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Roundtable on Apple's Future
John Murrell writes "Given the insatiable appetite for Apple rumors, analysis and speculation, SiliconValley.com has opened a week long roundtable discussion on the company's post-Intel future. Among those on the panel are Andy Hertzfeld, Tim Bray, Brent Simmons, John Gruber, Keven Krewell, Mark Gonzales and Leander Kahney."
You can buy a fancy computer that is relatively well built that runs OS X. But if you don't like OS X then you can put Windows or Linux on it. Most older PPC applications should work, Newer Applications have Fat binaries so both platforms work for a while. The OS has been tested on x86 in duel Development from day 1. All this ends are the annoying xPlatform is faster then yPlatform debates. Sure PPC may have its strong points but not much, this is probably a good move for Apple. While I am sure hacks for OS X that will make it run on any PC will be out most people are not going to try to hack there system to run OS X, or bother looking for it, when OS X says I can't install on my platform, most people don't have the time to make a hack for the OS. So not much will change, with the exception of some compiler flags that are different in some applications.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As a developer, I'm far more interested in a forum on the future of Objective-C. While a totally fantastic language, it still is lacking some amenities one expects from modern languages. Automated garbage collection is one such example. There are rumors (as recently as April) that Apple is/was working on a garbage collection system for Objective-C.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I thought the comment regarding the yellow box implementation (sic Rhapsody era) was very interesting and plausible.
This idea is that with the switch to Intel, Apple will be porting (has already ported) and developers will be porting all their apps to Intel compile to run native... has to happen...
to continue...
iTunes on Windows has already introduced a significant amount of OS X AppKit codebase to Windows (on Intel of course)...
which means that anyone with iTunes on Windows is ready to run many of these soon to be available intel compiled OS X Apps
inside Windows, ala Yellow Box (basically an OS X runtime space on Windows).
SO..... we will end up seeing all of the Apple consumer / free apps for OS X also running on Windows inside the YellowBox space at native speeds (cause they're built for intel) and an increasing number of developers using XCode to compile apps that run perfectly on both OS X and Windows/YellowBox and decreasing number of developers not doing so as there will be no performance hit or added overhead and thr upside is you hit two OS's for the price of one. Which also means consumers can pay for one license while being able to install their purchased software on both Windows and Mac.
Over time people start thinking "I really only use the free Apple Apps and all my installed and paid for apps will run on Macs, so why not buy a Mac?"
This could take less than 5 years but at least 2 years... just long enough for Game developers to start the process.
IMHO
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.