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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.
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.
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?
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.
Well, Apple seems to be trying to trademark Mactel.
Umm.. a Intel fanboy
...
As has been said in previous replys to your post, it's obvious that intel (altough keeping it's position as a player on the microprocessor ground) it's really falling behind competitors, such as IBM itself and obviously AMD, wich has demostrated recently that can do more than just "cloning" PI's or PII's
It makes me wonder why Apple didn't choose AMD, we all know that in terms of price AMD is also winning, and could pretty much kill Intel in the foreseeable future.
New players come in to town with different architectures such as IBM/Sony with their Cell chip, and only IBM with the new line up for the PPC cores, so
Definetly something that will we need to follow later on.
You're right in that Intel started developing 64 bit chips earlier, but as already said, they did it the wrong way.
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.
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 $1000 to replace your DV camcorder with HD, pay Apple a quarter as much for their new HD iSight and plug it into your existing iPod Video.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Let me put it this way:
As someone who is OS agnostic, dislikes M$ 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.
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!
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*