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The Future of Apple's Pro Desktop Line
SB_SamuraiSam writes "WWDC is drawing nearer and ArsTechnica has a thorough look at what they think Apple's plans are for their future Pro desktop line. It's a decent read. As always Ars has a competent pulse on Apple and is more reasonable than purely speculative. From the article:
I think Apple's CPU choice is clear cut. Strange as it sounds, the Xeon 5100 series is the best fit for the Mac. If Apple wants to keep the Quad name alive, it's the only option. Dual CPU configurations are not possible with anything else in Intel land, so if Apple wants to offer two CPUs and four cores, Xeon is the only game in town. With the benchmarks we have seen, the Core 2 Duo is a clear winner for Intel, outperforming anything AMD has to offer. The Xeon? With its faster FSB and different memory, it's even faster than the Core 2 Duo."
I'd have to guess being uniform. It's pretty obvious that they're going with the Intel route for everything else as the Core Duo is a decent chip (and the Core 2 chips are supposedly quite nice). Having their pro line be the black sheep might cause more headaches than they'd want: different motherboard, different chipset, different CPU, different drivers, etc. Might as well "go with what's working" for them.
That being said, considering their already buying bulk from Intel, adding another line of chips to their order is probably fairly cost efficient. So now instead of buying x chips from Intel at a bulk-order discount of y, they'd be buying 1.2x for perhaps an even larger discount-per-chip (0.98y). After all, you can get lower than a standard OEM price if you buy large-enough bulks.
I don't think anybody believes Apple intends windows to be the primary OS on their hardware. However, it does make for an interesting comparison when windows and windows apps run faster on a Mac than a PC.
What will be most interesting is what Leopard has in store in the way of windows compatiblity. Some think Bootcamp functionality will no longer require a reboot.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
An "Exclusive for X years" deal with Intel is the reason Apple can't use Opteron; the reason Apple won't use Opteron is because Intel provides the complete package of processor and chipsets, optimized for stability and performance. In order to use AMD processors, Apple would have to sign deals not just with AMD but also with ATI, or NVidia, or VIA, or another chipset maker.
And you're wrong, AMD no longer has the high-end edge. They won't regain it until 2008 at the earliest.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
We already went through this just a few years ago with OS X. Apple would be STUPID to wait until CS3 comes out. Yes, designers squirmed for a year or two while they waited for all their apps to come out, but Apple managed to stay in business in the meantime, and by the time the apps came out, the OS was quite nice. Hell, the FINDER in OS X 10.0 sucked ass performance-wise; I can't imagine trying to run any real APPS with it. (I used 10.0 to play around with the UNIX side of OS X while I waited 9 months for 10.1 to appear. While 10.1 was out, all the apps were released, and then Apple came out with 10.2 and the whole package was finally very nice.)
Same thing this time: Apple will have new hardware out, and one day when the apps appear, users will be able to buy them and use them that day. Apple will continue to sell G5s, and designers will hoard them, just like they did with the last of the OS-9-booting MDD G4s. The switch to Intel is really no different. Doesn't matter if it's the OS or hardware changing, the effect on the applications is the same: the apps won't run in an ideal manner, so people will either wait to change, or get by with non-optimal systems, untill the apps match the system.
Besides, plenty of people buy nice Macs and don't use CS. Final Cut is already shipping for Intel and Apple's other pro apps will all be universal soon--maybe even coincident with the release of the hardware. I'd expect to see an announcement regarding that at the WWDC as well: "We at Apple have just finished our transition to Intel, and we've also transitioned all of our apps. Yay us!"
The biggest difference this time, actually, is with Adobe: since OS 9 came out, they purchased Macromedia, and Quark almost dead, so Adobe can drag their feet all they want for the Intel transition.* That's another big reason that Apple would be stupid to wait for Adobe to get a product out the door. (Besides, how would it look for Apple to be waiting on Adobe before releasing new hardware? Very weak, that's how.)
* Plus, the switch to Intel ain't exactly easy. Same situation at Microsoft.
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I wonder, would that mean running Windows in a Window (like Parallels), or having a hypervisor and a hotkey to switch between OSes?
Of course, I'd still rather see a complete and 100% compatible DarWINE instead of any kind of virtualization... perhaps Apple ought to put some funding and developer manpower into that!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm willing to hazard a guess on the nature of the redesigned enclosure.
Have you noticed how Apple likes a certain symmetry between applications (iTunes brushed aluminum, Safari brushed aluminum) and the Pro enclosure (G5 brushed aluminum)? Apple seems to be experimenting with a lighter, smooth metal theme as seen in the current Mail.app. I hereby conjecture that the new Pro Mac enclosure will likewise be a very light-colored, smooth metal with a similar look.
I'm pretty sure Parallels runs using a hypervisor too, IIRC. It's not Mac virtualizing a Windows platform, it's Parallels virtualizing both Mac and Windows. The Mac acts as a host operating system, and Windows as a guest but only in appearance, because Apple won't allow OS X to boot on anything else besides TPM. If Apple would allow booting OS X outside of TPM in some circumstances(which is probably never going to happen) you could conceivably do it the other way around - run Mac as a guest OS to Windows. Is there a Virtual Machine that makes the guest OS think it's running inside a trusted platform? I'm not sure about the specifics.
I could definitely see Mac supporting Windows inside a built-in "Classic"-type virtualization environment and integrating with the OS, so that double-clicking on an exe file in the Mac would launch it in Windows. I could even see them doing that in "rootless" mode like they did with Classic when they first made the transition to OS X - run Windows applications as though they were running on OS X directly - they draw regular Aqua windows instead of Windows Windows, can be switched to from the Dock, and have the same background as other OS X applications (although Classic still head a lot of the appearance of Mac OS 9).
Some people have suggested reproducing the Windows API inside of Mac OS X, since Apple has been given access to the entire Windows API but I think that would run counter to Apple's commitment to comparmentalizing different APIs inside of different protected memory stacks, so that a crash inside a Windows application doesn't take down the whole host OS with it. While reproducing the Windows API doesn't preclude the possibility of running it on top of OS X, instead of parallel to it, it's not worth the effort when an instance of Windows itself can already run on top of OS X. I also don't think that would be better than virtualizing Windows, since a hack could easily make Windows run applications in rootless mode inside the OS X graphical environment . Then they could advertise that Mac OS X now runs Windows programs just as well as it runs Mac programs - even though really it would be Windows running Windows programs on top of Mac programs.