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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."
This is a really interesting take on the switch that I hadn't considered before. This move to intel makes all the sense in the world if Apple is trying to cram an intel processor inside the iPod, and for pure volume discounts alone, this could really help apple's overall profit margin.
I'd worry about putting all my eggs in one basket, but I suppose as far as baskets go, intel is a relatively safe bet overall.
:::: the insomniac's digest
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.
This lets a comparison with Dell/HP be VERY clear.
If the Apple hardware is $100-$200 more than a Dell, it is a straightforward question, is it worth this premium to get OS X. It makes for a straightforward comparison. In addition, if Apple's manfuacturing gets better (and they grow their share from the #8 player in the PC space to #3/#4, which is probably around a 10% market-share), then they can price equally to PC players and STILL make good margins, because they don't have to pay MS their fee.
Forget JUST the processor difference, they can really enter a straight competition with a minor price premium for a superior system... Plus, if Microsoft stumbles and looks vulnerable, they can compete in the OS market.
Also, think about Government/Corporate contracts. Someone can write an RFP: runs Linux + random software that is x86 only... or runs Office XP... Since the Apple can, they can now compete for that contract.
Lots of good things for Apple, and some minor fears for those of us suffering the transition. (I have in-house Cocoa apps that will now need to be QA'd on two platforms, even if development is "click a button.")
Alex
And why does Apple need to switch from plain-Jane ARM processors to Intel's greased-lightning XScale? What do they need that extra power for? Why, to bring back the Newton, of course!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If such a move was made, does this make AMD's anti-trust case against Intel more convincing?
Maybe now (because of the lawsuit), intel will not provide such deals to Apple. Is then, Apple in deep shit?
Yes!
Irrespective of whether The Steve dealt properly with IBM, the reality is and has been for many years that developing their own CPU (or having it developed for them) was just too expensive for Apple.
The original idea of the Apple-IBM-Motorola coalition was that they would be able to compete with Intel by combining forces: CPUs for servers, workstations, and embedded systems; and by creating a third-party systems market to drive demand for these CPUs (PReP). This never really took off, so IBM and Motorola were stuck with having to compete with Intel for price/performance for a single customer that would only buy a fraction of what Intel and AMD would churn out. I have no idea how much it costs to keep up a competitive CPU architecture, but it must be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions per year.
Cell might be cheap, but it doesn't allow Apple to compete with PCs on a price/performance or performance/watt level. And paying IBM to continue to develop the 970 architecture was just too expensive: people might be willing to pay a bit more for Apple systems, but only so much.
Just look at all other contenders in the high performance CPU market: there's nobody left except for Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens, and they announced last year that they will cooperate on SPARC. From a pure market standpoint, Apple had little choice.
Intel have been working on something big. It was previously rumored that this something was the Pentium V and that Microsoft would be releasing a special version of Windows specifically for the processor.
"Windows Elements"?
What the hell is that? I'm thinking that the Pentium V has something so revolutionary that it prompted:
1) Microsoft to release a special version of Windows, specifically for the processor and,
2) Apple to change sides.
I also think that Intel expected to be much further along on the Pentium V at this point. It seemed like they were expecting to use it in order to quench AMD's 64-bit lead and, when the design was set back, they scrambled to come up with EMT64 as a stop gap solution.
So just what is this Pentium V and the "stackable" design, anyway? IMHO, it will be unified processor and NVRAM (not flash, something new). There will probably be at least a few gigs of a very fast NVRAM right on the processor. This NVRAM will be as fast or faster than SRAM so there will be no need for a cache or external system memory - the operating system will be installed right in the processor. The stackable design is for expansion.
Intel's NVRAM page. Nothing to indicate that any of this is true but some interesting reading, nonetheless. This could also explain MontaVista's PRAMFS.
If the backing-store RAM is comparable in access speed to system memory, there's really no point in caching the file I/O data in the page cache. Better to move file data directly between the user buffers and the backing store RAM, i.e. use direct I/O.
I have to post this anonymously... You'll see why below. The real reason Apple switched from IBM is because IBM just hasn't gotten their shit together with 90nm. I know this because I recently left a job at a large semi-conductor manufactorer that used IBM for our digital fab. IBM repeatedly promised, "we'll fix the problems in our process" for YEARS, and just couldn't get their act together. With run after run of silicon, IBM couldn't manufacture the parts correctly (or other other customers parts). Finally, my company became fed up, and bit the bullet to switch to another manufactorer. It was a 4 engineer year sunk cost (to update some the design), and the design worked out of the chute (and at pretty good yields). You heard it here first... IBM just doesn't have their shit together at 90nm.
You know Apple's not the only PC manufacturer that's been pushy. Dell has been dropping hints about using AMD for some time now and you can believe that everytime they do, Intel gets to shell out for another advertising campaign or something. I mean, how much 'testing' does Dell have to do to magically realize (like everyone else has) that AMD has the upper hand in most performance areas? I say that Dell merely does this to get more consessions from Intel.
But look at it this way. Intel knows that Dell secretly fears Apple in it's space. What this is REALLY all about is Intel getting more leverage. I can just hear it...
INTEL: "Oh? What's this Dell? You want to use AMD? Ok, then I guess you won't need this advertising spiff more than Apple will..."
Intel is the real winner in this scenario, not Apple, although I have no doubt that Apple will thrive regardless.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Especially on the G5, with a relatively small L2 cache (especially for a 64-bit CPU) and exceedingly high memory latency.
Why does this surprises us at all? It was a bit obvious that the switch had to do more with money (since IBM didn't want to lower their prices for Apple) than by the mere ideology of which processor Apple feel is better. Hello, wake up.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I'm wondering if the 360 has something to do with this, or if it at the very least nudged Jobs over the edge.
;-)
Hear me out. Most people have heard about Jobs' pathological reaction when he loses face, and everyone knows that he *hates* Bill Gates, right?
So awhile back Jobs' predicts 3Ghz G5's in 2005 (which I guess became the "3GHZ Promise"). IBM fails to deliver. However, Microsoft announces shortly before E3 that the 360 will use a 3.2 GHZ triple-core G5. I can only imagine that Jobs was pissed on some level that Bill Gates trumping him in Apple territory.
Of course, there have been a few reports that the 360's G5 is essentially crippled, and that the chip will effectively be only twice as fast as the original xbox's cpu. Even if it's true, I don't think that changes anything. Jobs may have figured figured (and I'd be inclined to agree) that even if the 360 chip is not really as powerful as it seems, it represents time&effort that IBM was dedicating elsewhere instead of working on improving it's offerings to Apple.
In fact, when you consider that IBM is working w/ Sony and Nintendo on other customized G5's, it seems pretty clear where Apple stands in terms of priority. Not that I blame IBM -- why the hell would you care about the rantings of Steve Jobs when you are going to be selling your product to 3 out of the 3 biggest players in the console market, with each one amounting to way more sales that what you'd ever get with Apple.
Not sure if it's the case, but it sounds plausible enough. At least he kept the promise though, right?
Think about this folks.
Apple did everything ti could to kill the old architecture. What better way to force people to upgrade to OS X software than make it impossible to run "Classic Mode" applications without the performance hit from running a PPC emulator on Intel?
And think about this, IBM is a major force behind Linux. What's an OS that's a threat to Apple? Gee, you think the FREE Unix based OS with the most momentum could be a threat? In which case, why on Earth would they want to pay money to IBM, a company contributing vast swaths of code to Linux, one of Apple's competitors, and an OS it's trying to steal developers FROM.
And by the way, this switch makes it easier to lure Linux and BSD developers away from their OS of choice.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I wonder what The Steve will break in a fit of rage if and when AMD's case against Intel results in a ruling that renders the volume deal illegal and void. You'd almost think that AMD (lawsuit) and IBM (PPC announcements, Cell) banded together to flip The Steve the finger after he had already made the decision.
It is pretty common for suppliers to give you breaks like that. It would behoove Intel to offer a discount on pentiums to move more xscale. Right now, xscale is still playing catchup to ARM which had a three year lead on xscale, (if my memory serves me right).
Although, Intel will be only too happy to give them a decent discount in the short-term. It increases their revenues, and helps them beat AMD in the brand game.
I think a combination of non computer items like the iPod, prospects of rapid market share growth, customer loyalty, and mindshare could give Apple leverage when it come to price per unit.
Let's face it, Intel would love to be associated with a company that seems to have a touch of genius in marketing and design.
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Seems to back up this fairly depressing review of Tiger/G5 I've just finished reading. Say benchmarkers comparing Tiger to Linux on XEON:
Top level of the review here. Note this review is really only relevant to high load server applications.
This is interesting and all, but I have to say that it is really unfortunate if we view a computer company's success strictly in terms of its market share, or even in terms of its profit. If you do, you end up making statements like this:
The desktop wars are over. Commodity IBM PC-compatibles with Microsoft OSes and Intel chips won.
I think what really matters is who makes the best product, and in my opinion the success of Apple is in the acheivement of OS X. Now, I am not so naiive to think that the business side of things does not matter; in order for OS X to continue to exist Apple must be successful financially as well. I just think we'd all be better off if we reoriented ourselves towards what success really is. Part of the reason OS X is such a success is because SJ is not only concerned with market share. He's not thinking he failed if market share is 5%, he's thinking he failed if the computer sucks.
For a class last semester I designed a simple 16bit VVVRISC (very very very reduced instruction set) processor, did full layout (n-dope here, metal there), timing sims, assembly language, the whole schebang.
At one point I was deciding whether or not to put a multiplier in. Mind you, ever decent processor on the planet has AT LEAST one, but this was a one man effort. Adding this function would slow my clock by a factor of x10. The circuitry to multiply is just a whole lot deeper. I chose instead to implement multiply in my assembly using shifts and adds. It made my multiply instruction 3x slower than if I had circuited it, but it made all my other instructions hellafasta.
I know my example was bad, but it is how I grew to understand the difference.
The point is, RISC means the slower, less often used functions don't slow down the rest of the process. So lets say a CISC processor implements several multimedia happy functions, and makes them 3x faster in doing so. Now lets say the algorithm changes, and wants a slightly different function. Now the software must either do it the RISC way or do it the CISC+software_patch way.
RISC to me feels cleaner, and probably allows for more elegant pipelines - simple instructions often can use the same silicon (my ALU used parts of the adder to do XOR/AND/OR/etc, multiplier would have been off to the side).
www.olin.edu
I dunno about that... My 2 year old P4 laptop is on the verge of expiring after being dropped, slopped and overheated on a regular basis. Looking around at both the Wintel and Apple offerings, not much has changed in two years. Hard disks are a bigger, video chips are a faster. A few more bells and whistles which I would likely strip out as soon as a I brought the machine home.
This is unlike the situation two years ago when I upgraded from a Win 98 / PIII / 15" XVGA laptop to my current XP / 3 GHZ P4 / 17" WUXGA / 2 GB laptop. Definately more bang for the buck there.
So, once again, I'm back to drooling over the G4, ancient technology notwithstanding. Urrgh.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, Apple seems to be trying to trademark Mactel.
Not even close.... yet.Apple has about 3% of the world's PC market and Dell has about 18% of the world's PC market.
Apple is probably counting on this deal to increase their volume of sales considerably.
Reasons:
RISC actually refers to a bundle of tricks and optimizations. Most modern "RISC" processors are not all that reduced in instruction set size. Some of these tricks are:
:-)). More registers make for faster code in general. I think that the new x64 extensions have increased the number of registers in the Intel architecture and, in any case, fast on-chip caches make the point almost moot.
Regular instruction set - all of the instructions are the same number of bits in length. CISC processors often have some instruction that are 2 bytes long, others are 4 bytes long, etc. Decoding this in a timely fashion was a problem back in the late 80's, early 90's. Today, there are lots and lots of transistors on the CPU to throw at this.
Single cycle execution - Originally RISC instructions were designed to be executed in a single cycle. CISC processors often had highly complex instructions that would take multiple cycles to execute (sometimes 100's or 1000's in the case of the VAX). Today, processors are pipelined but the idea is still the same - pump out instructions once per clock cycle. CISC processors tend to do this now as well.
Lots of registers - Registers are fast access memory inside the CPU itself. CISC processors varied in the number of registers available. Some, like the VAX and 68000 had lots of registers while others like the 80x86 have smaller numbers. RISC chips typically have large number of registers (unless you consider the 6502 as a RISC chip
Uncomplicated instruction set - The "R" in RISC usually really meant that all of the complicated instructions were thrown out and instead the compiler would just emit code to do them. Most of these terribly complex instructions (the VAX had a classic example which was the "evaluate polynomial" instruction) were actually microcoded (microcode is software that is a level below assembler, typically hardwired into the CPU) so they were not much faster than simply coding the routine using assembler. Easier to use if you're coding assembler by hand but who does that?
So, RISC was a lot more things than moving complex instructions from hardware to software AND the complex instructions that were moved from hardware to software were typically slow "in hardware" because they weren't really hardware but microcode. Most of the advantages of pure RISC are no longer as large as they were in the early '90's because the sheer number of transistors available (more transistors means you can make more difficult things run faster) is so large now that those optimizations don't buy you much. The battle now really comes down to how much money can you throw at the chip in order to produce new versions of it that run faster. When you look at the sheer amount of money invested in the Intel architecture vs PowerPC or SPARC or Alpha you will begin to have a lot more respect for what the RISC camp accomplished with a much smaller budget.
They were supposed to hit 3.0GHz many months ago, and they still haven't. They're stuck at 2.7GHz, well, at least the current chip is. The next chip IBM has announced (last week) tops out at 2.5GHz. How's that for progress?
And the yields. Ugh. The 90nm G5s became "available", but were only used in the XServe for a long time because so few chips were available they couldn't spare any for desktops.
The real thing is they were supposed to produce a chip useable in a laptop a year ago, but they still haven't, well, perhaps the one just announced. But I think that was just too late. And it's still not going to get the battery life of a Dothan or Yonah CPU.
There's an additional issue at play here. Currently Apple designs their own north and south bridges, to go with the CPUs. This takes a lot of Apple's time and costs a lot to do. And north bridges are getting far more complex. To make a truly cost-competitive mainstream machine (think iMac G5 or Mac Mini) in the future, you're going to have to have a north bridge with built-in video. That will add a lot more difficulty/cost/time to designing a north bridge. But if you go Intel, the 955 has pretty good (non-gamer) video built-right in. And it's only going to get better by the time Apple ships their machines.
But really, it comes down to what the other poster said. IBM can't get it together on the PPC at 90nm. I saw a couple of the timelines of machines Apple planned to make. Every 6 months a new timelime would come out, removing machines because the promised high speed, high yield or low power chips didn't appear on time. There's only so much of that Apple could take I guess.
Actually IBM got out of the PC market. They kept there server line. There business consulting and servers fit together very well. An IBM server running Linux, DB2 and Websphere make a good one stop solution. Also Servers are one place where hardware companies can actually make good money.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't know much but from what I do know...your theory sounds solid as granite. I mean they have VPC already. Damn, thats just depressing.
I too have to post anonymously because of where I used to work (Apple), and frankly your story is a load of shit.
I was part of the project team that maintained the x86 core of OS X and we in on a lot of the conference calls that Apple had discussing the impending switch. What acually happened was that senior management was extremely unhappy with IBM sharing the PowerPC technology with Apple's competitors Sony and Toshiba (via the Cell work, as well as other stuff that hasn't been announced yet). Apple disagreed with IBM as to what their technology licensing agreements said they could and could not do, so Apple basically laid it out on the line and told IBM to cease sharing the technology with Apple's competitors or they woud go somewhere else. I wasn't there when IBM said no, but Jobs was livid at the last meeting I was in on, and demanded to know how soon we could get our work out the door into some Intel based systems.
I have not had the patience to explain this to people here, but the Powerbook line right now is simply outgunned by laptop computers that sell for 1/2 to 1/3 of its cost.
I've wanted to buy a new powerbook for a year to replace a G3, but I won't do it because the G4 used in the PB is simply old news at this point. And since its so old, you keep thinking "I'm going to wait another quarter; they can't keep this G4 PB line going much longer".
Now, if Apple wants to sell 15" powerbooks for $1200, then they'll sell some. But they won't (15" prices are hovering in the $1800-2300 range). And if I'm willing to pay top dollar for a top PB performer... I can't. Not for any price.
Right now, PB sales have got to be in the dumper.
What might be a killer app to design a video iPod around is the DV (or HD) camcorder. Clip your iSight onto your iPod. Now you have a camcorder that's smaller than any other on the market and records approximately forever, strait to hard disk, no messing with tapes. Maybe in H264. I think that's what a "video ipod" is going to be.
Have and iPod Video and want an HD camcorder? It'll cost a heck of a lot less than buying a DV camcorder, all you need is the iSight, which, by the way, you can still use as a webcam. Want to upgrade to an HD camcorder? Instead of giving Sony another $1000 to replace your DV camcorder with HD, pay Apple a quarter as much for their new HD iSight and plug it into your existing iPod Video.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I'm sorry, Apple's as subject to the Bathtub curve for electronics hardware as much as anyone else.
Things either go really wrong right away, or at the end of the product life cycle.
Also, there are effect of environment as well.
Stick a Mac in a dust-choked closet and it'll suck up and die just as quickly as Ye Olde Dellboxen.
Before talking about how indestructible Mac hardware is, try catching some of these people who've gone to the Apple forums to get hardware issues resolved...at least before the Apple guys delete the posts.
Before you kill this post with "-1, Troll" markdowns, do a few searches for "Broken iPod", "Problems with Apple Hardware", and browse articles on ArsTechnica, Insanely-Great, MacAddict, etc. Then tell me I'm trolling.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Ever heard of 'Title Case'?
Furthermore, for your inference to be plausible, there would need to be a posessive " 's " after "Real", which there isn't. The title makes sense.
There are other reasons for choosing Intel too:s .aspx/featured_desktop1?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs) and think that Apple's are crap for performance and cost too much. If Apple can sell the same configuration as Dell for $100 more, people can justify the premium while not wondering about performance. I'm one of the most pro-Apple and pro-MHz-myth people out there, but I have a hard time believing that a 1.25GHz G4 is going to compete with an Intel processor over 2.5GHz.
-Intel delivers new processors on a more regular basis than IBM/Moto's fits and starts. It's not because IBM/Moto are incompetant. It's because Intel makes its money off the fast moving consumer market while IBM and Moto make designs for more of the long haul. Think of SPARC chips. They don't progress at the steady rate that Intel chips do. They progress in larger leaps at longer intervals and Apple has had that same problem with IBM/Moto (and it's really only a problem when selling to consumers).
-IBM's ability to deliver. This might be Apple's fault as the article suggests, but even if it is Apple's fault, Apple doesn't want to commit to huge purchases they might not use. Intel offers them the chance to say "we want 100,000 chips" and then a week later say "we need 250,000 more" and get the extra 250k a week after they receive the 100k simply because Intel sells these chips to more than just Apple and so they continue to make them unlike IBM.
-Public Perception. I think this is one of the biggest. Using Intel chips lets the avoid the crap that people say against the processors that Apple has used. I'm sure there are a lot of people that go into a store, see a 1.25GHz Mac mini for $500 and then see a 2.8GHz Dell Dimension 3000 with monitor, kb and mouse for $450 (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/feature
-Motherboards. Right now, Apple has to custom build most of their stuff. With Intel, Intel would be more than happy to sell Apple a fully tested, reliable system to install their OS on. No more in house chipsets, motherboards, whatnot.
-It's easy/foolproof!!! This is the best reason. Going with Intel makes you like every other manufacturer out there. When they have problems, you do and so your sales don't slump against their's. You don't have to worry about making sure people know your chips are competitive, you don't have to worry about IBM/Moto keeping interest in a market that doesn't make them money, etc. Apple doesn't have all these worries with Intel. The OS is a big enough draw, especially now at a time when Mac OS X is just beautiful and Windows is getting nastier and nastier to run.
You can't be serious. IBM doesn't care about DRM because nobody has asked for it. If Apple wanted DRM they would simply ask IBM to include in into their CPU and it would be done. Another option would be to include it in the G5 chipset that Apple already designs. If Apple wanted hardware DRM they would already have it.
Let me put it this way:
As someone who is OS agnostic, dislikes M$ but doesn't feel Linux can replace Windows completely any time soon due to lack of software (no flames please, I'm talking about Photoshop, Avid, After Effects etc), I'd love to have OS X as my system (especially since I love BSD).
However, Macs are terribly expensive. I think that's mainly what has been keeping them at 3% of the market.
If they can lower their prices (which I'm sure had something to do with the decision to switch), and I can run Windows, Linux and OSX natively on the same hardware, I'm switching - simple as that.
In fact, I'm sticking with my AMD64 for a little while longer until Apple announces their prices... then I'll decide.
If their prices come down enough to warrant a switch, I'll switch. Having been a PC guy for 20 years, that's big - and if even 10% of the market thinks like I do, Apple's market share can easily quadruple in a year. Now, that should be incentive enough for Apple.
-- This sig for rent.
no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC.
;-)
That isn't strictly true. There are tons of people, myself included (to my shame), who find alternative technologies attractive. I mean, let's face it, Windows _would_ let me do everything I need to, but I use Linux because of basically irrelevant technological advantages it has. The same goes with PPC. Sure, it might not *really* matter, but PPC is sexy, PPC is "cool," and PPC is a selling point for Apple machines.
To be quite honest, I think OS X is the worst of the three OSes I use regularly. It's really polished appearing so long as you only do a certain limited set of things, but I constantly run into its limitations and vastly annoying bugs. Apple sold its hardware to me because the hardware was better; perhaps not technically better, but better by my own standards.
I'm not in the least alone on this, either. Alternatives are "in." Some people dye their hair blue, some people pierce every part of their body, some people wear black fishnet stockings on their arms, and some people buy Apple products.
I'm a geek. ;)
;)
No, really, without getting into all the greeblies of X86 vs. PPC CPU design, at a primal level I can probably best characterise my preference that I'm drawn to purposeful design over attrition. That's not to knock X86 performance, and that's not to say that PPC is by any means perfect, but they're driven by different design philosophies (and different strengths) and I find the Power architecture to be a much more elegant expression of deliberate intent than X86's design-by-attrition: for example, regardless of how clean things may be at the microcode level, X86's ducttaped front end strikes me as a redundant kludge.
Putting all that aside, I really favor diversity in the desktop ecosphere, and let's face it - PPC is the last truly viable alternative to X86. Apple's machines have been great desktop PPC implementations (well, at least the Newworld G3s and the new G5 towers) in much the same spirit of clean and purposeful design, and a heck of a lot more affordable than IBM's Power offerings. PPC is well-supported by GNU/Linux and I expect to get at least a good decade out of my G5. Heck, the only reason I had to let my G3 go after eight years was that I foolishly bought into an Oldworld system and found myself painted into a corner.
Now if only the HURD were to reach that same degree of maturity and platform viability...okay, off to traipse blindly through my field of idealistic daisies!
I don't know about K-12, but at college I observed that the PCs were under constant use by the students, while the Apple computers generally sat around in sleep mode, waiting for someone to get tired of waiting around for a "real computer" to open up. Probably the reason the Dells don't last as long is that they simply see a lot more use/abuse by the students. That and the fact that low end Dells are pretty crappy machines anyway.
My bet is that the move had something to do with Intel's DRM, and making the Music Industry happy - since Apple's focus now is iPod/iTMS.
Also, each iPod sale is a potential "switcher". iTunes is available for Windows, yes. But each iPod sale is a person who may be curious about OS X, might actually buy an iMac, or Mac Mini. (the Mac Mini is aimed at "switchers" - who already have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, but want to front a minimal investment to switch platforms, just replace the CPU.)
But what if iPod potential "switchers" can't be supplied with enough PPC-powered Mac Minis, or Mac Minis are still a tad too costly, or what if Apple can't slip a powerful enough chip into that enclosure due to heat issues? The switch to Intel chips solves all of these issues. The difference between a Windows iPod/iTMS user, and an OS X iPod/iTMS user? The OS X "experience" - the same schlock any cross-platform software producer can do: make their Native version better than the ports. Like IE Windows compared to IE Mac. iTunes Mac will be kept more up to date with features than iTunes Windows, and it will only cost an iPod/iTMS user a couple hundred bucks to switch. And with Intel chips, they can ramp volume to meet demand now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes. I had a friend come and rave to me about her new Windows computer and how much better it was than a Mac. I asked her what kind of Mac she looked at to compare it to. She said that she *had* a Mac. I asked her which model. She said, "Mac Plus".
So, this was in 1997 and she's comparing her 11 year old Mac to a brand new Windows box and thinking that is a fair comparison.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"Apple doesn't have deep enough pockets to make this happen."
While I agree with most of your sentiment, if you flip your argument, Sony should have deep enough pockets to beat Apple in the MP3 player market. They have deep pockets, but they've done jack to dethrone Apple. Sony has deep enough pockets to make Sony Connect successful, but they haven't. Sony has deep enough pockets to make MemoryStick to become successful, but they haven't.
Substituting the name Microsoft into such an argument also is noteworthy. Microsoft has enough cash to make anything successful, but it hasn't worked. The Xbox would be dead if it were not for the Xbox Live system and Halo. Using your argument about developer relationships, Microsoft should be #1 in videogames considering their relationships with the game developers and the fact that the Xbox is easier to program than the Playstation2. But reality paints a different picture.
"End of story: Apple can't kill the PSP."
Apple doesn't have to kill the PSP because Nintendo will do the job just like it has done to every other handheld competitor. The PSP is awesome, but it is the 2005 version of the Atari Lynx, which judging from my user name, you should conclude that I am very fond of. Twenty + year olds are buying PSPs, not the kids nor are the parents buying them for the kids...just like with the Atari Lynx 16 years ago. The kids still get the Gameboys. All Apple has to do is add videogame functionality and better movie playback to a video iPod and it would split the demographic that the PSP appeals to. Even more so when the Video iPod is coupled with an Apple online movie store which would demolish the Sony UMD market for PSP movies.
The games would just have to be nice. Couple that with Apple's "cool" factor and its advertising campaign, and the Sony PSP would be toast. Having the absolute best technology in the handheld gaming area has never led to success. Otherwise, the Atari Lynx would've won out over the Gameboy. And the Gameboy did not have great third party support when it debuted. Its success was due to its low price, the leveraging of Super Mario Bros. on the machine, and the fact that Nintendo had a larger production run and better distribution than Atari with the Lynx. Third party title strength came later.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Yes, IBM's new CPUs seem adequate. But what about next year? And the year after that? And the year after that?
Given their history, I don't think they can be depended on to keep revving the line quickly enough.
To get the latest G5's out, Apple probably had to shovel truckloads of prunes into the goddam fab.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
The ARM2 processor was the first RISC chip that came in a home microcomputer. It was clocked at 8MHz and appeared in the Acorn Archimedes range of computers. Acorn also licensed the chip designs to third parties, including Intel.
It's low-power, it has a clean instruction set and a relatively low tranistor count.
And, yes, it does run Linux :p
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Nonsense. AMD has some extremely low-power processors that happen to be much faster than anything Intel makes, while still being cheaper.
AMD doesn't have a seperate line for their mobile chips, but Intel won't either as soon as they adapt their Pentium Ms into their desktop/server lines, which they are currently working on.
No, AMD just makes processors that are better than the Pentium M for laptops. 64-bit, faster, just as low-power, cheaper, etc.
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