Apple Switching to Intel

Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC keynote today that Apple is switching to Intel processors. MacNN has live coverage. The bottom line is that Mac OS X for the last five years has been running on Intel, the switch is expected to be complete in two years, and Rosetta will allow PPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs, transparently. If you're using Xcode, it is small changes and a recompile; otherwise, you might be seeing a lot of work ahead of you. You will be able to order the 10.4.1 preview for Intel today.

where's the lawsuit against c|net?

[professorhojo]

Late Friday afternoon, C|Net News [com.com] published an extremely valuable trade secret about Apple [apple.com] and Intel [intel.com], days before Apple was scheduled to announce it ( Apple to Ditch IBM, Switch to Intel Chips [com.com] ). So, where's the friggin' lawsuit [eff.org] against C|Net to find out who leaked? Where is the judge who is going to claim that what C|Net published was "stolen property"?

From: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/06 /05/apple_intel_wheres_the_lawsuit_against_cnet.ph p [corante.com]

So here it is

[Ignorant Aardvark]

My prediction of when you'll be able to run Mac OS X on an x86 machine is still: never. Apple isn't a software company. They're a hardware company. Just because they're changing their processor does not mean you're going to be able to run it on your hardware.

Cross-compatibility: OS X and Windows

[flashinglights]

This means we'll be able to buy Apple hardware and run Windows software natively, through WINE or similar.

After recovering from the shock, this is starting to seem like a good move for Apple.

Wow. How's that for a well-kept secret?

[bc90021]

They've been building everything on PowerPC and Intel at the same time for five years. Wow.

Apple biggest challenge

[Maxwell42]

I think this is simply the biggest challenge Apple is ever going to take:
- From a marketing point of view
- In engineering (hardware and software)
- In communication with its partner (it seems it's already a success as Wolfram Research, Adobe and Microsoft are in the wagon)

Wow...

Yeah, except now you can have a fast mobile

[xtal]

The powerbooks weren't cutting it and there was NO WAY to get a G5 in there.

Maybe I can get back to a 4-5hr runtime like the first generation Tibook had..

Why buy a mac then?

[dudle]

If it runs the same processor as my $300 Dell, why should I go spend all the money and get a Mac? Just for the OS? I'm wondering.

Worst part about this?

[allanc]

That smug bastard Dvorak was right.

Dammit.

Re:apple getting out of hardware?

[MustardMan]

Uh, no. They are going to put intel chips inside their machines. They will still use openfirmware, and not a pc bios, and still allow the os to only run on their proprietary machines. x86 != PC

Re:This is bullshit.

[WhiteWolf666]

Keep in mind. Mac OS X is a unix OS, with lots of unixy underpinnings.

You loose *some* compatability with existing Mac apps.

More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.

This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.

Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac.

Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.

WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.

Re:This is bullshit.

[pomo monster]

Sticking with the Mac would be annoying and difficult because of compatibility headaches, so you're switching to Linux?

Re:So when can I get a copy?

[Bedloe]

Never. Apple will simply use a custom chipset in their hardware, and OS X will only run on that chipset. The chipset will be incompatible with Windows. Absolutely nothing will change with regards to compatibility between Macs and Wintels. Of course, something COULD change at any moment, and that's what's so beautiful about this plan. After Apple has successfully migrated the OS X developer community to MacIntels, it would be an easy step to open the floodgates and unleash OS X for ALL Wintel systems. My guess is that Apple isn't doing this until Microsoft is less of a threat (perhaps with a democratic administration in to pursue unfair business practices by Microsoft), but it's basically an "in case of unbridled euphoria, break glass" option.

Apple getting out of hardware?

[toupsie]

Now that Apple has announced that it is moved to Intel, who is going to buy a G5 now? I am sure as hell not. Apple just killed the sales of its hardware for the rest of the year. Also does this mean I will be able to buy a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Mac OSX Server?

I wish I hadn't just bought a Mac Mini

[Andy_R]

This sends a very clear message to potential Mac buyers... Do not buy until these machines ship in 2006, or you'll get an obsolete machine, like I just did.

Perhaps they wanted it...

[sterno]

All of this would assume that they wanted the information kept secret. I have little doubt that if news.com was publishing this information, Apple didn't have that big of an interest in keeping it secret. With individual product releases, they are quite a bit more protective because they want to control how the products are treated in the media.

A good example of how this can work, if information came out on the shuffle well in advance of release, you'd see lots of reviews picking it apart for it's lack of a display, etc. So, before it ever hit the streets there would be a certain image of the device that could hurt their sales. But when Apple released it, they managed to spin the lack of display as a sort of feature. That the shuffle is about random playing, not picking songs out of a large library.

As far as this change goes, it doesn't really need to be handled in any particular way. They needed to keep it officially secret as a publicly traded company, but practically speaking I don't think they really cared. Ultimately the people most effected by it, ISV's, seem to have had some awareness ahead of time under NDA's (at least the bigger ones).

The end users of macs, for the most part, won't even understand what this means, or care. As long as the next mac they buy runs the software they have now and works as well as what they have now, they won't care.

Well, there was a hint already

[kompiluj]

when Intel CEO Otellini said he would buy an apple [theregister.co.uk].

Re:This is bullshit.

[Senjutsu]

And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers.

No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.

Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.

"Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.

I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.

AMD would've made more sense

[RADicaLMMS]

Its about time, but a switch to AMD makes more sense. Tables have turned indeed. AMD CPUs are more expensive faster/better. Intel has reduced prices, performance lacks. ...and now this. BTW I recently bought a P4 3.2 Ghz Prescott, so I'm on the side of facts, but the facts are obvious aren't they.

IBM forcing this?

[3770]

I can't help but think that Apple didn't want this move, but was forced by IBM.

IBM might have said that they weren't going to spend any R&D on the G5/970 for the laptop for instance.

And Apple was forced to take the plunge.

And now they are desperately trying to make this sound as if it will be an advantage to the end user and that it is a great thing.

But behind the scenes Steve Jobs is cursing IBM.

Time to stop believing

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

so long as you weren't using any Altivec-heavy apps (since SSE is a poor replacement)

Look, that was Apple propaganda. They are going to stop spouting it now and so can you. You can stop believing it now and start believing things that are actually true. Like switching to Intel is actually going to give Apple the biggest performance boost they've had for several years.

(And no, I'm not just an Apple-basher. I've been using PowerBooks for years, despite the fact that their performance sucks unbelievably compared to a PC.)

Re:So here it is

[metlin]

Apple isn't a software company. They're a hardware company.

No, Apple is both a software and a hardware company.

There is a difference.

Re:This is bullshit.

[WatertonMan]

My memory of the transition was different. Apple did a surprisingly good job on it. Some programs didn't run, but they were mainly games or specialized utilities which were now redundant. Apple's real problems came from that silly "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft and then the release of Windows 95. That, combined with some spectacular crappiness of stability under Sys7 cost Apple their marketshare.

Some blamed the unstability on the 68K -> PPC transition. But really it was a ton of accumulated crud along with some spectacular missteps by Apple.

Re:How did Appple keep this a secret?

[antibryce]

It wasn't a secret. It'd been discussed on numerous sites (including this one) many many times.

Re:Why buy a mac then?

[jamesmrankinjr]

Just for the OS? I'm wondering.

Yes.

Peace be with you,
-jimbo

Re:Farewell Apple

[mitchell_pgh]

Farewell?
(official "apple is dead" #94,549,238,192,204,223)

Apple has shown time and time again their resiliency to major hardware and software migrations. Once people get over the shock and awe of this announcement, people will start to realize it was a natural progression. We will be moving from a "niche" OS using a "niche" CPU to a "niche" OS using the "industry standard" CPU.

If next year, IBM sold off their PPC manufacturing, Apple would/could be dead in the water. Now that they are with Intel, they can just glide along with the industry.

Re:Apple getting out of hardware?

[Oz0ne]

I am, for one.

Why wouldn't you? You're going to be running the same apps, on the same platform (software) and it's a good processor.

The pc market has *never* been a "wait six months then buy," market. Everything changes too fast. Why would people deny themselves the tools they want (or need) waiting for the upgrades? Upgrades and changes will ALWAYS bee just over the horizon.

Re:This is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit kidding yourself. The real reason your pissed is mac users aren't going to be "elite" anymore.

So is it all about the DRM?

[FunWithHeadlines]

OK, so it's real. Intel-based will mean some advantages, some disadvantages. Maybe in two or three years Apple will be ahead in chip speed, or maybe not. OS X runs on Intel? OK. But all of this is less interesting to me than the suggestion in this Wired article [wired.com] that says this move is all about the DRM.

Here on /. we have moaned and whined and foamed at the mouth about Intel's hardware-based DRM plans. But some suggested that even if the Wintel world rattled down the DRM highway in lockstep, at least there would be the creative side world of Apple where Uncle Steve would put stickers on computers saying, "Don't steal movies" and maybe some half-hearted picket fences to keep the most obtuse user from figuring out how to move movies from one machine to another.

Doesn't this change everything? Won't Apple just become another fiefdom in the DRM kingdom, where users are kept in chains? Won't this mean that Macs will be just as distrustful of their owners as PCs are going to be? Cuz I'm no "pirate," and I respect copyright laws, but I hate being treated like a thief by my own equipment. If Apple is about to go down the same DRM highway, I think it's going to become my way rather than their highway. And my way will be away from Apple, and toward FOSS completely. Maybe I'll buy the last "free" PowerBook Apple sells, max out the memory, get lots of backup parts, and then run Ubuntu or something on it for the next decade.

Re:So here it is

[KH]

I'm more than certain as soon as Apple starts selling Mac mini x86, or even before, there will be people who hack OS X and make it run on pretty much all the x86 boxes.

Considering the fact that Darwin runs on x86, and that the backend of XCode is gcc, there really isn't anything that stops people booting OS X on regular x86 boxes. Some BIOS hacks?

Note the remark about the preview 10.4.1? On which machine are you supposed to run it when Mac mini x86 is not yet available?

Re:This is bullshit.

[mrchaotica]

This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.

Huh? The thing that makes an app "first class" on Mac OS is using the Cocoa API. OpenOffice on and x86 Mac will suck just as bad as it does on a PPC one, because it's painfully different from every other Mac app.

(Sigh) Just like all the Windows software is going to be...

Re:Apple getting out of hardware?

[Mononoke]

At worst, PPC hardware wouldn't begin to become obsolete until June '06, and even then only for those living on the bleeding edge. I'm thinking this will be a great time to get a good deal on a PPC Mac, because of all the people who think that it's obsolete right now.

Of course, I'm posting this from a G3, so what would I know.

This seems familiar to NeXT owners

[Jay Carlson]

Although Apple clearly isn't becoming a software company the way NeXT did, the parallels to NeXT history are a little spooky.

NeXT eventually threw in the towel on shipping 68000-based hardware. The transition from "black" NeXT hardware to "beige" PC x86 hardware pissed off a lot of early adopters.

One of the pissed-off users remixed the original audio welcome mail into this [nyud.net]. They posted it to usenet with the readme:

This is a sound file with SteveJobs and Khan. I do not see the two as mutually exclusive.

I'm sure the mindless Apple fanboys are now going to find some new magic word besides "Altivec" to justify their purchases. Me, I'm just happy with this mini.

Re:This is bullshit.

[aktbar]

Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed. Vmware will run on a mac. ...

WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.

And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??

Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...

It makes sense though...

[Om]

Think about it. We don't have a G5 Powerbook because we hear about the massive heat issues. Hell, just recently, I am having to take back my recently aquired G4 Powerbook because they are catching on bloody fire.

Secondly, I understand that Adobe is not making Photoshop and their other products for the Mac *first*. They are going to the PC, and then the Mac.

I mean, this quote says it all:

"I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,"

So they go Intel. Who cares? Most of us are using Linux on x86, and we couldn't care less. The only thing that alarmed me was that they didn't choose AMD64, but thats just me. Hopefully, this will influence developers to port their stuff over to OS X now (which would benifit Linux indirectly imo). So hopefully we'll get a ton more games (yay!... games are a wasteland on the Mac) and apps because of this switch.

Things are abotu to get interesting now. Its like Jobs saying, "OK, Gates... lets fight in your ring."

++Om

Who is going to buy a PPC mac now?? back to 32

[acomj]

Seriously. Who would drop many $1000s on a piece of hardware that has a lifespan of 2-3 years. You know the support for ppc apps will last a couple years before companies compile for X86 only.

And going back to 2 gig memory limit and 32 bits is going to be really fun.

Re:Wow. How's that for a well-kept secret?

[EvilMagnus]

Well, to be fair there's been plenty of rumors about this for a few years now, but this is the first solid proof to come out. :)

Re:This is bullshit.

[Golias]

Apple's software is ready to run on Intel today.
Adobe's software is ready to run on Intel today.
MS's software will be ready to runon Intel "RSN."
A dev of Mathematica ported it to Intel in two hours to show off at the Stevenote.

By the time you find yourself compelled to buy an Intel-based Mac (one and a half to two years from now), all the software you own will probably already be "universal binary" stuff without you even being aware of it. In fact, if you are an OS X user, some of it already is, and you weren't aware of it.

The few remaining apps will run through the Rosetta emulator just fine (such as the old version of Photoshop, which was demo'd on an Intel Mac at the Stevenote.)

For customers, this will be damn near transparent. Relax. Breath. It will be okay.

Re:This is bullshit.

[soupdevil]

The transition was so difficult for the audio and video industry, that for many people it STILL hasn't happened. You can find workhorse macs running OS9 in nearly every recording studio and post production house in LA.

adding insult to injury...

[Thud457]

not only are they giving up on the (IMHO) superior PPC to cowtow to the MHz moron marketroid contingent,
but,
this now means,
that fucknuck Dworvak is actually right about something!!!!

Actually, looking at the egos involved, pointing that little fact out to Jobs might be enough to wreck the deal....

Re:Why buy a mac then?

[word munger]

Come to think of it, MS Paint and Photoshop both run on the same processor. Why should I waste all that money on Photoshop?

Reasons this will be good

[Arcturax]

Like Jobs said, most apps are simply recompile. It will take only a couple months to get most apps you find on things like versiontracker over to the Mac.

It makes PC game conversion simpler and less expensive. No more big vs little endian problems or re-writing X86 assembler.

It allows for cheaper hardware, meaning the pros can buy a cheap intel Mac to play around on to see if the transition will hurt them or not before they all change over in 2007.

It gives Apple choice. If Intel continues to lose out to AMD, Apple can switch without losing compatability.

It also showcases the amazing portability of Mac OS X.

Last but not least, would be if they let you run Windows side by side with the Mac OS on dual core or multiprocessor machines. This would let "switchers" use both until they can transition to the Mac OS and let Mac heads play all those PC games they have been missing out on. I think this may be just HUGE for Mac gamers.

We shall see what the fallout is, but I think on the whole, this is a very positive and smart move for Apple.

Re:This is bullshit.

[topher1kenobe]

The note about VMWare running a Mac is significant, but FAR more important to me is the fact that OS X should run in VMWare soon.

Avoiding the Osborne Effect

[Niherlas]

Apple is making the transition to Intel processors (which does NOT mean that MacOS X will run on commodity x86 hardware).

Why? Steve mentioned a lack of a PowerPC roadmap. Leander at Cult of Mac mentioned possible Intel DRM to enable iTunes for Movies [tripod.com]. Everyone mentions that we haven't seen a PowerBook G5.

Why now? We all know that Apple's going to take it on the chin in the Mac hardware sales division. But Apple can take that hit right now. It has the well-known $4 billion in reserves. And it also has the iPod and iTMS - which have been bringing in a large percent of Apple's profits lately. With iPod running high for, well, the next year or so, that can prop up the Mac division through the transition slump.

Re:So here it is

[Danathar]

Really?

So what are developers going to test their Intel compiled OS X apps on? Is apple going to sell prototypes of Apple Intel systems to any developer who wants to test their app?

Steve said that an Intel preview version of OS X would be available within days...what exactly do you think this will run on?

Re:This is bullshit.

[defy god]

The 680x0 was not a growable architecture; the PPC architecture was (and still is).

interesting that you know much more about the PPC architecture then Apple. considering how they own IP in the PPC architecture themselves, as well as being the main software developer for it since it's inception. let's face it. Apple knows more about the PPC's future than we can speculate. They would know it's limitations. Would you prefer they stick to the PPC and be stuck with another Motorola situation? I've been a long time mac user myself and loved it when the 604e was killing the pentium line in benchmarks. Then we mac users were stuck at 400mhz because Motorola couldn't deliver. I love the G5 chip and all, but i'd rather have a transitional period such as this and have a viable processor as opposed to another "400mhz" like bottleneck. The 3.0ghz G5 was promised to us 2 years ago. We're still stuck at 2.7ghz.

Re:Have a taste...

[jellomizer]

What do you expect buying a computer before a keynote? If you are going to buy an apple you need to buy them in Feburary or July. I got my Powebook Febuary 2002 Top of the line. It wasn't considered obsolete until mid 2003.

Re:Worst news of the day

[Anita Coney]

Gee, I thought the Mac was impervious to viruses, spyware, and worms due to the bullet-proof security of OSX. Now you're telling me that it was due entirely to the PPC platform?! Who would have guessed?!

Re:Better be on Mach-O, folks

[SilentTristero]

The third option is to wait for Intel to recompile their x86 compiler to run under OSX. Shouldn't take them long (no new backend, it's just a command line app -- just need the new obj/lib/executable formats), and it's a sweet compiler for sure. Really good autovectorization, tight code, the Intel image/signal processing libs, etc. etc.

I'm sure it'll be available as a backend to Xcode for those like that sort of thing, and for folks like me who still like a common dev env (emacs, scons, and command-line compilers) across all platforms it'll be there even quicker.

Re:Time to stop believing

[sjf]

Look, that was Apple propaganda

-Wrong

Intel is actually going to give Apple the biggest performance boost they've had for several years.

-Could be true.

Altivec is absolutely the superior SIMD architecture. No doubt about it. On the G4 it was severly hampered by the cost of main memory access - for in-cache operations it is significantly faster than Intel. The G5 on the otherhand saw Altivec really reach its potential: the G5 has a much faster memory bus.

In my view, the leap to G5 was a pretty significant performance boost. But, Intel may deliver a similar boost, however it won't be because of the SIMD architecture.

Re:Have a taste...

[doktor-hladnjak]

It doesn't shock me too much that it only took 2 hours to port Mathematica. I mean, the API for OS X on Intel is probably exactly the same as for OS X on PPC. Probably only very, very small parts (if any at all) of Mathematica are written in assembly code. You fix those parts and anything that relies on specific processor behavior then do a recompile.

Apple has obviously got an x86 gcc for Tiger and has already begun the process of porting the frameworks, most of which will probably not require massive porting effort. Frameworks like vecLib will probably require some more work to use SSE instead of Altivec though.

Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.

Re:Apple getting out of hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh lord. Put simply:

Apple is not making Mac OS X for your PC.

Apple is putting Intel chips in Macs.

You will not be able to install Mac OS X on a Dell. At least not any time soon.

To quote:

At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007

Read more here: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.h tml [apple.com]

Re:This is bullshit.

[mcc]

Dude, do you even know what "recompiling" means? Your entire post is nonsense.

Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.

Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux /unix software on OS X is that GUI apps don't share quite the same API, which means they have to be run in an X server app, which is sort of kind of like wine, only 100% compatible and 100% ugly.

This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.

I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.

What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.

WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.

That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.

And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.

Jobs is being Played...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM - WinTel is working Jobs over like a little school boy.
Apple is taking steps backwards, look to the game machines for the future.

The PPC-Cell Chip will dominate any little chip Intel can make.

The Xbox 360 is a home PC killer - taking aim at replacing eBay, Google, Amazon, Home Computers, TiVo, and PS-3s - the box is designed from the start to dominate.

The PS-3 is a more powerful game system, but it doesn't seem to have the reach built into it, unlike the 'take over the world' plan laid out by Microsoft.

I am suprised Microsoft hasn't bought a Cable TV network yet.

Re:where's the lawsuit against c|net?

[Gid1]

Agreed. This just a couple of weeks after Intel's CEO recommends buying a Mac if you want "safety from security woes". In hindsight, that was a whopping hint.

Re:Apple's Marketing Woes?

[Golias]

When the new G5 towers were rolled out two years ago with the promise of hitting 3 GHz within a year, we annoying Mac Zealots practically creamed ourselves. G4 and G5 chips did outperform Intel offerings at the time on a per-clock-cycle basis.

However, two things happened since then to change all that.

First of all, IBM dropped the ball. Badly. It's been two years, and the G5 is just now hitting 2.7 GHz.

Secondly, Intel came out with a new line of notebook CPUs which kick G4 ass six ways from Sunday, and the G5 is simply to hot and power hungry to consider in a laptop. Powerbooks are absolutely vital to Apple's present and future. They've always been leaders in notebook hardware, and it's simply killing them that they've been losing that edge.

So the choice for Apple is: Stick with G5 and continue to stagnate, or change. Given that they've decided to change, they wisely decided to give their devs a year to ramp up for it.

This has the added bonus of pimping their Xcode and Apple Dev licenses to software houses which have been using Metroworks Codewarrior up until now. Win-win, as far as Apple is concerned.

Re:Have a taste...

[OrangeTide]

It probably takes an hour or so just to build. I know the projects I work on usually take 3-5 hours to build. Sounds like they tweaked a configuration and turned the crank and an x86 binary popped out.

Apple is Orwellian - Enemies/Allies change

[AHumbleOpinion]

Man, it is cold in hell today.

However this is nothing new to long term Apple users, we already have our Parka's from when IBM was transformed from the "Satan" of the Apple universe into a partner. Keep in mind that unlike Intel, IBM was an actual competitor. Intel was merely a supplier to competitors, well, that and a convenient whipping boy for marketting material of questionably accuracy.

Re:Apple getting out of hardware?

[not_anne]

I sure as hell will. I need to upgrade my system now, and this news does not make all G5 computers obsolete instantly. I'm not going to wait a year to buy a new computer, that's just silly talk.

I'm going from an AMD PC to a Mac G5 dual desktop. Strangely, when I upgrade again in a few years, I'll be going from PPC to Intel. Go figure.

Re:This is bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire rant above is based on this statement being true: ...this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero.

It isn't.

The transition from 68k to PPC was brutal because the 68k APIs were not built to be cross-platform. They weren't even conceived of being ever cross-platform. The situation now is completely different. Most OS X software built now, not just including but particularly the Adiums of the world, are built against Cocoa. Cocoa is designed to be cross platform.

So, when you complain that "they could have, if they wanted, made OS X a truly cross platform OS to begin with", guess what? They did. In retrospect, this seems to have been the entire point of the Cocoa API all along.

It's certain the transition won't be as painless as Apple would have you believe, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as the 68k->PPC transition was.

Re:Have a taste...

[forkazoo]

Indeed, this will be a huge blow to Apple marketing. The PowerPC chips have always had some interesting feature, or excelled at some particular benchmark. Maybe they were faster, maybe they were slower. That's not the point. It was always possible to benchmark some obscure x86 worst case scenario to "prove" that they were selling the fastest computer in the world, ever.

Now, they will have negligible margins on Dell in the benchmarks. If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.

I understand the technical issues, but I would be surprised if IBM wasn't able to clean up their act with all the PPC chips they will be moving for embedded systems (game consoles as well as misc. other)

Color me worried.

Overreacting surely?

[Master Of Ninja]

You so need to sit down and take a chill-pill. Being x86 will not make it easier to make viruses. That whole aspect will depend on the OS, and it is still OSX. And your friends computer is suddenly not going to stop working. The transition is not happening for a wee while yet, and so Apple will still support his system. They're even going to allow the production of dual platform binaries. You're just getting worked up over nothing. I just think you and your friend are zealots - mac on x86 may be good. They might even have the rights to licence altivec over to intel processors. Just chill...

Duh

[Paradox]

Have you seen what happens when people try to bring Objective-C features into C++? TrollTech tried with Qt.

You get a complex meta-language layered over the top of Qt that involves a lot of complex memory semantics, another special compilation phaze that's obnoxious to deal with, special build tools that lack flexibility, and odd syntax that editors don't recognize.

It's a nightmare. Objective-C is a much better language all around for GUI programming. C++ has its place, and that's why ObjC and C++ can talk and play nice. But pure static typing (inferred or lexical) in Applications is going the way of the dodo, get on the bus now or be left behind.

Re:Why are Mac users so pissed?!

[Junta]

The main problem is that Mac frequently does this to their userbase.

They did the m68k to ppc migration, which was really rough, both for early adopters of the ppc platform and over time, those who bought m68k macs near end of the product life left out in the cold when new applications released.

Then, as the pain of that faded, they scrapped the also crappy classic OS9 for OSX, which caused essentially the same pain, but less so....

Now the pain of that migration is at and end and they are jumping processor architecture again, which is a really painful deal. They claim that their technology would be able to execute ppc code effectively, but they made similar claims at m68k to ppc time and that didn't work out either.

This time at least should be a pretty final step, if going to x86-64, since the architecture is a competitive one (AMD vs. Intel) and so much of the world runs on it, if it got screwed somehow, more than Apple would suffer. Picking m68k over x86 was a simple misprediction, picking ppc over x86 again was a mistake they are finally owning up to.

Re:It makes sense though...

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Is there a 64-bit x86 laptop available now?

Apple has three choices for x86 hardware: none at all, PC-compatible, and unique. Not making hardware means that Apple is having MacOS X competing 100% against Windows and Linux. They won't win against Windows; they won't win against Linux; not without available software, which they won't get without an installed base, which they can't get without available software. They will implode the way that Be did, and NeXT would have (without the Apple buyout). Recall that Microsoft's entire business was built by ensuring that customers had no choice but to pay for Microsoft Software. Why pay extra for your PC to be able to run MacOS X software? What would be available for MacOS X/86 that isn't out for the PC already? And MacOS X/86 will always be more expensive than Linux.

Apple could try and build their own PC-compatible hardware, and bundle MacOS X/86 with it. And compete directly against Dell as well as Microsoft and Linux. Do you think Intel will give Apple first shot at the hot new chips? Or Dell? When there are supply problems, is Intel going to be more worried about annoying Dell or Apple? Will they be able to charge a premium for their hardware? The Megahertz Myth was a difficult piece of marketing; it will be much harder convincing the public to support Apple the way it will need to be supported when choosing between one Pentium IV 570 machine and another.

Or Apple can keep their hardware unique. Different from the PC, even though they share the same processor. Now there is no possibility of a multi-boot machine. Good or bad? I don't know.

While the Mac Mini made me want to believe, this makes me not.

Re:-5 WRONG! READ THE KEYNOTE!

[MustardMan]

Thanks for correcting the troll before I had a chance to do so. There's nothing quite like someone screaming "RTFA" when they haven't done so themselves. I also get a huge kick out of the "Apple is losing their edge" trolls. The modern Apple is all about the style and user experience. OS X will still only run on Macs, Apple industrial design will still be the object of much lust, and people will still either love or hate it, based on random points of zealotry that have little to do with the actual usability of the system. Whether it's powered by a G5, pentium, or a squirell, as long as the eye candy is rendered smoothly, people will drool.

Re:Have a taste...

[Golias]

Hey, PowerPC was (and still is, really) a great platform concept.

But people don't buy computers for the concept. The x86 world beat out the PPC world when it comes to consumer chips by simply doing a better job of implementation. While IBM was promising 3 GHz performance that they couldn't deliver, Intel was cranking out a new chip which offers more performance per Watt on laptops than the "insanely great" G4.

x86 didn't look like it had a hell of a lot of potential three years ago, but AMD and Intel kept pounding. A good old "three yards and a cloud of dust" attack won the game.

Apple welcomed this leak

[GPS Pilot]

C|Net's article created fantastic media buzz for Apple. I'm betting that ten times as many people followed today's keynote address than otherwise would have. This allowed Steve to explain the transition in the best possible light, to a huge audience. And I do think he did a great job of putting a positive spin on this, with the CEO of Intel and the cofounder of Wolfram Research as eloquent guest speakers.

Re:Have a taste...

[FeloniousPunk]

I freely and publically admit to being one of the people who said that no way would Apple be that stupid. I was wrong- Apple was that stupid.

When Apple does not die as a result of this, I trust that at some point you'll be as open and honest as you are now and admit that in retrospect it was you who were that stupid, and not Apple.

Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users?

[MrPerfekt]

Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?

The problem is when some "smart" developer decides to save space on his binary by simply not compiling in PowerPC support because "his userbase doesn't have that significant of a percentage of PowerPC users anymore". That's fine and dandy to the majority of x86 Mac users, but what about those left with a perfectly good aging PowerPC system?

They're suddenly unsupported and that's a horrible worthless feeling with nobody to blame it on except Apple for making, at worst, an arbitrary platform shift. At best, it's a failure of engineering which isn't terribly reassuring either.

ARM-chair Punditry

[ewhac]

I've long said, Apple needs to decide what they are: a hardware company or a software company. If they're a hardware company, release the machine specs to Linux. If they're a software company, port to Intel.

It seems Apple has decided they're a software company.

Predictions for Apple's Future under Intel

Apple currently makes most of its money on hardware margins. Therefore, there will be a brief flirtation with binding MacOS-X-Intel to Apple-branded Intel-based systems. Despite fruitless (no pun intended) lawsuits to combat the practice, installer patches will rapidly be developed and widely spread to allow MacOS-X-Intel to be installed on any x86-based system (thereby increasing the popularity and spread of MacOS-X, but Jobs will almost certainly be incapable of seeing that, at least initially). Apart from their industrial design, which is absolutely first rate, there will be nothing to recommend Apple-designed boxes over dirt-cheap clones. System performance will be below par compared to other Intel-based offerings, and not enough people will be interested in paying the $500 premium just to get a pretty box.

The reverse transition will also be true: People will try installing Windows on an Intel-based Apple box. Apple will try (and fail) to prevent this, too.

Moving to the Intel-based platforms places Apple in direct competition with Microsoft. The relationship between Apple and Microsoft has long been one of, shall we say, détente. This state has survived because neither has directly tried to enter the other's playground (there is no version of Windows for PowerPC). There may even be secret agreements between the two companies to maintain this state -- indeed, such agreements may be the driving force behind Apple's initial attempts to keep Windows off Apple-branded Intel machines, and MacOS-X-Intel off clone machines. By supporting the Intel platform, Microsoft may feel itself no longer bound by such "gentlemen's agreements," and start pulling overtly dirty tricks to undermine MacOS-X. Expect to see threats of Microsoft ending support for MacOS-X versions of Office. Expect also to see Microsoft even more shamelessly mimic the MacOS look-and-feel in upcoming Windows releases (Shorthair^WLonghorn is still far enough off that it could be completely re-specced).

Once Apple realizes that it can't bind MacOS-X only to its own machines, they will attempt to form OEM relationships with the major PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, IBM, etc.). They will then run smack-bang into the same wall Jean-Louis Gassée did when he tried to get BeOS bundled with PCs -- Microsoft won't let them. The anti-trust accusations will heat up again, this time with Apple behind it. By the time it reaches the courts, George W. Puppet and his operators will no longer be in office, so it's impossible to predict what the political pressures might be. Microsoft will start at a disadvantage, since it already has a criminal judgement against it, but a lot will depend on political orientation of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.

In short, Apple has stepped into a very different and very messy business landscape. I sincerely hope they're ready for it; I'd hate to see them go away.

Schwab

Re:Time to stop believing

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

OK, let's not get distracted by details. The big problem with discussing Mac vs PC performance is that even though it's plainly obvious that real applications compiled and run on PCs perform much better than on Macs, the Mac supporters always twist the discussion around to irrelevant microdetails.

So - yes, you're right. Altivec is a better architecture than SSE(2). When Apple get their performace boost it won't be because of the SIMD architecture. I agree with you. But overall, it will be a performance boost.

Not that I care about performance that much myself, I bought my PowerBook for MacOS X.

Re:So here it is

[sjf]

As a mac user who bought a single-processor G5 a month before Apple dropped it from their line, and a 2nd Gen. iPod two months before they released the 3rd Gen, this for me is the last straw.

Aww. That must have sucked. I presume both those devices just upped and died the moment they were outdated by superior technology ? That's why I never buy any technology that is in danger of being improved: you should see my mousetrap !

Once my current G5 has outlived it's useful life, I'm unlikely to buy Apple again.

I'm sorry I don't understand: I thought Apple had bilked you by 'dropping [it] from their line.' You say it still has a useful life ?

Re:Have a taste...

[Anonymous Coward]

MMX is better than AltiVec

No one seems to get it.

Altivec is a poor substitute not for MMX, SSE, etc. but for the GPU . With CoreVideo, there's no need to offload the instructions to a vector processor on-chip, you just have everything in video memory with the GPU handling the major vector operations.

Re:Why are Mac users so pissed?!

[Anita Coney]

But Apple (well, Jobs) has always placed "insanely great" ahead of backwards compatibility. I wish Microsoft would dump their baggage and create something new once and a while instead of simply adding more and more useless features to the same bloated code.

As the old saying goes, to make an omelet you have to first break some eggs. I applaud Apple for its willingness to take chances and for breaking so many eggs.

Re:This is bullshit.

[Otter]

Yes, I realize that.

My point is that there's not a significant base of Linux software out there that's been kept off OS X by the CPU. (There's some, I'm sure.) The issue with Open Office wasn't that it couldn't run on OS X, but that it didn't run natively. That doesn't change (i.e. OS X doesn't magically turn into Linux) with a processor switch. GIMP is precisely as useful (or useless) to Mac users as it was before.

Re:Have a taste...

[adamjaskie]

This will kill Apple.

Why? The Apple fans that buy Macs because they have OMG PPC970 will be chased away, sure. But not the ones that buy Macs because they are Macs. As long as it runs OSX and Photoshop, looks pretty sitting on their desk, and Steve Jobs said "Hey, you know, this is pretty good!" they are sold. The fact that they will most likely cost significantly less will be an added bonus for them, and likely attract even more customers than the switch chased away. People will likely not buy Dells, only to load them with OSX, because people generally use their computer the way it came until it dies. If someone wants OSX, they will buy an Apple, just like they do now.

And nothing has been said yet on if you WOULD be able to load it on any Dell or Gateway system. It could very well need some proprietary Mac hardware to run on. The CPU may be the core of the computer, but there are other things, too, such as the chipset and BIOS that could be Apple-exclusive.

I fail to see how this can have a SIGNIFICANT impact to Apple's install-base in the short term, and only see good things in the long term.

Re:This is bullshit.

[WhiteWolf666]

Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X. That's why the 1.0 port took so long. I'm not talking about NeoOffice/J, by the way, I'm talking about the X11 port. That's why the Mac X11 OO.org port alpha is 6 months overdue *so far*.While running under X11 is less than ideal, it'll still work nicely.

NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.

I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.

Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.

Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.

Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.

And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.

Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.

Re:No fear!

[Monkelectric]

So what it really comes down to you're saying, is, are you an idealist or a pragmatist? Face it, PC people were right, and were always right, and you were always paying that 28% markup for slower hardware in a shiny shiny box.

Re:Mathematica: bad example, already cross-platfor

[ultramk]

Yeah, because all of the most important apps we need to run aren't cross-platform. Like Photoshop, Illustrator, Office, etc.

Oh, wait. ...so what's left? Final Cut Pro? I would suspect that they're already on board.

So, what big Mac apps are there (which aren't made by Apple) that aren't already cross-platform?

I suspect that the Rosetta emulation will be sufficient for smaller apps, it's the big ones I worry about.

m-

Re:Worst news of the day

[John Whitley]

virus will never have been easier to port, so does worm, spyware et al.

Sorry, but I need to put the smack-down on this right now. You haven't a damned clue about how this stuff works. Virii and worms depend largely on application-level "design features" or exploitable holes to get a foothold on a system. Virii, worms, and spyware also utilize system call and system library/framework calls to further establish that foothold and/or effect their individual program functions. These have nothing to do with the particular processor architecture.

Where processor architecture matters is in low-level binary exploit code such as the "shellcode" used to take advantage of a particular processor architecture. Simply put, anyone who's capable of actually writing shellcode for one platform can write it for another with a modicum additional effort and docs easily downloaded off the 'net.

The best example of this is a white-hat security company whose developers got tired of writing assembly. So they wrote a suite in Python that lets them give a high-level description of the exploit and target app parameters -- the Python code then generates the appropriate shellcode for every platform out there. Got a version of OpenSSH with a known exploit? Think you're safe 'cause you're on (SPARC, ARM, PPC, etc.?) Think again. These guys don't even have to click a button to do the translation; the high-level app just generates and tries various platform's shellcode, possibly hinted by system fingerprinting runs.

If there's any protection to be had, it's in the different OS platform layers (e.g. no ActiveX, radically different system libraries, etc.) rather than processor architectures.

Re:where's the lawsuit against c|net?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Don't be silly, apple only sues people who can't afford to defend themselves

You're talking about a company that sued fucking Microsoft, buddy! How's that for cojones?

Smoking crack

[s.o.terica]

Wow, this was labeled Insightful?

RTFA, dude.

1) Apple never stated that PPC chips weren't more powerful now, only that according to Intel's and IBM's roadmaps, they won't be more powerful in the future. And they actually didn't make any mention of total power, just "power per watt", and we all knew that this was the reason they couldn't get a G5 in a PowerBook anyway.

2) Your friend's computer is going to be just as useful as it would have been if they hadn't announced the switch. They're not even going to start switching for another year, and that's likely to be the platforms that require low heat dissipation requirements, i.e. notebooks.

3) This will have virtually no effect on most end users. All software will run seamlessly on both Intel and PPC for years. The software that needs to have a speedup on Intel will of course have to be recompiled, but much software probably won't show a demonstrable difference (especially software that's primarily just a front-end for Apple technologies like QuickTime or Core Image).

4) This will have no effect on Java developers, perl developers, web hosting, etc., and virtually no effect on developers who use XCode (e.g. Mathmatica, which was ported in 2 hours, despite having "code dating back to the Reagan administration"). The only developers who will suffer a significant impact are the 20% of developers who haven't started a switch from Metrowerks.

Jobs made the wrong move here

[mclaincausey]

I'm not sure I understand what Jobs is smoking here.
He says that the P4 roadmap is more promising than the PowerPC roadmap, but the G5 PPC has had a faster growthrate in clockspeed than the P4, and has a much better vector engine. I think Jobs just can't bear the fact that he stuck his foot in his mouth on the 3GHz thing, a wall that has stumped the ENTIRE semiconductor industry and not just IBM. IBM has MUCH better R&D than Intel and comes out with semiconductor innovations like it's a bodily function: dual core, copper wiring, SOI, 90nm, etc.

They've been ahead of Intel by a wide margin. AMD, as ubiquitously pointed on on /., would have been much smarter.
Stupid fucking move.

Re:This is bullshit.

[mcc]

Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X ... there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac

OK, but surely with OO those problems don't have to do with the CPU arch in specific? I mean, OO works on sparc. I know it does. I've used it.

And maybe there's apps out there with cpu arch assumptions, but I use a lot of UNIX software, and it's almost all on PPC or sparc. I still have more problems with the makefiles than I do with people making bad cpu assumptions. The OS is still so much bigger as a compatibility stumbling block the CPU disappears in the limit. The linux community in particular meanwhile has gotten very good at avoiding hardware arch errors, and the debian police are there to make sure they keep this up. I'd be unbelievably surprised if the number of "mainstream" linux apps which are more likely to run on OS X/x86 than OS X/ppc requires more than one hand to count.

Why *shouldn't* wine work?

Sorry, I don't think I phrased that well. Let me try again: Wine for OS X is going to take some time before it's ready for the average user and it's going to take hugely long amounts of time before it's running anywhere but the X11 ghetto. And, well, it is. I've looked at Cedega and I'm sorry, that thing is a pain. Maybe not so bad by BSD standards, but we need something that someone unfamiliar with the command line can use. Given we don't even have a gui frontend for Fink yet as far as I'm aware the chances someone will do so for Cedega in any reasonable amount of time doesn't seem great.

Re:Full-speed win32 compatibility

[Wildkat]

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."

Read this carefully and you have a HUGE opportunity for Apple and a HUGE problem for Dell, HP and others. If you buy a Dell you get Windows and/or Linux. Buy and Apple and you will get OS X, Linux and Windows. Apple suddenly becomes a "partner" of Microsoft because Microsoft doesn't sell hardware. Imagine Apple and Microsoft entering into an agreement to bundle a version of Virtual PC that includes a copy of Windows Whatever. Microsoft instantly achieves near 100% market share and at the same time kills any monopoly argument because Apple builds the ultimate choice machine. Apple could enter another agreement to bundle with Red Hat and offer an out of the box tri-boot system that would be a developers dream. Apple gets the sweet irony of Dell and others being screwed by Microsoft. Their dependence on Microsoft to provide them with an OS and their complicity in building a monopoly that now screws them by helping remove the one thing that protected them from the best hardware company in the business.

Short term this will kill Apples hardware sales. I know I am going to hold off replacing my desktop for a year. But long term market share will be determined on Apples ability to produce machines and market them.

JMHO

Long-term kick in the balls for Microsoft

[Nice2Cats]

And one more thought: Once the dust has settled, the customer is going to be looking at a Pentium running Windows and a Pentium running OS X -- no way of hiding behind different hardware anymore. For your average computer buyer, it will be a direct comparison, and Windows will get slaughtered. The real "Tiger" kicks "Longhorn's" ass even when it is still vaporware, and even if Microsoft can deliver by 2006 (which looks iffy), they will be facing the "Leopard", a whole new cat. I just hope Apple can keep the excitement up till then.

Yes, this a bold move, but if Apple can pull it off, Microsoft might actually have to work for their money for once on the desktop.

Re:Have a taste...

[nocomment]

Don't leave out Gamecube, they use PPC as well.

Re:Perhaps they wanted it...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The end users of macs, for the most part, won't even understand what this means, or care. As long as the next mac they buy runs the software they have now and works as well as what they have now, they won't care."

Not exactly. I actually converted to Apple more for the hardware than the software. I'd run Linux on it, for all I care the minute Apple became shady.

I suspect that moment has come.

I don't think so

[Nice2Cats]

Indeed, this will be a huge blow to Apple marketing.

I don't think so. I think they'll be pointing at IBM and saying, yeah, it was a really good platform up till now, but those guys in the suits dropped the ball on us, are too stupid to get the G5 right (a well-publicized problem), and Intel took the lead with the new Pentium portables. Fuck this -- we have always gone with the best chip out there, starting with the 6502, and we always will. Heck, with all of the Intel ads out there, your average consumer probably saw the PowerPC as more of a problem. Like, why aren't these guys using "the Centrino" like everybody else?

In fact, after a bit of quick footwork, this will be a beautiful position for Apple to be in. Look, they can say, this is what you can do with a Pentium -- if you have OS X. Look, kids, same hardware has your Windows box, but not one single virus, no crashes, no maleware...

Having Intel and Apple dovetail their marketing efforts -- scary, actually. But not bad.

Re:Have a taste...

[Skjellifetti]

This is a huge blow to PowerPC's credibility, though.

Not according to the NYT [nytimes.com].

By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. And while the microelectronics business as a whole is strategically important for I.B.M., it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services and software. A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, estimates that the company's technology group - mostly microelectronics - will account for less than 3 percent of I.B.M.'s revenues and 2 percent of its pretax income this year.

For years, according to industry analysts, the work for Apple has been barely a break-even business for I.B.M. When the two companies were negotiating a new contract recently, Mr. Jobs pushed for price discounts that I.B.M. refused to offer. For I.B.M., "the economics just didn't work," said one industry executive who was briefed on the negotiations. "And Apple is not so important a customer that you would take the financial hit to hold onto the relationship."

I'm more interested in this quote [com.com]:

However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] 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."

Too bad. I'd like to run OS X w/out having to pay an Apple hardware premium.

Re:Have a taste...

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I'm a Mac user, and as long as the OS X + Hardware integration is there, I couldn't care less what CPU is on the inside.

Re:It's the about the Intel compilers....

[w0lver]

It also about supply, IBM was bad enough making enough processors for Apple. AMD is a lot smaller than either Intel or IBM... They would be betting their future on a company on the ability for AMD to fill their demand. I don't think it was a risk they were willing to take.

Re:Have a taste...

[adpowers]

Good point. Close minded Winboys have always just said "Macs are slow" and dismissed them. Even if the G5 was king for a short while, they still dismissed it. Now that they'll be running on almost exactly the same hardware (the motherboard will probably be the biggest difference), the biggest performance changer will be software. And I can attest to how much OS X has improved in the last few years in terms of speed. I'd like to see a comparison of 'snapiness' and the like between the P4 and G5 PowerMacs.

Re:Saddening.

[JebusIsLord]

nah, you'll buy a mac for the same price, and it'll look the same and work the same (only faster). I don't see how a switch from powerpc to x86 is an ideological shift or anything.

Apple has been slowly transitioning from proprietary hardware for a very long time. 20 years ago the system was all SCSI/68000/3.5" floppies (when PCs were IDE/x86/5.25"). That stuff cost too much money though (economics of scale), so they switched. The only thing left was the CPU, and its been killing them.

As long as the machines are still built by apple exclusively, this'll be more-or-less transparent to the mac user.

it was already obsolete

[SyndicateDragon]

Your G4 processor was obsolete when you bought it.

It's not like your PPC is going to stop working next year. It's not like Apple is going to abandon PPC users. I'm sure that eventually, like the 68000 series, the PPCs will stop getting updates. I'm sure that date is a lot farther in the future than the usable lifetime of a G4 mini.

Personally, I'm still going get a G4 mini. I'm sure they will be faster, maybe cheaper in the future. Such is all technology.

Re:Have a taste...

[Chaset]

Well, the precise arguments there are moot, but I would still contend that the PowerPC is technologically and aesthetically superior to x86. But, economics trumps both those by a huge margin every time.

Intel/AMD are in the position to throw 10x the resources at an architecture thats 5x as crappy as the PPC and still come out 2x ahead (the numbers are arbitrary... but you get the idea.)

In an ideal world, those vast resources would be spent on improving something a little nicer than the x86, and the overal benefit to the general public would probably be greater. I can only imagine how much more performance we'd be seeing in CPUs if that were the case.

I still lament the fact that some of those vast resources are being diverted to working around a 30 year old design that had some nearly inexplicable quirks.

I also lament the overall loss of diversity in the CPU market. Just like in the loss of biodiversity, how many good ideas and concepts are being lost with the "death" of MIPS, Sparc, Alpha, PA, etc. ... and now PPC. (yes, they're still around, but don't nearly have as much effort put into their development as x86.)

Understandably, it's a necessary business decision for Apple... but it sort of makes me feel "dirty" having to use an x86 in my next Mac. Oh, I'm sure I'll get over it. I still recall the shock I felt at the kludginess of it all when I read the 286/386/486 programmers manuals way back when.

Re:Have a taste...

[Tower]

While we're at it, the new PlayStation is using the Cell/PowerPC cores, too...

Why buy Mac? Same answer yesterday and today

[AHumbleOpinion]

If it runs the same processor as my $300 Dell, why should I go spend all the money and get a Mac? Just for the OS? I'm wondering.

And how is that any different from yesterday? Apple's OS and bundled software are the only reasons to buy a Mac, PowerPC or x86. Other than the rare zealot no one really cares what CPU is inside, many Mac users probably would be surprised to find out they had a "different" CPU. The whole PPC vs. x86 thing was just marketting BS(*), hopefully you already knew this.

(*) In general PPC offered a 25-30% advantage over an x86 of the same clock. This advantage was nullified by large clock discrepancy. Apple reacted to this by offering dual CPUs. This was a fine short term stop-gap measure but a pretty expensive long term one. There are a few applications out there that really benefit from a RISC architecture but they are not what normal users are running. If Apple decides to use 64-bit x86 then these apps will not suffer much, if at all. When you build your app for 64-bit x86 you get some architectural improvements, more registers for example.

Where does this leave me?

[TheDrinkNinja]

Over Christmas, I plunked down $2000 I'd been saving for the past two years to get myself a G5. I love it; it's fast, efficient, and does everything without a hitch. I'm doing a small time documentary using Final Cut Express, and planned to take this machine with me to college.

Now, I'm supposed to sit back, and listen to Apple say, "Looks like what we were 'committed' to was a facade, expect the lifespan of your computer last only until we decide, and there's nothing you can do about it." Where does this put me? Where?

There's no way ATI or NVidia plan to support this hardware anymore, it's obsolete, so no more new video cards in the future. The RAM to run this thing? Well, no point in making that anymore, the computer is obsolete, prices are going to skyrocket. It'll only take two hours to port a program? Tell that to all the OS 9 developers who never bothered to get their stuff converted to X, even though that was supposedly "fast and easy" too. And then for Apple to have the balls to come out and say that this has been in the works for the past five years, but not have any kind of warning whatsoever? I'm a high school junior on a limited budget- Small time upgrades are all I have or will have the money to pay for. Had I known I was putting down $2000 in sweat and blood for something got the rug pulled out from it six months later, I would have waited. Now what? In three years, after their transition is over and Apple drops their support for the G5, then what am I supposed to do with this worthless, unupgradable hunk of metal at my feet?

Shame on you, Apple. The whole reason I went with you from the first place was the fact I thought you didn't double-cross your customers. The sad thing is, too, I've put too much money into this OS and machine to switch to anything else.

Sell your machines, make your profits, get your stock price up, Apple. But just remember, you're now the very thing you sought to be different from. Thanks a lot.

Re:Apple Computer - WORLD CLASS MANAGEMENT

[xxnickmjonesxx]

I wholeheartedly agree. While the whole thing scares me a bit (mostly because I'm scared of change I guess) I think it truly is an example of how smart Apple's management has become in the last 8 years or so. Jobs is probably the only person who understands this company this well, for one thing, and it gives him an unfair advantage. But the success of Pixar shows that even when he hasn't almost single handedly invented the industry that his company works in he just knows business.

At the risk of sounding dramatic Apple *is* Steve Jobs.

Re:You're right.... dammit!

[localman]

It's funny how that happens... something could be said about evolution vs. revolution. It reminds me of all the times I've done a "clean rewrite" only to end up with something that just wasn't any better. Sometimes even worse.

A lot of people won't give up, though: in the face of enormous evidence they'll still assure themselves that because something is "new" and "clean" it's somehow better.

So if x86, with all it's hacks and kludges, is still faster and more efficient than these so called "clean" designs, what the heck is the point of having a clean design?

Cheers.

Impact on other PPC based desktops

[barkholt]

It will be interesting to see how this impact other systems basing themselves on the PPC architecture - the 'reborn' Amiga and MorphOS systems spring to mind.

I think this will finally kill of the PPC as a general desktop processor. With no major OS pushing it forward, all alternative platforms hoping for a major breakthrough should probably attempt to get off the architecture if they want to survive.

Incredible how the x86 is becoming the defacto desktop CPU, there is just no way around it anymore :/

A peek at microsofts remaining hand

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the MacNN coverage of the keynote a Pentium 4 development machine will be available in two weeks. Also announced are Pentium III (or "m" in marketing English) based notebooks. These need a differend chipsets. Also OS X has been running on x86 forever, even before apple had much reason to look into x86. (We knew, Darwin, but still)

To me this doesn`t sound like apple has its own special chipset. It doesn`t even sound like they have much in the way of apple specific non "IBM compatible" firmware. It wouldn`t matter that much as Darwin boots fine from a plain old PC bios. As Darwin is open source it could be made to boot pretty much anyware (Ice cream [ffii.org] for the first person to port it to the x-box 360 ;-)).

Without a chipset to set the x86 Mac apart from its "IBM compatible" cousin and only minor differences in the firmware (it still has to initialize the same (Intel?) chipset) what is the difference? Especially if you build a PC with the same processor, chipset, disk controller, graphics and sound?

So if, and this is the big if, (pre-???)installing OS X comes in the reach of the corner computer shop then we have a platform with:

• Cheap x86 machines
• "Walk into store, have fixed, walk out" support
• Every major productivity application in use today (ms office,adobe)
• Better security than on windows running ie/outbreak, or at least that perception.
• A user interface that is at least equal to the other desktop competitors.
• documentation [amazon.com], and word of mouth/relative/coworker support that beats Unix-alikes.
• Support for most things you find on a network.(kerberos,ldap,cifs,NFS,imap,most websites)
• The support of geeks everywhere happy with new chances to replace stuff with tiny shell scripts
• a possibility for wine on os x, meaning buy one os, get the second one for free. This may be enough for a couple of those business specific windows only apps
• big players [dell.com] more and more free to ship the OS they like without getting on bill`s shitlist.
• microsoft opening up the office file formats [slashdot.org] potentially giving away their other cash cow.

Apple could

• Sue? Doesn`t seem likely if you stay within the apple public licence when messing with Darwin and buy [apple.com] the rest.
• Ignore, seams likely
• Embrace, more likely then you might think! Where did all those crazy BeOS people go? They already tried the head on attack on windows and their motto was that getting a new OS is a smart thing to do once every decade... Also NeXT really was intended as "the next standard desktop os" and many people working on os x might still think of their baby that way. They might for example help out people working on drivers. Afterall more drivers means more hardware options for Apple to consider for their next Mac.

Ofcourse without pure windows dominance microsoft loses a lot. Even if they keep office microsoft would be left with

• the x-box 360 (seems IBM will have less supply problems and with ppc microsoft may have found a way to keep the machines cost down)
• file and user authentication servers everywhere (keep them, os x doesn`t care and samba 4.0 is moving in)
• exchange (which the people I know would rather get rid of)
• sql server (get your linux or os x copy at sybase.com, that is if you dont like opstgresql or mysql)
• windows CE (which the mobile phone people wont do because they have plenty of problems without inviting microsoft into their market)
• Lots of worthless patents (Remember the "no patent experiance required" jobs? Anyway there will be a european showdown [edri.org] soon)

Re:Apple Computer - WORLD CLASS MANAGEMENT

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, your reality has been distorted.

Re:Have a taste...

[iabervon]

Chances are the Intel macs will have Open Firmware instead of a PC-style BIOS. There's a lot more to the PC architecture than the processor, and the OS legitimately relies on all of it. You'll be able to use the CPU from your commodity PC hardware, but you won't get it to read your hard drive unless you have a motherboard with Apple's firmware, and it won't run at all unless there's physical RAM where the BIOS is on a PC.

Re:Nice

[bnenning]

Apple would be idiotic not to include something akin to VirtualPC - or maybe even more like VMWare - on these new macs, to let them run windows at near-native speeds on top of OS X

Thereby removing any incentive for developers to target OS X. See OS/2. The bad thing is, this will happen whether Apple supports it or not.

Re:This is good, here's why.

[tesmako]

There are real problems with the way IBM is going with the PPC also however. They are going with much simpler in-order cores plus a whole bunch of vector units. The problem with this is that while you can get great performance with few transistors with code specially tuned for the chip you will get abysmal performance if the code is not tuned.

Sure we have lived with in-order cores before (out-of-order was introduced to the PC with the Pentium Pro), but it is troublesome, we are back to the compiler having to do the heavy lifting trying to put together the ideal instruction stream. It is actually a lot worse than it seems when I compare it with the original pentium, with its shallow pipeline and the relativly speaking lower memory latency of those days you could get away with a lot more without trashing performance.

Even if Apple through some magic manages to generate decent code for the in-order primary core (and it is not unlikely that they'd have to dump GCC since lots of hard-to-merge work would have to be done, and then they would lose the advantage of having a freely redistributable compiler) they will still be stumped on the vector units. Sure some of the heavier apps manage to make good use of Altivec, but that is a lot easier than trying to keep 8-16 vector units filled at the same time. Basicly only scientific and various extremely expensive pro applications would ever manage to invest the effort needed to actually manage to tap much of the power of the vector units (part because vectorization is hard, but also importantly because there are so many units to fill).

This all adds up to the Cell (and IBM's new in-order cores without the vector units) being quite unsuitable for any market where the applications are not written very specifically targeting the chip. It works for consoles since development is hardware-specific there, but putting out a computer with the Cell and expecting it to work out on peoples desktops is not in any way a good idea.

Re:Wrong as wrong can be

[doublem]

Did you ever have to QA an Adobe Photoshop plugin?

This adds an architecture to the process.

This also complicates corporate roll outs of upgrades, as well as the purchasing process for companies.

Saying it's only a recompile away is an easy thing for the Linux crowd, especially when two thirds of the users compile form source when installing anyway.

Tell that to the Newspaper IT department that has to roll out a Photoshop upgrade to 300 users on a mix of Mac OS X machines with different OS versions and now different architectures.

And don't forget all the users who will take their new Mac, load it up with the install CDs from their old Mac and call IT demanding to know why Photoshop is running slower than it did on the old Mac. Telling the user about thins like the performance hit from Rosetta emulation wont, fly, and will make the IT department look bas, especially to PHBs and PHUs.

The fact that Adobe can release a new version doesn't make it any better to deal with. You quickly hit the point where it's enough of a headache for management to tell the graphics people to suck it up and switch to Photoshop on the PC.

Re:Saddening.

[damsa]

ibooks and mac minis are made by ASUS.

Re:Bad news for GCC

[fupeg]

So not only has Apple dumped IBM, they also appear to be planning to dump gcc.

Let's hope so. I can only imagine OSX 10.5 (Leopard?) compiled with Intel's compiler, with the threading bugs [anandtech.com] fixed, and running on a multi-core Pentium-M [wikipedia.org]... Then people will understand Apple's choice.

I don't think we'll have to wait till 2006

[Nice2Cats]

I don't think we'll have to wait until June 2006 for the first machines. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here (not that anyone here gives a damn, of course) and say: Mac Mini with Intel CPU around Christmas.

My reasoning: Apple and Intel have to prove that this will work and they have to do it fast. Apple doesn't want people in late 2005 going, well, it's only six months, we know it's going to be the low end, I won't buy my Mac Mini or iBook then...you need to surprise people just the way Scotty did it on the Enterprise: Give them a longer time frame and then astound them when you beat it. Intel has a thing or two to prove, and they already built that little Mac Mini clone thingy, which I bet was a proof of concept for something that had to do with Apple. You also want to have PowerPCs and Pentiums side by side in the Apple Stores as soon as possible so people get used to the idea -- just like Linux, where it is just assumed that it will sort of run on anything.

The main problem are going to be the portables. The G4 is at the end of its rope, and the iBooks and PowerBooks are way behind the pack, especially the 12" PowerBook. But you can't upgrade the iBook to a Pentium without pissing off the PowerBook people, and if they don't upgrade the PowerBooks soon (like, tomorrow), I don't think anyone is going to buy them for a very long time. That is going to be a critical step for Apple.

Oh well. I guess the reason why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and I'm not is because he has this stuff figured out...

My guess is just a really fast Virtual PC

[TheLittleJetson]

I don't think dual booting will happen. Too much work, and makes Mac users reboot (and we love doing that!)

I think the more likely scenario is a version of Virtual PC that doesn't suck. Runs the windows code semi-natively...

Re:can't wait for the $excuse$

[0111 1110]

WHAT REASONS are there to spend the extra $500?

$500 would be no problem. A nice case alone costs nearly $200 and no one can touch Apple when it comes to industrial design. They know how to make things that LOOK GOOD. And lots of people think the Aqua GUI looks way better than Windows, myself included. Considering one of the biggest markets for Apples are artists of various kinds, it would be an easy sell. However I think they are going to ask a lot more than a $500 premium. Probably more like twice that, especially on high end systems. But I have no doubt that they will pull it off. Look at their success with the Ipod. These people are not stupid. The biggest question is whether Leopard will be cracked for use with standard PCs. Although I don't think the Mac crowd are the kind of folks to download an illegal, cracked OS from Emule or whatever. So it's mostly a non-issue anyway. And anyone who even thinks about making a PCI/USB plugin firmware adapter would get sued into the stone age. Interesting move from Jobs. I have to wonder what Gates is thinking about right now. Looks like he could be getting some real competition finally, especially if the new IntelMacs have super-low introductory pricing.

Re:This is bullshit.

[toddestan]

The transition was so difficult for the audio and video industry, that for many people it STILL hasn't happened. You can find workhorse macs running OS9 in nearly every recording studio and post production house in LA.

My guess is that a lot of these places, after getting burned multiple times from Apple, are going to seriously consider upgrading to commodity PCs whenever the upgrade finally happens.

Re:Have a taste...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a lot worse (well, okay, "different") than that. Basically, x86 is not apple's tier-1 choice. They wanted PPC. But Motorola, Freescale, and now IBM have all failed to meet Apple's needs. So, they have to cut there losses and go someplace where they'll have new products to sell in three years.

At this point, I can't imagine there being another Desktop chip architecture for at least ten years, and probably not ever. IBM has NO reason to develop anything even remotely approaching Desktop-scale chips. Next-gen consoles are all using their current line of PPC technology, after which point POWER5 is going to do more for their servers than PPC ever could. Sun is on its way out; SGI is all but finished (with MIPS and in general). This leaves embedded markets, using lots and lots of ARM procs, and x86.

With the rise of x86-64, there's no need to extend the architecture for the forseeable future. AMD won't break compatibility, since that's their major selling point. Intel won't either, since they need enough help as it is keeping up with AMD. Either multiple, parallel embedded machines will replace x86, or nothing will.

Actually, as an investor, Apple scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

World class or not, the management and success of Apple depends way too much on Steve Jobs. Remember his operation and the effect it had on the stock price? It was a good reminder of why I have not invested deeply in Apple.

Apple will not be a truly world-class company until they demonstrate success post-Jobs. Right now they don't seem to have a product development process that is independent of this one man's personal involvement.

Until then it is a highly risky investment...like investing in Brad Pitt or Heidi Klum. One run red light, and there goes your investment.

Re:*bzzt* Wrong!

[doublem]

You ever try to use a mouse on a laptop when at a client site where you have barely enough space for the laptop itself?

My Thinkpad has a decent built in pointing device, but because a Mac requires an external mouse to be useful I can't use it on the road, because there's almost never a place to set a damn mouse. I'd have to use a trackball or external touchpad, and let me be blunt, having an external touchpad hooked up to a laptop that already has a touch pad looks pretty absurd.

This isn't about the fact that I'd have to buy an external pointing device for the laptop to be useful, it's about the fact that the need for an external pointing device makes it sub standard hardware for use on the road and it's that's not worth my time or money.

Apple hardware is, to be kind, overpriced and suffers from castrated functionality.

World Class Fanboi

[buzzini]

...forward looking but also incredibly obvious. Decreasing power of suppliers is busines 101. Pepsi/Coke at one point owned their own steel manufacturing units but didn't use them just to get better prices. Microsoft built an entire web-based Office suite called NetDocs just in case web-only apps took off. Etc, etc.

Re:This is bullshit.

[sqar]

This is what they say now.

Important is what they say in two years and even more important is what they're going to do. Besides this there are a lot more vendors that might "think different" about that issue.

At the latest when the next crisis hits the industry a lot of vendors will straighten their portfolio. Then it comes in handy if you have to maintain only one codebase.

Sqar

Well, why can't they?

[BattyMan]

I had so hoped, though, that we were finally going to get beyond the x86 architecture - that their strategy of piling kluge on top of kluge on top of kluge in the name of backwards-compatibility was finally going to come crashing down.

I do not see anyhthing in Jobs' statements about the x86, just Intel, who's (by now) as eager as anybody to break away from the x86 legacy (and show us some new innovation in hardware dewign). Note that the 8086 _was_ pretty cool and innovative - in 1975.

Unlike the situation with the Wintel architecture, there's NO thing limiting Apple to backward x86 compatability. They can just march straight forward with Itanium, I64, AMD64, or whatever the 64-bit mode is gonna be. My guess is that Intel will be happy to supply them with modern, 64-bit CPUs, without x86 legacy compatability.

Why bother with x86? They never had it, and _don't_ need it!

You Will Be Assimilated

[dispensa]

I think the whole thing is a shame. I love my G5 computers, and I love my x86 boxes too, but more than anything, I love the diversity. I'm glad someone out there was pushing a real, honest-to-god alternative to x86 that was actually getting used.

Diversity is important for tons of reasons - security, a healthy computing ecosystem, and because I just like it that way.

Too bad. :-(

Re:More likely...

[Quarters]

In the press release Jobs is quoted as saying "Our goal is to provide our customers with the best personal computers in the world, and looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far"

That's spin. While it may or may not be 100% true it's positive and that's all that matters to investors. Have you ever seen either party in an announced business collaboration say anything but glowing statements about them, their partners, and the deal they worked out?

It wouldn't look good for Steve to stand up and say, "Well, IBM told us we're small potatoes. So, we're going to switch to Intel so we have enough chips to ship our niche market computers."

Re:Well, why can't they?

[AstroDrabb]

Did you read some of the comments from the link? Some of them, IMO, are pretty scarry.

Launch of Microsoft Office 2004 was best product launch for Mac OS X. New version of Messenger due for Macs in the next few months. Additionally, a new update for Exchange users. MacBU commits to delivering a "Universal Binary" for Microsoft Office. Jobs also invites Bruce Chizen of Adobe on stage to talk about Intel-based Mac transition. Adobe says it is committed bringing its applications to Intel-based Macs.

Is it just me or does it sound like Apple has sold out to MS? Why would Apple give a sh!t about those MS products?

Rosetta is a dymanic binary translator. Runs PowerPC code on Intel-baesd Macs. Transparent to users. Pretty fast (not fast but "pretty" fast). Jobs demos Rosetta used to run PowerPC macs on Intel-based Macs. Jobs shows Microsoft Excel/Word running on Intel-based Mac (without any porting and/or recompiling). Jobs also shows Photoshop CS2 with all plugins that are translated and run on Intel-based Mac without significant speed decrease.

Mac OS X has been leading secret double life. Every Mac project build for Intel and PowerPC and Intel. Every release of Mac OS X has been built for both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs. For the last 5 years.

What happened to Apple being so anti-MS? What happened or is going to happend to Apple's nice new office apps? I personally do not consider this a "good thing". It looks like Apple is just going to become another software company, especially based on this comment by Jobs:

Next year will be about Leopards, the next version of Mac OS X. More than processor, hardware, the "soul of the Mac" is the operating system.

How many Apple fans are going to change their tune from "Apple has always been a hardware company" to "Apple has always been a software company"? What a complete 180 for Apple.

Re:Another Steve Jobs hissy fit

[Josuah]

I think it is quite unfair to categorize this ias a Steve Jobs hissy fit. IBM failed to deliver processors that met the roadmap Apple was planning, and promised by IBM, so they are switching suppliers. Having Mac OS X run on x86 over the past 6-7 years was Apple's way of ensuring they were not stuck.

This is a sensible business decision that has nothing to do with looking bad. As it happens, Apple is probably the one company that is in such an excellent position to switch suppliers, given the choices: AMD, Intel, PowerPC. How many other consumer electronics companies can make a switch like this? Other companies are stuck because their stuff will only run on a specific platform.

Read Previous Posts, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Things I don't want to see posted anymore:

"Slashdot has slashdotted itself!"
Yeah, we know. People have said so since page 2 of the comments.

"Hell has frozen over/Pigs are flying!"
Ditto.

"Hey can I run OS X on my $200 Dell now cuz then I wouldn't have to pay for a Mac and that would be totally r0x0r!!!!"
No. No no no no. You can't. Apple would never let it happen in a million years (and said so, if you read the article), and if you think you're going to hack it so you can use your POS beige box, enjoy it while you can b/c all the stuff you like about OS X comes from R&D financed by Apple's hardware profits.

"Apple should just be a software company!"
Yeah, and release drivers and other buggy shit to compensate for hardware disparities? I don't think so.

"I just bought a PPC Mac and I'm so pissed off!!!"
Your hardware will work for at least another five years. I promise. Apple is not just going to dump its PPC users. In fact, the switch won't start until mid-2006, and compiling for both platforms is little more than checking a box, so don't give me that "developers will be too lazy to develop for both" crap. Even if I only got ten more users, I'd check the check box. It's worth my time.

"My big-endian stuff won't work!"
If it really bothers you, write a converter (in like five minutes, godforbid), and shove it in your code as a subroutine. Or, gasp, recode it.

"Nobody will buy Apple between now and then!"
PPC is going to be their platform for the next two years and supported until at least Mac OS XI. Don't sweat it.

"I hate Apple. I'll never buy their hardware again!!"
Give me a break. I'm the biggest Mac zealot I know, but look at the sorry state of the G5. This was a needed move. Who really gives a crap what's in the computer as long as it performs the same function? Just because you need the biggest, bestest chip doesn't cut it. Look at the benchmarks. Intel wins.

"AMD!!!"
Sorry, I'd like to see it too, but not enough fab capacity for Apple's needs. Plus, Intel has a better roadmap.

"What!? No 64-bit!?"
What does the article say? Low-end machines (32-bit already) first in mid-06, high-end (by that time 64-bit intel) in late 07.

Read the comments before you repost or rehash some old, tired argument. It kills /.'s bandwidth and I'm guessing annoys a load of people, including me.

Re:Saddening.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's an ideological shift because for years the Mac Zealots have pulled the Apple line about why the PPC is superior to x86. Now they are forced to admit that PPC was a mistake."

How is this insightful? It seems that Apple has decided to switch processors because their supplier failed to meet promised speed and power consumption targets. How is this an indication that the PPC was a mistake? They made the move to that architecture, what, a decade ago?

Re:Um... NO...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Discussing the relative merits of AltiVec versus SSE/SSE2 is details.

That's the whole point - I'm not discussing that. I'm discussing the relative speed of Macs and PCs. The pro-PowerPC tactic is to distract people away from that and talk about irrelevant microdetails of architecture and deflect direct questions about performance with Keynote presentations showing graphs of performance of specific operations in particular applications ignoring 99.99% of the stuff that actually matters. (I've endured their whole spiel at Infinite Loop myself.)

For picture manipulation work or certain classes of mathematics operations, AltiVec is going to be better than anything else- because it's better and more efficient.

Then you're talking to the right person: a mathematician who works in graphics. (Well, ex-mathematician anyway.) A $1000 PC easily outperforms a $2000 Mac at just about any task you throw at it. The difference between the PC and the Mac is so great, and so f-ing obvious when you have the machines side by with many pieces of numeric and image processing code compiled for both, that I might as well be talking to someone who claims I have 27 fingers for all the sense they're making - or at least someone who expects me to hand code all of my inner loops in assembler, which is just as likely. (Of course I'm not stupid enough to make my comparison between gcc on MacOS X and gcc under Windows. I use a compiler that's good at optimizing for x86 under Windows.)

I love my Mac for the usability of its user interface (both CLI and GUI) and for the fact that it looks so damn good. It depresses me when I have to fire up my ugly old PC when I actually want my code to finish in a reasonable time.

Re:This is bullshit.

[bullitB]

The lack of a permute unit is HUGE.

There are lots of real-world data manipulation situations where the SSE shuffle routines are useless; you need a real run-time permute function. AltiVec's vec_perm is like...insanely awesome.

Outside of that, and the fact that AV is one set of instructions, as opposed to like 5 in x86 land (MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, revisions), you're probably right, SSE can probably replace AltiVec pretty well. Still, some warning (like: DO NOT WRITE AltiVec CODE UNLESS YOU WANT TO REWRITE IT SOON) would have been appreciated.

Re:You're right.... dammit!

[localman]

And obviously this didn't translate into any useful benefit for Apple, IBM, or the users. Again, I ask what is the practical benefit of a "clean design"?

And to express my sympathies, let me say that I am an artistic type, so I greatly appreciate elegance in design. In a way I am bothered by the fact that the PPC didn't leave the x86 architecture in the dust. But I try to temper my love of elegance with practicality, not worry so much about the whether the die etchings are pretty on a purely functional piece of equiptment like a CPU.

Cheers.

Re:Have a taste...

[OwnedByTwoCats]

How can MacOS X Leopard (f'rex) "require" Open Firmware?

Once the machine has booted, it has booted. And remember, MacOS X Leopard would have to tell the difference between running over Darwin on Apple hardware, vs. running over Darwin on generic hardware. It isn't MacOS X Leopard that boots; it's Darwin. And we know it will work.

I fear Apple is setting themselves up to compete against Microsoft _and_ Dell at the same time. And they won't have the cash to pull it off. Revenues are going to fall off sharply this year and next; noone will want to spend money on PPC software that will be hobbled by running on an emulator in just a year or two. And if you're not buying new software, why bother buying new hardware?

but what about 68k code?

[hawk]

Will old 68k code still run?

Will it happen with the 68k emulator itself being emulated.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I *do* have enough 68k software for this to be an issue :) [Including the last decent version of MS Word).

hawk

Re:AMD kept Intel Honest.

[FireBreathingDog]

It is just in the same way that Linux forced Microsoft to improve. If you don't believe me see Windows 3.1 and compare it to windows 95 - 98

Are you high, man?

Competition from Linux had nothing to do with improvements made in Windows from version 3.1 to Windows 95. If competition had anything to do with it, it was competition from Apple.

The only people using Linux prior to 1995 are the folks on Slashdot with 4-digits-or-less user IDs. In other words, old-school hard-core geeks. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

What Linux desktop were you using before Windows 95 that was a significant improvement over Windows 3.1, which sucked? Note that 'ksh' does not count as a GUI, by the way.

Re:This is bullshit.

[mr_burns]

My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes useless.

This is why I bought my G5. I wanted a mac that would run 64 bit PPC apps when that's all people were compiling. I also wanted hardware that didn't have DRM hooks built in.

I thought it was a sage investment. I couldn't really afford it but my Macs last me 5 years at a stretch and the timing seemed right. But I guess I was wrong. The real kicker is there's no mention of Rosetta running the intel binaries on PPC. If all people bother making 2 years from now are intel binaries (like what happened in the 68k/ppc switch... ppc only for many apps) and there's no emulation environment for them on PPC then I've lost 2 years of value. What was a $540/year computer now becomes a $900/year computer. I have to upgrade 2 years earlier than planned and the resale values are all thrown out of whack.

And I speculate that the Intel CPU's in these future macs will have hardware DRM features.

So it looks like in a couple years I'll have a powermac G5 and a powerbook G4 running Linux and an Intel box running OS X.

Bizzarro world man. Bizzarro!!!

renAIMed Consortium

[drjzzz]

A for Apple (integrator, still)
I for Intel (duh, bye IBM)
M for Microsloth (Office, bye Motorola)

We hardly knew ye. So much for think different.

Re:This is bullshit.

[Krach42]

Let's ask someone who understands deeply the full and total differences between AltiVec and SSE2.

Like, me. I wrote the AltiVec emulation in PearPC. Thus, I have quite a bit of authority on the differences between the two.

AltiVec has a more fleshed out assortment of instructions. SSE2, and SSE both are missing a number of instructions. Most of these don't get used often, so you're not losing much in the way of speed, but AltiVec has a more complete implementation.

EXAMPLE:
PAVGB
PAVGH
but no PAVGW

PMINUB and PMINSW, but no PMINSB, PMINUH, PMINSH, PMAXUW

PSLLW and PSLLD, but no PSLLH, or PSSLB (same for all packed shifts)

Then, I'll point out a number of points upon the design straight from the Pentium 4 optimization guide.

Don't use SSE when 64-bits is all you're working on. This makes obvious sense for floating point code (denormals take a long time to calculate and can stall results for the stuff you want), but this is saying use MMX when only using 64-bits of data. Because, and I kid you not. They say that the 128-bit SSE is wider, and thus performs slower. (Why should it when it's PARALLEL execution.)

Also, SSE3 is breaking parallel operations by providing horizontal instructions. Why even vectorize these, they're going to run as slow as scalar operations. Ok, so you get out of passing it back out to memory, but come on, the idea of a vectorization unit is to perform parallel vector math. But I understand the strong desire to make things work fast rather than proper, and avoiding those few clock-cycles means that they're willing to stall a vector unit on a scalar operation.

Um... what do we have left. AH yes. The problem of XORPS vs PXOR. They both do the same thing right? They XOR the value of one 128-bit register against another 128-bit register. But there's a fundamental point here. If you use XORPS on an XMM register, which is integer, then you're going to get slow down. If you use PXOR on an XMM register, which is floating point, then you're going to get slow down. Now this really isn't a problem when you can track this information and such. But really. Shouldn't these both be equated to the same microcode, and handled by say, a logic vector unit that handles permutes (sorry, shuffles) and logic? WOULDN'T THAT MAKE SENSE. Not apparently to the SSE designers.

Now, SSE2 yes had double-percision floating point in 128-bit vector registers, which gets you a whole incredible 2 elements per vector. Wow, that's definitely worth the overhead of using vector registers, and insuring alignment, etc. Plus, the G5 can issue two identical FPU instructions at one time, and since all PowerPC math is done in double-precision (or better internally to an instruction) you get two double-precision operations per cycle. Wow, I can see a true benefit for hacking in double precision support into AltiVec.

Now, if you want to debate any of these points, I'll gladly point you to the proper resource to prove my point, as I use them constantly in my work on emulating AltiVec with SSE.

(BTW: emulating SSE with AltiVec would be almost painfully simple compared to AltiVec in SSE. It's almost entirely a proper superset of SSE.)

Oh, last, let's not forget about those wonderful instructions that Apple must have told someone to put in there, because they're used for Anti-aliasing fonts, and icons, and are just used all over the place in OSX: vmhraddshs, etc. Which will likely never have a single instruction equivalent in SSE.

Economic vs. Science...

[sedyn]

But clean CPU designs don't seem to outperform dirty designs by enough of a margin to be useful.

That is assuming that both designs have equal resources pouring into them. In other words, that all variables save design are controled.

Unfortunately, in the real-world, might is right, and more money, R&D specifically, is poured into the x86 architecture.

Another way of looking at this is to say that if I use a clean architecture from today and compare it to an 8086 from the early 80s then the clean architecture would destroy the 86, because it has had a lot more money and man-hours invested in it.

Besides, Intel processors basically are clean, save the ugly emulation functions they preform to maintain reverse compatibility.

Re:Here's why Jobs likes Intel and not AMD

[aluminumcube]

That is right... because as we know, Steve Jobs is a complete moron. As he begins to lead his company through it's third fundamental technology transition (the second with him at the helm) I am sure he didn't look AT ALL towards other chip manufacturers.

Have you ever thought that you might not know everything Steve Jobs and the collective executives of Intel and Apple know?

Look, i am not going to hail the divine wisdom of Steve Jobs but the fact of the matter is that this is chess, not checkers. Jobs has a history of making announcements that go from being a big deal and parlaying them over the course of a year or two into massive technology, product and market changing success. He did this with the original Mac, he did this with OS X and he did this with the iPod/iTunes/iTMS... I don't know if you were an Apple watcher way back in the day, but iTunes use to be nothing more then a nice little Mp3 player- nobody ever expected that it would become the core enabler of one of the biggest revolutions in consumer product history.

As far as your opinion about Intel v. AMD in the Power per Watt category; the whole power per watt business is probably just Apple's throw away reason to give to the industry today. Remember, Apple will still be moving G4 and G5 based systems for the next 24 months so they can't exactly out and out trash the PPC platform just yet.

Re:Hall of fame, here we come?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh sure, YOU don't care about the mods...but what about those of us who have been trying to raise Anonymous Coward's karma by posting on-topic, insightful, interesting, and informative stuff? It's assholes like you who keep us at zero. Thanks for nothing!

Re:Where does this leave me?

[phrasebook]

a G5. I love it; it's fast, efficient, and does everything without a hitch.

So what's the problem? Why do people think their hardware or software is junk as soon as something else comes along? Your G5 will be as fast and efficient in 5 years as it is now!

Now, I'm supposed to sit back, and listen to Apple say, "Looks like what we were 'committed' to was a facade, expect the lifespan of your computer last only until we decide, and there's nothing you can do about it." Where does this put me?

That's exactly the risk you run when you buy something like Apple. If you don't want that sort of cloud over your purchase, get an A64 box and run a free operating system.

In three years, after their transition is over and Apple drops their support for the G5, then what am I supposed to do with this worthless, unupgradable hunk of metal at my feet?

Use it as a reminder (in case you aren't getting enough already - seems like Apple users have to keep forking out for OS X updates if they want to run newer apps and get secure). By the way you won't have any trouble upgrading the RAM on your G5, that's just standard DDR.

Re:Intel branding

[nikster]

I can answer this with confidence: There will be no Intel sticker on any Mac.
Just look at their designs: The iPod, the iMac G5, the iBook, the PowerBook - look closely. This is not just design - this is an obsession with design. Apple's current designs are not just better than other computer designs - these are among the best or better than anyone is designing anything.

Not having an Intel Sticker on these was probably the first thing Apple would have asked for in this deal. There might be a logo on the box though.

Blame Motorola

[Per Abrahamsen]

The idea was that Motorola would produce cheap PowerPC chips for low end computers, while IBM would continue to create fast POWER chips for their big servers.

Motorola dropped the ball, so Apple switched to IBM for their CPUs. But while you can use a server CPU in a desktop machine, the power consumption is too high for a laptop.

IBM isn't really interested in laptops (or desktops for the matter, they just sold their entire PC division). I suspect the estimnated sales numbers for Apple laptops are too small to warrant the development cost alone (unlike the sale numbers for game consoles).

Re:Here's why Jobs likes Intel and not AMD

[akuma(x86)]

I think Steve Jobs knows more about Intel's , AMD's and IBM's roadmap than you do. He's responsible for leading a multi-billion dollar corporation and is likely advised by experts that know 1000x more than you do. He knows what he is doing as evidenced by the stock price since he took charge.

How do you know where Intel vs. AMD is in 2006? Do you have processor samples? What is the probability that AMD will maintain a lead over Intel in the future? What is the probability that AMD will even be able to supply Apple 2-3 years out?

You're extrapolating performance from chips that are sold today - the chips on the market were designed 3-4 years ago, sometimes longer. Future chips are being designed now and big customers are advised of their progress and future performance.

Jobs is not making a smart decision? Get real. If AMD is so power efficient, why are they only in 5% of laptops?