It'll be interesting to see how this changes things for Apple. I have to think about this a while and read some more before thinking about what this will mean.
Posts: 872 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Given the inherent benefits of their current hardware platform, I doubt they're going to use Intel processors for their desktop computers. Remember, Intel makes more than just CPUs.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Its too hard to know specifics until we hear an announcement, but I doubt there's a move to x86 in the near future, unless its with a killer emulation layer.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Yes, it would be much more likely that Intel would just make the chips, not dictate the design.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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This whole thing snowballed from the C|net story that cited two anonymous sources. I even saw it on the CBC TV business news this morning, but there still hasn't been any independent corroboration; Apple, IBM, and Intel have all declined to comment. I think that if the rumour was strictly true (i.e. Apple is abandoning PPC entirely in favour of x86, which is not actually implied at all by the original C|net story), Apple would have already filed lawsuits as they have done regularly in the past with these sorts of leaks.
I think a lot of news agencies are betraying their lack of understanding by assuming it's going to be Pentium D Macs. That assumption is seriously premature. It could be any number of things:
Nothing, just a rumour.
Apple trying to put pressure on IBM to get processor speeds up and heat dissipation down.
Apple using Intel processors in a Media Centre style offering.
Apple licensing Intel's hardware Digital Rights Management for use in PPC-based Macs.
Apple going to Intel for another non-CPU component (e.g. northbridge).
Apple needing a new PPC supplier because IBM is going to be too busy making processors for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Revolution, and Intel agreeing to manufacture PPC chips for Apple based on an existing design.
Apple transitioning from PPC to IA-64 (Intel's Itanium line of processors) because it sees no long-term future in PPC. (Cue developer revolt -- first 68k to PPC, then OS 9 to OS X, now this? Forget it!)
Apple transitioning from PPC to x86 (Intel's Pentium line of processors) because it sees no long-term future in PPC. (Again, cue developer revolt.)
Apple attempting to make the Mac a processor-agnostic platform by implementing an advanced emulation layer (e.g. the Transitive software, if it's all it's cracked up to be; I believe Transitive's CEO used to work at NeXT as COO when Steve was CEO there). Added: with this sort of scheme they can chuck whatever processor they like in there and it won't matter.
...hear that sound? It's the value of my dual G5 plunging into the toilet.
Added:
I've been keeping tabs on the WWDC keynote (Steve is still talking), but here is a link to the press release.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
My guess is that this is the prelude to offering OS X on non-Apple computers. If people want to see a viable* Windows competitor, this is an important first step.
Dagonee *viability judged on perception and market forces much more so than technological capability.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I think it's more likely that the x86 Macs will be able to run Windows than that OS X will run on commodity x86 hardware, and I don't think either of those outcomes is very likely. Apple makes its money from hardware and iPods. This way -- switching processors but continuing to build the rest of the components -- they can still ensure that OS X will only boot on Apple-supplied hardware.
Apple allowed Mac clones once before, and the end result was that they ate into Apple's own hardware sales.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Tstorm: Does anyone else see convincing evidence they're going to use x86 CPUs?
The fact that Steve just said so, explicitly, in front of 3,600 people? Like, not half an hour ago? That's pretty convincing to me.
All of his keynote speech demos were running on a Pentium 4-based Mac. Intel's CEO was just on stage with Steve.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Yes, we do know that it's CPUs. Even more specifically, we know that right now it's Pentiums. Software developers are being offered P4-based Macs.
Added: Which means that it's going to be x86, not Itanium. Also, Intel's going to have to come up with a swankier-looking version of their "Intel Inside" logo... Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Here's a stupid question: aside from cases, which don't really count, what hardware does Apple actually make? The motherboards?
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Two years? That's bold. I'll certainly take that bet. Even on the off chance it does happen at some point in the future, I will be utterly astonished if it's as early as WWDC 2007.
If Apple were a person, that person would be a complete control freak.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Yeah, I didn't take into account the fact that Apple announces products much later in the development cycle than most other companies. Even if I lose the actual bet, I suspect the development will be very far along by then.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Steve: "More than even the processor, more than even the hardware innovations, the soul is the software."
Perhaps he's acknowledging that if this doesn't work -- if the transition to Intel processors doesn't affect Apple's declining marketshare -- they'll do what Dag thinks and go software-and-gadget-only.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Jon Boy: Apple makes the motherboards, yes.
Chris Kidd: What it means to you is "don't buy a Mac between now and July 6th, 2007" -- that being when the "Intel Inside" Macs will be released to the public, presumably with whatever Pentium M-derivative Intel has been cooking up to succeed the P4.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: It worked for Microsoft.
Microsoft is a lot bigger than Apple and has the marketshare and resources to ensure good driver support from vendors across the staggering range of available hardware options. Apple does has some money, but no marketshare to speak of.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
This was the worst kept secret ever. Not just within the last week or so, but also the fact that back when OS X was being developed it was well known that an Intel version was being built (even pre-release for the early versions). This ever since the project known as "Rhapsody" existed.
-Bok
EDIT: Tpyos ar dum.
Posts: 7021 | Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
Also, Apple would have to develop a PC-style BIOS for OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, since it's not like any PC hardware manufacturers will be interested in supporting OpenFirmware.
Added: Wait a minute. These Intel-based Macs will debut on July 6th, 2006. That's 6/6/6.
o_O
Added 2: Clearly I can't count. Thanks, Jon Boy.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote: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," he said.
quote: Does anyone else see convincing evidence they're going to use x86 CPUs?
LOL. Sorry, I didn't hear the speech, or see the demo. I'm off in my own little world today, it seems.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Dagonee: I would be extremely, extremely surprised were that to happen.
According to Apple's SEC filing of two days ago, their first quarter income this year was just under $1.5 billion from macintosh computers (a strong increase from the year before, 29%), a bit over $1 billion from the iPod, and under $750 million from other music stuff, software, other non-computer hardware, and services.
Also, Apple puts considerable R&D into software development with very little return on the software, because OS X sells Macs.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Exactly, so what will happen to Apple if you can run their software anywhere? I personally bought a Mac b/c I knew that I did want OSX. However I'm not sure that most people actually want that.
This will definately be an interesting change to watch. Maybe nothing big will change. I guess we'll see.
Posts: 872 | Registered: Mar 2002
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well I would think that at the very leat we're going to see a somewhat steep decline in Mac sales over the next year (hopefully and probably picking up again after the apple intel machines are released.
overall though it looks at the moment as if the required software changes will be relativly slight, though I would be immensly surprised if it turned out to be as painless as Apple is making it seem at the moment...
Posts: 187 | Registered: Jan 2005
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What I find truely funny is Apple has become what it was supposed to fighting against. Anyone remember Apples 1984 commercial? Remember the enemy was IBM. Then in a abrupt about face the real enemy was Wintel. IBM was Apples friend and the G5 Mac was a super Computer. The G5 is so much better than a intel based PC. Now afer five years of telling people x86 was inferior to the G5 it has now told us the x86 marchitecture is better then a G5. So after all these years of telling people to think different it has become just another PC maker, albeit with a nicer looking OS. You want to play games, you can now duel boot with OS X and Windows. Soon we will see Apple selling PC's with both opperating systems so you can have the best of both worlds. I'm sorry Mac fans, after all your years of fighting, it has all been for nothing. We have seen the enemy and he is us
Posts: 796 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:You want to play games, you can now duel boot with OS X and Windows.
Not necessarily. Apple has said that they won't do anything to preclude booting Windows, but there's no guarantee that it'll be trivial. Apple doesn't want to have the Mac OS go the way of OS/2.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Agreed. On the other hand, Virtual PC (and wine, for that matter) will actually run at a decent speed. So it might be possible to play games that way.
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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I think that would have the same end result, though. If an abstraction layer like VMWare or WINE allows Windows software to run easily and effectively on an x86 Mac, it could hurt the Mac software market.
Added: ...which would suck rocks, because Windows apps running on an x86 Mac would have the Windows look and feel, defeating the whole purpose of using a Mac in the first place.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:The Intel-based Power Macintoshes that Apple is showing at their developer conference are based on an Intel motherboard, generic Intel graphics and off-the-shelf Pentium 4 CPUs. This information has just become public in the past few hours.
...
Think about it. Apple releases a developers-only preview release of Mac OS X for Intel. It’s a fully functional release of the operating system, not a beta or prerelease copy. It will work reliably, and it will run the vast majority of existing Mac applications unmodified via the Rosetta translation technology. But because this is a one-off developer release, it’s of very little value to computer owners. Future software updates, like the soon-to-be-released 10.4.2 update, won’t install. Existing Mac software will run, but it will run in translation, which means it will be frustratingly slow. But according to reports, Apple’s bundled iLife applications, major selling points for the Mac operating system, are already Intel-native and run at full speed.
Given Apple’s experiences with software piracy, particularly the rampant software piracy that spread developer builds of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger all over the Internet this past spring, Apple’s management from the top down knows full well that this developer preview will be in the hands of every kid with a cable modem within days of its release. Most of them will be able to install it on their own computers and run it and the full suite of iLife ’05 applications at full speed, and run most existing Mac software in translation.
As a result, Apple will give thousands, possibly millions, of people a taste of Mac OS X running full speed on their own PCs.
Apple’s giving their potential future customers a free taste, that’s what they’re doing. It’s a try-before-you-buy deal.
I can't vouch for any factual entries. This is not the only speculation on the subject I've read, some of which dates back to before the chip announcement.
Still a long shot, and I don't buy the marketing through piracy analysis. But this outlines some of my thinking on the subject as far as technical feasibility and desirability.
posted
Their "item the sixth" is hugely misleading:
quote:...apart from the constraints introduced by hardware-software interfaces, there is nothing at all that prevents the version of Mac OS X that runs on the developer transition machines from running on any PC with compatible components.
Saying stuff like "apart from the constraints introduced by hardware-software interfaces" means he doesn't get to say stuff like "there is nothing at all that prevents." Dismissing the differences between a PC BIOS, Intel's EFI (which it looks like Apple will be moving to), and OpenFirmware (which Apple is moving from) as merely tivial constraints is absurd.
The big question -- one I note the author ignores completely -- is who designed the motherboard inside those dev kits. Rumour has it that Apple did, and it's just a minimally-revised version of the same motherboard that's in my G5 tower. If that's accurate, the likelihood that "every kid with a cable modem" is going to be running OS X is infintesimally small. But that's one of the "constraints" that the author dismisses out-of-hand.
In any case, nobody has convinced me that such a move would be at all sustainable for Apple. In my view, it would be analogous to waht happened to Be: first, building custom computers (the BeBox), then the switch to x86, then transitioning to software only, then death.
And BeOS was great, for its time. OS X is merely good.
I see a switch to software-only happening if and only if Apple starts losing money on hardware -- that is, if marketshare continues to trend downward. That won't happen in two years, they won't have had enough time to see the effects of the hardware switch on their sales. They won't even be finished the transition two years from now. I think such a switch would be their last-ditch attempt to survive. The doomsday scenario, so to speak. It didn't save Be and I don't think it would save Apple either.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Fortunately for my Coke supply, Apple offering OS X as software only doesn't have to be a good business decision, just one Apple makes.
However, this
quote:The big question -- one I note the author ignores completely -- is who designed the motherboard inside those dev kits. Rumour has it that Apple did, and it's just a minimally-revised version of the same motherboard that's in my G5 tower.
isn't quite accurate. He states:
quote:The Intel-based Power Macintoshes that Apple is showing at their developer conference are based on an Intel motherboard, generic Intel graphics and off-the-shelf Pentium 4 CPUs. This information has just become public in the past few hours. (Comments I made to the contrary yesterday and on Monday were erroneous. The source who fed me that information has been sent to bed without any supper, and says to tell you he’s very sorry and that it won’t happen again.)
Of course, I don't know that he's right, but he's taking the previous rumors into account.
I'd say that if this is true, then I'm far more likely to be right.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Even if that's true, why would Apple include support for any chipset other than the one in the dev kit? You still wouldn't be able to boot OS X on, say, your Dell.
Added: The doomsday scenario would leave me sufficiently disconsolate that buying you a Coke would be the least of my frustrations.
Added 2: Your only hope of getting the developer build of OS X/x86 is for the OpenDarwin developer community to spontaneously generate massive amounts of driver code. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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It being possible for people pirating OS X dev versions or being members of the rather expensive (for non-student people) to boot OS X with only some mild hackery and many devices not working on non-Apple x86 hardware does not in any way imply OS X would become generally available for commodity x86 hardware.
Microsoft's dev box for their next XBOX is a dual G5 powermac, yet the XBOX OS is obviously not going to become generally available for Macs.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I specifically said I didn't buy the marketing pirating analysis. But possibility that the Mac box was based on Intel, not Apple, parts makes it far more plausible that Apple is moving this way.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I disagree, actually. I don't think it means anything -- except maybe that this decision was made relatively recently. Since Apple isn't going to be using the P4 in its x86 Macs, the hardware contents of the dev kits isn't indicative of future direction.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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To use a related example, that MS is using dual G5 powermacs as dev boxes for the next XBOX doesn't mean the internal architecture's going to be all that similar (its not, its using CELL processors, which operate on a very different architecture).
Its just that today's OS are modular enough that once you have it working with the processor instruction set, you can pretty easily write code to run it on whatever basic hardware (mainly meaning motherboard) that processor is part of (provided you know in advance what said hardware is, as both MS and Apple do).
Right now P4's are all that are available to develop on, so Apple's made it so their developers can develop on them. This is true whether or not the release is on commodity hardware or not, so its no indication that it will be on commodity hardware. Intel may very well make the motherboard, but it will very likely, given apple's history, not be the same as any other motherboards.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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The Xbox 360 isn't using the Cell, it's using a triple-core in-order PPC processor that IBM calls Xenon (an easy name to confuse with Intel's Xeon line of P4s). It's similar to the Cell's "processing elements," but not exactly the same.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Entirely, yes. The only thing they share is the PPC ISA [Added: and AltiVec/VMX]. That whole in-order/out-of-order execution thing...
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote: Michael Dell is interested in licensing Apple's Mac OS.
I've mentioned several times in the past few months that executives from several PC companies have told me of their interest in Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Sadly my sources would not let me attribute these assertions; PC executives are pretty leery of offending Microsoft, which holds enormous power over their businesses. So, many readers have challenged me on this point.
But Dell (the company) has for several years fearlessly—and lucratively—sold servers loaded with Linux, the operating system Microsoft reviles and dreads. And as the industry's top dog it wields more bargaining power with Microsoft than other PC-makers. So I emailed Michael Dell, now the company's chairman, and asked if he'd be interested in the Mac OS, assuming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs ever decides to license it to PC companies. (For now, Jobs says he won't.)
"If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers," Dell wrote in an email. It's the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple's software. Though that's all Dell would say for the record, I suspect his interest is not unknown to Jobs. So, as I said in this column last week (and in an article in the new issue of FORTUNE), the ball is in Jobs' court.
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