Jun 06
So you guys have seen the comic, and probably have read the news, so what are your thoughts? I am a little torn…as both a heavy Mac and PC user, I guess this can be seen as a strong move for the growing Apple brand these days, and probably bodes well for the powerbooks needed a better heat fix, without losing form-factor. Anyway, your thoughts? Not looking for a bash party…just your honest geek thoughts on the matter.
Video: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
The line between Mac and PCs is getting more and more blurry in regards to what they do, and how they go about doing it.
After reading this article on Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2438
It sounds to me like Apple is going to try to make a run at getting a slice of the x86 OS market than rather than trying to take the PC world over. I think within 2-3 years Apple will be mentioned along side Dell and other PC makers, while people will ask whether you run a MS or Apple OS. While I believe Apple will survive in hardware they have always had a more polished feel to their operating systems. I think that polish on a x86 machine will be what it needs to take a portion of the OS market. My experience with Apple has not been the greatest, though if I had to option of dual booting a Apple OS and Windows I would be very interested in giving it a try.
The non-mac world is in the middle of a generational shift (several actually). We have the x86 arhitecture moving to 64bits and we have the new CELL arhitecture from IBM.
It’s like Apple is trying to cross a rope bridge in the middle of the storm of the century
i’ve always thought of apple as having kind of a niche market, and this such change will only seem to bring cost down for the average users who own an iPod and think that having a mac would be cool too. too many people take the mac Vs. pc argument too seriously. apple will never be able to compete with windows or linux in businesses and organizations because, despite having a prettier os and more stylish case, the mac has no real networking platform. if they dropped the cost and opened their platform a bit it might help home sales. but let’s face it, pc’s are computers for the unwashed masses while macs are good enough for celebrities. what would happen if macs became as common as pc’s in the home? what would happen if we saw more and more spyware and viruses on macs as a result of rising popularity?
^sorry but this isn’t going to lower prices on macs. Apple paid less for the IBM PowerPC CPU than what it’s going to pay for Intel x86 CPU now.
why Intel?
eeeuckh
Gil,
Taken from this article: http://www.wincustomize.com/Articles.aspx?AID=77626&u=0
“Some pundits had predicted that Apple would have to switch — economies of scale would force it. But why now? What were the factors leading to the decision? In my view, there were two factors that made the time right for Apple to make the jump.
The first factor had to do with the difficulty IBM was having in ramping up the performance of the PowerPC chip at the price-level Apple could afford. With only 2% of the market, Apple simply couldn’t purchase enough of IBM’s CPUs to justify the investment in producing faster CPUs at a reasonable per unit cost.”
They now claim 15 or so % of market share…growth in the mac market meens IBM was not able to keep pace I think.
Well, if you think about it, this isn’t that big of a deal. The big deal was when Apple went dropped MacOS and went with Unix. This is just a matter of changing code and recompiling. Apple zealots are so blind in a way, especially if they are wanting to make a case out of this. Apple hardware has long changed from proprietary hardware of old. SCSI, Appletalk, etc. have long gone. I grew up with a PC and moved to Apple in college with my design major. I have a Mac and the only difference between it and my PC is the processor and motherboard. All of the inner components are common to both. PC100 RAM, IDE HD, USB, FireWire, 10/100 Ethernet. And this is a 5 year old Blue/White G3! The switch will be transparent to the end user. The only thing that will be damaged is the zealots pride having to mark one more thing off their list that they can argue about.
Hm. Apple chose just the right time, I guess.
The userbase is still rather small in comparison to what it could be, it makes big bucks on iPods etc, and MS is struggling with both longhorn and the 64-Bit switch. If anything, the timing is perfect IMHO.
I just hope that such nice things as the target mode and the Open FW will stay…
The things I dont (want to?) understand:
Why intel? Even in one year they’d have to move hell and earth (and probably will) to beat the Performance unit/Watt ratio AMD offers – and I bet AMD would’ve ripped off their own legs and beat themselves to get that deal. Well, but Intel has deeper pockets… and they ARE the big guy. But still… ;_; (Yes, me = AMD fanboy. ^^;) If anything, I’d have understood using Pentium Mobile CPUs… those are quite nice and… apple-y.
whoops, pushed the wrong button, a little bit early.
Here’s the rest of my $0.02:
Plus, with this move, they enter direct competition with Microsoft and Linux etc. Why? Well, you will be able to compare a Windows-Box and an Apple-Box directly. They will use the same architecture, and I bet my poodle there will be hundreds of stupid reviews sprouting about $Operating_system_A being 3.5 nanoseconds faster at booting, opening a Photoshop document, and closing down. Or whatever. And you can BET this is gonna be taken as marketing fodder. No way to ‘back out of this’ now by saying ‘it’s the different architecture’.
(Just to be clear on that: I don’t believe in that BS myself, but can’t you imagine that Ma n Pa will be delighted to hear that Application X runs $whatever seconds faster on system $Bla – it’s just the way the computer world is wired today)
There is that thing that I find highly interesting: hybrid software. It should be possible. Imagine a Program that runs on both the Macs and Windows machines – it needn’t piggypack a whole PPC-copy of itself around, and with OS-agnostic code being shared those little f*ckers could get quite small. Maan, I wish I’d have one of those devboxes. XD Of course, that’s just for kicks, and SDL and all the other ‘abstraction layers’ already do that.
I don’t exactly like what went on with the whole Metrowerks stuff. First, an unknown entity buys out the x86 Metrowerks compiler/debugger, then Apple announces their switch, while conveniently mentioning that Metrowerks users just won’t be able to ‘switch’. That XCode lock-in could be a bad thing, I’m not sure. It could be good, too. Haven’t decided on this issue.
(URL: http://www.metrowerks.com/Discontinued/default.htm )
OK, I could go on for hours like this, but this will have to suffice.
deathmonkey: it still doesn’t mean it’s going to lower prices. Apple was GOING to pay more for the PPC chip
I don’t like it. Intel is big enough as it is, we don’t need them to become the Microsoft of the processor world.
Gil, the CPU is only a part of the pricing equation. Apple have been having to pump money into the entire system for years, designing their own motherboards etc with nothing like the economies of scale Intel can get.
I think it’s unlikely that they’re just going to throw all that expertise out of the window, and I do think they’ll retain some of their hardware teams in order to tweak the boards they get from Intel. I think Macs will in general be considerably higher spec than the average PC (to retain some high-end cool), but there will undoubtedly be some savings.
Whether those will get passed on or not is unclear (they may simply be ploughed back into R&D), but there has definitely been a trend towards cheaper and cheaper Macs recently. Things like the iMac G5 and the Mac Mini are priced a lot more aggressively than Apple historically have risked.