[Wolves] Apple moving to Intel?

[chris procter]

--- Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org> wrote:
> Andy Wootton wrote:
> 
> >>> If this is indeed true, it is a truly bizarre
> move.
> 
> It makes good business sense

It makes very good business sense, they get a cpu
manufacturer that is dedicated to making fast desktop,
and fast and low power laptop cpus rather then one
supplier who concentrates on embedded and one that
concentrates on server and games machine cpus. Intel
get a big name that has no backwards compatability
issues, can use all their nicest newest tech, and
isn't tied to Microsoft. AMD doesn't have the range of
technology that intel does (especially for laptops,
and 60%+ of Apple sales are laptops). 

> With anything, there are also losers - I only bought
> my Apple kit for
> the PowerPC inside it 

AOL.

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 doubt it will be whitebox trash, it will probably be
the most advanced x86 hardware anywhere with all the
old crufty bits removed and lots of nice new tech. But
I'll need convincing as well.

> I've started
> moaning that IBM should somehow revive the PPC
> Thinkpad they did.

There is actually a gap in the market now for someone
to produce non-x86 based laptops for the geek (how I
hate that word) market. There is a minority of Apple
customers for whom the ppc was part of the mystique
(including me, and by the sounds of things you). Its a
small market but all the software (linux) is in place,
and the customers would evangelise it for you.

I cant really explain why the ppc is so important, at
the end of the day as a user you cant really tell the
difference. I guess the x86 is like windows, it works,
 it does what you want, but you always have this
nagging feeling that its not as elegant and
technically beutifull as it should be.

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

Actually the BSD layer probably makes no difference,
its not standard BSD but a heavily hacked version that
runs on the mach microkernal, however the hard work of
getting it to run on intel was done back in the days
when linux was still a terminal emulator by NeXT for
NeXTStep which ran on ppc, x86, mips and parisc. It
seems that when Apple bought NeXT they kept at least
the x86 port going for just this eventuallity, and its
been kept upto date and in sync ever since. This isn't
a short term strategy, or one they thought up in
response to the G5 not reaching 3GHz, you've go to
admire their long term thinking.

That does leave open the remote posibility that Apple
could release a mips based machine sometime in the
future...


> 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)

Harsh. Apple have release some good stuff into the
open source world, Darwin is so far the only kernel
relased from captivity into the wild (at least until
OpenSolaris appears). In the middle of the intel
furore there was also an announcement that they have
changed the way they work with webkit to sort out the
problems they had with the khtml team (webkit was
always open source but now has full CVS access as
well)

I for one mourn the passing of our PowerPC overlords.

chris


		
___________________________________________________________ 
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday 
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com