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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.'"
Apple is going with Intel because their competitors' chips "are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat".
It's like rain on your wedding day!
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat, and therefore not suitable to notebook computers.
So, we jumped to Intel, which hasn't be plagued by this issues of late...
I can't believe that someone actually decided that.
Lollerskates: Apple marries Intel, just as Intel product line takes back seat to AMD. Jobs spends huge sum of money to... -maintain second place, in a two-company vendor race.
,,,And, suffers new never-before-seen losses in the form of generic-install piracy.
..But the GOOD news is, the new Macth juth look faaaabulouth!
~
It seems to be costing them me as a client, since they dropped FW800, s-vhs, display resolution, probably battery life and anticipated dual-layer DVD-RW drive...
is this still part of the "think different"-stuff or did that train go already?
We're talking about Apple: one of the most proprietary computing companies ever.
I don't thing they're going to worry about avoiding vendor lock-in.
Ride the skies
And Intel is oh-so-perfect?
How about the mobile Celeron processor in my sister's laptop that runs at 69*C ?
If I were to switch to Intel, it would cost me my self-respect.
So - suddenly Intel, whose CPUs are the most power-hungry of the whole CPU industry, has a secret to make CPUs that are 2-3x more efficient (200-300%) than the ones from their competitors from now to 15-20 years (switching an architecture is a long-term strategy, not a short-term one)?
It's just me who thinks this is just bullshit? There are low-power 970GX chips that eat less than 30W (maybe they're not as good as centrino, but they're OK, would you risk the long-term strategy of your company for 5-10W?). Stop telling that "G5 are too hot to be put in a laptop".
It's like the "IBM can't provide a 3 GHz CPU" - AMD has been beating Intel with CPUs at frequencies lower than 3 GHz (right now AMD hasn't CPUs at 3 ghz, just a few 2.8 ghz ones); only intel has needed to go beyond of 3GHz to keep competitive and Jobs asks IBM to provide him a 3ghz CPU when he knows that 2.8 Ghz opterons are beating the 3.8 ghz intel monsters? I guess it's much easier to convince apple zealots that the intel move is the "right thing" if you hide the real reason and invent false excuses, right?
Offtopic, but I would switch to the Mac full time if they let me turn off the goddamn mouse acceleration. I was a given a dual 1GHz G4, and I'm loving it. Except moving the mouse cursor is like dragging it through the mud because Steve Jobs doesn't think I can handle a 1:1 relationship between moving the mouse and moving the cursor.
It's not simple acceleration like in Windows, it actually DEccelerates when you slow down the mouse, so I'm constantly undershooting my target (and then overshooting when I speed up the mouse and it goes faster than I intended).
You'd figure hey unix and all that jazz, there's gotta be a workaround. Instead there are about a dozen half-assed solutions that usually only turn the acceleration way down. Many of these 'solutions' cost money, like USB Overdrive and SteerMouse.
The best I can do right now is use the MS Intellipoint software, which lets you use it's own acceleration scheme, which is kind of like getting kicked in the balls instead of getting castrated.