On Jun 3, 2005, at 6:52 PM, Tom Gal wrote:
http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+to+Intel+chips/ 2100-1006_3-5731398.html?tag=nefd.ledesupposedly. I still won't believe it till I see it.
Well, Steve Jobs just announced it about an hour ago, so we better start believing it.
I fully expect, however, that it's not quite as simple as "Apple becoming only an x86 clone maker." I most certainly think that Apple is going to make the OS available to run on generic hardware, but I also fully believe that Apple will continue to provide the high- quality engineering that it has always put into its products. If Apple hardware starts falling to the same "standards" of design and construction as the rest of the PC makers, Apple will most assuredly sign its own death certificate.
That said, I'm sure Steve Jobs wouldn't even have considered this unless he (and Apple) felt truly constrained by IBM's seeming inability to provide greater performance in the PowerPC line.
I'm also saddened that the final major competitor to the x86 architecture has once again been religated to "proprietary vendor" status. PowerPC is a very nice architecture.
I'm also quite puzzled why Apple would go with Intel instead of AMD, given AMD's better overall price and system performance (Hypertransport blows the doors of Intel's shared bus architecture in nearly all throughput tests, especially in multi-cpu systems.)
Job's reference to "Universal Binaries", though, smacks of NeXTStep's "Fat Binaries" when they started supporting Intel systems.
We shall see if this is either the beginning of the rise or the beginning of the fall of Apple. The least they could have done was go AMD, though...
Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
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