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Intel PowerBook Rumor Mill
catdriver writes "AppleInsider has an article guessing about Apple's new Intel portable offerings in early 2006. 'With the initiation of the Intel Power Mac project last month, all five of Apple's Intel Macintosh projects are now said to be underway and moving at an exhaustive, yet fruitful pace. It should come as no surprise that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is reportedly leading the charge, with his heart set on making 2006 the next 1984.' With Mac OS X for x86 now catching up to its PPC sibling, is Apple ready to take the plunge?"
I am sure that there have been some issues, that I have written about before, notably the porting of hand coded Altivec instruction sets to equivalent Intel specific instructions. However, the code bases between Intel and PPC have been pretty close to one another going back to the NeXTstep days. You do remember that NeXTstep ran on Intel, right? At any rate, the next step, no pun intended :-), should be interesting indeed. I am hoping for additional professional plans that Intel specific chips should allow, particularly at the subnotebook (or even Newton formfactor) level. I have been travelling more and even the 12in Powerbook, which has been the best laptop I've ever owned, is starting to be cumbersome.
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Hmm, I wonder what Orwell would think about that.
Yonah is scheduled to arrive in January 2006, and will be followed in Q3/2006 by "Merom".
Most "Yonah" models are dual core, but a low-end model with only one core will be available. Apple will most likely opt to use the dual core "Yonah".
Merom will add 64 bits - yes, Yonah is 32 bits only.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
It has been speculated in many places that one of the main reasons Intel was chosen over AMD was mobile CPUs. Notebooks is one area where Apple is far behind PCs in terms of perceived performance. While servers and desktops have received new generations of PowerPC chips, the notebooks still use G4s. Although they've been updated, they're still G4s. It would stand to reason that this would be a main area of focus for Steve Jobs and Apple once the change had been made.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No, the reason there are no G5 Powerbooks is that the mobile G5s came out too late and are too slow. Keep in mind that any G5 based laptop computer would max out at nearly 1GHz slower than the fastest Pentium-M and Turion 64 laptops, yet have similar IPC.
Insightful?! Wtf! How about bleeding-frigging-obvious. Don't waste your mod points on this crap I wrote.
Most importantly, Altivec, while really fast, only support single precision computations. This is sufficient for improving multimedia playback, applying image filters on photos or compressing music, but lacking for high-precision computations. SSE supports double precision, a big improvement for the scientific market.
So, we have a few groups of people here:
1. Current OS X users.
They will almost invariable switch to the new Intel-based macs. I would say that most of them don't even know or care what chipset they are running on.
2. New OS X users.
These are people who will now be enticed to switch, because of the Intel move, that otherwise wouldn't have been. Perhaps they were waiting for the extra performance that Apple can offer in a laptop now that they have Intel processors. Perhaps they like that they can recompile their x86 specific programs on Macs now. (Yay! SBCL w/ Threading on OS X!? Dare I dream!?!?)
3. New Mac Hardware users (but not OS X)
This is the group you seem to be in. You want the Mac hardware, but don't care for the OS. I can't say I agree with you, but that's beside the point.
So, Apple will have all the people they have now (group 1), some new folks (group 2) and some additional hardware sales to people who are going to install Linux or Windows or BSD or something on the box (group 3).
Do you seiously believe that group 3 is big enough compared to the combined sizes of groups 1 and 2 that it will do anything other than add more to Apple's bottom-line? You aren't going to affect Apple's image unless group 3 is BIG or astonishingly well publisized.
Besides, even if group 3 were very large, we are talking about people who are buying the Hardware for the Hardware's sake. Because it's high-quality, attractive hardware. This could NEVER put them into direct competition with Dell. Dell is all about volumes. High volumes at low prices. Apple is EXACTLY the opposite. If Apple were buying the cheapest parts at the highest volumes to crank out machines as quickly and cheaply as possible, then group 3 wouldn't exist.
Well, those are my thoughts. You know the drill. Grain of sand and what-not.
Justin Dubs
Because they're largely a hardware company? I mean, why does Dell still want control over their hardware? Why don't they just package their Dell restore CD to work on other vendor's machines? It'll be cheaper, right?
Only cheaper != more profit. In order to sell their OS as their primary business, they'd need to make it support an ungodly number of weird hardware configurations, and probably raise the price of OSX a whole lot just to stay profitable. Plus, then they'd need to worry much more about piracy. When you're a hardware company, you don't need to worry too much about people downloading your product.
I have NEVER seen that kind of emphasis put on this transition. Way more emphasis was placed on the 68k to PPC transition and the OS 9 to OS X transition. I don't recall reading anywhere that this transition would be the evolutionary step the synopsis makes it out to be.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
The problem with that scenario is that Apple won't offer support for Windows on Macs, or Linux on Macs. So that rules out any users who might want support, e.g. business and educational institutions. I can't see many normal home users either forking out for a mac, then forking out again for a copy of windows XP, downloading drivers if needed etc. It might be 1% of users (i.e. you if you're reading this) who have got the time and interest for that. And are you really going to go to all that trouble to install windows???
Don't forget as well, that virtual PC will truely *fly* under OS X on intel - it takes away most of the requirements for emulation, so if you need windows stuff, that'll be the way to do it, it won't suck performance wise like it does now.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
1) Where is the profit in letting vendors sell Intel machines with Mac OS X?
Right now for a $1k system they might get $100 profit. If they license OS X for $30, they might get $20 profit (being optimistic here). So if they sold $1.6b Macs last quarter, and have 10% margins (they actually have reported 9.6%), they made $160m; if they license overnight, they'll have to sell 80m copies to make the same amount of profit. Only 177m PCs were shipped last year, so they'd have to take HUGE chunks of the market in order to make a transition profitable.
News article about shipment last year.
So it's not good enough that shipping OS X for Intel is cheaper; it has to be profitable. Microsoft is profitable because they got $30 or so for every PC shipped last year, or $5b in OS licenses last year.
2) Why do they want a bigger share? They only need to make more money, and that doesn't necessarily equate to bigger share. As I outlined about, $100 per PC vs $20 per PC requires an overnight 5x increase in shipment.
If Apple wants to lower prices, they still have lots of things they can do:
a) strip out components: Compare a Mac mini to an XBox 360 or PS3
b) use cheaper components
c) increase process efficiencies
None of those things have anything to do with adopting OS X for Intel en masse.
GPL Deconstructed
> Why does Apple still want to control the hardware? Why don't they just port to Intel and let vendors sell Intel machinces with licensed versions of Mac OS. It'll be cheaper.
1. Because Apple is a Hardware and Software Business, unlike Microsoft. 80% of Apple's profits come from their hardware.
2. Increased development and debugging time to try and make it run on a vast selection of hardware which in turns makes it buggier, slower, and more driver failure prone.
3. Apple doesn't like the idea of Mac OS X, which is beautiful, running on ugly ass hardware.
4. Apple doesn't want to have to try and support everything under the sun, which is what Microsoft tries to do, but often never goes well.
5. Apple doesn't have any form of anti-piracy software in any of their current builds of the consumer level OS. Only the Server editions get that.
6. People would pirate OS X and take a huge chunk out of that measily 20% of their profit intake, take into consideration that already 80% of their profits would be gone, because of supporting other computers.
> I've often heard it said that Apple has priced itself out of the market. If they want a bigger market share they'll need to take advantage of cheaper prices that come through competition. My guess is that if Apple is allowing only specific hardware to run their OS it'll envitably be more expensive.
And those people that say such stuff are about as bright as a lightbulb in a closed fridge. Steve has repeatly said they have no interest in garnering a huge marketshare. They are happy with what they want. Take into consideration what would happen if all of a sudden they had a huge marketshare.
1. Suddenly troubleshooting and technical help services would have to multiply in their size exponentially to keep up with the market mass.
2. Suddenly they'd have to start supporting every piece of hardware under the sun that Windows does, because customers will whine.
3. Suddenly the OS will have a lot more attention from the cracker community, yeah cracker, not hacker. While OS X and all *nix systems are far superior in their security model than Windows, its still not crackproof.
I'd also like to point out if you looked at any of Sony, VoodooPC, Alienware, or other vendors... outside of that discount bargin crap stuff like Dell. You'll see that Apple's hardware is more than reasonable pricing.
I doubt that prices will rise. One of the biggest reasons Apple went with Intel is because Intel is the 800lb gorilla of the market. They can give HUGE discounts on their CPUs that AMD and IBM/MOTOROLA/FREESCALE just can't match. Not because of some "performance lead on the competition." Anyone that can put 1 and 1 together knows AMD clobbers Intel in the gaming, 64-bit, server, and price market.
Right now there is virtually no difference in hardware between OS X and the average run of the mill PC. Outside of the processor and motherboard, which will soon not be there at all. I'm pretty confident that the prices will either stay at their current level or drop down a bit.
very good points, but i disagree with the "backfire & hurt OSX" conclusion.
I personally don't like OSX, but LOVE the Apple hardware. I would be interested in purchasing a Titanium (x86) and putting Windows and Linux on it. I odn't believe I'm alone with that opinion either.
First glance you may say, good for apple, they still get the money. However, what that starts to do is move mindshare for apple to a premium hardware supplier, not a platform supplier.
I believe there are many people that will consider doing this, and I think this could hurt OSX. This move could put Apple (overtime) going Head to Head with Dell not MS.
apple has a much much better chance at competing with dell and gaining market share than they do against microsoft. selling hardware to windows users is a damned good business plan for apple - can you say iPod? profits from OS X are minimal, they give it away with their machines. so, suddenly that other, oh, 95% of computer users are potential apple hardware customers. windows users will switch hardware vendors (eg. dell to hp to apple) at the drop of a hat. but switching operating systems, even if it costs nothing, is a huge investment of one's time in relearning everything and repurchasing applications. so among committed windows users (eg. 80% or more of all computer users), "mindshare for apple" is already zero. this will change that. dramatically.
now, literally millions of windows users will pick up apple powerbooks and imacs because the hardware is so #%#$%#$% awesome. at the same time, that gives them free access to OS X, while not forcing them to use it. so that massively opens up the potential market for (higher-margin) apple software products like FinalCut, DVD Studio Pro, etc., which are really top-of-the-line in their class.
remember in the 90's, apple headed down that road of trying to compete with microsoft, licencing clone manufacturers of apple hardware. it was suicidal. jobs is smarter than that. look for apple to triple their hardware sales (where they make most of their profit) in the next few years...
"You know, the girl with the sledgehammer breaking that giant screen with Big Brother in it.
Only this time around the girl is the stoner chick from the Switch campaign.
She wanders into the room looking dazed, sees the giant talking face on the screen, then cocks her head like a confused cocker spaniel while trying to use her iPod as a remote to change the channel.
Eventually she wanders out a side exit.
Craploads of RAM and HD space
Running the latest version of OSX
Running any version of Windows and Linux in VM spaces
Just reduced my development test machines from four to one
I've currently got six separate machines. My main development box (Suse 9.3), my game box (WinXP), and my four test machines for compatability testing ( WinXP, Win2k on cheap beige boxen, Suse9.3 on a decent IBM Thinkpad, OSX on a MacMini ). Reduce my test machines down to one machine that's also my portable. Lowers my power bill, more desk space, and a portable I can do ANYTHING on (from development, to BF2/Civ4)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Tell me about it. Next thing you know, people will be spreading rumours about some kind of video iPod. Pfft. Lunatics.
You know what would fill that void perfectly? A 10" PowerBook Tablet. Considering that OS X has supported graphics tablets since forever, and they've still got that good handwriting recognition from the Newton, it seems logical to me...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
According to Apple's most recent quarterly results portables are outselling desktops. This is the actual (non-drug induced) reason why we'll see Intel-based PowerBooks before we see Intel-based PowerMacs. And I'm pretty sure we'll see the PowerBooks before iBooks, but that's just a hunch.
cat
No pro user will rely on Rosetta.
:-)
These kids today and their universal binaries; back in the 68K->PPC transition we ran the entire OS under emulation -- and we liked it!
Because, unlike most Windows users, we don't maximize everything, so the extra width isn't just wasted space.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;