And most likely, the entire hungry Linux community could port all the x86 Linux code to the MacIntel OS within weeks, creating a huge flood of good products.
Well, OK, the "two-tiered" x86 rollout is clever, but Dvorak continues to assume that MS would roll over and play dead, and that the Mac experience would not be severely compromised by crapshoot PC hardware. He is apparently blind to the fact that MS has been tring to contain the commodity nature of its platform for years now, and that MS and OEMs alike are beginning to inch away from that market (e.g.: XBox, TabletPC) and toward more strictly controlled reference platforms and even closed systems (XBox again).
In other words, he's expecting Apple to abandon a strategy the wisdom of which the market is just realizing, adopt an ancient ISA in the twilight of its existence and dive into the same market everyone else is scrambling to get out of. Ha.
I won't rule out some diversification by Apple. There are spaces, especially in enterprise applications and rendering, and some server applications, where non-PPC platforms make sense. But Dvorak's scenario is bankrupt, as usual.
yep, but on the PC side the component makers will keep the OEM's honest (besides competition between the OEM's themselves) the roll your own market just keeps growing.
Plenty of money for people selling mobo's and GfX cards to gamers and hobbiests, or even just to white box makers with hustle. Plenty of shops in TO with 10+ years in business selling their own generic combinations, plenty going in and out of business too, but people are making money, and people are buying. Down by UofT, a guy I went to undergrad with made his tuition money stealing the bosses's clients and undercutting them on systems and service. (almost 10 years ago, kept me in cheap PC's throughout HS and my first 4 years of uni courtesy of his special employee discount)
M$ will close down the software, but not the hardware, roll your own will always remain an option so long as people go for it, and we know it's around 30% of the computer market and growing.
However, I see the console getting a larger role in computing in the next ten years. It will be all most people need and it will be hermetically sealed, but unlike a mac, it will feature a disposable price tag, and so people won't mind the throw away nature of the beast.
One thing, though - all things being equal, who really DOES care who manufactures the CPU?
If it were feasible, Intel would be fine with this Mac user.
Things are never equal. Intel will never manufacture a PowerPC, so backwards compatability would take an immediate hit.
Intel also has a proven track record of taking kludges to their illogical extreme. While I admire their determination and would love to see their engineering resources applied to the PPC, I'm not sure I want them designing anything original.
One thing, though - all things being equal, who really DOES care who manufactures the CPU?
If it were feasible, Intel would be fine with this Mac user.
ah... you obviously don't buy your software. do you?
i think most proffesional apple users do care. many of them use quark xpress or other non osx native apps and as if... i think it would take some time till they upgrade because it still run's in classic end upgrading costs a lot of money per computer.
i think a lot of software makers don't like it when apple shove aside their investments in powerpc technology
I think there is a relatively poor understanding of the difference between a hardware platform and an OS among a lot of people. Let me try and clear it up.
Mac OS X may well be very portable as claimed. It may be that it would take a matter of weeks or months to port it to Intel if Apple so chose.
But what will that get you? it'll get you yet another Unix-based OS on Intel machines. That's it.
Mac software is compiled for PPC processors. To make it work on x86 chips will need at MINIMUM a recompile (assuming all the toolbox code has been ported PERFECTLY, otherwise it will need a complete overhaul). More likely though, any games or other high-performance software will have large sections written in assembly. This won't be portable and wll have to be re-written from scratch.
Think how long it took to port Photoshop to Mac OS X. Now that was already PPC (and Altivec) optimised, and it's carbon not cocoa so presumably most of the toolbox code didin't need to be changed either. Do you really want to wait that long before you can use any of your existing software again? What if you had to do it without the benefit of being able to use the previous versions in the meantime (as with Classic under OS X).
Now consider the fact that some software you use (maybe most of it) would NEVER be ported. I still use plenty of classic apps, and I doubt they'll ever be updated, especially some old games. But at least they still work under OS X on PPC.
But never mind, you think, there'll be all that PC software you can use. That won't take long to port, right?
WRONG!! All PC software uses windows system calls. That'll be even harder to port than Mac software. Not to mention the fact that it's crap anyway, which is why we use a Mac - for the software, remember.
Okay, so what about all that Linux software? Sorry, that won't work either. For one thing it has all of the problems of trying to port windows software (different libraries, etc), but despite what you might think Linux is actually considerably less well supported than Mac OS. There is no way that Linux programmers are going to have the time/money/inclination to port their stuff to an Intel Mac OS. And if they had all this wonderful software in the first place, why wouldn't more people be using Linux anyway?
Ah, but what about all the Unix software that is inherantly portable anyway? Well, it's portable because it doesn't rely on any graphics or sound libraries - it all runs in the terminal (or the ugly X-windows interface, which has to be run on top of the OS anyway, so it makes no difference what OS you're using). So yes, you could use Unix apps, but you can do so under Linux already anyway if you think Intel is so great.
So what do we have here? Porting Mac OS X to Intel will mean what? It'll mean a buggier version of Mac OS, with NO software support AT ALL.
Sounds great.
Oh, but I forgot the idea of emulation. We could emulate a PPC on Intel. Yeah, great plan. Have you ever seen a Mac emulator for PC? No? That's because Intel chips are incredibly poorly designed. Motorolla chips (whatever you may say about them) have a beautiful architecture that is ideal for emulating other chipsets. Features like being able to swap the byte-order in hardware for instance. That's why we have virtual PC, and PC's don't have virtual Mac. And incidentally have you seen the performance of VPC? It's piss poor. So what do you suppose it will be like trying to emulate a Mac on a kludgy Intel chip? They aren't that much faster than G4s you know, a 3Ghz Intel chip might be able to handle a 300Mhz Mac at best I would guess, and the Altivec emulation would probably be even slower.
So great, for your next 3Ghz $2000 MacIntel you can choose between a machine that runs no existing Mac or PC software, or one that runs Mac software at less than a 3rd of the speed of the machines we have now.
Now enough of this nonsense, lets get back to drooling over the PPC 970.
Comments
Originally posted by sc_markt
A new mac on intel article from Dvorak.
pc mag, 4/7 '03
And most likely, the entire hungry Linux community could port all the x86 Linux code to the MacIntel OS within weeks, creating a huge flood of good products.
Aahahahah! Hahahahahah! Ha! Ha!
Oh, what a comedian.
Well, OK, the "two-tiered" x86 rollout is clever, but Dvorak continues to assume that MS would roll over and play dead, and that the Mac experience would not be severely compromised by crapshoot PC hardware. He is apparently blind to the fact that MS has been tring to contain the commodity nature of its platform for years now, and that MS and OEMs alike are beginning to inch away from that market (e.g.: XBox, TabletPC) and toward more strictly controlled reference platforms and even closed systems (XBox again).
In other words, he's expecting Apple to abandon a strategy the wisdom of which the market is just realizing, adopt an ancient ISA in the twilight of its existence and dive into the same market everyone else is scrambling to get out of. Ha.
I won't rule out some diversification by Apple. There are spaces, especially in enterprise applications and rendering, and some server applications, where non-PPC platforms make sense. But Dvorak's scenario is bankrupt, as usual.
Helps keep the heat off Uncle Bill, who's knee he probably sits on.
Plenty of money for people selling mobo's and GfX cards to gamers and hobbiests, or even just to white box makers with hustle. Plenty of shops in TO with 10+ years in business selling their own generic combinations, plenty going in and out of business too, but people are making money, and people are buying. Down by UofT, a guy I went to undergrad with made his tuition money stealing the bosses's clients and undercutting them on systems and service. (almost 10 years ago, kept me in cheap PC's throughout HS and my first 4 years of uni courtesy of his special employee discount)
M$ will close down the software, but not the hardware, roll your own will always remain an option so long as people go for it, and we know it's around 30% of the computer market and growing.
However, I see the console getting a larger role in computing in the next ten years. It will be all most people need and it will be hermetically sealed, but unlike a mac, it will feature a disposable price tag, and so people won't mind the throw away nature of the beast.
If it were feasible, Intel would be fine with this Mac user.
Originally posted by jouster
One thing, though - all things being equal, who really DOES care who manufactures the CPU?
If it were feasible, Intel would be fine with this Mac user.
Things are never equal. Intel will never manufacture a PowerPC, so backwards compatability would take an immediate hit.
Intel also has a proven track record of taking kludges to their illogical extreme. While I admire their determination and would love to see their engineering resources applied to the PPC, I'm not sure I want them designing anything original.
Originally posted by jouster
One thing, though - all things being equal, who really DOES care who manufactures the CPU?
If it were feasible, Intel would be fine with this Mac user.
ah... you obviously don't buy your software. do you?
i think most proffesional apple users do care. many of them use quark xpress or other non osx native apps and as if... i think it would take some time till they upgrade because it still run's in classic end upgrading costs a lot of money per computer.
i think a lot of software makers don't like it when apple shove aside their investments in powerpc technology
Mac OS X may well be very portable as claimed. It may be that it would take a matter of weeks or months to port it to Intel if Apple so chose.
But what will that get you? it'll get you yet another Unix-based OS on Intel machines. That's it.
Mac software is compiled for PPC processors. To make it work on x86 chips will need at MINIMUM a recompile (assuming all the toolbox code has been ported PERFECTLY, otherwise it will need a complete overhaul). More likely though, any games or other high-performance software will have large sections written in assembly. This won't be portable and wll have to be re-written from scratch.
Think how long it took to port Photoshop to Mac OS X. Now that was already PPC (and Altivec) optimised, and it's carbon not cocoa so presumably most of the toolbox code didin't need to be changed either. Do you really want to wait that long before you can use any of your existing software again? What if you had to do it without the benefit of being able to use the previous versions in the meantime (as with Classic under OS X).
Now consider the fact that some software you use (maybe most of it) would NEVER be ported. I still use plenty of classic apps, and I doubt they'll ever be updated, especially some old games. But at least they still work under OS X on PPC.
But never mind, you think, there'll be all that PC software you can use. That won't take long to port, right?
WRONG!! All PC software uses windows system calls. That'll be even harder to port than Mac software. Not to mention the fact that it's crap anyway, which is why we use a Mac - for the software, remember.
Okay, so what about all that Linux software? Sorry, that won't work either. For one thing it has all of the problems of trying to port windows software (different libraries, etc), but despite what you might think Linux is actually considerably less well supported than Mac OS. There is no way that Linux programmers are going to have the time/money/inclination to port their stuff to an Intel Mac OS. And if they had all this wonderful software in the first place, why wouldn't more people be using Linux anyway?
Ah, but what about all the Unix software that is inherantly portable anyway? Well, it's portable because it doesn't rely on any graphics or sound libraries - it all runs in the terminal (or the ugly X-windows interface, which has to be run on top of the OS anyway, so it makes no difference what OS you're using). So yes, you could use Unix apps, but you can do so under Linux already anyway if you think Intel is so great.
So what do we have here? Porting Mac OS X to Intel will mean what? It'll mean a buggier version of Mac OS, with NO software support AT ALL.
Sounds great.
Oh, but I forgot the idea of emulation. We could emulate a PPC on Intel. Yeah, great plan. Have you ever seen a Mac emulator for PC? No? That's because Intel chips are incredibly poorly designed. Motorolla chips (whatever you may say about them) have a beautiful architecture that is ideal for emulating other chipsets. Features like being able to swap the byte-order in hardware for instance. That's why we have virtual PC, and PC's don't have virtual Mac. And incidentally have you seen the performance of VPC? It's piss poor. So what do you suppose it will be like trying to emulate a Mac on a kludgy Intel chip? They aren't that much faster than G4s you know, a 3Ghz Intel chip might be able to handle a 300Mhz Mac at best I would guess, and the Altivec emulation would probably be even slower.
So great, for your next 3Ghz $2000 MacIntel you can choose between a machine that runs no existing Mac or PC software, or one that runs Mac software at less than a 3rd of the speed of the machines we have now.
Now enough of this nonsense, lets get back to drooling over the PPC 970.
Socrates