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Apple May be Intel Show Pony
Robert writes "Computer
Business Review reports that the implications of Apple dropping IBM as its chip vendor
in favor of Intel, announced earlier this week, will straddle the broader computing
landscape. Apple stands to gain a competitive edge by partnering with Intel because
it will have access to slightly cheaper stuff."
Is it just me, or are the headlines and summaries becoming more and more sarcastic and twisted, especially with regards to anything Apple-related?
Apple May Be Intel Show Pony
Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become.
And that's just on the front page this morning! It's not that I have anything against a little editorializing, but these don't even seem like relevant comments any more...
Linux will be hurt by Apple moving to Intel like fish will be hurt by someone adding a bucket of water to the ocean.
KFG
Anyone who thinks the switch to Intel is all about cheaper components has surely lost their mind...
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There are a number of ways, and it's silly to think any will work 100%. I think they'll use custom motherboards along with a custom BIOS that OS X will have to recognize to run.
Of course the slashdot type crowd will find a way around it, but Apple will never sell copies for the general public, and they will never support it for non-macs. As long as they make it *difficult* for the general user to instal OS X on their Dells, etc.
I think saying Apple will *stop* people from running OS X on their computers is a bit much. That's why they have said they won't "allow" it.
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Apple will be able display the tons of technology Intel has developed. Look at the cool shit they have every year at the Intel Developer Forum. Look how little of it has been adopted into the mainstream (BTX for example). Intel can put Apple on the cutting edge.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Here's what I think is Jobs's plan. Apple sales will crumble anyway over the next year--he knows that--so I think we can expect massive discounts to employees of major corporations, of the order of 70 percent off with no restrictions on the numbers sold to individuals within those corporations for personal use--they buy them for relatives, friends, and so on. Apple will take the hit for a while because that way lots of powerbooks with OSX get into the hands of non-IT people in big companies--the people with the money. OSX is so spectacularly good they won't be able to help themselves being impressed. Then in 2006, just when MS begins its "upgrade to Longhorn" push, these managers who have had cheap Macs for a few months will think, "Er, no, we won't, thanks, lets look at these new Intel Macs." Then: Profit!
Why would Apple care about where else IBM is selling processors? The reason Apple is moving to x86 is because IBM has not been able to deliver cool-running PowerPCs. As we've seen from another /. article, laptops are now overtaking desktops in sales, and very clearly if Apple wants to retain the market position it has, or even grow it, it can't afford to wait for IBM to get its ducks in a row.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That is a 25+% profit margin on computer sales. To think this is going to chance is pure fantasy. It could if Apple did something totally radical to go head to head with Microsoft. But just switching a CPU will mean more of hte same thing.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Intel sits on every PC standards group and is the 800 pound gorilla that sees to it that those rules are not only followed to the letter, but that companies who deviate from them suddenly find themselves without Intel's support - truely a death sentence in the PC industry.
I'm on several of the JEDEC committees. Intel has no interest in developing hardware that breaks any rules.
It would be a weak protection though.
So? What would some enthusiasts getting MacOSX running on their Athlon 64s mena to Apple? Nothing.
But it will stop a significant clone industry from developing. Even if it's relatively trivial to get MacOSX to boot on generic hardware, doing this as a business means you'd be a nice fat target for Apple's lawyers under the DMCA.
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"While I agree with you that many will still buy Apple machines because it's 'easy', and of course they'll still get tech support, It'll be well under a year after release before the first pre-cracked OS X/x86 torrent is available download, which will mean they could lose quite a bit of business from the geek population."
They may lose some "business from the geek population", but I doubt it will be significant. I suspect the folks who run a cracked x86 version of OS X would not have been Apple customers anyway.
There are a significant number of people, like myself, who switched to OS X from Linux because it works without having to spend a weekend tweaking, testing, and swearing at the screen. It's likely we'll all line up to buy the new x86 (or whatever Intel chip) Macs. The guys who are running the cracked x86 will be the ones who don't mind having to spend hours playing, writing custom scripts, tweaking, and swearing in order to get the initial install to work, and then repearting that process every time they want to install a new application (which of course won't have been purchased either).
#DeleteChrome
I can't see Apple using some generic PC board in a production Macintosh. They WILL use a board that they design, and it won't be like a PC board. As the above poster stated, Apple doesn't need to support Legacy crap.
Just because the development machine is a standard PC, doesn't mean that the shipping product is going to be one. The development machine is to just get developers started in getting their code working on Intel powered machines. And Steve Jobs did say they would want them back (the machines). So, I'd think that in 6 months, a lot of Developers are going to be asked to send back the machines and receive real Intel Macs before they become available to the public.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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--
Cell processors are in-order and therefore quite unsuited for general workstations and notebooks (unless all you do all day is performing matrix operations).
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i am sure they also like powering what is considered the cutting edge personal computer company. for their market share, Apple gets a LOT of headlines and that can only help Intel's public profile.
And it makes sense to support Apple on Intel.
Up until now, Intel has had to rely on their periodic festival of dreck, where they feature some cloners' ideas of cool computer designs, which usually suck (PC ottomans?), and generally include something that looks an awful lot like something Apple recently shipped.
It doesn't help that nobody is really betting their company on those designs succeeding.
Now with Apple, Intel doesn't need to rely on second rate designers or whimsical-but-useless designs produced without any concern for marketability.
And on top of physical attributes, these showpiece machines will be running OS X, which makes the Apple machines more distinctive. Otherwise, Intel has to say "It's an ottoman! That runs Windows! Isn't that... great?! Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, huh? Comfy, too! Haven't you wished your laptop was an ottoman sometimes? No? Oh. But, wait, you can get it with a Green Bay Packers logo on it!" (yawn)
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Arrggh! :-D I wish this fascination with the Cell processor would die. Yah, the Cell is derived from the Power architecture, but it is not a drop in replacement for a desktop CPU. It might not even be that great of a game console CPU. The Cell is designed to make graphics processing easier (well, to feed vector units, IIRC).
Also, as a game console oriented chip, the Cell isn't about ramping up processor power/speed. It is about cutting manufacturing costs while holding the processing power steady. Do you really want Apple to make major transition to an unproven CPU architecture that is going to remain at the same speed over its lifetime? At least with x86 Apple has five years experience with making the code run. Going to the Cell would mean starting with no experience.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Licensing died the first time because the cloners were undercutting Apple's ridiclously high hardware margins. But, Apple is now a "cloner" themselves, which means the hardware margins are going to inevitably drop -- and that means Licensing will be back on the table for Apple.
Plus a HP or a Sony would be a much stronger partner than that crappy PowerComputing outfit.
Folks need to understand that Apple has just turned itself inside-out. You can no longer make any assumptions based on how they handled things in the past, their business model is going to have to change.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Looks like an ugly, extremely generic PC for playing games on.
Or Alienware, for that matter?
Looks like an ugly, generic PC for playing games on. That has been made shiny in an attempt at "style."
... and then they built the supercollider.
The architecture will be x86, or x86-64. This is not in debate anymore. The developer transition boxes are Pentium 4, and that's what the compiler targets. x86. It might not be the same exact chip, but it will be the same instruction set, otherwise you'd have a worthless lot of recently-ported software when all is said and done.
-twb