I though some of you might find this amusing...
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[nexodus] cringely on apptel .. sure, why not. |
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http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html
Going for Broke
Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an
Attempt to
Dethrone Microsoft. Really.
By Robert X. Cringely
The crowd this week in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers
Conference seemed mildly excited by the prospect of its favorite
computer
company turning to Intel processors. The CEO of Adobe asked why it
had taken
Apple so long to make the switch? Analysts on Wall Street were generally
positive, with a couple exceptions. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE!? Are
these people drunk on Flav-r-Ade? Yes. It is the legendary Steve Jobs
Reality Distortion Field at work. And this time, what's behind the
announcement is so baffling and staggering that it isn't surprising that
nobody has yet figured it out until now.
Apple and Intel are merging.
Let's take a revisionist look at the Apple news, asking a few key
questions.
The company has on its web site a video of the speech, itself, which
is well
worth watching. It's among this week's links.
Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance
advantage
over Intel?
This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in
the G4
and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe
Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to
pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how
much
faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium
equivalents. Was
that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question
totally ignored in this week's presentation?
Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?
OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit
chips --
Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs.
So is
Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to
pretend
that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains
why the
word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly,
he never
said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-
Ghz
development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark
very well,
either (it's in the links).
So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a
big deal
about it in their earlier marketing?
Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?
If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its
performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which
equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs AND
does so at
a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense
than Apple and Intel any day.
Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even
begin for
customers?
This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has
completely
forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him,
Osborne was
the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first
luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular
fashion
when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several
months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought
Osborne
1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was
twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why
would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub
with him
(Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for
Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his
present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in
the
next 12 to 18 months?
Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout
a new
Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?
This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers
inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.
Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow
third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to
Intel. But
this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show
how
easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why
give it a
year? And companies typically make such announcements to their
partners in
private under NDA and get away with it. There was no need to make this a
public announcement despite News.com's scoop, which only happened
because of
the approaching Jobs speech. Apple could have kept it quiet if they had
chosen to, with the result that not so many sales would have been lost.
This means that there must have been some overriding reason why Apple
HAD to
make this public announcement, why it was worth the loss of billions in
sales.
Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
People "in the know" love this idea, that Hollywood moguls are
forcing Apple
to switch to Intel because Intel processors have built-in DRM
features that
will keep us from pirating music and movies. Yes, Intel processors
have such
features, based primarily on the idea of a CPU ID that we all hated
when it
was announced years ago so Intel just stopped talking about it. The
CPU ID
is still in there, of course, and could be used to tie certain
content to
the specific chip in your computer.
But there are two problems with this argument. First, Apple is
already in
the music and video distribution businesses without this feature, which
wouldn't be available across the whole product line for another two
years
and wouldn't be available across 90 percent of the installed base for
probably another six years. Second, though nobody has ever mentioned
it, I'm
fairly sure that the PowerPC, too, has an individual CPU ID. Every
high end
microprocessor does, just as every network device has its unique MAC
address.
So while DRM is nice, it probably isn't a driving force in this
decision.
Then what is the driving force?
Microsoft.
Here is my analysis based on not much more than pondering the five
questions, above, and speaking with a few old friends in the business. I
won't say there is no insider information involved, but darned little.
The obvious questions about performance and 64-bit computing come
down to
marketing. At first, I thought that Steve Jobs was somehow taking up the
challenge of making users believe war was peace and hate was love
simply to
show that he could do it. Steve is such a powerful communicator and
so able
to deceive people that for just a moment, I thought maybe he was
doing this
as a pure tour du force -- just because he could.
Nah. Not even Steve Jobs would try that.
The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap,
and
nothing that IBM couldn't have matched. If Apple was willing to
consider a
processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more
sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that
technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is
simply about
business -- BIG business.
Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP
selling
iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal
computers, too.
Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn't
always
been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship
with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from
Intel's
standpoint Microsoft doesn't work hard enough to challenge its
hardware. For
Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and
Microsoft's bloatware strategy just isn't making that happen,
especially if
they keep delaying Longhorn.
Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three
percent
market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back
control of
the desktop from Microsoft.
Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that
drives what
Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when
they did
have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.
So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the
market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin
product with
better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as
Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By
the
way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility
mode
with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).
This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was
able to
own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the
back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique
features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box,
too. Apple
could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the
value was
in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the
consumer
electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not
much. And
if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would
drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.
That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill
Gates.
And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of
CEO of
the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.
Remember, you read it here first.
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