[Wolves] Apple moving to Intel?

[Jon Masters]

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Andy Wootton wrote:

>>> If this is indeed true, it is a truly bizarre move.

It makes good business sense, they'll probably gain a few customers now
that they can take on Dell on their own home ground.

With anything, there are also losers - I only bought my Apple kit for
the PowerPC inside it and now they've decided they want to start
producing cheap whitebox trash (for the mass market - where people only
care what the box looks like, not what's actually inside - let's face
reality, almost any modern CPU can run a web browser) I will need some
serious convincing before handing over my money.

I actually also own a Tadpole SPARCbook 1 - from the days when laptops
were real heavy duty - but Tadpole have also gone with Wintel so the
choice for non-Intel laptops is quickly falling away. I've started
moaning that IBM should somehow revive the PPC Thinkpad they did.

>>> Whatever I may think of Apple's practices, the fact
>>> remains that their
>>> architecture is still superior to that of a PC. Going with Intel just
>>> doesn't make sense, unless they have agreed to make
>>> Apple-friendly non-x86/IA64 chips.

The chips will be bog standard nasty x86 (I say that with some
qualification folks - I often write PowerPC assembly for a living and
have studied the architecture, it clearly does rock) but there'll
probably be some "surprise announcement" by Jobs that he's raised the
Itanic or something similar for a G5 replacement Powermac.

> Don't Intel own or have manufacturing rights to Alpha and ARM from their
> kissing and making up with Digital?

They have things like Xscale and IXP - don't get me wrong, a lot of the
Intel stuff is ok. I just hate the x86 as an architecture. It sucks -
anything designed in less than 2 weeks and bodged for over twenty years
is bound to suck in a modern world with modern concerns. The fact is,
Intel's NetBurst (and related) tech is a really cool hack that tries to
fix fundamental (almost unfixable) problems with the original design.

> Apple have already moved from Motorola to PowerPC architecture though.
> They must have made the job easier next time by basing Darwin on BSD.

Sure. This might be a good thing though from the point of view of
preventing Linux users from being lured away to OS X - why buy a cheap
and nasty Apple x86 when you can get something else and run Linux on it
instead? :-) No, I don't seriously believe the average consumer even
remotely cares about anything other than GHz speeds - if they even care
- - or will give a damn about my points, but meh.

> The burning question in my mind though is whether Ade will move to OS X
> when it's available on 'non-proprietry Intel' hardware.

Let's face it, Apple is about as proprietary as they come - despite
their open appearance (they throw code over the garden fence from time
to time but remain a tight lipped organisation) - but there's some charm
in well engineered hardware stacks like the good stuff Apple made.

Take the above points how I meant them - I'm venting some steam - I
understand how it really works, but I don't have to like it.

:-)

Jon.
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