i could be brave

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Macintel

Categories: Technology

Every other blogger on the planet has written about Apple switching to Intel processors for their Macintosh computers.  I’ve held off until now.

The hysteria that ensued immediately after the announcement was pretty amusing and for the most part I’ve just been checking out other peoples’ takes on the whole thing.  I thought I would start by making comments on what I’ve heard other people saying and then give my view.

Sweet!  Mac OS X on my Dell!

Apple is apparently going to do everything they can to make this impossible.  Apple makes an incredible amount of money on their hardware and their industrial design is large part of what makes a Mac special.  I suspect some hacker types will figure out how to get OS X running on their Dell.  But I don’t think it will be easy and that will be enough to make most people not find it worth the effort.  More importantly, since Apple’s OS only runs on Apple made computers they are able to prevent the hardware conflicts and other issues that plague Windows users.  None of this is going to change.  Jobs is brash, controlling, and reportedly not very nice when he thinks you have crossed him.  He is also pretty dang intelligent.  Give him a little credit here.

Does this mean I can run Microsoft Windows on my Mac?

It very well could mean that.  Apple publicly stated that they would not ship Intel based Mac’s with Windows installed.  However, they also publicly stated they wouldn’t do anything to stop people from installing it themselves.  Even better, it would be easy to port WINE to an Intel based Mac.  The idea of being able to run Windows apps directly in OS X (at full speed) is great to a Mac based web designer who’s spends a lot of time in Virtual PC trying to get an XHTML/CSS based design to behave in Internet Explorer. 

How could Apple do this to me?  My computer is worthless now.

This kind of comment is actually starting to annoy me.  Will XBOX’s all stop working when the XBOX 360 is released?  Apple is changing processors.  They aren’t stealing your current computer and beating it with a sledgehammer.  They also aren’t dropping the PowerPC immediately.  In fact they will be phasing in the Intel processors at the low end not the high end.  Laptops will be the first up since they are the ones suffering the most at the moment due to IBM’s inability to make a G5 chip that won’t cook an egg.  Apple has made it as easy as possible for programmers to write their software for both PowerPC and Intel Macs and most Mac software should ship so that it runs on both processor types for at least 2 or 3 years.  By that time most of the current base of Mac’s will be getting to the point where the performance of new software will be so bad you won’t want to run it anyway.  Computer life times are always notoriously short in the performance department.  Nothing new here.

Cool, Mac’s will be cheaper now.

I doubt it.  There are cheap Windows based PC’s because they are produced cheaply and in great quantities.  Intel based Mac’s will be designed by the same engineers and likely produced by the same production companies.  The price of computers has less to do with the processor used than with the method and quality control employed to produce it.  And of course simple supply and demand have a lot to do with it as well.  Demand for Apple computers while good doesn’t compare to demand for Dell’s and the other large Window’s computer producers.

How stupid is Job’s?  No one is going to buy a Mac now since they know Intel based ones won’t be out for a year.

There is a famous story about the Osbourne Computers.  They announced a new better computer way before they were ready actually sell it.  No one bought their current computers because they were waiting for the new ones and with no influx in cash Osbourne was unable to continue functioning and they went out of business.  The lesson soon became known as the “Osbourne Effect” and people have been mentioning it in spades since Apple’s announcement. 

What people seem to forget is that Apple has billions of dollars in cash reserves.  They could weather out many years of slow sales without any problems.  More important is that after people calm down and the misinformation gets cleared up I think people will realize that if they need a computer now and they want it to be a Mac they might as well buy it now.  By the time the Intel based Mac’s are all that is available it will be time to buy a new computer anyway.

How do I feel about the switch in processors?  Well, I’m actually really excited.  I’m a PowerBook user and mine is starting to feel a little slow.  I wasn’t real happy about the fact that IBM was showing no signs of progress in getting the G5 into a laptop.  Now, I have a dual core PowerBook (or whatever Apple decides to call it) to look forward to.  It will be much faster, it will have better power management.  And I will be able to test pages in IE6 without using the painfully slow VirtualPC emulator. 

I’m quite happy about the switch.

Posted by Jamie at 12:10 AM