Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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."
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?