Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
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
Apple will not make the OS available to run on anything other than
Macintosh computers purchased from Apple. It'd be absolute market
suicide if they did.
From C|Net:
'After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller
addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no
plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't
preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said.
"We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac
OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac
OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said."'
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.
The majority of the market doesn't give a crap about standards of design
and construction, they care about cost. That's why allowing OS X on
other x86 hardware would be suicide - it would immediately shoot Apple's
hardware revenue in the head, and that's where they make their money.
Could selling the OS to a wider userbase make up for it? Possible but
doubtful, and they'd have to ride the iPod for income until OS X managed
further market penetration. And guess which Washington-based company
would try their damndest to stop such penetration? :)
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.)
Two answers to your puzzle:
1) AMD is already suffering their own production shortages, whereas
Intel is dumping billions into new fabs and should have no problem
guaranteeing availability to Apple.
2) Notebooks are outselling desktops these days. AMD has crap for
mobile offerings. Intel has the Pentium M, which is a fantastic piece
of engineering that offers the most winning combination of computing
power vs. heat and battery life on the market.
Job's reference to "Universal Binaries", though, smacks of NeXTStep's
"Fat Binaries" when they started supporting Intel systems.
Heh where do you think they got it from?
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...
The only thing that I'd have liked to see in a switch to AMD would be
the continuation of the HyperTransport architecture in the PowerMacs.
But if the performance is there with Intel, and it is (as much as the
AMD-fanboy sites would like you to think otherwise), I don't see why it
matters. In fact, Intel generally holds the benchmark crown over AMD
when it comes to media-based applications like encoding, and that's one
market where the Macintosh lives comfortably.
Remember that Apple's choice of Intel really just determines the
instruction set. Apple and Intel are going to sit down and put together
a reliable and well-engineered logic board for the Mac. They don't have
to accomodate all the things that x86 PC makers do for the sake of
backwards-compatibility (why is it that my 3.0GHz Pentium 4 can still
run DOS?) They have a clean slate. They're going to make a kickass
machine. It will just happen to have x86 instructions at the center.
The users won't know or care.
--
Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com
Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting
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