Sources Say Apple Originally Planned AMD Chip For MacBook Air 197
Several media sources (here's PC Magazine's version), all seemingly based on an account at SemiAccurate citing (but not naming) "multiple sources," report that Apple originally planned an AMD-chip based MacBook Air, rather than the Intel-based version that emerged later ("Plan B," says the report).
In summary (Score:5, Informative)
And this is essentially the story of AMD for the last decade.
Re:PPC vs Intel vs AMD? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:wish they had used AMD chips from the beginning (Score:4, Informative)
Apple going with AMD wouldnt improve the battery life as OP implies, AMD having better battery life would increase chances of it getting into Apple devices
making the comment original
Re:In summary (Score:4, Informative)
Apple continued to ship Core2s in their smaller systems for a surprising length of time after the newer intel gear became available because that was the only way they could continue to get Nvidia GPUs in anything too small for a discrete graphics card, and they were just that unimpressed with intel's offering.
Given that, it seems likely that AMD must have had real, serious, dealbreaker, volume issues with their APU parts(not just 'we need our Intel marketing support money' volume issues) for Apple to have dropped that plan.
It would be interesting to know if AMD just can't ship them in quantity at all(which seems modestly unlikely, given the number of cheapie PC laptops where they've popped up, and the fairly low prices they must be selling for), or if Apple required some fancy low voltage bin that AMD's process just didn't hit regularly enough...
Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously power consumption is important but performance is also very important. An Atom is an extremely cheap CPU that doesn't deserve to go in a $1000 laptop, like I said. Otherwise you can take the argument to silliness by asking why Apple didn't go with ARM or something.
I've found that Macbooks are pretty comparable in price to a Windows laptop now, at least the Airs (since we're on that topic). Nothing out there matches a Macbook Air in price, considering that the Air comes with an SSD and a Sandy Bridge CPU.
Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant (Score:1, Informative)
My HP dm1z plays Portal 2, BioShock, Half-Life 2 episodes, and everything else. Beat that, MacBook Air. Oh, and it cost 400$.
How does it do that? AMD E-350 APU. Maybe it is little better than an Atom and the radeon cores are bolted on through PCI-E, but it's pretty damn capable. With a TDP of 18W.
You want a netbook with modern graphics? There's only one game in town. At least until the ARM netbooks with nVidia graphics come along...
Re:PPC vs Intel vs AMD? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant (Score:2, Informative)
BZZZT, wrong, but thanks for playing. Asus U36SD [bhphotovideo.com].
US$861
Macbook Air 13" [bhphotovideo.com]
US$1250
The Asus has a faster processor, switch-able graphics, USB 3, HDMI, VGA, SATA 3, Gigabit Ethernet and if you wanted to stick a 128 GB SSD [bhphotovideo.com] into it, you're still $150 up on the Macbook. The Macbook also solders the RAM to the mainboard meaning it's non-upgradable and does not use a standard form factor or SATA interface meaning if you want to upgrade that you need to pay more then you would for standard hardware and yes, people do upgrade the RAM and HDD in their laptops, especially as SSD's get cheaper (well, get cheaper for most of us).
Not to mention that Asus supports the U3xSD series with their 2 year international warranty where as Apple only has a 1 year North America only warranty.
So can we do away with the myth that Mac's are cheap. I can get a Dell with an SSD for A$800. That's in Australia where everything costs more.
Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant (Score:4, Informative)
ah... I wasn't aware AMD sold off every fab... more fallout from Intel's dirty tricks... fuckers... competition drives technology, and Intel set technology back a bit by doing what they did.
The fallout from the "dirty tricks" was maybe that AMD couldn't gain as much marketshare as they might have during the window of time when AMD's technology was competitive, but that was mostly limited by how fast they could expand production facilities (building chip fabs is very expensive and time consuming). Many other factors went into AMD's fab sell-off, most of them self-inflicted wounds. Off the top of my head:
* The last time AMD executed well on CPU core design was the original Athlon 64/Opteron core. Everything since has been between terrible and mediocre, with the only minor success finally coming this year in the "APU" products (which still only give them a foothold at the low end). In the meantime, Intel hit a home run with Core 2 and kept executing extremely well thereafter.
* AMD had to cancel an entire next-gen CPU architecture, and based on recent events probably should've cancelled Bulldozer too. While waiting for these new architectures they could do little but release minor retreads of the aging K8 (Athlon 64) core, which kept them a year or more behind Intel in performance (especially in the growing laptop segment, where AMD was very weak). Worse, they managed to screw up some of the retread products with serious bugs, hurting their credibility (especially in the server market).
* AMD correctly anticipated the need to acquire GPU technology when GPU + CPU integration was on the horizon. However, after failing to acquire NVidia, they then overpaid for ATI by several billion dollars. After the acquisition, ATI went through a multiyear stretch of disappointing products, so the ATI division kept posting losses. It was so bad that for a year or two AMD had to periodically write off hundreds of millions of dollars of "goodwill" to reflect the declining value of the ATI division relative to what they'd paid.
* Core 2 hurt demand for AMD's CPUs badly enough to drop orders far below AMD's production capacity, at a time when AMD was trying to expand from one to two fabs. They were eventually forced to mothball the new facility partway through completing it, which is very bad news financially (fab equipment is horribly expensive and depreciates quickly, so buying a bunch of it and then having it sit idle means you're losing money at a scary rate). It's also bad financially to not fully utilize a completed fab, for the same reason, but because AMD's process tech was too unique, nobody wanted to build ASICs in AMD's fabs, so they were stuck with just letting it be partially idle.
* Tying into that, the reason for expansion was that during the P4 vs. Athlon64 era, AMD's CEO (Hector Ruiz) had come up with a long term strategy of expanding marketshare to 30%. This required a second fab (AMD had traditionally had just one), and aggressive price competition with Intel to buy marketshare. He stuck with it long after Core 2 changed AMD's competitive position for the worse. This left AMD spending tons of money and pricing its products too low during a time when they should've been putting the market share expansion plan on hold, maximizing profits on the products they had, and focusing on new products to put themselves back in front of Intel.
This all snowballed to the point that AMD was unable to get new loans because they were too much of a credit risk. They were hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, and were having problems with the capital expenditures needed to keep up with Intel on fab technology even after giving up on capacity expansion. It became a death spiral which could only be stopped by selling the fabs. It never would've gotten so bad if it AMD hadn't stumbled so badly on execution and made so many tactical and strategic mistakes.
(Many in the industry think AMD hasn't been run well since Jerry Sanders retired in 2
Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant (Score:2, Informative)
Your post just confirms what I assumed in the earlier post. By "sane" you mean "like Windows".
The idea that Windows keyboard shortcuts are correct and Mac OS ones are wrong is just moronic. Neither is wrong or right - they're just different. Note that Mac OS keystrokes came first. Most of the Windows ones are the same, but with using the CTRL key, because Microsoft copied them yet didn't have an Apple Command key.
Just to tackle a couple in particular: What you say about Play/pause always starting iTunes is just false. If for example I have VLC open, then the play/pause key operates that. It'll operate whichever AV program is nearest the foreground at any one time. If there is no AV app open, then pressing play will indeed open iTunes. That's the most sensible way the computer can respond to the request. The only possible reason for you not liking it is if Windows lacks that functionality.
As to defrag, again that's your preconceived Windows idea. Windows has a crap file system that degraded if you don't defrag it. The Mac OS disk format effectively defrags as it goes. Mac OS doesn't have a separate defrag app because it doesn't need one. For sure, for people like you who believe that Windows defects must be defects in Mac OS too, there are of course companies who will take your money for a program that shifts files around the drive. As PT Barnum said: there's one born every minute.
Your comment about the number of options also betrays flawed thinking - that more options is always better. Some options are essential - for example setting a default paper size in a document app. But many options in badly written software - usually on Windows - are there purely because the developer couldn't make sensible choices and defers the choice to the user. Take Vuze as an example - under its original identity as Azureus, it had something like 50 pages of options. So many options pages it had to have a hierarchical tree of options pages [toritraders.com].
Few of the options make any sense to users, and changing many of them will result in you not being able to download torrents any more, without any clue as to why. It was such a big fuck-up that when they changed the name to Vuze, they shipped a new default UI without most of the options - but ironically with an option to switch back to the old UI. Good software had options for those things that are really needed, and avoids having unnecessary and confusing options.
Mac OS isn't perfect, but it's so much better than Windows.