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Mon, 06 Jun 2005
Mac on Intel - It's true.

Ok, it's official (press release), Apple is switching to Intel. Stuff that stuck out in the coverage that I saw:

CPU power per watt was cited as a significant factor - the laptop angle.

Jobs did his entire keynote on a OS X Intel box. They've been compiling OS X on Intel for the last 5 years.

Mathematica did their port in 2 hours days hours with one person. There is an emulator for 68k, er PPC binaries on Intel, which can run MS Office and Photoshop, at least. MS and Adobe are on board.

Here was the best coverage that I found:

MacRumorsLive
MacMarc
MacNN
#wwdc on irc.arstechnica.com (transcript)
#apple-x on irc.apple-x.net (transcript)

Ok, back to work now. Commentary tonight.

And yes, I *am* happy.

[11:11] | [computers/operating_systems/macosx] | # | TB | F | G | 5 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post


Not me. Eighteen months ago, I wrote that such a deal wouldn't occur because it would potentially allow clone makers to produce cheap Macs and make price comparisons easier between Macs and Windows-based PCs. (I also predicted that IBM services would begin to teeter, so I wasn't a complete bonehead.)

When news of deals began to surface last month, I wrote another article quoting several analysts downplaying any budding relationship. They say animals can sense things early, but I completely ignored the fact that two weeks ago my cat started drinking coffee and fiddling with the band saw.

Still, the predictions weren't that bad. It won't be an easy transition. Sales will likely decline between now and June 2006 when the first Intel-based Macs come out, because few will want to buy a computer out of a product line heading for the tar pits. Clever PC makers and software developers, particularly in emerging markets, will be able to figure out how to put the Mac OS on white-box PCs.

Nonetheless, many decisions are fraught with risk and difficulty. The Austro-Hungarian empire originally didn't enforce its will on the Serbs in 1914 because of the all-consuming importance of the sheep-cheese trade in the Balkans. But fear of losing prestige, worries about Russia and pressure from the Kaiser in Germany all pushed them toward a precarious course of action.
from cnet- who moved my cheese?

With PowerPC chips, Apple found itself grappling with an ever-widening performance gap. Although PowerPC was somewhat comparable to Intel/Advanced Micro Devices processors in the first part of the decade, those chips began to pull away. Intel and AMD also came out with new, faster, cheaper versions at a faster clip.

The troubles began to come to a head with the G5, the IBM processor that debuted in 2003. Benchmarks from Apple touting the superiority of the G5 were widely questioned.
Posted by
shep husted at Mon Jun 6 17:26:52 2005



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