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Will You Stick with Apple, After the Switch?
caseykoons writes "While I understand the /. crowd is likely to be biased, I am curious. Has Apple's decision to switch to Intel Chips lost the company some of its old supporters? I have used Macs since I grew up, was a loyal 'Mac Evangelist' back in the '90's, but the company's decision and the recent connection to Trust Computing have had me wondering if I will stick with the old Apple from now on. What are your thoughts?"
..and it will still be all that it is today. The only people leaving would be the ignorant ones.
It's not the processor.
I'll be sticking with Apple. Recall that IBM was the object of Apple's animus in the Big Brother ad in 1984. If Apple made nice with IBM, I really don't see the problem with making nice with Intel.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
I plan to actually buy an Apple after the switch happens. I'm more annoyed at the "lock out" chip to prevent OSX from running on anything but Apple's lineup of Intel stuff, but for the most part, I can't wait to go Mac
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
I like their software. Their hardware will still be nice. Not as different, but still nice, even if it is still overpriced. But their OS won't change. It will still be a nice, easy to use OS with Unix underpinnings. That is why I bought my iBook, not because it has a G4 processor.
/usr/games/fortune
There has been an unbelievable amount of hype around this change. I guess I'm not sure why so many people seem to have some sort of religious attachment to the CPU. The vast majority of folks (even many developers) never interact in any meaningful way with the CPU itself (e.g. assembly) that would really differ in moving from PPC to Intel. There will be emulation for a while and this will be less than optimal but for the most part this shouldn't have much effect on most users and from a functional point of view will barely be a blip on the radar in 2-3 years.
Computer user since December 25, 1982
Mac user since July 5th, 1988
I've gone through System 6, System 7, OS 8.1/8.6, pretty much skipped OS 9, and then from 10.0.4 on up to 10.4.2. That has carried me across 8mhz 68000s, some 68020s, a IIfx (I still pine for that machine), various 030s and 040s, a handful of PPC601 upgrade cards, eventually to native PPC machines (some of those with 486 cards in them!), all the way to my current 533mhz G4 tower and G3 iBook.
So what was the question? Whether or not I'm gonna ditch the Mac because of a processor change?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
The new Apple hardware will be stylish, perform well, run the best combination of usability and power on the market and be compatible with the other 95% of the computing world. You'd have to be an ideological moron to give all this up because of a "connection" with something that's a bit on the nose. But those sorts of people are few and are already running Linux (but they call it GNU/Linux).
When Apple starts affecting my freedom to use my computer the way I want, or otherwise fucking up the user experience, I'll ditch them.
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From my experience much of the Intel hatred in the Mac crowd was caused by Apple themselves with their anti-Intel campaigns (remember the toasted bunny suit?). In my mind these ads were targeted towards the not-so-knowledgeable crowd who thought Apple and Intel were directly competing companies (which they obviously aren't, Intel being a chipmaker and Apple being a computer-maker). Mac-thusiasts who bash Intel are almost certainly just repeating the same messages that Apple fed to them several years ago.
It seems to me that Apple is just doing what is necessary to ensure that they deliver a top-notch product to their customers, which is a fairly rare thing today. As far as I'm concerned, bravo to Apple for being aggressive enough to make such a decision.
Has Apple's decision to switch to Intel Chips lost the company some of its old supporters?
That decision alone won't directly affect very many people's decision. In the end Apple may lose some customers, if the transition is too difficult for the software developers, or if the Intel chips can't perform as well, or if the rate of piracy goes up. But directly, who cares what company makes the chip? A few zealots, maybe, but the vast majority of the world doesn't make this type of distinction.
A computer is a tool. You use it to get stuff done.
An Apple Mac does its best to help you do your stuff done, and gets out of your way otherwise.
This is why many people love their Macs. As long as that doesn't change, we won't care what's on the inside.
Same with me. The Mac was the last bastion of hope for those who wanted to avoid the x86 platform without having to pay thousands of dollars for a Sun workstation. The Mac was a blend of elegant hardware (PowerPC and OpenFirmware) and elegant software (Mac OS X). There was nothing crappy about a Mac with OS X. It was something to lust after.
And in 2007, that elegance will be gone. Choice will be gone. There will be an x86 monopoly on computers (except for the SPARC, and who knows how long that will stay). The only choice we'll have left to make is whether to buy crappy hardware and run Linux/Windows on it, or to buy crappy hardware that comes bundled with Mac OS X.
The x86 is one of the worst processor architectures ever designed. It has a crappy instruction set and is filled with hacks. However, due to Joe Sixpack users who believe that higher megahertz == higher performace, and because of stupid companies who fell for that Itanic pile of BS and dropped their elegant architectures, the x86 somehow killed the MIPS, Alpha, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, and PA-RISC archiectures. The x86 isn't popular due to technical superiority. The x86 is only widespread because of some excellent marketroids running the company, and because Joe Average can't walk into the computer store and buy himself a MIPS or PowerPC machine.
OSX on ARM? Funny. You really don't know what your talking about do you? ARM is nice for their ipods, but not their powermacs (I just assume the ipod uses arm) Unless you spend all your time coding in asm (and I hope you wouldn't, modern c/c++ compilers can do better asm then humans anyway) then you shouldn't care about which architecture your using. PPC may sound better in docs, and may be a cleaner arch compared to old x86, but I'm sorry, compare the G5 to your amd64 (yes I know theyre not using amd, but intel's been slack with their 64bit, and the amd chip is still an x86_64 chip so all is well) in terms of power consumption, heat and performance. Or the G4 vs Pentium M for the same reasons. Sure, PPC may be a cooler arch, but unless you plan on living in a dreamworld, x86 beats out ppc.
Sure you can run Linux or *bsd on your intel machine, but you can on a ppc machine too. That's not the point of having an apple computer. The x86 darwin port is not the same as the OSX x86 port.
It's going to depend, isn't it? On whether the PPC emulation for all my old software is really up to snuff, on whether they keep FireWire and OpenFirmware for the production machines (I know they ditched OF for the dev machines, so we'll see), on whether they still use good components, and on whether Macs will still get the girls. We'll see.
Will you stick to PC's, after the switch?
You can get still a Sun UltraSPARC for US$1395. The elegance will be present unless you're programming in assembly. The processor will be completely abstracted from you and the only difference will be that the computers are faster, especially the laptops. Just pretend it's a better chip.
From Ars Technica:
See, there's often a difference between what a company sells and what consumers actually get when they purchase the product. Apple Computer, Inc. has "sold" slightly exotic, "technically superior," performance-oriented hardware for years, regardless of where the company's products have actually stood vis-à-vis the PC on the performance ladder. Or, to put it differently, the "RISC" PowerPC architecture has been a core part of the Apple brand and the overall "mythology" of the Mac platform since the 68K transition, even if that architecture rarely delivered on company's promises with benchmark numbers. So what Apple fans are mourning right now isn't the loss of some actual technical superiority of the Mac hardware, but rather the loss of the perception of that hardware's "technical superiority." Even more importantly, Mac enthusiasts are also mourning the loss of that perception's role in the ongoing maintenance of the myth of Apple and of the Apple brand in the form in which these two have coexisted in the PowerPC era.
Look beyond the mythos and marketing, man...
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
I've written assembly as well, but haven't needed to in years. And I'm not talking about a school project, I'm talking about real world code. Lots of it, over many, many years of my career.
Why on earth do you care about how clean the assembly language is for a particular chip? Do you care about how clean the microcode is in the computer in your car? Do you care about what goes on inside your TV or VCR? The vast majority of people buy a computer for the applications they can run on it, and never do any programming at all. Of the minority that do program, the vast majority are never exposed to anything but high level languages.
If you're writing the code generator for a compiler, I can see as you might care. But even there, there are larger issues. Apple is switching to Intel chips because Intel is achieving more performance for a given power/heat budget than the PPCs. Intel has economy of scale on its side as well. The end result is better for the user of the computer.
Sure, I agree that Intel's instruction set is not that pleasant to deal with, but seriously dude, get some perspective.
On the other hand, in general I find that when looking at compiler generated assembly I find things that I would have done differently (that is, better). But the downside is writing assembly that works is a pain in the butt. And this is where the compiler kicks a human's ass. I have found compiler bugs where the compiler spits out the wrong assembly, but 99.99% of the time it produces assembly that corresponds to your source code. And since C is at an ever so slightly higher level of abstraction from assembly you are guaranteed to write better code in C.
Only fools write first in assembly any more. Assembly should be reserved for things that absolutely can not be done in C, like interrupt routine wrappers and extremely speed critical inner loops. Otherwise you are just making an unmaintainable mess for no reason.
So, if by "good" you mean the tightest, fastest, most optimized code possible, then you are generally right. A really good human can generally outdo a compiler. But even then not 100% of the time. Now, if by "good" you mean code that is maintainable and bug free then no, a human writing assembly cannot even begin to compete with a compiler writing assembly from human generated C.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
What it comes down to is yes, x86 is a weird bad architecture - but it's faster than the competition. It has a crappy instruction set filled with hacks, but it's faster than the competition. PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, PA-Risc, Sparc... are all more elegant but x86 is still faster. Other CPUs are "done right" in a technical sense, but when it comes to real products in real machines that can be bought for the money people want to pay right now to get a job done...
x86 is still faster than the competition, because for all its defects in technical 'purity' Intel and AMD have been able to squeeze more performance out of those chips than have the competition - End of story. That's what counts to consumers, and that's what counts to Apple.
Why would it make a difference? If you are a loyal Ford/Benz/Honda/etc. owner, and you found out the company was switching the type of engine used, would you look elsewhere?
You will ask yourself:
1) Will it be as reliable as the old type of engine?
2) Will it get at least as good fuel efficiency as the old type of engine?
You don't buy a car based on the type of engine it uses. You buy a car based on what it consumes (type and quantity of fuel), and what it produces (locomotion).
Computers are purchased the same way. The question is more about how smoothly the transition will be made, than it is about Intel processors. New model year cars generally have more hiccups than the 2nd or 3rd year. I can only imagine this will be the same way. Doesn't stop people from buying new model cars though.
And just as soon as Apple subsumes Palm they'll have my whole personal-computing niche sewn up.
I'm not sure that Palm has anything left to save at this point. The Lifedrive is a lunatic device, and now they're talking about Linux? What's left of Palm that would be worth subsuming?
VHS was superior.
It had longer tapes. This is what people were after at the time. This was a substantial difference at a time when betamax tapes were limited to just one hour.