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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.
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.
I can pretty much guarantee that Apple will create the most legacy-free x86 you've ever seen... they were the first ones to switch to USB for everything, they were the first ones to drop the floppy, and they were the first ones to offer wireless internet and CD-burners as standard equipment. Apple likes being current, and they have no problem dropping obsolete components.
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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.