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What is the Intel Switch Costing Apple?
SenseOfHumor writes "A Business Week article says that it costs Apple $898 for an Intel iMac before loading it with software and packaging. From the article: 'But for Apple, the switch to Intel chips is less about saving money in the short term, and more about hitching its wagon to Intel's longer-term product road maps, particularly in the area of notebooks. IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat, and therefore not suitable to notebook computers.'"
It should be easier to switch to AMD or other X86 platforms in the future, opening up more negotiation possibilities.
The article didn't mention overhead. You can bet that there is a cost associated with the overall organization, plus the physical plant, R&D, etc. that most likely brings the costs way up from where the article puts them!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
It is odd to me that Apple leverages so much into specific processors rather than specific processes. It would seem to me that Apple really has a great interface -- and that is the product they want to sell. With their OS kernel being based on some *nix variety (BSD? I can't remember) I would guess that the processor itself is unimportant if their software and APIs are hardware transparent.
Here's the great thing about the market and letting it lead you (instead of the other way around) when you are an OS or software provider -- you can focus on writing good clean code, and follow up that code with the hardware that offers your code the absolute best package given the infinite choices.
Power management, heat creation, MIPS, FLOPS, BOPS, GHZ, THZ, MB, MBps, whatever the hardware does best, there's always a ratio to price. That's the great thing about the free market, though, competititors will always want to beat the other.
What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around? Is this Apple goal with Intel, possibly? Shake up IBM (and show smaller processor companies that they, too, have a chance) and create an operating system that must now work with 2 (or 10?) completely different processor subsystems? Is this Apple showing that they can get away from hardware entirely, and focus just on software?
The pentium-m processors are incredibly power efficient and perform very well. Sure there desktops are absolutely horrible from the Northwood to the Prescott core (and perhaps some new cores since i've stopped paying attention to what intel releases on the desktop now) but that doesn't exclude the fact that they do infact have one of the best, if not THE best solution for notebooks.
Hmmm... Pie...
This wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, Appple was unable to build a fast laptop, and IBM couldn't offer them anything competitive with what was happening on the x86 side of things. I've got the latest Powerbook G4, which is the best, fastest laptop Apple could offer until now, and it's just too far behind the curve. Would you rather they remained there, while IBM worked on other things and didn't care?
I'm a Mac user, and I've been keeping an ear to the ground, but I haven't heard any mention of the new MacBooks having improved battery life over the 'old' PowerBooks, so I am guessing the reverse is true (or much would be made of the better battery life). Of course, there are lots of other reasons for the move than just lower power consumption, and even on that front, there's no way of knowing right now if the new MacBooks will have lower unit-of-power/unit-of-computational-power costs. With the possibility that the new chips provide better-than-G5 performance in a laptop, well, there's certainly something going right with this switch, even if Intel doesn't have the best reputation for efficient, cool chips.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
If Apple's going to be commodity CPU on the server front, then there's no incentive on the hardware front to pay for Apple.
Uh, why do you say that? You're saying that the only important hardware consideration for a server is what brand of CPU it uses. All Intel servers are otherwise equally desirable, and all AMD servers are otherwise equally desirable.
That's obviously not the case.
And really, no one in the past five years bought an Apple because of the PowerPC processor. They bought one despite it, because the hardware was great otherwise, and because the OS was great.
This space intentionally left blank.
The Core Duo is a great laptop chip, have you seen the benchmarks and reviews lately? IBM had no real roadmap for a laptop version of the G5. Shortly after the switch was announced, IBM made some vague statement saying that they had a low power G5 design, and they could have made it if Apple wanted it. I seriously doubt that their chip would have come near the performance of the Core Duo, or that it would be ready today.
The CPU benchmark numbers tell the tale. The Core Duo is 4-5x faster than the 1.67GHz G4 in the PowerBook, but only 2x faster than the single-core 1.8GHz G5 in the old iMac. So you can assume that the Core Duo is at least twice as fast core-for-core as the G4, but about the same core-for-core as the G5.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
"What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around?"
I think the problem is that Apple is a software company that makes its living as a hardware company. And to make money from hardware, they have to be perceived as different from their competition. If you follow what you're saying to it's logical end, you come up with a solution that says "Apple should not sell hardware, they should write software that runs anywhere".
I'm sure Jobs experience with NeXT tells him that selling an operating system, his experience watching Gasse sell BeOS tells him he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft on that basis. So he's chosen a middle ground that appears to be increasingly difficult to maintain differentiation on the hardware side.
The next few years will be interesting for Apple, that's for sure.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Why would the general populace ever want to buy a Mac?
Almost every person that I've induced to switch or helped to switch were prompted to do so to escape the Windows virus nightmare.
Luxury auto brands like Acura, Infinity, Lexus, Cadillac, and Lincoln should all be folded, because they are super dumb. I mean, who's going to pay the "Cadillac Tax" just to get a glorified Chevrolet? Corporations aren't going to switch; our fleet here doesn't even SEND requests for bids to any of these brands--they go to Chevy/GMC or Ford, because they provide us with machines that get the job done. And sure, all the Cadillac fanbois will tell you that the user interface is so much nicer than a Chevy (even if underneath the gloss they are indistinguishable), but at the end of the day who really cares? Price/performance is all we look at.
In conclusion, Apple will definitely go out of business, just like luxury car brands, because nobody in their right mind will pay extra for something nice.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
With the understanding that this was not intended to be an accurate estimate, it's still an exaggeration.
Apple has, at the very least, shown it's operating system to be more flexible (or morphable) than Microsoft's Windows.
Apple already made a successful platform jump once before (from 680x0 to PPC) and maintained side-by-side compatibility.
They've also now made an operating system jump (from the MacOS 9.x series to the OSX series fully encapsulating MacOS 9.x as Classic.)
I think the best Windows ever offered was a version of NT which ran on a Sun box. That didn't last too long.
So they've already paid the price for freedom from hardware lockin. Now they're just cashing-in.
I look forward to testing some old System 4.1 apps in Classic under OSX on Intel. From everything else I've seen, support should be transparent.
Which, when you think about it, truly is priceless.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
On thing that is not called out in this article (at least not well) is that Apple is saving R&D costs and R&D time by not having to develop its own chipset like is has done in the past. Instead Apple is utilizing Intel developed and manufactured chipsets. Intel has the economy of large volumes for their chipsets, Apple did not.
When Apple was making its own chipsets they could only afford to revamp them every couple of years because of the low volumes in relation the development cost and manufacturing tooling and ramp. Now Apple can refresh their chipset and product offering as often as Intel does without excess cost.
The component costs per unit may be higher but saving in both time and money other places will help make up for that.
The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers
And this conjecture is based on what? Certainly not any real world evidence. The Cell architecture is completely untested and a radically new design for a commodity chip. On paper it looks decent, but so did Itanium (and, technically, Itanium is quite good... except that the software has never been able to properly exploit it. Much the same may be true for Cell).
Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums.
Yeah, and look at what a fantastic success story that was! I mean, we have NeXT cubes everywhere now!
Frankly, it's a drawback. Software developers have to certify their code on multiple platforms if you do that, and that's hideously expensive. Sure, you can claim that you can compile for one and it'll work on them all, but know what? That's a lie. It's always been a lie and it always will be one.
Writing cross-platform code isn't as hard now as it used to be, but it's still not trivial. Even if you're talking about different CPU architectures on the same OS. We see that at my workplace running on HP-UX when it comes to PA-RISC vs Itanium; we develop on PA-RISC, but some of our customers run on newer hardware and we cannot replicate the bugs. And this is for software that compiles on several flavors of Unix and Windows, across more CPU types than I care to list, and under at least 3 different compilers. We've already done the hard work of writing cross-platform, cross-OS code, and yet same-platform/different-CPU bugs still happen.
You throw that kind of crap at your average development house and they'll do one of two things -- only develop for the most popular configuration (thus helping to marginalize the others) or just develop for another platform that doesn't have these issues (e.g. -- Windows and x86).
Apple has, at the very least, shown it's operating system to be more flexible (or morphable) than Microsoft's Windows.
Apple has always kept the Intel jump as an Ace card in its back pocket. Rhapsody was developed for both Intel and PowerPC, and Apple kept Darwin x86 up to date. For many of us, the only surprise was that Apple actually made the jump, not that they could do it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Very true. Volume-wise, the game console market beats Apple's meager volume hands down. No wonder then that IBM chose to devote its Microelectronics division's resources to making the PowerPC derivatives for the Nintendo Revolution, XBox 360 and PS/3. Not to mention embedded versions you find in consumer items and under the hood of cars. The Cell processor alone will find its way in many consumer electronics appliances, not just the PS3.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year) and making a high-volume chipset for several consumer markets (volume: millions a year). Guess where IBM prefered to invest. Can't blame them for telling Apple to go fly a kite.
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The performance for a given power crown has been handed back and forth for a while between Intel and AMD. While it is true Intel has had Pentium M's for quite a while, they have not been comparable to competing AMDs for performance for most of their existence, barring a few anomalies. This is my unbiased opinion. I am neither an AMD not Intel "fanboy" as so many on Slashdot seem to be. I haven't yet purchased a non-PPC laptop in this millennium. Looking at arstechnica or a similar sites comparisons over the last few years seems to show that most review sites agree with my assessment. To summarize, your assessment is completely correct, if you don't care about performance as part of the equation.
The Intel switch wasn't about switching to a dominant architecture, it was about moving to a platform that had a future roadmap for performance-per-watt. Intel is kicking butt in that department with the Core Duo (a laptop chip that manages to compete with a desktop Athlon64). Merom and Conroe later this year are supposed to further this even more dramatically, being chip redesigns with performance-per-watt as the design goal.
Steve Jobs was tired of selling a G4 Powerbook, so he moved to Intel.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The argument that "performance has reached adequate levels" rears its head every few years or so in the industry. The fact is though, everything goes in cycles. Sometimes the software development outpaces the currently available/reasonably priced hardware, and then things shift back the other direction for a little while. But the one thing that's certain is; development isn't going to come to a halt on the software side. If you develop faster, cheaper systems - eventually, software developers will figure out ways to make use of everything that's available to them. They have to, because in most cases, that's the only thing that keeps food on their tables. New versions are expected practically yearly for most popular applications, and once you've offered all the basics - what else is there to do for the next upgrade? You have to add "cool new things" that catch people's interest. Whether that means toolbars that automatically fade into the background when they're not used for a little while or voice recognition integrated into the app, built-in video tutorials or adding all new capabilities to perform tasks the app never tried to tackle at all before - you're going to need ever faster CPUs to become "commdity items" to go along with your work.
Apple has a deep hole to keep trying to dig themselves back out of largely because the perceived "value for the dollar" of buying a Mac became VERY poor in the mid to late 90's. Sleek new systems running OS X have started turning things back around - but Apple's move to Intel means they've got to be MORE concerned with performance increases than ever before! They can't lean on an excuse (however accurate or inaccurate is really was) of "You can't compare Mhz to Mhz between Intel or AMD chips and our PPC chips!" Now, the CPUs powering their hardware are the SAME ones powering everyone else's hardware. So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
And when it comes to software, Apple has no peer. Apple consistently creates great applications that normal people want to use. Apple's competition, on the other hand, has demonstrated -- repeatedly -- that they cannot do the same.
So that's the reason for the switch to Intel. Apple has moved what used to be a two-front war onto a single battlefield where it has the ability to outmaneuver all opponents.
Smart move. Expect Apple to capture some market share.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
Even that's not quite true. The power of a cpu is what you can do with it, not its clock-speed. A faster chip of the exact same line is not more powerful if the software is less powerful.
For example, for day-to-day tasks, a slower Mac is more powerful than a faster PC. For games, a slower PC is much more powerful than a faster Mac.
When it comes to iLife style apps, a 1.25GHz G4 Mac is far more powerful than a PC (Windows or Linux) of any speed.
Or, put another way, what's more powerful: running Windows Movie Maker on a 3 GHz cpu, or iMovie on a 2 GHz cpu?