Comments on: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips
Apple will announce its plans Monday in a move that raises questions about the Mac maker's future computer strategy.
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architecture. That is too crude to implement the noce features OS X
provides - like real plug and play, not plug, wait, and pray.
GREAT news, but I question the "Mini first" strategy. The rather
obvious choice for the first Intel system is the xServe. Most
xServes run mostly Apple-supplied or admin-compiled software,
so the switch would have minimal impact. Emulation might not
even be necessary.
As for the overall "feel" of the machine... it'll still be an Apple.
The "soul" of a Macintosh is NOT in the processor, which was
proven by the switch to PowerPC. Intel Macintoshes will be every
bit a Macintosh, only be faster and use less power because of
the better CPUs. PowerPCs aren't all that great anymore, and the
Pentium M will be a MUCH better choice for the Mini. It's too
bad AIM wasn't able to keep up with Intel, because the PowerPC
showed a lot of promise, but the actual products simply don't
compete anymore.
That being said, this would suck.
Itanium to maintain the RISC concept), and WIndows can run on
the same processor, the next generation computers might be a
common hardware design and dual mode OS's. That was the
CHRP concept a while back 'Common Hardware Reference
Platform' with a core kernal plus personality (OS) overlays.
Can't really see Apple going with an X86, even tho maybe they
could. The X86 line is just aboout out of steam and needs to be
junked.
And, if Apple shifts to the Itanium, that just might force MS into
a clean OS design, especially one without the registry file.
The reason they did this is because it was _EASY_. Take a look at any OS-X binary. If you know your stuff, you'll be able to tell that it was produced with gcc. gcc's got the tremendous advantage that it doesn't NEED you to write any hardware-specific code. If you're compiling for an IBM PowerPC G5, it'll throw in Altivec instructions where necessary. If you're compiling for an Pentium-4, it'll use SIMD. If you're compiling for a dual processor system, it'll figure out what can run in paralell and shunt the code this way and that.
In other words, porting architectures is about as difficult as modifying the "ARCH" variable before your run make. about the main exception to this is the Kernel. You know, Darwin? The thing that already runs on any system you care to run it on? Yeah. Done and done. When Jobs says "easy", people who've been programming as long as I have, and who've been so obsessed with getting a copy of Marklar for the last four years as I have been know he means it. In fact, at the worst, it means about 600 computer-hours of compilation, and maybe about the same number of man hours in stability testing on their "reference machines".
and how will i get new software for my computer. who will make
outdated stuff... i hate apple... to court i say to court
make an all new processor.. but i hate intel and damn.. this
really sucks
mac mini intel mini ahhhh
Macintosh is in the boot loader, which lets it "plug and play" (to
use an Intel term) anything, and in the operating system, which
was designed from the user's point of view.
An Intel Macintosh will be every bit as much a Macintosh as the
PowerPC Macintosh was after they switched from 680x0. If you
never buy Apple again, have fun in Windows-land, which will still
have all its same problems.
Meanwhile, those new apps will come on shiny DVDs with both PPC and x86 versions. And how much you wanna bet that Apple 1) keeps a generic PowerPC on the mainboard for "classic" apps for the next generation or two of Macs, and 2) already knows how to make a better PearPC, DOSBox (emulator with API extensions and integration built in) style for their later generations.
I mean, this is APPLE, man. They won't leave their small and loyal zealo- I mean user base behind.
For reference, I like macs, and even own one, but I'm under the impression that about 90% of people who use macs exclusively are insane zealots. I mean, you realize that this shift, if done correctly, can place Apple OVER microsoft, right?
out of this post strapped to my head.
apple has no reason to switch to X86, x86 has been just as
stangnent as IBM has been if not more, the only real jump is dual
core, and IBM cant be far behind, and with the low clock speed of
the pentium D i dont see apple switching to intel.
MacOS X Server x86 is a no-brainer. Also, the Pentium M is now
going dual-core, while Apple can't even get the single-core G5
into a laptop... The Pentium M would easily double the
processing power of the PowerBooks and Man Mini. As for the
P4 vs. the G5, Apple has fallen a little behind here, too... why not
take advantage of the P4's lower cost and (slightly) higher
performance?
Basically, except for the irrational overreaction of short-sighted
Mac zealots, it's a no-brainer benefit for all of Apple's hardware.
None.
Come on people, we know you like to entertain these ideas, but its just not going to happen. I'll eat my hat if it does.
"all that software (Photoshop, Illustrator, GRAPHIC DESIGN SOFTWARE, any software really) would have to be rewritten for x86. OS X would run on Intel."
Yes, Adobe would have to rewrite Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign for the x86. Oh, like IT'S NOT ALREADY RUNNING ON THE X86 YOU FRIGGING MORON! Visit Adobe.com and click on PRODUCTS.
"Now, in the year or so it would take to rewrite all this software, and change production of the computers and alter them, how many people would buy a PowerPC based computer that will have no software or support in the future?"
Yes, this whole thing makes no sense from what we know. Assuming everybody's assumptions are right, and Apple will do a straight port to x86, it will be the end of Apple has a hardware company.
C|NET.
Let's face facts, if Apple were to switch to x86-based
architecture which would be a monumental logistic nightmare,
they'd no doubt switch to AMD chips which are far more
powerful than Intel chips running at far far greater clock speeds.
Odds are if Apple is indeed in negotiation with Intel, it's not for
CPUs but for some other technology like PCIe or WiMax
Wow. Adobe would have to change an environment variable and sell lots of copies of the same version of each piece of software they put out. I'm sure THAT'll put them in the poor house.
wrong Monday. Who knows. If it turns out that Apple is going to
jump to the Itanium or some new processor that's fine with me. If
it's x86 and this turns out to be Steve's great folly of a crusade
against Microsoft (which is an imagined enemy anyway) you can
count me out.
For now, though. I don't buy it.
power.. and cant hold their own against amd... their next chip
has the ability to kill peer to peer and a remote control thing...
hackers here ya go.. man intel is whorible..
Sun's UltraSPARC... of course Sun being a company making Unix
processors to begin with. If this is true, this will go down as one of
weirdest things to occur in my short lifetime. If Steve is really
personally angry enough at IBM to pull this sort of a stunt (which I
doubt he is, surely he's smarter than that) then the world has
officially gone to Bedlam.
Sloppy reporting.
From a marketing perspective I think Apple should stick to PPC to preserve their brand equity.
It means that Apple's insignificant market share wasn't included in the numbers. Just take the 100 percent and multiple it by 2 or 2.9834 or 1.93434 to get the PPC numbers. OK?
That said, OS X stands the best chance of pulling this off. It already runs on Intel x86 (it just doesn't get out of the Apple campus), and it supports "FAT" binaries -- executable files that contain code for multiple processor architectures in a single file (this elminations a lot user confusion -- "there's two files, which one do I launch? PPC? x86?? Huh?"
But Apple's got a big problem. It just put customers and developers through a big transition in operating systems... now it wants to change processor types. Developers will probably not be happy. A lot of older code may not be endian-neutral. PowerPC is big endian, and x86 is little endian. Users will want to be able to run their old PowerPC apps. Is Steve Jobs going to ask everyone to immediately go out and buy upgrades of their software for x86? At least with the OS 9/X transition you could use classic, or boot into OS 9 for any apps that wouldn't run in Classic. So do they have an efficient emulator/binary translator they plan to use? If they don't they're dead.
This seems like a very risky move. CNET has typically been reliable about this stuff, but I doubt Apple can pull this off. If Jobs thinks they can, I'm willing to speculate that his ego is now bigger than planet Earth, and he's way out of touch with reality.
servers, but way down the list in revenue... it's one area where
Apple tends to provide the cheapest solution. xRAID is one of
the highest meg-per-dollar solutions, and xSAN is half the cost
of competing SAN solutions. They're definitely not high-end
servers, but for what you get they're a great deal, which is why
you see them in many of the "low cost supercomputer" setups.
And offering the option of Intel (and a *server* OS on Intel-
standard hardware) is virtually a no-brainer from a business
growth pespective.
It's up to a company what they choose to use. I've never worked in a homogeneous company, they've all had unix flavors, windows, and at least some macs in the marketing group if not more. In many of the companies I've worked at, which have a lot of unix, many people use macs for their laptops.
What you say makes no sense, in syntax or fact.
server market against favorites such as Microsoft and Linux. It's a
tough sell asking enterprises to lock into proprietary hardware.
Aside: I'm very happy with my Powerbook and its G4 processor. But
I know, things could be a little sweeter with Intel's M chip. Too bad
this has to happen when the powerpc is picking up steam on the
gaming consoles.
Anyway Darwin is running on x86, whole stack of server apps
was there all the time.
Prospectives of Apple on servers were always underestimated.
Analysts were shouting "Apple's server line is fastest-growing
server product," but due to M$ induced ad hype Windoz vs.
Linux everyone is refusing to notice Apple. And Apple has
scored bunch of deals good already.
x86 for Apple's desktop will be complete disaster and Apple
understand that. "Think different" aspect will vanish. But on
server side they will be capable to make cheap and good and
fast systems.
Windoz management - especially as shipped by M$ - sucks very
much. Linux management and rocket science are some things
comparable in complexity. Management tools Apple developed
for they X Serve line are one the best: drawing power of Unix
and throwing convenient GUI into the mix. Imagine polished and
finished YAST2 with remote management capability - something
nor SuSE nor Novell did accomplished - what great potential it
could have.
inside be any less proprietary than an Apple server running Mac
OSX with a PPC chip inside?
PowerPC that Apple is going to give up on its relationship with
Apple just because they're at 2.5 rather than 3Ghz? By now, any
fool on the street knows Ghz are kind of irrelevant, for one.
Second, the developer community would be ticked off to say the
least, and I'm no developer. Third, PowerPC is a great, not good
architecture, and it just needs time to develop. IBM is not like
Motorola of 68xxx days, and are very much in the
microprocessor business, and at the pointy end too. Fourth,
they've already got to deal with two CPU suppliers, you think
they're going to have to support three? Finally, can't you
imagine some NEW device they're going to introduce that could
use some appropriate cool Intel chip? If you imagine Apple
have been busy simply trying to tweak the platforms, you're
sadly mistaken. I'm sure this signals some interesting new
directions for the company.
they were stuck at 2.3GHz. By now, if they'd stuck to that curve,
they'd be closing in on 4GHz.
And if the PowerPC is so great, why are most PowerPC chips
underperformers and power hogs? Wasn't it supposed to be the
other way around? An ABI is only as good as the chips you can
make with it.
In the meantime the Intel Pentium M is going dual-core in
laptops *this year* while Apple is stuck with 64 bits that no
laptop user needs, and has no major laptop-capable current-
generation CPU.
2) Right. You're no developer. So you don't know that the OS is about a zillion times more important than the architecture when it comes to writing code. Seriously, no one writes in assembler anymore. Not production code, at least. gcc will compile to x86 with about as much difficulty as it will compile to PPC, and about all the developer has to do is swap an environment variable from "PowerPC-G5-Altivac" to "686-P4-SIMD" (or "686-P4-64-SIMD-Dual", as the case may be), and gcc will take care of dealing with how the binary should be specialized.
3) Umm.. it's a processor. I know there's flame wars back and forth about RISC versus CISC, but to a compiler it's all the same. And as long as the compiler can take advantage of the features of a processor, it doesn't MATTER which one it's on.
4) "Support"? It's an extre couple hundered CPU-Hours per product for compilation on the new platform. Nothing Apple can't handle. And whos their other supplier? Motorola? I'm pretty sure Apple negotiated a special 68k instruction set out of IBM for the PowerPC switch so that Classic could run in its own mode.
5) I dunno. XScale processers are pretty awesome things. They're ARM, and if you don't know what that means, take a look at your GameBoy Advance, your Nintendo DS, your Sony PSP, your PDA, or any of a number of other small devices. Apple just needs to come up with an application for it.
I mean, hell, they could probably make a PDA that would knock the **** out of Windows Mobile sales.
New Direction: Run OS-X on any x86 machine. Steal a LARGE chunk of MS's market share.
Reasons not to do this:
1: Fear of reprisal from MS. Doubt it. They pull MS Office, and guess what, no one cares; Apple Work handles all MS documents and works better. I mean, lack of Office for Linux doesn't stop those in the Know from using Linux. It's called OpenOffice.
2: Apple users no longer can point at their new mac and look down on the PC using plebs, thinking they couldn't understand the sheer extacy of owning a mac. Apple's response would likely be something like, "Umm, this is business. Your machine still works and remains supported. I mean, I didn't _THINK_ we'd made our customers into complete nutters..."
3: Steve Jobs smokes crack. Since this one isn't true at all, I'm pretty confident that OS-X will be released for x86 in general, as a seperated OS (possibly with an open-source kernel to increase machine support). It won't be the OS-X that is on your pretty Mac Mini, but it will have all the things Darwin does not.
Intel Inside/Apple Outside
Blue Men Dancing/Other Bright Silhouettes Dancing
Wonder what the pundits will call this duo? Aptel? Inpple?
Intelapple? AI?
CharlesJo.com
OS Wars
http://charlesjo.com/newsletterissue?
newsletterIssueEntityId=285
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/04/0238235&tid=118&tid=3&tid=137
Actually, it's referencing this article.
OSx86 could be another name for the duo.
CharlesJo.com
switch this late in the game. IBM has done a real good job with
PowerPC and it would be crazy to switch to the x86 architecture
now.
are not unhappy with G5 speeds; marketshare is starting to grow
for the first time, and the risk of people running a hacked up
variant of Mac OS X on some random Dell is high. Why would Steve
Jobs want to run this particular risk? Not a good idea.
I've always been a PC/Linux guy and after test driving several different Macs I was still undecided but went to take the plunge on a Mac Mini anyway.
But... after telling the rude little troll behind the counter what I wanted configuration wise, he informed me that his technician was "too busy" and I wouldn't get it till the next day.
Had he not been such a jack*ss I might have been more understandable, but that experience and this article clinched it for me. I'am sticking with my PC.
Quite frankly, I found the MACs to be pretty slow performers, but OSX is really nice. Hopefully we'll see it available for x86 platform someday.
In the meantime, Apple can keep their hardware.
Oh, happy day!
to everyone. Secondly you have no idea what goes on instore and
back of house, so I would be careful when making such remarks.
Dvorak, trolling for fish bate , how fitting with a last name of
SHANK..land. There is nothing to this story that warrants any
discussion period, move along people realise when you come
across a wanna be journalist....
perspective of switching the platform to intel-based processors:
it means that Apple can finally compare apples to apples in
speed tests instead of comparing apples to oranges for such
bottom line issues as "processor advertised speed" (as if this
weren't meaningless in the bigger scheme of things, where real-
world performance rules -- but the marketing types will rejoice).
It will also mean that it will probably be easier to gather the
programming staffs to deal with machine-level coding/patching
(since finding machine-level programmers versed in G4/G5
chips is difficult); conversely, it wil also mean they probably will
inadvertently start pulling in the dredges of the programming
realms that currently infest the PC side of the world and are at
least partially responsible for the innate quirkiness of unstable
PC's.
From a co-marketing stand-point, being able to shout "intel
inside" and convincing manufacturers of third party add-on's
that adding a few code-snippets to support the mac (instead of
having to build mac-specific versions) will open up the
accessory and add-on market. Anybody remember NuBus?
Finally, it might signal the emergence of the penultimate battle
-- if they get the OS running on plain-jane OS boxes from a
dozen (or a zillion) different vendors, they will be able to take on
MS Windoze as the platform of choice. Unfortunately, I see this
particular tactic back-firing in three ways:
(A) MS is a marketing company. Yes, they sometimes write
software (and more often absorb it through acquisitions, etc),
but primarily they are the biggest gorilla on the planet because
of marketing prowess. Apple doesn't have the coffers to go toe-
to-toe with them on their home-turf, even with a superior
product unless the spyware/virus/maint/update/support cycles
continue in the current vein on the Windows platform.
(B) If they give up hardware control, they will open themselves
up to the same kind of glitches that the PC side already endurs;
If they don't give up hardware control, they are stuck right where
they're at, but at the mercy of Intel/AMD, both of whom are
extremely loyally dedicated to the Wintel platform because of
raw sales numbers (meaning MS could leverage marketing force
against them, including in such things as processor
development direction -- it doesn't take a genius to figure out
that if MS wants Intel's staff to dedicate itself to changes X,Y,Z,
smaller clients like Apple will be left on the back-burner).
(C) In a combined view (a subset of the full Mac OS runs on
generic boxes, with a complete superset of the Mac OS running
on Apple-branded Intel-driven hardware -- something shown as
early as the roll out of OS X beta's), apple gets split two ways to
Sunday -- people will lambast them for poor stability on the low
end of the spectrum and lambast them for too high prices on
the high end of the spectrum (right now they can be lambasted
only on the pricing models). Apple history has always shown that
their attempts to go low-end, mass market goes awry somehow
(remember the Mac clones?); the company size simply isn't right
for this kind of move, and I doubt it could stand the growing
pains of that kind of growth while still being the same
outstanding firm it has been in terms of products &
conceptualizations realized at the desktop level... This speaks
back to the Pepsi generation at Apple, and the problems that
existed then as well... If anyone has looked at the stock, it's
already started to tank as a result. If you hold stock, I'd expect a
harsh ride over the next two weeks as it rollercoasters...
Best possible solution, if the news is true:
Apple will remain Apple. The box will still be Apple and the OS
will run only on Apple-delivered boxes; the processor core
changes to Intel Itanium or some other multi-core RISC
architecture that they see as feasible, but from the outside of
the box, we don't see the changes...
Fingers crossed
=-= The CyberPoet
needed, the number of people familiar with x86 vs PPC is
probably irrelevant. Almost all of that would be in the code-
generating portions of gcc or a JIT compiler for Java, anyway.
Writing code generating code and writing general purpose
assembler code are completely different things.
Second correction: the stock shot up 5% when the first hint of
this rumor came out. I expect if it is confirmed (which I'm still
skeptical of), it will shoot up even more. The point to sell is
right after the Mac Mini Intel box goes on sale, before news of
how poorly it's doing comes out. Then buy it back shortly after
they announce that they're going to stick with some new PPC
that IBM just came out with or something.
Mac interface to be ported to Intel, period. They are talking with
Intel about using their next gen WIFI chipset. MacNN has much
better coverage.
Anyway, just wait until Monday.
It's gonna be interesting, would they put the "Intel Inside" sticker over the apple now :-)
- Cnet and others trying to manipulate stock markets.
- by June 3, 2005 10:37 PM PDT
- Since these rumors resurfaced a few days ago, Apple's stock has
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
-
- Huh?
- by samkass June 3, 2005 10:45 PM PDT
- 1. Apple's stock has been very steady this week until Friday,
- Like this View reply
Processing -
Showing 1 of 5 pages (288 Comments)been rising again.
Monday, when this rumor is dispelled and once again Apple
shows that they won't switch to the x86 architecture, the APPL
stock will crash... (well maybe not crashing but it will go down
by some margin)
Some "clever" people could make a lot of money out of this, or
they simply some company wants to hurt Apple's stock, hoping
to throw them in a downward spiral.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not a criminal offense...
when news of overstocked iPods and Macs sent it down... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5d
2. There is no time between now and Monday to trade stocks, so
stock manipulation as a motive for an article posted after market
close on Friday concerning news to be announced Monday
makes no sense.
3. Intel is, I believe, or was a major investor in c|net, and thus it
WOULD probably be illegal if the motive was stock manipulation.
In short, I don't think so.