the other of these two designs.
That's one more core than either IBM or Motorola/Freescale, yes, but despite having all the resources and all the time and all the talent of two major former competitors in hand... they're still barely ahead. And they've screwed up badly before... they got the StongArm from DEC and developed a successor that was barely faster at twice the clock rate.
Yes, the odds favor them. But the odds have favored them for years and they haven't managed a clear victory... ever. They've marketed and made deals and bluffed their way out every time. That's how they beat Alpha, that's how they beat MIPS, that's how they beat PA/RISC. They convinced people they were unbeatable, like they've convinced you they were unbeatable, and when they've shown their hands it's been a pair of Itanics.
For better or worse, Intel is the only major supplier of PC CPUs in the world
As of Monday, yes, that's absolutely true.
But that would have been try no matter when Apple pulled the plug. They would have done it in 1997 if they thought they could get away with it: that's when Rhapsody was announced as the Macified version of NeXTSTeP. They would have done it in 2000 or 2001 if they'd been able to swing people over to the original plan for Rhapsody, instead of having to come up with Carbon as a stopgap to keep the ISVs from revolting. None of what you're saying now was any less true back then.
All I'm saying is that there's no other reason to do this NOW, rather than in 2001, or 2003, or 2007, other than Apple's got enough market share and cash to risk it now, and they've got enough developers on the NeXTstep-derived API that they can risk losing a few of the ones still coding to MacOS-derived Carbon for whom conversion is too much of a hurdle.
"All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform."
To answer that question, simply look at the extremely slow adoption rate of desktop Linux, which has more crazed zealots than any OS ever has or likely ever will.