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Apple Disabling 3rd Party CPU Upgrades? (Updated)
mrwiz writes "According to this article at Appleinsider, it looks like Apple may be removing the upgradability of processors even further with their next generation logicboards, codenamed "Shark", by moving the boot ROM off of the logicboard and onto their processor daughter cards. "
Update: 09/07 07:56 by CT : The Happy Blues Man writes "MacOS Rumors has an update on the "trojan" firmware upgrade for Blue & White G3s. It seems that even in Apple itself, the issue was hotly contested and the proponents' reason was to stop 3rd parties from shipping G4 upgrades before Apple's G4s were shipping. Apple sources have confirmed a fix will be available. " Update: 09/07 08:54 by H :I've been told by numerous people that this is NOT true-more to follow.
Well, after reading some of the later comments on this thread, I think it's safe to say people jumped the gun (myself included) over the processor thing. But I still stand by my opinion that Apple made a series of blunders which limited it's market share to education.
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If you have an AT PC, you'd have to change the case, the motherboard, the CPU, and the ram. If you're unlucky enough to have a bunch of ISA/EISA cards, you may have to replace one or two of those as well.
If you're lucky enough to have an ATX PC, you may only need to change the motherboard, CPU, and ram.
If you're really lucky you only need to pop in a new CPU.
Only in the last case is it really affordable to upgrade.
For Pentium users, you'd probably need to change case, memory, CPU, and motherboard. For PPro users, the same. For PII users, you may be able to just upgrade the bios and CPU. But a PII user doesn't need to worry too much about upgrading...
On the mac side I've heard that one can upgrade all the way back to the 7100 Performa series to a G3 or maybe even a G4, with a daughtercard. That's unheard of in the Wintel world; it would be like upgrading a Pentium or Pentium Pro to a PII, Celeron, or PIII, none of which are possible.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
While there is certainly a dark side to this issue: the argument that Apple is abusing its position, there is a another dimension to be aware of.
The huge G4 introduction at Seybold was a major step in reminding the world that there are more options out there than Windows running on Intel.
If a company such as Newer Technology or XLR8 shipped a card with the G4 on it first, Apple's announcement would have been pretty anticlimatic. No one is going to be able to generate more interest in the G4 than Apple. So, IMHO, it's overall better for the Mac industry (and all non-Wintel platforms everywhere), if Jobs gets first shot at promoting something like this.
And I know what some people are thinking: "Free market -- it's Apple's fault if they don't ship first." But it's not that simple. Apple has to ramp up tremendous volume before they are able to ship a product, which is something upgrade board manufacturers do not have to do. This gives them the illusion of being significantly faster than Apple at getting things to market.
This was the exact same issue with PowerComputing. They came out with faster machines before Apple did, but they could do this because they had so few customers. For example, I believe PowerComputing shipped 200,000 machines TOTAL in the several years they were in business (all to Apple's high-end, high-margin customers), whereas Apple has received 140,000 preorders for the iBook alone in the last two months.
So, in the end, these tiny little hardware vendors would give the Mac market a short-term gain, in exchange for a long term loss. It's much better for the platform (and all non-Wintel platforms everywhere) if Apple gets to make a big show about new techology.
So while blocking upgrades is pretty drastic, I don't think it would be unreasonable for powerpc upgraders to wait until Apple brings major new chips to market before they ship theirs.
Based on some quotes that I'm not able to reference at the moment, it seems this is how Jon Rubenstein (Apple hardware VP) feels as well. Upgrade cards add value, but it's not in the platform's best interest to be leading the way.
It's not a black-and-white issue by any means, and I welcome other viewpoints.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"They make firewire proprietary, which effectively kills it."
Um...excuse me? What exactly is "proprietary" about IEEE 1394?
Why? It's perfectly legal to recreate a boot ROM. I'm talking re-engineering here, not copying verbatim. You could even use the clasic "one engineering takes it a apart, another (clean) engineer puts it back together based on the report" method or something.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Now THIS is the kind of bullish propoganda one would read on Mackido. Sure, you'll have to buy a new motherboard if you want the newest generation of CPU's. I guess if you wanted to, you could slap a new proccesor on your old board, turn that 133 mhz Pentium into a 233, but as you say, that doesn't give much of a performance increase. What you don't realize is, that unlike on Macs, PC motherboards don't have a whole hell of alot on them 'cept the bare esentials. Sure they have the chipset, your little pci/isa/agp slots, and usually IDE/floppy controlers. They don't include things like video,sound,3d hardware, ethernet, and whatever else you want on your computer. That meens you don't have to thrown away everything else when you upgrade your motherbaord. The motherboard is just another component in the system. It happends to have alot to do with your computers performance, so it's replaced alot.
How modularized PC's are is very important. It's probably their greatest strength. While macs are prone to the all-in-one problem. "Ooops, the sound in my iMac just died. If I want it working again, I'll have to trade in the whole unit." If such a thing happends to your PC, you can just pull out the old sound card and insert a new one. That's why Apple pisses me off. I'm just a kid and I can not afford a Macintosh. PERIOD. A PC offers me alot better price to performance ratio inside my price range. I can customize my system, and buy junky components where I don't care about their quality. "Hey, I could give a flying %&$# about sound quality and I'm on a budget. I'll just pull that sound card from a 386 and use it in my speed demon!" Where would Apple let me save money on a Macintosh by doing that? Beleive me, if I could put together a PPC machine, capable of running MacOS, for the same price of a PC, I'd be browsing this from LinuxPPC right now.
Sorry if I ranted on for a long time. It's just that I hate it when people spread misinformation(even if it's not directly lies).
www.macosrumors.com has a slightly different version of events. Of course, they are only talking about Sawtooth not Shark, but it sounds like the recent controversy has changed Apple's attitude a little.
Did I miss something? It seems to me like Apple open sourced, inserted their foot in their mouth, and then shot themselves in the foot.
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If everything on AppleInsider were true Disney would have bought Apple 10 times.
I saw a story on the Weekly World News that an alien tried to mate with a Harley, you should probably. And as far as rumors go I'd say AppleInsider is on par in terms of accuracy as the Weekly World News. (Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, heh)
Oh, and as far as MacOSRumors vs. AppleInsider, AppleInsider has long been known to spout garbage, and you can tell it's garbage when it damages Apple's image. They do it to make it look like they're scooping the other rumors sites. IIRC, they got horrendously burned on the Apple Media Player (AMP) story, which turned out to be an Apple Corporate ruse to root out leaks. AppleInsider ends up with more ad revenue that way, but they have the reputation among Mac rumors site watchers of being somewhat irresponsible with their reporting.
I hit both sites regularly, but I trust MacOSRumors more, and I think true insider sources trust them more too.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What makes you think I'm uninformed?
Last I checked, AT motherboards cost more than ATX motherboards, and still used newer memories.
I am aware you can upgrade a Pentium up through the AMD line, up to near Celeron performance levels. So my old Pentium can go from a P133 to a AMD K-63? No, the motherboard isn't that up to date, and bios releases don't allow it to use the k-63. So I need a new motherboard.
I haven't been seeing $50 AT motherboards. And don't forget the cost of memory, as your IBM PC XT more than likely does not have a significant or useful amount of memory. How you upgrade is important; I thought we were talking about reviving 3, 4, 6 year old PCs to modern performance levels in a similar way one would upgrade a 7100 Performa to a 400MHz G3 or G4. Which is just bios and daughtercard on the Mac, but memory, motherboard, CPU, possibly power supply, possibly case, and possibly peripherals like mouse and keyboard on the PC side.
It would be very nice to be able to pop in a daughtercard into my P133 motherboard's PCI slot and use a Celeron or something.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
About the only time you can count on anything from AppleInsider anymore is when it has screenshots (the one thing it does better than MOSR).
It's sad. Back in the days when it was MacNN Reality, it was quite good. Now, I rarely trust what it says without a picture.
What happened? Sun Microsystems wasn't interested in protecting DEC's products and took over their market. DEC should have known better, they'd pulled a similar trick on IBM years before.
Here's Apple boosting PC sales by alienating its own customers. Mac customers have seen how easy it is to get a new motherboard and CPU for your PC. Their faith has made Apple a success again, and this is how they are paid back? If I were an Apple customer, I'd be losing faith about now.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
So I looked at all the Super7 motherboards at the site. All used DIMMs, no SIMMs. Oh, and the MB5077 doesn't exist(at least not on AltonPC site). The closest is the M577, an AT formfactor with 3 DIMM slots.
We are talking about the same thing, right?
My original point was that a PowerPC Performa 7100 could upgrade to a G4.
To be fair, that meant upgrading a PC from a Pentium to an AMD K6-3 for a reasonable cost.
On the Mac side you just pop in a daughtercard and off you go(you probably need to patch the BIOS and use a OS that supports the processor as well, but the same holds true for the PC)
On the PC side, if I were to upgrade my Pentium, not only do I need to use a something like the AltonPC M577(let's assume it's $60), I need to grab the processor, an AMD K6-3 for about $100, and finally ram. Let's say I grab 64MB. Best of my knowledge then, that's $80, because prices are going up right now.
So I just spent $240... assuming I'm not also forced to replace an ethernet card, video card, sound card, or SCSI card as well.
For a Mac person, a Performa 5400 to a G3 costs $299 (From a PowerPC 603e@160MHz to a PowerPC G3@300MHz)
So you can't be arguing it's easier to upgrade a PC than a Mac, though I do cede that it costs $59 dollars less on the PC(assuming that the M577 is indeed $60, and not closer to $100, as I suspect)
I never said one couldn't upgrade a PC; just that it was much easier and hassle free on a Mac.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
To some extent, but consider: would you buy an upgrade to a chip which had never even once been used in any computer being produced at the time? I wouldn't have done that, and I doubt most other people would have done it. Yeah, upgrade companies want to go up to faster chips, but you'll notice that even before the ROM block issue came up, they had G4 upgrades ready but didn't sell them (as evidenced by the fact that not only were they announcing G4 upgrades the same day as the G4 machines, but the fact that they were able to find the ROM block on the day the trojan^H^H^H^H^H^Hsystem update was released even though the block hadn't been removed).
The upgrade companies had been holding back on purpose; the ROM block changed nothing (which renders it worthless from a business perspective, but Apple decided to be paranoid).
I'm not defending Apple at all; that was a dirty trick that they pulled. But consider everything before accusing people.
(as evidenced by the fact that not only were they announcing G4 upgrades the same day as the G4 machines, but the fact that they were able to find the ROM block on the day the trojan^H^H^H^H^H^Hsystem update was released even though the block hadn't been removed).
That should read as follows:
(as evidenced by the fact that not only were they announcing G4 upgrades the same day as the G4 machines even though the block hadn't been removed, and by the fact that they were able to find the ROM block on the day the trojan^H^H^H^H^H^Hsystem update was released).
I should have used the Preview button, I guess. Actually, Rob, you should consider forcing a preview before any message is posted. It would cut down on errors and also give flamers one last chance to cool off before posting a flame.
There's probably be a bit more to it than keeping processor upgrade makers from beating Apple to the punch. It's worth keeping in mind that at the present time there isn't a release OS for the PowerPC that is AltiVec aware. And if applications are AltiVec aware and the OS isn't, we have a bit of a problem on context switches. This may partly have been a ploy on Apple's part to keep the world simpler for application writers, and a little less freaking weird for users.
But the conspiracy theories are of course more interesting. Of course, time will tell.
I think Apple will do the right thing, under Steve Jobs they have been one of the few companies willing to change things, because of user input. and I think that their track record on reversing stupid decisions supports my hope.
1. iMac originally supposed to have a 33.6 modem, changed to 56K when users complained
2. Opened source several key technologies
3. When their Open Source license was deemed too restrictive they changed it
4. They tried to charge $1 a port for Firewire, but then formed a patent pool with Intel, Sony, Compaq, Philps and others, and changed the fee to $.25 per system, unlimited ports.
5. Have made an effort too hold and in fact reduce the price on every system, introduced under Steve jobs, no they are still not as cheap as X86 systems, and probably will not be unless they can start to claim 20%+ market share, because the economies of scale are not there for them.
(please do not bring up promises made pre Steve Jobs aka Scully and the other dumb asses) and yes I know that they have screwed people around on OS X for Intel and free/low cost yellow box licensing, but the conspiracy side of me thinks that more of the blame lies with the Microsoft Office for the Mac deal. 150 Million bucks does not HELP save a multibillon dollar company, but having M$ Office does. Also Steve's cutting of the clones, Newton and things like Open Doc I believe was necessary. Apple it seems was like an old house the foundation was still good, but the upper floors were rotten. So just like a renovator Steve had to to tear it down to the foundation which is, easy to use multimedia computers, not cool but expensive handhelds. True sometimes good wood gets torn down too, but this is the price you pay for a renovation. And since I am rambling, the clones will probably return, once OS X is out and the Mac only needs a open standard Open Firmware to boot, the first time around Apple had to do so much design work on the boards, for the clone makers and it was not getting enough money to support the R & D for and entire industry. Just look a the motherboard for a StarMax 3000, its got Apple Computer silk screened on it not Motorola.
Check out Mac OS Rumors. The article for today (9/7) mentions that they are working on the firmware patch to the G3's mentioned on AppleInsider, but also that the decision to put it there in the first place was very controversial and was mainly intended to insure that 3rd-party processor upgrade makers didn't beat them to the market with a G4. Still not very nice, but not as ogre-like as forever baring G3 owners from upgrading. Plus the G4s themselves are easily processor upgradable for future SMP cards. It may not be as bad as AppleInsider makes it out to be. Plus, this is just an early prototype. The earlier Sawtooth prototypes also had the boot ROM on the processor daughtercard rather than the motherboard as it is currently.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I know for a fact myself that this is FALSE... ...but if you read the www.MacOSRumors.com article, well you see this for yourself. Outdated information. Happnes alot. Stop bbelieving something that (I, atleast) consider rather ridiculous. Btw... Shark refers to several of the next motherboards to be released, including Sawtooth, the one that will be shipping around October. (Shark names, ha ha, get it?) Other ones will apparently have Shark names too. Geez guys stop spewing false, bad Apple PR. Same problem with the blue g3-g4 issue. Apple just didn't want some 3rd party company spoiling their party by releasing a g4 first. There will be an update soon(TM) Apparently this caused much distress in the insides of Apple, but it was necessary, and will be changed back to the good side of the force (allowing upgrades). Hey ever seen an Pentium chip come out before Intel said so? Nope. Same general idea. -Curt
On the other hand, you will be able to switch out your Mac BootROM so if you wanted to run an O/S such as Linux or Be, you could free yourself completely of the MacOS. I think that most of the other hardware under the hood is understood well enough for some third-party to engineer a BootROM independent from Apple's. You wouldn't be able to run MacOS or OS/X but there's always sheepshaver!
~GoRK
I don't see all the shock that is being expressed over the lastest move by Apple. Apple does like other people making money from their product, without first taking a really nice cut of it. They have done this from the begining and will continue to do this until the end. Whenever that may be. (Hopefully not too soon) Not letting you you upgrade your system to the latest and the great equipment out on the market has always been around in computers, Apple just likes to take it one step further. They always had.
When Intel decides that it would be fun to change the voltage on the board for the Pentium III, so you can't bring your 350 PII to a new level of Quaking, there was really no uproar. Why should Apple's move be that much different.
Basically, if computers companies don't create a cut-off point, how are they going to get everyone to buy they newest products every year or so. I'm not saying that it is fair, but I guess that I have become too desensitized towards corperate computer practices.
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
Everyone chill your nuts, I can picture apple loyalists going on murderous rampages, slaughtering helpless sheep and launching their innards at Apple HQ.
THIS IS A RUMOR! There is nothing announced yet, and no one outside of apple and its tight ring of beta testers has seen this machine yet. Also, one of the main selling lines in the past for Macs have been that they last 25% longer than wintel machines because of upgradeability. Why would they change this?
Most importantly people, look at the competing Mac rumors site Macosrumors.com, they claim that the boot rom is not on the daughtercard but on the mainboard as it should be, and it is all confused. Realize that these sites sensationalize and sometimes probably make up the rumors they post. They have seen all the commotion over the boot ROM patch and this site has found a way to stir it up even more and get hundreds of thousands of more hits by getting posted here on Slashdot.
To Rob - have we had enough Apple stories for one day?? I mean I love Apple but this is starting to become a little overkill. Also this story was a little out of line, it is a malicious rumor that is probably not true.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
Hello ignorant PC buyers!!! When was the last time you've upgraded your Intel-based PC WITHOUT buying a new motherboard? Doesn't happen, never has since the early of the Pentium (P60-P233). Ever since then a mainboard lasts 6 months, coincidently as long as the time for the next generation CPU to come along.
Oh wait a second, yeah you can upgrade a 400 P3 to a 450 PC.... I forgot about that, sorry.
"The voices in my head say crazy things"
Geez. All this rumor mongering and negativity!
I've heard rumors on both sides; Apple disables G4 to prevent future upgradeability *or* to prevent 3rd party from introducing G4 to early.
We won't ever know which one is true if Apple has indeed decided to fix the B&W G3s in the near future.
Likewise this boot rom thing.
I had heard news/rumors that Apple has been designing their OS and PCs to not need the bootrom, with the advent of MacOS X. Is this true, can anyone confirm, acknowlege, or speculate? Anyhow, by moving the bootrom off the motherboard it means that future motherboards would not need to be changed if bootroms are unnecessary, reduced, or modified. Instead all Apple has to do is produce a new daughtercard at significantly less cost.
Yes, this may *become* an issue if they refuse to license out the bootrom to 3rd party upgrade manufacturers. It may also become a *boon* if, for example, someone wanted to convert G4s to Be boxes(and wrote/designed their own bootroms for BeOS), or Linux, or what have you.
Did I mess something up? It's possible. Please correct!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Even if this were true, it wouldn't mean the end of 3rd party hardware. Apple likes to control their hardware - and why not? It allows them to take shortcuts in their OS. Apple would (and does, I've had several friends intern/work for Apple) call this level of control "assuring a high-quality customer experience".
When Apple couldn't keep up with demand and was strapped for cash, it licensed its hardware technology out and Mac clones started to appear. The most successful of these companies was Power Computing. When Apple had some money again and decided that they couldn't get MacOS to run "just so" on the souped-up Power Computing hardware, well, this press release speaks for itself.
Bottom line - Apple will let people make compatible hardware when/if they have to. They never want to.
Imaging if you will. It has been rumored that Apple may one day allow clones to be made, again. By moving the ROM to the processor card, Apple rids the mainboard of the proprietary Apple parts. It is a standard "open" PwerPC motherboard design. LinuxPPC and Be would be much more able to support the hardware. Clones could produce nonMacOS systems easily. Apple would sale more Power Macintosh machines. And there would be an increase the PPC market share. Mr. Jobs was smart enough to bring Apple back from it's death bed. Do you really think that he would let it go back?
So this is either the return of clones (which Apple doesn't seem to have alerted any upgraders, or former cloners about) or the end of upgrades. Which is it?
Let's see. Bogus rom "update" to block G3 -->G4 conversion...Rom installer doesn't willlingly go backwards (can't take a g3 v1.1 rom back to v1.o using Apple's ROM utility)...New ROm checks in OS-9 beta build requiring the new bogus blocked firmware...Adobe releasing Altivec plugins for Photoshop only through Apple--Apple only bundling these plugins with new G4's...now Shark has boot rom where upgraders can't get at it.
See a pattern here?
Enough of this, eh? Here is an excerpt from the MacOSRumors information posted today.
_ _____________
"Very importantly, it has been confirmed by reliable Apple sources that the company is planning to include fix for the G4 upgrade block installed with the latest Blue G3 Firmware. Apparently, the decision to develop the block code was extremely controversial within Apple, and even its proponents generally stated that their intentions were only to provide insurance that Apple was not"surprise attacked" by third parties shipping G4 upgrades before Apple was able to ship their own G4 machine.
Secondly, MOSR has confirmed that the recent confusion over whether the new Sawtooth-based G4s were processor-upgradable was caused by outdated diagrams of the board. Once more recent
versions were uncovered, it was clear that the Boot ROM continues to reside on the main board, and there are no obvious barriers in hardware nor software for the new G4s to be upgraded for years to come.
In a related note, we were surprised to hear from several third party developers that not only had they succesfully used prototype multiple-G4 upgrade boards on Beige and Blue G3s...at least one has also completed a proof-of-concept test for a multi-G4 card that would support the use of the 128-bit, enhanced-performance MaxBus as a "backplane" bus for the processors and cache chips to use for incredibly efficient inter-processor communication -- but would still be compatible with all upgradable PowerPC Macs and their 64-bit "60x" bus protocol. MaxBus, which many insiders had previously not expected to be applied to the Mac until mid to late 2000, could offer dramatic benefits even in this only partial implementation."
_______________________________________________
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driph
This is a rumor . There's another rumor going around that Apple's going to reverse the G4-block in the Blue G3's. They can't both be right (well, I suppose they could, but it would make no sense at all).
Wouldn't matter anyway, seeing as how OSX (and therefore Darwin) requires no proprietary boot ROM. Nor, actually, does OS8.6 (the G4's and iBooks have no proprietary ROM in hardware, therefore MacOS wouldn't be able to boot at all if it still required one. Truth be told, MacOS has booted on CHRP machines since 8.1!) All the upgrade makers would have to do is trot on over to FirmWorks and get their OpenFirmware ROM's from there. No big deal.Linux already works with these OF modules, so it doesn't hurt them in the least. MacOS... well, what do you think OSX is for?
But I'll humor you =)
So lets say I upgrade my PPro...
I have to replace the motherboard. Mine has SCSI. That already places me into the $300 motherboard range. None are Celeron compatible, so minimally I need a slocket and PPGA Celeron, so I spend $400 or so already. Then I need to upgrade the ram, as I have the measly SIMM type, and no one supports it anymore. I have 96MB. Lets say I buy up, into 128MB. Last I checked, sdram prices have gone up. So now I'm spending almost $570 for an upgrade.
All Apple users, if I am not mistaken, of the G3 series can upgrade to the G4, with a minimal amount of hassle. B&W G3s need a bootrom patch(or something like that), but that's it.
Heck, I suspect all PowerPC users, 603, 604, 603e, etc, can upgrade to the G4... THough I can't be certain, not owning a PowerPC.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Silly rabbit, didn't you know that according to Apple Corp. internal documents, RGB will heretofore stand for "Raspberry-GeminiGreen-BondiBlue"?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Oops, I misspoke.
What I meant was not removal of the bootrom, per se, so much as removal of OS dependent stuff from the rom, leaving, essentially, just the BIOS stuff.
Previously some part of the OS was stored in the bootrom, and from what I've heard Apple is migrating away from that model. That's what I've heard, at least.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Why is it a blunder to get into a niche market as education? Their blunder was to not capitalize on their strength(education) and grow outwards as students moved up through the school system, into college, and into the business world.
And about firewire: as far as I can tell, they didn't make it proprietary, they just charged a $1 per port(it is now, I've heard, $0.25 per machine) fee for it's use. And it is far from dead, as Sony, a large, well entrenched, and savvy consumer products giant, has been putting firewire (called iLink) into every single product than can, from camcorders, VCRs, TVs, etc. Don't tell me that there is a smaller market for consumer electronics than PCs/iMacs! So firewire isn't dead and it isn't going to disappear, especially as lots of other consumer giants are using firewire for storage, consumer products, PC peripherals, etc.
And about backwards compatibility: they didn't do anything to make their CPUs non-backwards compatible. They released a patch to make their B&W G3s not-forward compatible, and there are rumors that they will be releasing a patch in the near future to fix that.
A lot of general hype, mis-information, and bad press is floating around.
Even I may be guilty of spreading some, so please correct me if I am wrong! But be careful of spreading more rumors and buzz or hype.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I'm not sure I believe that Apple has *ultimately* decided to disable G4 upgrades from B&W G3 machines. I hear rumors that they are going to fix it, especially after this uproar.
I'm not sure how Apple took this one step further than anyone else... Intel released the PPro socket8, then(ostensibly to cut costs) went to the PII Socket1, then(again, to cut costs) went to the Celeron PPGA Socket370, and will in the future migrate the PIII to the flipchip Socket370.
Now since there aren't any clones for any of these chips(barring Athlon's use of the socket1), I'd imagine Intel does the same thing to force purchases of new motherboards, memory, and CPUs all at once. So you're right in that this isn't a new tactic.
What's amazing is that even with this problem, there still exists the ability/possibility of B&W G3 owners upgrading to G4s and beige G3s upgrading to G4s.
Thats as if I had the chance/option to upgrade my PPro to a Celeron or PIII.
So Apple still wins, I think.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*