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?"

Comments

Apple wants to use the dual-core "Yonah", not...

[Harry Balls]

...the current "Pentium M Dothan".
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.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[pv2b]

Insightful?! Wtf! How about bleeding-frigging-obvious. Don't waste your mod points on this crap I wrote.

Altivec

[0xC0FFEE]

"Altivec programs" really aren't coded against Altivec instructions directly. For example, for doing a vector add, you'd use vec_madd() which, if you have Altivec, maps to the vmaddfp altivec instruction. If you move to SSE, you'd probably code against the same vec_madd() but the compiler would generate the correct instruction for SSE. So, if you've followed Apple's instructions, conversion should be relatively easy. Furthermore, most people simply use Apple's higher level libraries (ie, vecLib, etc) that embeds most of what numerical people would need (like blas or lapack).

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.

Re:Altivec

[Reaperducer]

I'm sorry, sir. You seem very intelligent and well informed. We'll have to revoke your Slashdot posting permit.

I don't understand

[jtdubs]

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

Re:Will it cost more than a Dell running Windows?

[2nd Post!]

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.

Re:could backfire

[iamnotanumber6]

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...

Re:It's a reference to the Mac commercial.

[MooseByte]

"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.