On 07/06/2005, at 11:02 PM, J Philippe Chaperon wrote:
on 7/6/05 11:53 AM, Rod at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
er.
Your software will still work, and considering almost all third party
hardware is platform independent these days, they will work too.
What a real nightmare Steve Jobs has sprung on some of us!! I'm
still trying
to fathom what all this will mean for the 'believers'. It'll be
very hard
right now for the evangelists to evangelize the heathen to the Apple
religion....
I bet if Steve kept this a secret all along, even when they were
released, you wouldn't even know. It will still look like a Mac,
smell like a Mac.... :-) Watch the keynote in full. At the end of
the keynote, Steve says the soul of the Mac has always been the OS,
not the hardware. He's right.
A good test for that is loading up Linux on your Mac (no offense to
the Linux guys out there!). You'll find that linux runs fast, but
the experience is no where near the same as running OS X. No
different from the XBox 360 demos at E3 last week. Everyone thought
they were playing rough versions of the new 360 games on development
Xboxes. Nope - they were G5s. But if some smarty didn't take a
picture of what was underneath the desk, the punters would have never
known they were playing on Macs.
One thing I am certain of is that my dual G5, purchased to last me
through
many upgrades, both software and hardware, or so I thought some
months back,
is now like a lame duck sitting in the very busy Intel highway.
Why? Apple made the announcement of going to Intel, so all
development will stop? Please, please, please watch the
keynote!!!!! Steve mentions numerous times that PowerPC development
has not stopped, and there will be new machines coming out.
I now have absolutely no incentive to update to Tiger, I was
planning to
place an order for one today!! My current 10.3.9 will do until it
dies out,
and hopefully by then the effects of Jobs' decision would be
clearer. I am
just not in a mood anymore to put my heard earned cabbages to support
something built on shifting sand.
And miss out on all the cool stuff that 10.4 offers, even the under
the hood stuff that is designed and optimised for a G5? No different
from all those people who said they wouldn't switch for 9 to X. When
they finally made the move, they wondered why they didn't (Phil
Mcgree, where are you? :-)
Having said this, I am very well aware that some analysts have been
hinting
at the need for Apple to move to Intel for its supply of
processors. If my
memory serves me right, its been since the G3's were the high end
processors
that the pundits, at least some of them, were forecasting such a move.
Apple themselves have known this for quite sometime. All releases of
OS X were also made for Intel processors (and I would not be
surprised if there were also builds for AMDs and other CPUs). And
there will also intel builds of their previous attempts at a new OS
(Rhapsody etc). And the real sticking point is that NextStep,
Steve's foray once he was chopped from Apple in the 80's, was
eventually ported from a Motorola-based system to Openstep, which is
x86 based. And we all know what came out from Openstep........
I know this will be a difficult pill to swallow for Mac faithful,
supposedly aligning themselves with the Dark Side (I'm surprised
nobody has made the Anakin/Darth Vader analogy yet - I switched to
the Dark Side to save my company. I could see into the future that
Apple was going to die, and the Emperor (Intel) knows a way I can
save it..... teehee).
All I can say is have faith. It would not have been a light
decision by Apple to switch to Intel. May be they saw the writing on
the wall with IBM, and knew that deliveries of chips is going to be
even worse once the big Three Consoles are released.
I believe Apple have made the right decision. Just have a little faith!
Seeya
Rod!
