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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."
Dell has proven that they only want to make cheap stuff... they used to brag they made "PCs" now they just make "clones" but make them cheaply. Intel needs somebody to really show off their cutting edge stuff...which no normal PC maker will do. Enter apple looking for a new partner. Intel just lost the Xbox account anyway.. and the writing on the wall is that MS will stab them in the back just as fast as every other partner.. It's foolish of Intel NOT to take the opportunity to develop hardware that breaks all the PC rules and start over from scratch.. frankly they'll be Intel's "demo" group and just let everybody else copy them.
When I walk into a store selling Apple components, all of the prices have seem to have been standardized. I walk into Fry's electronics, and the thirty inch flat-panel is $2999. I walk into an Apple store and the thirty inch flat-panel is $2999. I bet if I walked up to an Apple Factory, they would sell me the thirty inch flat-panel for ... $2999.
Apple has never been in the game of "cheap" hardware, letting the market decide how much things will cost, etc. They like their components viewed as top-shelf, and I doubt things will change in the future. All Intel means to Apple is more profit, not lower prices for the consumer.
Linux has lost momentum and OS X has gained it. More and more people have decided that there's no point in waiting for Linux to provide a good user friendly nix desktop where things just work, when OS X already offers it. People have waited long enough for Linux already.
It was a tough choice, but I doubt Apple moved to Intel for cheaper chips, or better processors. Intel has always developed chips that aren't x86 or IA64 for "research" purposes.
I'd imagine that Apple are probably after Intels vast fabrication resources. They probably see that IBMs fabs will probably be under pressure to crank out chips for the XBox and Playstation.
For the volumes of chips that those two platforms will need, its hard for IBM to justify Apple taking up their valuable fab space.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
A low voltage Itanium 2 is coming at the end of the year in production quantities.
The support chipset for the Itanium is also quite impressive.
The Itanium roadmap shows support for up to 8 Itanium dual cores.
I understand that the proposed Apple / Motorola/Freescale settlement involves an unlimited Altavec X86/Itanium license.
I also understand that IBM is to make a significantly improved proposal to Apple about PPC supply and development within two weeks.
If much of this is true, Apple would have interesting options.
The real question, is why would you? I'm sure all you /. script kiddies will love the 'challenge' of getting OS X to run on that Asus cobbleware you put together with parts from CompUSA, and I would have too in the past. However over the 20+ year history of Apple, it has become clear that one truism of the world is that if you want to run Apple's stuff, you just gotta buy Apple's stuff.
And that's really not such a bad thing. Since getting in with Apple with my Mac Mini, I now see that it kind of is worth the price of admission. It sucks that it has to be, but it also sucks that I have to give a % of my salary to the government. The user experience is such that I don't feel compelled to hack a toaster to run OS X. I'd rather just buy a Mac and be done with it.
Hell, maybe the Intel Macs will be cheaper. I don't think they will, but then again the vast majority of the world (sans the Dvoraks) didn't think apple would ever switch to Intel.
1) Intel is sick of having most of its cool technology dropped through the narrow mindset of Taiwan^H^H^H^H^H^H^HChinese motherboard makers and the control-freak Microsoft. Microsoft's strategic interest is to blast hardware margins, differentiation and technology differences to zero, creating massive low price competition and a single software target. Then all innovation and profit margin goes onto the Microsoft side.
Intel hates this. Now, they have a cool computer maker who agrees with them and isnt' Microsoft's beeyatch.
2) Microsoft said "fuck you" to Intel on xbox.
4) IBM said "ok pay us....one TRILLION dollars" when Apple wanted them to actually make lots of performance and heat compatible chips at a fair price.
5) Intel to Apple: "Hey Sailor, new in town?"
Remember, a PC today is still based on the design of an XT. You've got bizarre things such as the 20th bit of the CPU addressing being disabled at boot time. Multiple interrupt controllers and DMA controllers cascaded off each other. You reboot a PC by sending a signal to the keyboard controller.
PC motherboards are really weirdly designed, and have accumulated quite the collection of weird hacks to work around the early flaws. Since Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility with older PCs, they can quite simply design a motherboard without all that crap in it. Enable the A20 line at boot. Replace the DMA and Interrupt controllers with better ones. Get rid of the memory gap between 640KB and 1MB.
Get rid of the legacy PC crap and it'll require some rather serious hacking to get the code to run on a standard PC.
With IBM looking at the hundreds of millions of units going to the console market vs the few million Apple would sell, it's easy to see IBM's point of view on this.
I worked for IBM's fab in Vermont for 15 years.
They "cheated" on Apple in the early nineties, putting PPC production on hold, at a critical time for Apple to maxamize profits on other chips.
How many times do you need your "domestic partner" cheating on you before you bail on the relationship.
(Hi to all of my friends that laid off but came back as contractors!)
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
No one gave a shit about USB until the iMac created a market for USB peripherals. It was still several years before it started appearing on most new PCs, thanks to Intel's chipsets - yet most consumer PC's to this day ship with non-USB mice and keyboards. This is exactly why Intel wanted to partner with Apple.
Buying a Mac now would not be a bad descision at all, there's still a 4-6 years of life left on the PowerPC.
I see a lot of wishful thinking about this. Remember the OS X transition? Within 2 years Jobs is up on stage sticking OS9 into a coffin and killing hardware support for the thing. Developers got the message and OS9 software disappeared.
I personally believe that Apple is going to quickly move to x86 hardware, and both Apple and ISV software support for PPC is going to start dying off in 2008. That doesn't make your shiny new PowerMac worthless, but it does mean you better be happy with only one generation of new software.
But, yeah, there's a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about PowerPC right now, and rightfully so. Apple could alleviate things if they just released a software/hardware road map.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.