OK. So, I was wrong… MacOSX 10.4.1 runs on Pentium 4 chips. The whole Stevenote was done on a Pentium 4, and nobody knew until he opened “About This Mac”.
Holy. Shit.
So Apple has a lot of work to do, undoing all the anti-Intel/Pentium marketing.
Questions:
What about Altivec code?
64-bit code?
Does this mean a Red Box windows compatibility layer is more feasible now?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
The beauty of blogs is that you can see people think through change. Having seen all the reliable press that the change was happening , I was watching your blog to see the news happen…. thanks for being true to your thoughts and for blogging soon after the event. It made your blog one of the best places to watch the news come out.
As to the change, it makes you wonder about dual cores: one with Windows, one with OSX. Or Multi cores one with Linux and one with OSX and one Windows. Then there will never be a s/w tool you can not run.
Glad you got some use out of my blog
I was absolutely sure the x86 rumours were false. I mean, who would have thought that was seriously planned?
The feeling from WWDC is that the transition will basically be a non-issue. The hardware won’t matter. MacOSX will Just Take Care of It™ so it really doesn’t matter what the chip is. This could be much smoother than the 68k-PPC transition.
As we found out later in the day, Altivec is no biggie — just us the Accellerate framework.
Yeah. Thankfully, that looks like it’s going to be the solution for all of the questions… Just USE THE APIs, PEOPLE, AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OK.
Or, you know, don’t use them. Roll your own code. And update/port/migrate that code on your own.
One comment I heard a couple of days ago on the This Week in Tech podcast (http://thisweekintech.com) is that if Apple makes this move, they are going to kill sales of hardware for the next 6 – 18 months. What effect do you think this announcement is going to have on hardware sales? Does it matter as long as the iPods keep selling?
If people are able to be rational, it shouldn’t have much affect on sales. It’s not like a G5 PowerMac, or a G4 PowerBook will suddenly work less effectively because a new model has been released with an Intel chip. The exact same software will run on both. Universal binaries, with code for PPC, Intel, as well as multilingual support in the same double-clickable app. So the logo on the chip really doesn’t matter.
However, people don’t stay rational. They freak out about “but – why would I buy a G5 now, if they’re moving to Intel?” – Apple’s moving future machines to Intel. They’re not disabling the G5 in a machine you buy 6 months from now…
I’d guess Apple’s going to have to come up with some generic performance numbers to market machines with over the next year, so you will only care about system performance, and not the logo on the chip. That should be interesting to watch unfold…
Mac is a slug. Always has been a slug. With their ”features” being nothing short of an annoyance, their overpricing, they’re domination in the ”media” business because they said they were better with media applications and businesses buying that load of crap, from their idiocy in allowing Bill Gates to steal their original code, and now… because of their betrayal to so many loyal fans.
Whoever thought of the switch to be real. Clearly mapped out, coming to a conclusion that it would boost sales. A lot of people though that Macintosh was like a brother, being ”different” than the rest of corporate America. Well let me be the first to say, along with the proof (intel switch) that Macintosh is nothing more than a money grubbing company like any other. They cut corners off of circles but they were genius in making you think otherwise. Your loyalty was their profit from the ground up. If you are going to buy a Mac, buy it because you want the Mac, not because you want to boycott windows, and certainly not to support the Underdog.
Jay, I buy Macs primarily because of the OS, not because of the hardware. The hardware is very high quality, but the OS is even better. Buying anything at this level just to boycott Windows (or for any other reason than to get the best tools available) would be just plain silly.
Especially since Linux is a much cheaper way to boycott Windows, and all proprietary software.