What is the Intel Switch Costing Apple? 531
SenseOfHumor writes "A Business Week article says that it costs Apple $898 for an Intel iMac before loading it with software and packaging. From the article: 'But for Apple, the switch to Intel chips is less about saving money in the short term, and more about hitching its wagon to Intel's longer-term product road maps, particularly in the area of notebooks. IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat, and therefore not suitable to notebook computers.'"
If they don't know.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If they don't know.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If they don't know.... (Score:4, Funny)
When did this change? (Score:5, Interesting)
The main reason of course was that RISC processors were on a much faster performance incline than the fuddy duddy old CISC processors like the x86 line. The graph comparing the two in the period 1995-2005 showed CISC acceleration continuing to slow and RISC acceleration continuing with, I believe, a skyrocket attached to the top of the graph. We all know how that turned out.
Re:When did this change? (Score:2, Insightful)
So when did this change?
Somewhere in the last decade where each architecture was developed into something different than it was.
Re:When did this change? (Score:2, Informative)
In the mid 1990s, Apple showed the famous picture of a Pentium grilling a hot dog and claimed Intel's chips were power hungry and ran hot compared to the nice cool sleek PowerPC. That was one of the supporting reasons that Apple ostensibly switched, according to all the engineering presentations at WWDC. So when did this change?
Just within the last 12 months has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power. The Pentium M chips were a step towards lower power, but the Intel Core Duo th
I completely disagree (Score:5, Informative)
False. Your statement isn't giving Intel enough credit and is not supported by the numbers. Since the original Banias Pentium M's were released back in March of 2003, we've seen Intel's mobile products have very good performance per watt ratios and overall power usage numbers. In fact, the overall power usage was the lowest in the original Pentium M's out of the entire line. You statement would be correct if you it said this: "...within the last 34 months (i.e. ~3 years) has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power."
Data pulled from Intel Product Specifications at http://www.intel.com/ [intel.com]
Banias (the normal voltage models-i.e. 1.7 GHz, 1.6 GHz, 1.4 GHz, etc):
Thermal Design Power: 24.5 W (Full speed) / 6 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 1.7 W
Deep Sleep Power: 1.1 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 0.55 W
Dothan (any model #):
Thermal Design Power: 21 W (Full speed) / 7.5 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 3.2 W
Deep Sleep Power: 2.5 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 0.8 W
Core Duo (any standard power model #):
Thermal Design Power: 31 W (Full speed) / 13.1 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 4.7 W
Deep Sleep Power: 3.4 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 2.2 W
The Pentium M chips were a step towards lower power, but the Intel Core Duo that ships in the imac is the first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems.
Again, False. The first part of that sentence has already been proven false with the numbers I've posted. The second part of your AMD fanboy'ism is also incorrect. AMD offers two TDP ranges in their "Lancaster" single core Turion64 mobile processors: 25 watts and 35watts. As you can see with the data presented above, both of these TDP's are larger than Intel's single core Pentium M offerings which have been available since March 2003. AMD's Turion didn't even arrive on the scene until 2005 which gives Intel a solid two year headstart. What's even more interesting is that more than half of AMD's entire single core Turion line consumes more power than Intel's dual core Core Duo mobile processors. AMD has yet to release their dual core Turion processors. So your statement that the Intel Core Duo is the "first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems" is complete wrong. Intel has had AMD beat since March of 2003 in the mobile market and still continues to beat it. Please check your facts before posting lies or put an AMD fanboy disclaimer on your posts.
Note: I didn't both including Intel's various Low Voltage and Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M, Core Solo and Core Duo processors that have an even lower TDP than the standard voltage processor numbers I posted above. Adding this information would only serve to futher prove that your statements are wrong.
Re:I completely disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
The performance for a given power crown has been handed back and forth for a while between Intel and AMD. While it is true Intel has had Pentium M's for quite a while, they have not been comparable to competing AMDs for performance for most of their existence, barring a few anomalies. This is my unbiased opinion. I am neither an AMD not Intel "fanboy" as so many on Slashdot seem to be. I haven't yet purchased a non-PPC laptop in this millennium. Looking at arstechnica or a similar sites comparisons over the last few years seems to show that most review sites agree with my assessment. To summarize, your assessment is completely correct, if you don't care about performance as part of the equation.
Re:When did this change? (Score:5, Informative)
No one at the time expected the changes in CISC processors. CISC processors still do have a "complex" instruction set in that they allow multiple forms of adddressing and varying length opcodes. However, internally these chips have become much more RISC-like. The current generation of Pentiums actually does an internal version of dynamic translation from CISC to RISC-micro-ops (which may be 1 or more per CISC instruction) and executes the micro-ops using a different instruction set internally. This internal RISC instruction set is used so central to the design that the L1 I-Cache is not actually a verbatim data cache of the CISC instructions but actually a trace cache of the translated RISC-like micro-ops.
Re:When did this change? (Score:5, Interesting)
It really just goes to show the error in the view that RISC and CISC are considered opposite approaches to processor design. The dichotomy was more pronounced in the early days of chip design, but the fact was that proponents of both approaches had good points, and so it was inevitable that modern chips combine the best of both philosophies.
I think the progress made on the PowerPC architecture is a testament to its viability. The fact that it's even managed to stay anywhere close to Intel/AMD is remarkable given the difference in R&D dollars (I'm just guessing). But the timing of the Intel switch makes perfect sense.
Consider the switch to the PowerPC in the 90s. It was a time when Microsoft was rapidly catching up to the Mac in terms of UI, and computers were generally underpowered for the common applications that people needed. Gambling on a more promising architecture could have paid off huge if the performance panned out. That never happened, and Apple was in pretty bad shape by the late 90s.
Now, however, computer performance has reached adequate levels for all the things the common people want... audio, video, web surfing, word processing. We can always use more power, but performance is not such a big deal as it used to be. Since they're not seeking a competitive advantage in performance, it makes sense of Apple to at least assure commodity performance by going with the dominant CPU architecture. Apple has contiunously struggled with supply problems from chip vendors for years, hopefully this will now be behind them, and they can focus on the creative part of their business which is where they've always excelled.
Re:When did this change? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Intel switch wasn't about switching to a dominant architecture, it was about moving to a platform that had a future roadmap for performance-per-watt. Intel is kicking butt in that department with the Core Duo (a laptop chip that manages to compete with a desktop Athlon64). Merom and Conroe later this year are supposed to further this even more dramatically, being chip redesigns with performance-per-watt as the design goal.
Steve Jobs was tired of selling a G4 Powerbook, so he moved to Intel.
re: I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple has a deep hole to keep trying to dig themselves back out of largely because the perceived "value for the dollar" of buying a Mac became VERY poor in the mid to late 90's. Sleek new systems running OS X have started turning things back around - but Apple's move to Intel means they've got to be MORE concerned with performance increases than ever before! They can't lean on an excuse (however accurate or inaccurate is really was) of "You can't compare Mhz to Mhz between Intel or AMD chips and our PPC chips!" Now, the CPUs powering their hardware are the SAME ones powering everyone else's hardware. So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
Re: I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Even that's not quite true. The power of a cpu is what you can do with it, not its clock-speed. A faster chip of the exact same line is not more powerful if the software is less powerful.
For example, for day-to-day tasks, a slower Mac is more powerful than a faster PC. For games, a slower PC is much more powerful than a faster Mac.
When it comes to iLife style apps, a 1.25GHz G4 Mac is far more powerful than a PC (Windows or Linux) of any speed.
Or, put another way, what's more powerful: running Windows Movie Maker on a 3 GHz cpu, or iMovie on a 2 GHz cpu?
Re:When did this change? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:When did this change? (Score:3, Insightful)
On
Re:When did this change? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When did this change? (Score:3, Informative)
Intel noted this issue and produced the Pentium M [wikipedia.org] processor (part of their whole "Centrino" push), which significantly reduced processor power usage on mobile computers. In the meantime, Apple was unable to convince IBM to produce low power G5's as they had gotten
Re:When did this change? (Score:3, Insightful)
In that respect, it's quite similar to the Itanium (no hardware branch prediction, all in compiler) -- screaming fast for something that's very well optimized, but change the processor (Itanic II), and you get bad performance on code compile
the real costs (Score:3, Funny)
porting operating system $30,000,000
finding yourself on the platform you have been bagging out for the last three decades? Priceless!!
-Sj53
Re:the real costs (Score:3, Insightful)
With the understanding that this was not intended to be an accurate estimate, it's still an exaggeration.
Apple has, at the very least, shown it's operating system to be more flexible (or morphable) than Microsoft's Windows.
Apple already made a successful platform jump once before (from 680x0 to PPC) and maintained side-by-side compatibility.
They've also now made an operating system jump (from the MacOS 9.x series to the OSX series fully encapsulating MacOS 9.x as C
Re:the real costs (Score:5, Informative)
Now, I'm sure emulators will eventually appear, but this isn't the best example to present to demonstrate Apple backward compatibility =)
Re:the real costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the real costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has always kept the Intel jump as an Ace card in its back pocket. Rhapsody was developed for both Intel and PowerPC, and Apple kept Darwin x86 up to date. For many of us, the only surprise was that Apple actually made the jump, not that they could do it.
Re:the real costs (Score:5, Interesting)
OS X derives from NextStep/OpenStep, and has been developed for n86 from day 1. They ported every release to PPC. Yes off course it needed aftercare, but still: first for n86, then to PPC.
Don't We Know this already? (Score:5, Interesting)
why is this news?
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:5, Informative)
Really, what this article is saying is that Apple is only making $450 per low-end iMac sold, based on their own estimates, which are most likely wrong.
Why is THAT news? You got me.
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:3, Funny)
Because the $898 worth of parts magically engineered themselves into a computer, set up an assembly line, and assembled themselves into iMacs, made the OS driver updates and general optimisations, and marketed themselves by hiring advertising firms and buying TV spots, then added themselves to the online store and transported themselves to the brick-and-morta
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:2)
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that the article only covered incremental costs, i.e. the amount it costs to make a machine out of raw materials and labor. Software costs are almost entirely based on development costs. Development costs are of course real, but a lot harder for outsiders to estimate. Note that they didn't even attempt it for the hardware side. But development
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:2)
For a company that has always prided itself on selling "Premium" computers, I do think part of the reason was they did not want to associate their brand with anything that connotate "Budget." That's just my 2 cents.
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where have you been?
#1) It's been discussed about a million times that Apple has had issues chip suppliers before producing enough of the desired chips for them. Intel has the fab capacity to handle any requests Apple makes. AMD doesn't. If Apple went to AMD, they would instantly become AMD's biggest customer. That puts a huge strain on production. AMD is pushing their production capacity as is. If I recall, there were recent shortages of the 3800+ dual core chips. That's without AMD taking on a bigger customer than they've ever had.
#2) Laptops. Laptop sales are growing, and have been higher than desktop sales for the past two years or so. While Intels desktop chips are hot and slow, the Pentium M is a nice fast low-power chip, and slightly better than any of AMD's current laptop chips.
In a few years when AMD has more fab capacity and maybe a better laptop chip than Intel, I'm sure we'll see Apple thinking about moving over to AMD, or at least offering those as optional chips. Or at least threatening to like Dell to make sure they get a sweet deal on chip prices from Intel.
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an interesting assertion, considering that AMD processors are outselling Intel processors in the retail marketplace in both retail box and OEM PC form.
Re:Don't We Know this already? (Score:3, Insightful)
That can't be right, AMD sells into HP, IBM, and pretty much everyone but Dell's computers, and we all think Dell will see the light soon. Any of those outsell Apple. I'd bet retail processor sales even outsell Apple. Capacity is easy, particularly as Apple is going to commit to one and only device (for now).
The fact is you won't know why they chose Intel because anyone who does know can't talk about it. I'm not implying that it
What about the possibility of avoiding lock-in? (Score:5, Insightful)
what about overhead? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what about overhead? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:what about overhead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, why do people keep believing articles like this where "expert analysts" predict the manufacturing costs of some given electronic product? There is almost never documentable evidence that they are right, and frequently they can be shown to be horribly wrong in hindsight.
The fact of the matter is that when a successful company brings a product to market, it's usually because they figured out how to make it cheaper than was gen
The finite choices come from infinite options (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's the great thing about the market and letting it lead you (instead of the other way around) when you are an OS or software provider -- you can focus on writing good clean code, and follow up that code with the hardware that offers your code the absolute best package given the infinite choices.
Power management, heat creation, MIPS, FLOPS, BOPS, GHZ, THZ, MB, MBps, whatever the hardware does best, there's always a ratio to price. That's the great thing about the free market, though, competititors will always want to beat the other.
What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around? Is this Apple goal with Intel, possibly? Shake up IBM (and show smaller processor companies that they, too, have a chance) and create an operating system that must now work with 2 (or 10?) completely different processor subsystems? Is this Apple showing that they can get away from hardware entirely, and focus just on software?
It's the marketing angle perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem is that Apple is a software company that makes its living as a hardware company. And to make money from hardware, they have to be perceived as different from their competition. If you follow what you're saying to it's logical end, you come up with a solution that says "Apple should not sell hardware, they should write software that runs anywhere".
I'm sure Jobs experience with NeXT tells him that selling an operating system, his experience watching Gasse sell BeOS tells him he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft on that basis. So he's chosen a middle ground that appears to be increasingly difficult to maintain differentiation on the hardware side.
The next few years will be interesting for Apple, that's for sure.
Re:It's the marketing angle perhaps? (Score:2)
They're not really going to sell the software only -- they'll still sell the package, but each new package could be a totally different configuration.
I gue
Re:It's the marketing angle perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that was on System 7; OS X is a much more portable operating system. A simple recompile is all that's necessary for most programs without a lot of assembler optimization.
They'll maintain differentiation with case design. Don't expect Apple to ship ATX systems; they moved to Intel because laptops are quickly becoming the standard, not desktops. Every laptop manufacturer uses custom designs anyway, and the IBM chips were really designed for servers and workstations (the POWER line at least,) not laptops.
One bonus is that they no longer have to emulate the x86 to do windows emulation, just translate the APIs. Apple has also written stuff like this before; with Classic mode on OS X. In 2 or 3 years I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows
Apple has their foot in the door of consumers' wallets/minds with the iPod. Now that everyone and their mother (literally) has an iPod, they'll be more open to purchasing a Mac as their next computer. With users becoming increasingly fed up with viruses and spyware, Macs are a very attractive option to many people. Once the price comes down a little bit (which I suspect it will once they ramp up full scale production on Intel) I see nothing but good things for Apple.
Re:The finite choices come from infinite options (Score:5, Insightful)
What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around?
Apple is not a software company. They are a hardware company. It's that simple. They build really solid, nifty hardware that apparently reaches fetish level for a certain market, and they've learned to turn that market into money.
The problem with being completely platform agnostic is that they would compeltely have to change their product line and manufacturing processes far too often, plus all of the porting from platform to platform would be a nightmare of its own.
Re:The finite choices come from infinite options (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that they're not a software company, but they're not a hardware company either. Instead, they're an integrated system company. Years ago, before the PC and Windows (and Linux, which has the same model) took over, you bought both an operating system and a computer. The two were pretty much inseperable. (This was how the IBM PC started out, as well as the Mac, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Apple ][, etc. And the same thing was true before personal computers: VAX machines had VMS, IBM machines had one of IBM's 99 different operating systems, etc.)
These days, not as many people are doing the same thing. Certainly if you buy a machine from Dell, Dell is working with Microsoft to make sure the system has all the right drivers. But that's not quite the same thing as an integrated platform where hardware design and software design are done by the same organization. Integrated hardware and software designs are available from Apple and also a few other companies like Sun. And the interesting thing is that both Apple and Sun have now adopted some x86 chips. Sun has Opteron servers and workstations available but continues to make new SPARC chips (including Niagara, a whole new series of chips), and Apple is using Intel chips in desktops and laptops.
For what it's worth, there is some value in an integrated system. Knowing that all the hardware and software come from the same place gives you a greater degree of confidence that it will all just work together. And if it doesn't, when you call for support, you are dealing with only one organization, so the blame game ("it must be the other vendor's product, not ours") is less likely. A certain percentage of the people are willing to pay a bit of a premium for these advantages, so that gives Apple (and Sun) a market that is a bit different from the regular market, which gives them a niche to play in.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Apple has really snazzy industrial design and that people look at an Apple laptop and instantly want one without yet even knowing what's inside. Think of the amount of appeal PowerBooks have had for the last few years even despite the fact that they still contain slow G4 processors.
No, it's more complex (Score:3)
You'd be right if the interface was everything (Score:2)
While I agree that Apple's OS has a lovely interface (and I just bought my first Mac, a powerbook, this week) I don't thi
Re:The finite choices come from infinite options (Score:2)
What about server-side? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Apple's going to be commodity CPU on the server front, then there's no incentive on the hardware front to pay for Apple.
Re:What about server-side? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, why do you say that? You're saying that the only important hardware consideration for a server is what brand of CPU it uses. All Intel servers are otherwise equally desirable, and all AMD servers are otherwise equally desirable.
That's obviously not the case.
And really, no one in the past five years bought an Apple because of the PowerPC processor. They bought one despite it, because the hardware was great otherwise, and because the OS was great.
Re:What about server-side? (Score:2)
Re:What about server-side? (Score:2)
Re:What about server-side? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cool (Score:2, Interesting)
The Cell processor is an IBM creation. Several are going into the Playstation 3, so will this require a fan? Seems IBM is still building cooler chips and Intel is not the only one that cares about it.
Don't really have the de
Brainiac design (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel's Pentium chips have all been "brainiac"s to some extent, but none so much as the P4... which they've backed away from. The new chips in the new Macs are less like the G5 or P4 and, while not exactly as clean and tight as the G4, are closer to it than they are to the real brainiacs.
But there's nothing wrong with the G4 core as a core. Taking the G4 core and giving it a faster bus, the way Intel's taken the PII/PIII core and given it a faster bus in Yonah, would have made a lot more sense. And Freescale's got one like that in the pipeline. They could have called it the "G5 Mobile".
Re:Brainiac design (Score:3, Informative)
It's been many years since fast "RISC" chips were simple. It's very straightforward to design a RISC CPU that executes one instruction per clock. I once met the design team for a midrange MIPS CPU, and it was about 15 people. The design team for the P
Freescale 8641D (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the greatest thing will be virtualized intel cpu's running multiple copies of OSX for servers. Or even Windows and OSX. Apple xserves will look very attractive now when can do anything, have apple quality hardware, and have true migration to any OS or software that you need. Brilliant move.
Apple, AMD (Score:2, Funny)
AMD fanboy's logic
Intel loses market share to AMD
Apple moves to Intel
Therefore, Apple loses market share to AMD
Then what are the savings on battery life? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Then what are the savings on battery life? (Score:5, Informative)
The G4 had a great processing/watt ratio -- for its time. So did the G3. So did the 603. However, each new generation of laptop used MORE power to get FAR MORE processing done.
Good point (Score:2)
The implication covers more than just the G5; though to be fair, later in the paragraph the author narrows the focus of this statement, something that I would have gotten if I'd RTFA before firing off that post.
Mea Culp Mea Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa
Re:Then what are the savings on battery life? (Score:2)
My Macbook should be in the first shipment (my department is paying for it, not me), I'm eager to see how long it will last.
Re:Then what are the savings on battery life? (Score:2)
Re:Then what are the savings on battery life? (Score:3, Funny)
Power grab (Score:5, Funny)
In a related news item, IBM chips are now running for elected office worldwide.
All Intel, All The Time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Too much politics, and not enough engineering.
~ SoupIsGood Food
Re:All Intel, All The Time? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:All Intel, All The Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this conjecture is based on what? Certainly not any real world evidence. The Cell architecture is completely untested and a radically new design for a commodity chip. On paper it looks decent, but so did Itanium (and, technically, Itanium is quite good... except that the software has never been able to properly exploit it. Much the same may be true for Cell).
Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums.
Yeah, and look at what a fantastic success story that was! I mean, we have NeXT cubes everywhere now!
Frankly, it's a drawback. Software developers have to certify their code on multiple platforms if you do that, and that's hideously expensive. Sure, you can claim that you can compile for one and it'll work on them all, but know what? That's a lie. It's always been a lie and it always will be one.
Writing cross-platform code isn't as hard now as it used to be, but it's still not trivial. Even if you're talking about different CPU architectures on the same OS. We see that at my workplace running on HP-UX when it comes to PA-RISC vs Itanium; we develop on PA-RISC, but some of our customers run on newer hardware and we cannot replicate the bugs. And this is for software that compiles on several flavors of Unix and Windows, across more CPU types than I care to list, and under at least 3 different compilers. We've already done the hard work of writing cross-platform, cross-OS code, and yet same-platform/different-CPU bugs still happen.
You throw that kind of crap at your average development house and they'll do one of two things -- only develop for the most popular configuration (thus helping to marginalize the others) or just develop for another platform that doesn't have these issues (e.g. -- Windows and x86).
Perhaps it's the other way around?? (Score:2)
Economy of the 'Change' (Score:5, Funny)
Laptops/small computers are the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Small, lower power chips that put out decent numbers are worth more to most people that large, power hungry chips that put out phenominal numbers. It's funny, the story below talks about AMD chips outselling Intel chips in the desktop. At the end of the day though, I fear AMD is taking over a market segment as it's being abandoned, nothing more.
Apple Clones (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I won't have an Apple that lights up, but I won't be paying the Apple toll for the same hardware either. And, chances are, I'll be able to use OS X.n anyway.
On thing not called out... (Score:4, Insightful)
When Apple was making its own chipsets they could only afford to revamp them every couple of years because of the low volumes in relation the development cost and manufacturing tooling and ramp. Now Apple can refresh their chipset and product offering as often as Intel does without excess cost.
The component costs per unit may be higher but saving in both time and money other places will help make up for that.
See the big picture: it's no longer a 2-front war (Score:4, Insightful)
And when it comes to software, Apple has no peer. Apple consistently creates great applications that normal people want to use. Apple's competition, on the other hand, has demonstrated -- repeatedly -- that they cannot do the same.
So that's the reason for the switch to Intel. Apple has moved what used to be a two-front war onto a single battlefield where it has the ability to outmaneuver all opponents.
Smart move. Expect Apple to capture some market share.
The iSupply business model: 1) guess, 2) profit! (Score:3, Interesting)
Their analysis on Apple's part costs for the Core Duo processor are simply, "we guessed Apple gets a 10% discount," but they offer no basis for that. Apple apparently negotiated a 50% volume discount over retail in Flash RAM from Samsung. iSupply gives no suggestion where they get their 10% figure, so for all we know, they just pulled it out of their ass.
The sensationalism surrounding iSupply's reports (available in full for a fee) make it clear that, while iSupply is in the business of selling information, it has all the integrity of a tabloid like World Weekly News or the Enquirer.
First they released sensationalist PR that suggested that Apple was making crazy money on the iPod Nano (now pay to read the whole report!), and now they release sensationalist PR that suggests that Apple is almost losing money on the Intel based iMac (now pay to read the whole report!). The truth is clearly not as extreme as their PR flacks spun it in either case.
Of course, on its own, a simple guess on the total cost of parts doesn't sound very exciting. But even with a sensationalist headline, a simple guess on the total cost of parts isn't very valuable.
Journalism in general has been coasting along for some time on the reputation of a former institution that earned credibility based on dutiful, responsible reporting standards and a self imposed ethic. Professional journalism is been replaced by cheaper PR editors (within newspapers charged with first making a profit rather than providing a public service) and independent bloggers who scribble whatever comes to mind without bothering to check facts (or assume their recollection of reality is the same as a report based on facts from attributed, verifiable sources).
The lines between [opinion/conjecture] or [commercial/political messages] and [unbiased and objective journalism] are being blurred to the point where the general public doesn't seem to even remember that they are different things.
iSupply is a good example of presenting your personal blog/business as if it were a credible news report.
Until iSupply can provide some basis that suggests they have any real insight into secret pricing deals, their figures are worthless. So far, all they've released is guess work based on what appears to be poor assumptions.
IBM's chips.... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a selective interpretation of the truth. The portion of the Power family that is used in Apple products generates a lot of heat because it's based on older Power4 technology. IBM's processor roadmaps include smaller-footprint chips just like Intel's do.
It is unlikely that Apple's move is simply about the roadmap due to power consumption. Power architecture is used in everything from cell phones to big honkin' servers. No, it's more likely that IBM's roadmap simple doesn't hit the same performance and power consumption points that Apple wants to hit.
Why Intel? Jobs wanted Intel. Why now? OS 9. (Score:5, Informative)
The ISVs, paricularly Adobe, plotzed. There was a major row with threats of abandoning the platform, and Apple backed off, improved Classic, came up with Carbon as a transition API, and brought out OS 9 and eventually OS X.
Steve Jobs reportedly had wanted to go with Intel as soon as possible. He thought Apple had made a mistake switching to the Power PC while he was away at NeXT. OpenStep ran on Intel, of course, and Apple had versions of Rhapsody that ran on Intel boxes, even on generic clones. They had a fat binary mechanism in OpenStep that supported by the end as many as five different processor architectures.
And that's why intel. Not because IBM screwed up, but because it was in their long term roadmap and had been for years.
But obviously... that wouldn't fly if they couldn't even cram classic Mac OS off in Blue Box.
But they kept their Intel code base alive, and every other year, about, they tested the waters by trying to stop offering a Mac that could boot up into OS 9.
Every time there was a user revolt.
Until late 2004. The last G4 that could boot to OS 9 disappeared from the Apple store, without any fanfare. And, apparently, there just weren't that many people dependent on OS 9 to make enough noise to notice.
A little over 6 months later, they announced the Intel switch.
Rosetta will run all legacy Power PC applications... well, all legacy Carbon and Cocoa applications that run on OS X. They're not running Classic under Rosetta. Classic is dead.
And nobody's bitching about that, either. Which means they guessed right, and Apple can finally drive a stake into the heart of Classic Mac OS and leave it behind for good.
And that's why they did it now. Because they could.
Pentium-M (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pentium-M (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pentium-M (Score:3, Interesting)
It's just too bad that the best Intel appears to be able todo is with what is, essentially, the rather old Pentium-3 design with a few added tweaks.
Then again, as someone who holds stock in AMD but not INTC, I'm not exactly crying right now.
Well, if that's what you believe. The Pentium M was simply outclassing the P3 and AMD solutions on release, and the Core Duo is not only dual-core (remember all the fans of SMP systems around here?) but is providing A
Re:Pentium-M (Score:3, Informative)
Lower power consumption yes, Athlon64 performance? Not yet. According to this roadmap [theinquirer.net] the highest clockspeed Yonah core is slated for January 2006 release and it's 2.16 GHZ. Now, Anandtech did some tests of the 2.0 GHZ [anandtech.com] core. This 2.0 GHZ core is barely able to reach Athlon64 3800+ X2 performance levels (the "slowest" AMD dualcore CPU, 90nm vs 65nm of Yonah). A 2.16 GHZ version should reach the 4200+ X2 and that's about it. Yonah
Re:Pentium-M (Score:3, Insightful)
Later this year will see Intel's desktop plans with the Merom and Conroe chips released. Conroe is a full-on 64-bit capable desktop chip and is supposed to not only cut power usage even less than the Yonah but will increase speeds.
Can you say new Power Mac? It's safe to say Intel learned its lesson the past few years and is ready to kick butt.
Re:Pentium-M (Score:4, Informative)
Today's Core Duo is a laptop chip, and it's already competing with AMD desktop chips. Imagine how Intel's high-end desktop chips will perform when released this fall.
Re:Here's some irony for you to chew on! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uhmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The CPU benchmark numbers tell the tale. The Core Duo is 4-5x faster than the 1.67GHz G4 in the PowerBook, but only 2x faster than the single-core 1.8GHz G5 in the old iMac. So you can assume that the Core Duo is at least twice as fast core-for-core as the G4, but about the same core-for-core as the G5.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
Re:Uhmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. Volume-wise, the game console market beats Apple's meager volume hands down. No wonder then that IBM chose to devote its Microelectronics division's resources to making the PowerPC derivatives for the Nintendo Revolution, XBox 360 and PS/3. Not to mention embedded versions you find in consumer items and under the hood of cars. The Cell processor alone will find its way in many consumer electronics appliances, not just the PS3.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year) and making a high-volume chipset for several consumer markets (volume: millions a year). Guess where IBM prefered to invest. Can't blame them for telling Apple to go fly a kite.
Re:Uhmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Assume Apple shipped 50% laptops, the volume would be 2 millions a year. Say 5 millions over the next 2 years (expected life of such a chipset design). Not bad, but we are talking about an engineering effort costing $50 to $200 millions. The resulting chipsets would have been $10-$40 more ex
Re:PPC vs i86 vs x86 vs MIPS vs ARM vs (Score:3, Insightful)
hitch your wagon - to a SINKING ROCK! (Score:3, Funny)
Apple Computer : Proudly going out of business for 30 years
probably never. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the Mac is on Intel simply because there was little else to do to generate new sales momentum. By going to Intel it is implied that people with the older technology will buy new Apples, thereby increasing sales and making Apple's bottom line look better. This will work in the short term but long term where is the excitement going to come from?
What do Apple computers do that Microsoft computers don't that will appeal to the general computing populace? Computing is
Re:probably never. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would the general populace ever want to buy a Mac?
Almost every person that I've induced to switch or helped to switch were prompted to do so to escape the Windows virus nightmare.
Re:probably never. (Score:2)
And I'm including the GNAA crap floods.
Re:probably never. (Score:4, Insightful)
In conclusion, Apple will definitely go out of business, just like luxury car brands, because nobody in their right mind will pay extra for something nice.
Re:How long before... (Score:2)
At the moment, Intel has the platform focus, marketing clout, bulk-discounting and supply chain that matches Apple's own needs and desires, and AMD can't replicate right now.
This may well change, but I can't imagine it happening soon. Apple has been very clear that these new Macs are with Intel Processors, not "x86 processors".
Re:roadmap (Score:2)
Re:smart move (Score:2, Interesting)
What really makes that possible is USB IMHO. Up until a few years ago it was basically impossible to hook external disk drives up to a laptop if you wanted to expand your storage unless you bought SCSI disks and a SCSI PCMCIA card. Now you can just go home, hook into your USB hub with a single cable and you've got access to your printer, scanner, external hard drives, DVD-RW
Re:My question is, how much might this cost Intel (Score:3, Funny)
Copy it, probably.
Re:Its just economics (Score:3, Insightful)