Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
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.
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.
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!