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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
Good point. I would assume that sales volume would have to be very, very high to receive a Dell-like discount. I don't think Apple qualifies. Then again, Intel might give them a good discount to keep them onboard. Apple could always re-marry IBM.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
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
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.
misspelled Teh
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.
The second coming of Newton, a video iPod or perhaps a PSP killer. Or all of the above, but with an integrated cellphone. And a pony!
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Then again, Intel might give them a good discount to keep them onboard. Apple could always re-marry IBM.
;-)
Or just use the oldest trick in the book ("We are looking at using some chips from AMD."), and then see what "discounts" you qualify for
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
They claim -Os is to remove bloat, not increase performance :-) Thing is, for kernel type code the resulting code is actually _faster_ than with gcc -O2, since there is a lot less cache pressure.
The Fedora kernel people have benchmarked this quite a bit (and now compile kernels with -Os too), the difference is quite measurable, 5%:ish in some benchmarks.
Thanks - the image of Isaac Newton with two bolts to his head (and stitches) growling "I live again" will haunt me today.
It's too bad they didn't go with AMD processors instead. Then the iPod could have doubled as a hot plate / coffee warmer. That would be a useful technology fusion if you ask me. Far better than a crappy cell phone in an iPod!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
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..."
Compiling with "-Os" (optimize for smaller code size) is not always at odds with speed, as is implied in the article.
While for some trivial benchmark code -O4 may generate faster code, for real-world applications keeping your code in cache is worth more than loop unrolling - so in real-world stuff often -Os is better than -O[2345].
www.eFax.com are spammers
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
Every iDotted? Of course! He got an iContract with iNtel. iThink you've nailed iT. iNeed coffee.
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.
And all this time I thought putting the "Intel Inside" stickers on the MACs when I was in in college was a cruel gag done to piss off the MAC users. Not I'm a bloomin' prophet.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
First, we had the Wintel monopoly.
Then some competitors came along and the non-Intel processors running Windows carved out a large enough market share to justify splitting the terms off into ChipZilla and Wintendo.
Now, we have MAC going Intel. What the HELL do we call this?
MacTel?
Intelmac?
Apptel?
Intenapple?
What terms can we use now???
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
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.
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?
Wow! Do you think perchance that this Pentium V will also have something to do with "code morphing"? I heard this technology should really be revolutionary!
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.
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.
> 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.
Yup... Good points.
A friend of mine and I were talking and he came up with this:
If you could spend just a little more on a machine and get one that would run OSX and Windows vs. the cheaper one and just run Windows, which would you get? We talked and came up with stuff like this:
$0: no brainer, sure get the OSX-able one
$100: probably get the one that runs OSX
$200: probably not get the OSX one
As you say, the Mac faithful will buy whatever Steve puts out for them to buy. However, some of the Windows folks might just shell out a little more to get the option (even if never used) to be able to run OSX... if the price difference is reasonable enough. I think Apple will gain by switching to Intel parts, even if the performance is comparable, it just allows a wider market easier access to Macs and OSX.
With all the horseshit I've seen on this topic, I knew there had to be a pony around here somewhere.
No, the larger the volumes you have, the lower the prices you can get. There's no unit step at a certain volume although if you are the single largest consumer you can probably get an even bigger cut. Either way they'll get lower prices on Pentium devices than on PPCs, and lower prices on PC components than traditional Apple/PPC components. The simplest reason is that the PPC volumes are low enough that R&D & other NRE expenses are a significant portion of the per device cost. On a mainstream Intel processor, those costs are divided amongst every consumer, it's almost invisible.
High end PPCs are used in a lot of places, but not in significant volume (when compared to a Pentium).
I don't see why anyone cares what hardware is under the hood in an apple, no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC. They use it because Apple owns & supports the entire system and the OS is good.
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
There are a few who care. And the likelihood that a random Mac user who also frequents /. cares about the CPU should be much, Much, MUCH higher than that of the total population (of Mac users =)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Oh, you stupid people, you don't grasp what's really happenning here. I have to tell you everything.
:-D
Apple is turning to Intel because The Evil Empire (AKA Microsoft) will at last buy 100% Apple stock and Mac OS X 11.0 will be the much-hyped Longhorn.
Macs on the otherhand last a MUCH longer time. Up untill 2 years ago I still had fully used and working 5500s in some of our buildings in some labs. We still have at least 200-300 1st gen iMacs and infact barely ever buy macs, even though our install base is over 1500. They barely break and are easily repaired and do everything they need to do so why replace them. The only time we ever actually replace them is either cause the CRT goes out, or the motherboard dies. harddrive and optical drive problems are easily repaired by ordering parts even on iMacs.
If anything Apples biggest problem is they build things too well so the numbers dont match the actual install base. Wasnt there a /. article a month ago talking about that fact that Mac are actually 11-15% and not the horrable 2-5% some people give it.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Well said. Ars is a fantastic technical resource, but I don't think they're up to snuff when it comes to business world commentary.
The reasoning put forth in the article that Apple was too demanding doesn't hold when you consider IBM's "Power Everwhere" strategy. The parent poster is right -- IBM could've pushed the 970 into other markets, but they failed to reach 3 Ghz and couldn't sell it. Calling it a custom job for Apple after the fact is just sour grapes.
IBM can whine, but they used Apple to catapult themselves to the top of the list for custom processors for things like the XBox and the PS3. Once they had those contracts, Apple was a fish they could throw back. Bait, if you will. Meanwhile, the XBox 360 is water-cooled, and the Cell chip that powers the PS3 is not a viable desktop processor.
And let's not forget that the PPC970FX is horribly underpowered. Clock-for-clock, the G5 is shows no major real-world performance improvement over the G4. The main reason the G5 is so great is that it hits clock speeds up to 2.7 Ghz. The G4 is a full 1 Ghz behind. But the 970FX, IBM's "low-power" chip, is clocked even lower than the current G4, and its power consumption is STILL higher than the Pentium M. Meanwhile there are new G4 chips out NOW that reduce power requirements even more drastically.
The only thing the 970FX brings to the table is 64-bit compatibility, which is only necessary if you have more than 2 GB of RAM -- not a likely prospect in a laptop. The fact of the matter is that IBM's "low-power" offering is the weakest of all major chip manufacturers. Even Freescale is ahead of them. Intel is just plain out of their league.
With that in mind, Apple's reasons for moving to Intel were exactly as they stated -- better performance per watt. IBM couldn't hit the goal, pulled the plug, and is now trying to blame Apple for the fallout in order to save face with other clients.
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
ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and later Intel, who did the actual production. Even with their fully in-house designs, they've been produced by third party companies; e.g. VLSI was responsible for the ARM2 and ARM3.
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 $1000 to replace your DV camcorder with HD, pay Apple a quarter as much for their new HD iSight and plug it into your existing iPod Video.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Let me put it this way:
As someone who is OS agnostic, dislikes M$ 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.
"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*