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Speculation on Real Reasons Behind Apple Switch
/ASCII writes "There is an article over at Ars Technica with some insider information about the reasons behind Apples x86 switch, given that the new IBM processors seem to be a perfect fit for Apple. The article claims that Apple hopes to power its entire line, from Servers to desktops to iPods and other gadgets with Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get."
Does Apple really sell as much (volume-wise) as Dell does?
Doesn't the choice to change processor basically give Apple and their users more options? If Apple release hardware that can run not only their own much loved OSX operating system, but also Windows, Linux and *BSD that it removes one of the major arguments about getting an Apple. Namely, "I can't run XXX piece of software, it doesn't support Apple". As long as a dual or even triple boot is possible then I can't see any reason to not get an Apple.
Ultimately look at it this way, If the Mohammed won't come to the mountain, get a big crane and get ready to do some heavy lifting.
Lord Steve may seem insane, but if so, one of his disorders is obsessive-compulsive. He would not pull such a major change as switching to Intel unless he had a thick contract in hand with every i dotted and t crossed.
If this theory is in fact the plan (for large values of if) then it's not just hope. It would be written in stone.
And what about men who are quite clear on their sexuality however deviating from mainstream it might be?
"Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get. If price of cpu's were really such a big factor, AMD might have been alot more willing to offer discounts than Intel.
"If the Apple hardware is $100-$200 more than a Dell..."
You're joking right? $200 difference? In your (and my) dreams maybe.
- Toby
First off, I RTFA... It implies that the iPod & iTMS, not the Mac, could drive Apple's future. What is Apple without the Mac? What is Apple without OSX? If the simple answer is a "portable media player company with ties to the RIAA & MPAA", then so be it - But that answer is shortsighted. This can be seen by Microsoft's foray into this arena (witness Windows Media and Media Center PC's), along with Linux's abilities (Myth) in this same subset of the market. It's the Media stupid! The media is *not* the player. If Apple, which the article supposes, is out to drive the hand-held player market with it's technology, then it may very well succeed - In hand-helds that is. If it ignores the Mac as the center of *their* digital world, they may end up with a cute player and nothing more.
With its switch to Intel, Apple is going to succeed where MS couldn't: build a "proprietary" PC that doesn't rely on anything legacy such as the BIOS.
Nearly everything except the BIOS will be standard on the Mactel platform. Seems to me like the perfect occasion to introduce a "trusted", DRM-enabled platform from the ground up.
Now Apple can tell the RIAA & MPAA: on our platforms, your stuff will be secure.
The desktop wars are over. Commodity IBM PC-compatibles with Microsoft OSes and Intel chips won. Sure the market is HUGE and niche markets (even #1 player Dell doesn't dominate the market, it owns the niche for moderately supported business machines with semi-custom orders) remain extremely profitable if done right, but Intel and Microsoft have extracted most of the profits. Even highly innovative AMD can only capture 20% of the market.
.Mac system, where the cost of the storage is going to zero but their annual subscribers are growth.
.Mac subscription (or some similar number). That means that Apple can sell a low-margin system like the Mini, pocket $100 on the system, and hope to grab another $200-$300 in software sales over the system's lifetime... So a $500 Mac Mini sale is as good for Apple as a $2000 PowerMac with 40% margins was 5 years ago.
In 1996 Fortune interviewed Steve Jobs and asked him what he would do if still running Apple. He responded that he would "milk the Mac for all it is worth and move on to the next big thing."
This doesn't mean that those of us with an investment in Apple hardware (or more risky, custom Cocoa software like we have) mean that Apple is going to abandon the Mac....
They are going the milk it for all it is worth.
With OS X, we have a NeXTSTEP/Mac fusion that Steve likes, and Apple will keep profitably pushing out software updates that they sell, but that isn't Apple's growth.
Their growth operations: software, when Steve rejoined they had recently gone from free OS upgrades to selling two upgrades, OS 7 and OS 7.5, IIRC, maybe 6 was sold as well.
Now, Apple sells new OS Versions every 1 - 2 years. They put out an iLife upgrade annually. They will probably put out iWork annually. And they replaced their free iTunes system with a nicely growing
The average Mac customer pre-Jobs bought a Mac and used it for 6 years.
The average Mac customer post-Jobs buys a Mac, and uses it for 3-4 years with 2 OS upgrades, 1 or 2 software purchases, and 20% of a
Apple will keep innovating the Mac to milk the cash cow... They will NOT enter price-wars or otherwise fight with MS or Dell or HP for market-share. They will milk the cash cow, try to execute and expand markets, but they are NOT interested in growing to a 10% market with the SAME profits as now by cutting their margins by 75% which would make the software developers happy.
It isn't a zero-sum game, they are selling the iMac or Mac Mini as a digital life system. Sure you have a Windows machine for whatever... but add a Mac Mini and a KVM (and annual OS X + iLife upgrades) to easily put your kid's Soccer Games on DVD and send to his grandparents. That is their "growth" strategy.
It isn't a bad strategy, but selling easy-to-use digital toys is how Apple is a growth company, and Microsoft is becoming a mature company that will steadily increase its annual dividend.
Good for Steve Jobs, good for Apple shareholders, and hopefully good for its customers as long as Apple keeps putting out new products that we want to buy because we are the cash cow to be milked, but we aren't going to benefit from price cuts from a price war because market-share and PC growth just don't interest Apple...
That said, I'm sure at some level Apple sees Linux entering the network market for office networks, and realizes that with the best (and easiest to use) desktop Unix... he can enter that market. If you like Linux, if Apple gets the BEST WINELIB performance, the BEST Qt performance, and best Gtk performance, and has KDELIB and GNOMELIB ported... well how tough is it that Apple is able to compete with Linux for SOME share of the corporate desktop market.
Apple is in a position to make SOME gains in PC market-share, but growing back to 10-20% over 10 years isn't giant tech growth... the iPod and OTHER SIMILAR projects is.
It's a smart business move, and Apple has set themselves up to grow profits steadily in their core markets, and then swing for the fences with new products like the iPod, iTMS, etc.
Alex
You misunderstand RISC. As do most people these days, it seems.
Back in the olden days, when chips were still designed by small teams on reasonable budgets, somebody noticed that hand-written assembly was rapidly becoming passe. When the assembly is being written by a compiler, it makes sense to design the chip with that in mind, and make an instruction set that is efficient at the kind of simple instructions that compilers like to write.
This led to a simpler design that could be made somewhat faster than a complex one. This led to many predicting the demise of so-called CISC chips. This prediction, like the "Internet in danger of collapse" and "Apple to go bankrupt" predictions, is no closer to actually happening than it was when it was first made.
The surprise was that Intel wanted a chip that had the speed advantages of RISC but used the same interface as their older chips, so they designed one. So they built a chip called the Pentium that translated CISC instructions into RISC ones. Since this operation is essentially O(n), they got good performance, and they've continued that basic design to the present day.
So to answer your question, it's already true that any operations that are not simple are emulated in software -- it's just that in x86 processors the emulation is on the CPU. Today there is no important difference between CISC and RISC, whether we are speaking of mainframes or desktops.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Is it just me, or are the "insiders" who can't even spell just a tad less than credible?
Why can't anyone take the announcement at face value? Clearly IBM (and Moto/Freescale) don't want to develop new top-end chips for a small market. Who can blame them?
But Intel is going to build their next generation anyway. Apple's small marketshare is meaningless in this context, they're in a race with AMD for a huge market no matter what else happens.
Let's remember that Intel has been courting Apple for well over a decade now. They're also clearly unhappy with the crappy boxes being offered by their existing vendors. Having Apple onboard making cool products with their systems must be a dream come true -- "See, THIS is what an Intel machine can do".
But no, not enough of a conspiracy in that I suppose.
I believe that the author is thinking in the material world too much. It's not just iPod and portability that's been helping Apple lately, it the customization. Having your own custom playlists to carry with you where you go, your own set of widgets on the desktop and your own group of rss feeds. All of this housed in a smooth, sleek package. It's not just the hardware that propels Apple lately, has anyone ever told this author about something called Tiger?
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
My Powerbook boots faster than my new Thinkpad. So this could go the other way. Apple fans could find that the Apple hardware my behave considerably different. Even if not, now Apple has to compete with high-end gamer boxes when trying to be the fastest. Perhaps they won't try to be the fastest, but faster than Dell/HP. It's going to get very interesting, to say the least.
You're joking right? $200 difference? In your (and my) dreams maybe.
You're talking about the current price differences. The poster of the original comment was saying what might happen with a switch to Intel processors. And this theory (that the switch is to be able to lower the price of Macs) was pushed in a lot of articles about the PowerPC->Intel switch. So the poster's conditional statement is a very valid point.
Actually AMD has a really nice chip that competes with the Xscale http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_6625_12409%5E12410,00.h tml
IBM and Freescale also have some PPC chips that are used in embedded systems that could have also worked for the IPod.
The Dell comment does make me think though. I would if it not the server market more than the IPod that is driving the change.
It is very likely that IBM is limiting Apples access to server cpus. Why are there now 4 or 8 cpu Apple servers? Maybe IBM does not want Apple to compete with IBMs Power based servers?
Intel would have no problem with selling Apple any thing they want.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why is this modded up?
1.) First of all, the article is ancient (Sept 2003).
2.) Second of all, the revolutionary thing promised was 64 bits, which we have today.
3.) Intel is not behind AMD in 64 bit chips. AMD chose a differant design, which sacrificed a lot of transistors for x86 compatibility, limiting the scalability and performance of their chip. It makes sense now, but it further embeds x86 cruft in the market place. Intel was working on 64 bit chips when AMD's main product was making pentium 1 clones.
4.) 90nm wont allow for gigabytes of memory on the die. Cache SRAM takes 6 transistors per bit. There just arent enough transistor now to do it. In addition, regular SDRAM cells take a transistor and a capacitor. They are the same speed, no matter where you put them. Delays from SDRAM sense amps aren't going away, either. I know it's a nice concept, but the L1 / L2 cache structure won't be changing drastically anytime soon.
5.) The last point just doesn't make sense to me. Backing store is normally a fancy word for a hard-drive, which virtual memory uses to store pages that are not in main memory. RAM and system memory are the same thing. All modern operating systems are smart enough not to cache file's in the on-disk memory backing store, because the same data is already located elsewhere on the drive. Why cache the data twice? To extend this concept further, the user can use mmap to map a file into user space as a memory block, and work with the file as if it where a block of memory.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
I think the most simple answer is probably the right one.
Apple got pissed off that the PPC was getting very few performance increases compared to the x86, and probably had a poor price/performance ratio. They also would have liked to release a more powerful laptop.
They quietly had OS X running on x86 architecture for years, in case IBM fucked them over, and when they saw that Intel had a decent processor in the pipeline (pun not intentional), and know that AMD already has decent processors, they decided to make the switch.
Intel is not behind AMD in 64 bit chips? Have you even seen a comparison review of the two chips lately? Put the crack pipe down.
As to Overshoot's comments, no.
The 970 wasn't intended to be a "custom processor chip." Had IBM hit its performance targets, it would have had ample alternative outlets for the 970. The great speculation was that IBM would push its own line of inexpensive 970 based Linux servers. But IBM wasn't up to the task.
And the suggestion that Apple isn't flush with cash? Again, no. Apple's sitting on a mountain of it.
Finally, Apple, no matter how egotistical its corporate culture may be, would never think itself large enough to bully Intel for volume discounts.
No, the reason Apple has switched is because marketing told it to stop fighting the dominate paradigm. When the Macintosh runs on the same base hardware as everyone else, marketing can concentrate on the OS and sundry applications. Sure, Intel *probably* sweetened the offer knowing that Apple's cutting edge design would reflect well on it. And the Apple premium will probably justify selling top of the line chips, forcing Dell and the like to buy premium chips for marketing purposes.
The only thing surprising about the decision to go with Intel is the fact that Apple thinks it technologically and commercially feasible to run on multiple architectures. Once Apple became convinced of their ability to do so, the decision made itself.
> Right now, Apple has to market Apple machines vs. Windows
> machines, and they are hard to compare. When the PPC is better,
> people don't believe it. They are either behind in performance or
> MHz/GHz, or something.
I don't believe it either, and it's not "just marketing".
I bought a 17" 1 GHz PowerBook G4 back in April 2003. Then in January 2005, the hard drive failed on that PowerBook, and I didn't have time to deal with it (and I couldn't be without my PowerBook), so I went out and bought a 17" 1.5 GHz PowerBook. A month later, I finally got around to swapping out the hard drive in the first 17" PowerBook, and I gave it to my wife.
My intention was to replace my PowerBook G4 with a PowerBook G5, but to my shock, there wasn't a G5 PowerBook.
When I took home my new PowerBook, it was almost exactly like my previous PowerBook. The first 17" PowerBook G4s were released in January 2003 and in the two years that had elapsed, there was no real difference in performance. In fact, I forgot that I had actually replaced my PowerBook -- that's how similar they were.
Note that while desktop machines are stagnating in sales, laptops are where the growth is. The fact that Apple's flagship portable had basically remained the same for two years is horrible. Contrast this with the changes in operating system. Mac OS X 10.4 is wildly better than the OS that came with my previous PowerBook. So from a software perspective, Apple's doing great. From a hardware perspective, the changes just aren't keeping up.
Ars seems to downplay the fact that IBM missed their 3 GHz target for the G5. More than that, they missed the laptop ready version of the G5, which some could argue is even more serious. People seem to want to blame Jobs or Apple's arrogance, but the point is, IBM hasn't been delivering. Results matter, and Apple's hardware is falling behind. Jobs is a smart guy to say, "we can't keep doing this" and he found a solution in Intel. I say, good for him. Now give me a laptop where two years of progress is noticeable.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Unfortunately for Intel, multi-year schedule slips and disappointing real-world performance results make that irrelevant. Starting earlier to develop something doesn't matter if the results of your efforts turn out to suck.
I can't dismiss your post, but I swallow it with a very large grain of salt.
My own tinfoil theory on the switch isn't only that Apple had grown weary of IBM's under-delivering, but also that IBM could not afford to keep Apple as a customer.
;)
Limited fab capacity? Check
Huge orders coming in from next generation console manufacturers? Check
Struggling to meet future demand, IBM had to choose between Apple and console manufacturers. IBM chose the latter.
just my 2cp, of course
The Xbox 360, PS3, and the Revolution are all supposed to be powered by PPC chips. IBM Can't keep demand as it is. Alot of time and effort will be placed on the console gaming system chips. Apple had to leave IBM becuse there is no way IBM would have kept up with demand.
It isn't about market-share. The win/loss is as follows:
:)
Businesses care (should care) about the net present value of business decisions.
If you can establish a monopoly in say, 5 years, like MS did going from 3.1 -> 95, then it is okay to make "okay" profits or even losses for 5 years because the NPV of a 10+ year monopoly is HUGE. Otherwise, market-share is IRRELEVANT, because it doesn't get you monopoly rents.
Job's doesn't win/lose based on market-share.
He wins/loses based upon the NPV of future cash flows based upon his current decisions, which will effect Apple's long term financial outlook and whether he has returned an adequate return to his investors based upon the estimated Risk premium of Apple's business.
Right now, based upon Wallstreet's evaluations, he has returned a terrific ROI to shareholders from the time he joined Apple. However, now Wallstreet pays more for a dollar of Apple's earnings, so to maintain that ROI, he needs to increase his cash flow faster to make an investor in 2005 happy.
He doesn't fail if market-share is 5%, he fails if he fails to make an adequate return to his investors.
Alex
WTF? What pocket universe have you been living in? One of Apple watchers' biggest complaints about APPL is that they have been sitting on a tremendous amount of cash for years, when they could have spent some of it to shore up their market position in many, many different ways. I argue that one of the biggest mistakes Apple made was not buying Netscape before Sun and AOL divided and conquered it, or CS&T/Steltor before Oracle subsumed it. Think of where Apple might be today if we had an improved Netscape SuiteSpot running on Mac OS X. What if Apple spent some of those billions in cash developing a successot to the Apple Network Servers to run the above server software? Wouldn't you like to see a product that could absolutely destroy Microsoft Exchange using Internet Standard protocols?
And, speaking of Oracle, how many years did Larry Ellison sit on Apple's board without producing an Oracle server for an Apple platform? But, I digress..
Motorola in particular, has written off hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused directly by the erratic actions of Apple Computer
Umm, how about..."Motorola in particular, has written off billions of dollars in losses caused directly by the erratic actions of Motorola? Hey, let's just completely ignore MOT's complete mishandling of the entire PowerPC agreement/concept. We weren't stuck at 500MHz because of Apple--it was MOT's inability to make a gracful transition to a new process line that caused *that*. Not to mention Motorola switching all internal operations machines to WinTel and ditching *their own product* in favor of a competitors?
And how, exactly is the example of one of IBM's "regular" customers in any way relevant to Apple? You may have forgotten that Apple *owns*, at least partially, the PowerPC IP, not to mention the fact that *no other manufacturer* uses PowerPC in a general purpose computing application, other than Apple and IBM, themselves. Yes, IBM has "other customers", but none of these have the same needs or relationship with IBM that Apple has. IBM is doing as much damage to their own product line by not moving the Power and PowerPC lines forward as aggressively as possible, unless of course IBM intends to pawn off their workstation, mini, and mainframe lines to China, as well...
The bottom line is, no matter how much Hannibal would like to wish it otherwise, IBM screwed up royally, and in the process, screwed Apple and Steve Jobs. You may want to go back and read my Slashdot post from 2005-04-15 to see my evaluation of the possibility of Apple moving to Intel (which , I may add, was well before any speculation/rumors on the part of C|Net or the WSJ).
May I direct you to http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146200&c id=12245408 ?
And I quote:
I think IBM had the ability to produce chips that were what Apple wanted in terms of power (as the article points out - the newer batch of PowerPC chips are more like what they want).
What does Intel have that IBM didn't? Better support for DRM type stuff in the processor. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,1 2449,1504558,00.html
Here's my theory. Steve Jobs has a long-term goal to position Apple as 'the' online media company. He already dominates the online music business with the iTunes/iPod combination. Now he wants to repeat the trick with online movies.
But Hollywood studios won't do a deal with him because they are worried about piracy. They want a platform with rock-solid 'digital rights management' (DRM) built in. And it just so happens that Intel has been moving technical mountains to build strong DRM into its processor architecture, whereas IBM doesn't see it as a priority.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
So Apple, thinking Intel would languish in their fat and happy X86 monopoly and X86 architecture difficulties, made the move to Power. It was fast and it had the backing of IBM.
What changed? Why didn't that hold up? AMD.
Prior to Athlon, Intel was on a fairly steady schedule of speed upgrades. You get a few 33's of Mhz every once and a while. They could take their time. Speed bumps were about money, not a race. When Athlon hit and Intel suddenly found themselves behind in the speed race with a processor that could run the same software, Windows, then their attitude shifted drasticly. From the 500Mhz intorduction of Athlon straight through to the 3+Ghz finalies. It was a rapid race to the top of the speed charts. Without that competition, I doubt Intel would have reached 3 Ghz by now.
That speed race also introduced enough new designs to overcome some of the advantages the RISC architectures had, either through redesigning the internal pipelining, or through material design and pure Mhz maddness that other less cash rich chip makers simply could not keep up with. So Intel caught up with PowerPC in the speed race and is in a position to provide cheaper prices to Apple. With the performance advantage gone, so is the incentave to go with something other than Intel.
AMD improved Intel enough to make them competative with all the RISC out there. They should thank AMD for the boost. Somehow I doubt they would be gracious enough to do it though.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I expect that apple is aware that they've got a target on their asses as far as portable media is concerned. Everyone is following their lead, but they're going to get caught in Apple's dust only so often before they catch up in one way or another.
Every incremental advance Apple makes in interface or capabilities for their media devices can only stay a true advantage for 5 to 6 months before some company hacks a piss-poor mass-marketable approximation.
One way they can again leap ahead of the competition is to introduce a complete system for video instead of a gradual release of supporting products.
If apple can integrate DRM into a MythTV style family mac to satisfy content providers, produce a vPod and begin offering H.264 video content on the iTunes "Media" Store, they will have a fully integrated solution available for the public at least a year before anyone could compete directly with them.
That would mean a rise in hardware sales, a tighter grip over portable media content sales, and a glut of leverageable IP patents for future licensing.
Gross speculation? Of course, but is it possible? Certainly.
:::: the insomniac's digest
It could be, you know, that they're looking say, a bit further out that six months from now. Come on, people. Do you honestly think Apple made this decision spur of the moment? Do you think they didn't talk to both Intel and IBM in depth. Do you think IBM wouldn't have shown them their future roadmap and do everything to keep a large client and likewise do you think Intel wouldn't have done the same in order to get a new client? The switchover isn't going to be complete for a couple of years and even then there will be a bit of a transition period before much of a benefit and "x96 mac only" apps start to appear. Whether or not Apple was correct will remain to be seen but this decision was based on where they see things being 5, 7 or 10 years from now. Not on whatever new chips IBM is going to have tomorrow or on comparing them to the chips Intel has today. Any new "news" we hear about this chip or that being released in the next year isn't going to be news to Apple, isn't going to affect their decision and isn't going to be mean much as far as judging whether their decision will end up being the correct one or not. So... let's just keep our heads, shall we?
Put more bluntly, Apple is switching to Intel so that Wine and VirtualPC/VMWare will work at full speed. Right now, I know many many people who would switch to a Mac in an instant, except they need some small, vertical application that only runs on Windows. By switching to Intel, Apple gets the opportunity to build Windows compatibility into their OS (using WINE code, customised) and capitalize on that market.
I'm not looking for this to be good enough to kill the market for native Mac apps (let's face it: emulating Windows is hard)--just good enough to let me continue using the 2-3 windows applications that I absolutely must have to do my business.
I can tell you this: the instant an Intel-based powerbook is available, I will be buying it so that I can run Windows in VMWare (or equivalent software) and get rid of my Windows laptop at long last. It's a convenience thing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Ahh, the tinfoil hat conspiracy mongering at Slashdot.
While I'm sure Intel chips will cost Apple less than the IBM chips, and could lower their costs, this wasn't about price. This was about saving Apple from death in the PC business.
Fact: despite the early promise of PowerPC, Intel's offerings are beating the dog shit out of that line. There's no comparison in performace. Yes, PPC does more work per clock cycle, but they're so far behind in terms of clock speed that it doesn't matter. There is no megahertz myth here. Clock speeds DO matter. And no one making PPC chips, Freescale nor the mighty IBM, can keep up with Intel. For PCs, Intel is the king . AMD makes some better desktop offerings, has some better prices, but doesn't have Intel's product range, especially in laptops.
Make no mistake...while OSX is the best PC operating system on the market, the supporting hardware was starting to suck. Compared to the PC world, most of Apple's offerings were stuck in late-90's levels of hardware performance, while charging a premium price. Is it any wonder that some anaylists were predicting a drop of Apple's market share to around 1.5 percent by 2008?
Apple did this so they could be a viable competitor. That's it. Intel has better chips, especially for portables. No one makes anything as good as the Pentium M for laptops. Not AMD. And certainly not IBM. Big Blue was never going to get a G5 into a Powerbook anytime soon. And when they did, it would still lag performance-wise (especially in battery usage) compared to it's Intel rivals.
Apple cannot survive at their present size on Ipods alone. This was a cold, calculated decision by Jobs and Co. to get competitive again. You can now take off those foil hats.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Please. Apple couldn't even eat the scraps off the Sony PSP table. Doesn't matter how many stupid U2 commercials they throw behind it. Portable (or otherwise!) gaming takes developers, which Apple doesn't have and never has. Hence, the perpetually sorry state of gaming on the mac.
The only company that could touch the PSP is Nintendo and even that is in question, due to their Sega-esque "3 headed monster" portable offerings of the Advance, DS, and advance successor.
Microsoft could buy their way in, but they want your living room, not your backpack....but I digress.
Some guy didn't know he couldn't right click, so he lost a giant project?
Goddamn, buddy, your coworker is just a moron who you didn't train enough.
This isn't Apple's fault. They don't cause trouble. Instead, your utter lack of training of the staff caused it.
How much productivity would've been lost if you had a two-hour basic training session for members of your staff? Not much, and it would've saved lots of trouble.
Jesus Christ, don't blame Apple for your shortcomings.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
True, but rock bottom price wasn't the goal here.
1- Apple wanted not only better chip prices, but better laptop chips. While AMD arguably has better desktop processors, they have nothing that can compete with the Pentium M in terms of performance and battery life. And the Powerbook is what drove this change, not the desktop stuff.
2- Steve Jobs is a label whore, marketing gear to the label whore public. In his mind, Intel = Levi's, while AMD = Wrangler. Good jeans, those Wranglers, but only those low class Wal Mart rednecks wear them. It just wouldn't do to put those low cost AMDs into an Apple.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Optimization is a complicated matter. Overly aggressive inlining for instance can actually hurt performance by creating stalls in the instruction cache. Loop unrolling can also be a loss for the same reason. The quasi-RISC nature of the PPC ISA already makes binaries large, and processor cache can be a valuable resource.
The reduction in memory consumption can also be a performance win on constrained systems. If you're already fighting for space (which OS X typically is on the more modest Macs) having a global optimization for space can be a win in user-visible performance as less is pushed into a pagefile on disk. On slower disks like you find in Apple laptops and Mac Minis--which also have little memory by default--that might translate into a nontrivial performance gain.
Let us also keep in mind that GCC isn't particularly well-optimized for any member of the PPC family. It's entirely possible that Apple has found that optimizing for size is the biggest win for them overall, due to the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, or because of an increase in bugs, or for other reasons. There are also situations where attempting to micro-optimize software isn't any sort of real win, because the algorithms or datastructures being used far outway any benefit. Take for instance anything that relies on Cocoa on OS X. Objective-C message dispatch is slow, because it's implemented using splay lists, hashed strings, and a lot of indirection. Unrolling a loop that sends messages to objects in Objective-C is probably not frequently going to be a win, because the dispatch overhead makes the loop unimportant. The only optimization that would be a big win here, would be to have a JIT compiler create a specialized loop where the dynamic dispatch mechanism of Objective-C is unnecessary. Then aggressive unrolling might be helpful. It might also not be.
I could probably give you a lot of further commentary if you wanted, but I don't know for certain what Apple has determined to be a performance win for their platform. I can really only give you hypotheses grounded in some technical expertise.
Complete troll but I'll bite.
Perhaps we are talking about hardware that ships with only one mouse button, apparently under the assumption that their developers are smart enough to create an intuitive UI that doesn't require two or three. However, if you feel inclined to use two or three, you still can - and the functionality is even there out of the box.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job of it, too. Unlike you.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Silicon Graphics."
SGI tried this. They built Windows NT PCs, in attractive custom cases, with workstation-derived interconnects and graphics. Basically all the hardware advantages of an SGI workstation with the software base of a Windows OS.
Sounds great, right?
Not only did they flop in the market, but it basically destroyed SGI. The PC people thought they were too expensive compared to Dells, and the SGI-IRIX loyalists felt abandoned.
Nice AMD bias.
On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,
The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).
mpeg2 to divx,...
Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).
Hardly.
The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Not this red herring again. I can see VMware being the cat's meow on this (and you can bet your bottom dollar that Jobs has already called up the bigwigs at EMC and said "Yo, guys, what can we do about VMware for OS X on ix86? This is something I think we need, and you could make good bank on"). But Wine on OS X? No. Not even Not a chance.
Why? Because it'll go one of two ways:
- Wine will continue to be what is has been on Linux - useful for certain (commodity) apps that stick with the documented, well-established APIs, but melts down in ugly ways with apps that make liberal use of the many poorly (if at all) documented APIs in Win32. Apple won't go for this, because it _must_ "just work".
- Apple expends huge amounts of work into eking out all those undocumented API hooks, and makes Wine work flawlessly. Well, that's great - they've now entirely obviated the need for OS X ports of their apps. All major developers will say "wow, we can write/build for Windows, and get perfectly working software on OS X as well? Gee, no more Apple specific builds! Saves us a bundle! Let's snort some more coke off this hooker's ass!" (Okay, they probably won't say that last part. Maybe not. Okay, they might...)
Either way, it's not going to happen. Either scenario. Because whatever else you can say about Steve Jobs, he does have a sense of self-preservation, and I don't think it would fail him in this case - he'd see what a huge blunder that would be and declare "That's the dumbest suggestion I've heard all month. We're not doing it. Not only that, whoever suggested it, and anyone that supports it, is fired." (Again, he might not say that last part, but who knows.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
for business a Windows machine is usually required because much special software for business only works with that OS
They said it had to be Windows, but they didn't say it had to be on a PC ;-) As it is now, and has been for many uears, you can run Windows on a Mac along with all the software you'd normally run in Windows. However you can't run MacOS or Mac software on a PC in Windows though you can software ported to Windows. With Macs you have both Mac and Windows, with Windows you only have Windows.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"I think the only films Apple would NOT get would be Columbia/Tristar which are owned by Sony (unless Sony doesn't care WHO sells their movies)"
:)
I doubt Sony (ahem, Columbia) Pictures gives a frak about what the rest of Sony does. The only strategic thing they've done for Sony Corporate lately was agree to issue their movies on the UMD format for the PSP. Before that, Sony Pictures supported DVD exclusively (and refused to license their films to Circuit City's DIVX joke-of-a-platform) and also agreed to provide content for Sony's mini-Beta (I forget the brand) portable video players. Video-8. That's what it was.
Of course, you can count on Sony Pictures not licensing any content to HD-DVD and will exclusively support Blu-Ray.
Music wise, Sony Connect doesn't seem to have that many more exclusive cuts available versus iTunes. Although that could be due to the influence of BMG, since they co-own Sony BMG Music. I noticed one exclusive track of The Killers that was available on Sony Connect and not iTunes, which did piss me off since I am a fan and got the rest of their music courtesy of Pepsi/Mountain Dew and their iTunes promotion.
Sony Corporate probably wouldn't care about an Apple iMovie/iTunes Movie Download service as long as their was a plug about viewing the movies in the living room on Sony LCD televisions...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Well, that worthless tip doesn't help with the third mouse button, does it now?
If I tap out "Shave and a haircut" does it emulate a third button?
Oops, except "Open in new tab" is right there in the menu. You still don't know what you are talking about.
Tools seem inelegant to those who know not how to use them.
I'm not saying that the OS should be designed so you HAVE To use a command line, just give me the option. Do you have any idea how much easier it is to administer even a Windows server with Secure Shell instead of Terminal Services, VNC or PC Anywhere?
Yes, I do know, because I do it daily on the AIX, Mac OS X, and Linux servers that I administer at work... from my Mac, using SSH. Built in. Instead of third-party installed. Like Windows. You still don't know what you're talking about.
How about copying Tetrabytes of data from one server to another, which I have to do on a regular basis as part of my job? If you use a GUI, you have a lot of waiting around. The command line tools for moving data around are far more flexible. If I need to copy just the 900 GB that's been added since the last update, I can do that with a single command line in Windows or Linux. Until Mac was built on top of a decent operating system (BSD) and had a decent command line, the kind of data transfers I have to do would require hours of work by hand, third party applications or applescript.
I don't know what a "tetrabyte" is, but I'm really not interested in talking about the six-year-old Mac OS 9, which is what your entire experience seems to be predicated on. Go ahead and go back to Windows 98 and tell me how easy administration is, cause that's what you're doing here. This is a complete non-sequitur filibuster.
I'm sorry, but if you honestly think a command line is a bad idea, then you've already demonstrated that you don't do a lot of the things that require more advanced tools.
The dumbed down Apple interfaces are good enough for you. Glad to hear it. You shouldn't have to learn to program to use your computer. Apple makes a nice entry level computer, and it can do a lot of the things that most computer need.
But a Mac would be a pathetic joke for my line of work. It's less of a joke now that it's Unix based, but there's a lot of NeXt crap that needs to go before it's worth my time, and a lot of things that just can't be cone from a command line.
I do plenty on the command line, and I'm glad it's there. However, I'm also smart enough to realize there is value in having an OS that doesn't require it. This seems to be the point you are missing.
Yeah, I guess it would be a pathetic joke to have a system that talks to everything easily, without having to jerk around with it constantly. I sure have a hard time filling my day up without having to reinstall drivers, clean spyware, check for viruses, and pray that I won't have to reinstall Windows.
I work on windows, but I can work *with* my PowerBook.
Knowing how to do various things from the command line is a great benefit. Even when you have to use Terminal Services, it's generally a hell of a lot faster to log in, open a command prompt, and do what you need to do as opposed to opening a window, waiting 30 seconds, opening another window, waiting 30 seconds and so on for ten minutes just to get to an interface to check a setting.
Hmm, maybe this is why on Mac OS X you can type in ">console" at the login prompt, which drops you to a text console to do everything you're talking about? Oh, I guess you still don't know what you're talking about.
I'm sorry you're upset by my having seen your toy computer for what it is, but to tell the simple truth, it's clear you just don't have computing needs that are sufficiently advanced to encounter many of the brain dead ways in which Max is castrated. You're also so brain washed by the Mac marketing machine and the "cult of Mac" that you can't examine your OS objectively.
While you can call me all the names you want, it still doesn't change the fact that you are not playing with a full deck of cards. I say again, try to know something about a subject before talking about it.
Have a day.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner."
What are you talking about, copying implementations? They license Intel's proprietary instruction sets, they didn't COPY them. They are paying Intel to have them. And having them is important for compatibility reasons. EM64T is also licensed by Intel from AMD. Nobody is stealing or copying anything.
Did you even read the complaint against Intel? They have been using anti-competitive methods to keep OEMs pumping out more Intel and less AMD. They have even gone so far as to threaten company heads that were going to attend the Athlon64 launch parties.
Actually I must ask if you even understand what anti-competitive behavior is. Intel releasing the Pentium M, a cooler and potentially faster chip, is perfectly acceptable. AMD did it with the Athlon64, after all. Selling new and advanced technology that you developed is how those companies function. If the Pentium M just happens to be better than Athlon's offering at the time, that doesn't mean it's anticompetitive.