As for bashing Freescale and IBM, I think all Mac users appreciate that PPC had potential, and that for a while that potential was actually realized. But Mac users badmouthing IBM and Freescale is nothing new at all. It began with the delay of the first iMac G5s and with the Pentium M vs. G4 comparisons. (Pentium M is not Netburst--it's a predecessor of Core and was the one execllent chip Intel had for a while there.)
The iMac G5 delay wasn't IBM's fault but that's who got the blame from the Apple fanboys.
Badmouthing Freescale started way way before they were even called Freescale, back as far as the G4 introduction and all the way through the cancelled Moto G5 project. Actually, probably as far back as the 68060!
You can blame IBM or Freescale all you like but ultimate responsibility for not delivering lies with Apple. They can't just sit back and hope IBM or Freescale produces a useful chip to beat Intel/AMD, they have to make sure it happens. There's a lot of history between Apple, IBM and Motorola and a lot of it bad and caused by Apple. I'm not surprised IBM or Freescales attitude to Apple starts with 'Show me the money'.
Going Intel sidesteps the chip wars by throwing in the towel. I don't mean that in a bad way. Everyone has to know when to quit and when to pick a new fight and that's what Apple have done. That doesn't make losing a good, unique architecture any less sad.
You forget all the things IBM and Freescale promised or anticipated that never happened. IBM didn't say "3 Ghz in a year IF you put high-end chips in your low-end systems." They said "3 Ghz in a year."
It's quite simple. The PPC was and in some respects still is a better design and if you tie your ship up with Intel in particular (AMD less so) there's no way the Mac is ever going to be faster or more architecturally interesting than a PC. It's lost one of it's differentiating factors...It's all about software now. The hardware wars are over. PowerPC lost on the desktop.
Ah, true words. However, for 99% of the marketing that drove Apple's profits and revenues in the PowerPC era, it wasn't because of "PowerPC inside". We'd like to think that the Pentium-on-a-snail ads and toasting-bunny-suit-people were really effective, but that would be a fantasy IMO.
For the average Mac buyer, PPC was just part of the Mac and they accepted it as it was, most of the time, regardless of how much they knew about PPC chips compared to x86. I don't think they were like OMFG PPC w0000t!!!
However I will venture that the difference now with Intel is Intel becomes a key selling point. It helps bridge the gap between "What is this weird Mac thing" to "Oh okay, it's like a PC but no viruses and looks cool...". Intel inside helps reduce the alienation of the potential buyer.
I mourn the PowerPC on the desktop but from a marketing standpoint, PPC-inside contributed very little and now Intel-inside contributes something.
...That doesn't make losing a good, unique architecture any less sad...
I guess that's a personal thing*. There are a lot of other architectures out there doing lots of cool stuff - Pentium M (it was/is decent), Core, Core 2, Athlon, Opteron, PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox360.
*For me owning my very own G5 to produce trance music (Reason, Rewire, Ableton Live on software, M-Audio hardware) gave me a lot of joy. The people that make Reason (http://www.propellerheads.se/) coded a fantastic music application that was really quite complex but remarkably stable. My single 1.8ghz g5 blew away the dual 1.something g4 I had previously when handling synth tracks, sound processing, etc.
Reason is now a Universal application. Will the iMac Core Duo serve musicians now just as the single or dual G5 did? For studios that really want the power would they be on the dualcore G5s or quad G5s and waiting for Conroe 2 to catch up?
I guess I'm starting to ramble, maybe the point I'm trying to make is that all the tech sentimental attachments aside, for a lot of the public, Mac users are oblivious to the massive efforts put into the hardware and software engineering. And the creative professionals, for them, they will use what is best, affordable, and comfortable for the work they produce.
G3, G4, G5, Cell(???), Core -- all will just be footnotes in history as we move on to the end of this decade.
Actually they both said it. We had this debate a year after, and there was a link posted to the original broadcast, and many of us watched it. They both said it.
Reason is now a Universal application. Will the iMac Core Duo serve musicians now just as the single or dual G5 did? For studios that really want the power would they be on the dualcore G5s or quad G5s and waiting for Conroe 2 to catch up?
That's one of the areas where the PowerPC will be missed. AltiVec is head and shoulders better than Intel's SSE and that difference pushed the Mac into areas PCs couldn't reach.
Back when the G4 came out I was on a mailing list for BeOS and we had audio engineers saying they were getting 10 times speed ups in their code because of AltiVec. Then again, we had ex-Moto engineers saying how screwed up Austin was.
Core 2 however should be quite capable still as it's now got 128bit SSE. It's the one thing that really cheered me up about the switch - finally a decent vector unit. Took them long enough.
Yes, I'm quite sure the Altivec of the G5 was very well utilised by Propellerhead's Reason. Made handling all those synth tracks really amazing.
(Ahh..! With the whole music side of my explorations 2001-2004 just using a G4/G5 Mac and Reason was a breath of fresh air from the late 90's trying to pull off stuff using Creative's AWE32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32)
That would be nice. In an Apple store you could go to the genius bar and ask an asian cock how to handle Apple's new wokstation or about a new recipe...
Ever since the original iMac, Apple has focused on high margins and slow growth for the Mac market.
But, PowerPC chips were so cheap, IBM/Moto saw almost none of the huge profits Apple was taking home. And to make matters worse, Apple played the ultra-segementation game meaning most of their volume was extremely low-profit low-end chips (think how long the G3 hung around).
If Apple had grown their marketshare to 5% and put higher-end chips in their consumer systems, you can bet that those suppliers would have stop dicking around and got Apple some better chips. As it was they were simply a lousy customer.
With Intel, Apple wanted started with a bang -- using only the highest-end, best performing laptop chips. This is a total reversal from their PPC product planning, and frankly I wouldn't expect it to last.
By next year, count on Apple's consumer systems lagging behind with Intel's cheaper, slower chips. Sure there will be a couple speed-queen models in the line, but for the most part Apple doesn't need to use Mhz to make large margins, preferring instead to rely on model segmentation and form-factors.
Ohhhh yes, of course...Apple had a change of heart when they got a change of processors. Do you really believe that horseshit?
You really think Apple was like "yeah, let's keep the G3 in the low-end for just another year?"
By next year, count on Apple's consumer systems lagging behind with Intel's cheaper, slower chips. Sure there will be a couple speed-queen models in the line, but for the most part Apple doesn't need to use Mhz to make large margins, preferring instead to rely on model segmentation and form-factors.
Time will tell. Frankly if they attempt that strategy sales will stagnate severely IMO. Apple already has a premium price on many of their products, using stale components in their models would be very detrimental to sales. When Apple switched to Intel, they bought into the Intel product cycle. This cycle moves rapidly and Apple can keep up or fall behind. With the margins Apple has they can afford to keep up.
The problems with PPC development started shortly after the G3 was released and Apple pulled the plug on licensing the OS. Before that IBM and Moto were working on building a new platform which could run multiple OS's, the Mac OS being just one but there was also a version of Windows NT for the PP platform which was pulled at about the same time. IBM who was the chief backer of the CHRP saw broad support in their efforts in this development fall apart. This was followed up by IBM and Moto splitting on the direction to move with the next generation chip, the G4, which IBM wanted to eventually take into a dual core chip and Moto wanted to add Altivec circutry. The chip couldn't handle both and with the "Death" of the CHRP there wasn't a prospective large enough market for two chip designs. This brought an end to the joint development of the PPC and the speed of that development that was enjoyed in it's earlier days slowed to a crawl. I think that this would have been different if there was a larger market for the PPC in desktop computers and servers but there wasn't a viable OS other than Apple's, and Apple didn't have enough market share to sustain the development costs of both Motorolla and IBM that were needed to keep the PPC desktop chip development up with Intel and AMD's competing pace for their chips.
It's quite simple. The PPC was and in some respects still is a better design and if you tie your ship up with Intel in particular (AMD less so) there's no way the Mac is ever going to be faster or more architecturally interesting than a PC. It's lost one of it's differentiating factors.
It's all about software now. The hardware wars are over. PowerPC lost on the desktop.
I agree. I would add that I think Apple will adopt new harware technologies quicker than pc vendors but this will not make a huge difference in the hardware between macs and pcs. But honestly, do you think Apple hardware was significantly better, with respect to cpus, for a significant period of time? Seems to me the advantages were few and fleeting.
Time will tell. Frankly if they attempt that strategy sales will stagnate severely IMO. Apple already has a premium price on many of their products, using stale components in their models would be very detrimental to sales. When Apple switched to Intel, they bought into the Intel product cycle. This cycle moves rapidly and Apple can keep up or fall behind. With the margins Apple has they can afford to keep up.
Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*...this is very different from Freescale and IBM which can afford to keep manufacturing the same chip for years (different types of customers in the the server, game console, embedded business.)
Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*...this is very different from Freescale and IBM which can afford to keep manufacturing the same chip for years (different types of customers in the the server, game console, embedded business.) *to some extent.
I think Apple has pretty much secured via contracts whatever G4s? and G5s it needs to complete the transition. They can't afford to not have contracts in place to secure those chips. While Freescale and IBM might still make those chips, Freescale has moved on to releasing newer models and IBM too........
Yeah, I think Apple will keep pace with Intel. However there is some possibility they might hold back slightly from the rest of the PC world once ALL apps especially macro/adobe/office go Universal... That way they get extra profit boosts off Intel's tendency to deeply discount CPUs on their way out... (look at the prices for pentium Ds and you'll see what I mean).
Apple's got a lot of room to play with now with Intel's offerings. Just FIX THE BLOODY PORTABLE FRYING PANS* first!
I agree. I would add that I think Apple will adopt new harware technologies quicker than pc vendors but this will not make a huge difference in the hardware between macs and pcs. But honestly, do you think Apple hardware was significantly better, with respect to cpus, for a significant period of time? Seems to me the advantages were few and fleeting.
Yes, they certainly were.
2001, Apple's laptops were thin, cool and the batteries lasted 4+ hours. Nothing to touch them until the Pentium M. You could get faster laptops with Intel but not thin, light ones. Speed weenies are blind to the principal reason by laptops often though - that they're portable.
About the same time the G4 was faster than the Pentium for a while and Apple were pushing dual processors in desktops too which shows in apps on OSX compared to Windows where developers don't have the same mindset.
When the G5 came out it was faster than anything by Intel/AMD for the money and the Quad is still faster for most apps than a dual Opteron/Xeon for about the same money. It had huge bandwidth then and killer FP performance.
Sure, you can build overclocked AMD monsters that are faster and cheaper but generally from the Tier 1 manufacturers, Apple has done ok on launch of new lines, only to be caught up later. The problem is generally that they don't update often enough so keep getting caught up and passed.
[i]...Yeah, I think Apple will keep pace with Intel. However there is some possibility they might hold back slightly from the rest of the PC world once ALL apps especially macro/adobe/office go Universal... That way they get extra profit boosts off Intel's tendency to deeply discount CPUs on their way out... (look at the prices for pentium Ds and you'll see what I mean)....
Apple has a strategy to take advantage of this, it goes under the product names Mac Mini, MacBook, and eMac. The MacBook Pro, iMac, and MacPro's need to keep pace with the rest of the Intel market or Apple will "loose Face" which will not look good when they are trying to gain market share. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Steve will be trying to get Intel to announce one of their chips on stage with him at WWDC or in SanFrancisco, or at least be on stage when a recently released chip is introduced in a Mac. Wouldn't it be great if the timing were right for Intel to join Jobs on stage to formally announce that Woodrest (or Morem or Conroe) is shipping and the MacPro (replace with appropriate model) is the first publicly announced computer to use the chip and will be shipping within X time frame?
And what higher-end chips were you thinking would go in the iMac (which was G5)
The iMac followed the PowerMac by more than a year -- practically an enternity relative to the PC world -- and even then it only had the slowest, cheapest G5 CPUs in them. How long were G3s used simply for segmentation purposes?
My point is really that Apple will likely revert to this style of behavior after the Intel transition is complete. Their model segmentation gaps are so large that they really have no incentive to push newer, faster technology down to the consumer lines very quickly.
Quote:
I don't see how that would magically have made IBM and Freescale "stop dicking around."
Nice that you deftly ignored the argument, but having higher volumes is not "magic", and if Apple had higher volumes, there would have been more interest in making PowerPC chips for them. Seems pretty non-controversial to me.
Quote:
kim kap sol: You really think Apple was like "yeah, let's keep the G3 in the low-end for just another year?"
That's what they did, didn't they? So they must have thought it.
Quote:
kim kap sol: Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*
True, but there's usually a roughly equivilant replacement. Three years ago I had a brand new 1.5Ghz Pentium-M laptop, and similar speed 1.5Ghz Core Solo is still being sold in the Mini.
@homenow -- your description is right on. Truth is that PowerPC was a deadman walking as a personal computer chip after the first generation, and with hindsight, it was a mistake for Apple to adopt it. They should have gone right to Intel in 1994.
My point is really that Apple will likely revert to this style of behavior after the Intel transition is complete. Their model segmentation gaps are so large that they really have no incentive to push newer, faster technology down to the consumer lines very quickly.
I disagree. I don't think Apple's previous behavior will carry forward. I think they buy into Intel's product cycle and refresh just like pc vendors do. They really don't have any choice. Whether they like it or not Apple's products will be compared to pc vendors products now that the hardware is converging.
Comments
Originally posted by nagromme
As for bashing Freescale and IBM, I think all Mac users appreciate that PPC had potential, and that for a while that potential was actually realized. But Mac users badmouthing IBM and Freescale is nothing new at all. It began with the delay of the first iMac G5s and with the Pentium M vs. G4 comparisons. (Pentium M is not Netburst--it's a predecessor of Core and was the one execllent chip Intel had for a while there.)
The iMac G5 delay wasn't IBM's fault but that's who got the blame from the Apple fanboys.
Badmouthing Freescale started way way before they were even called Freescale, back as far as the G4 introduction and all the way through the cancelled Moto G5 project. Actually, probably as far back as the 68060!
You can blame IBM or Freescale all you like but ultimate responsibility for not delivering lies with Apple. They can't just sit back and hope IBM or Freescale produces a useful chip to beat Intel/AMD, they have to make sure it happens. There's a lot of history between Apple, IBM and Motorola and a lot of it bad and caused by Apple. I'm not surprised IBM or Freescales attitude to Apple starts with 'Show me the money'.
Going Intel sidesteps the chip wars by throwing in the towel. I don't mean that in a bad way. Everyone has to know when to quit and when to pick a new fight and that's what Apple have done. That doesn't make losing a good, unique architecture any less sad.
Originally posted by nagromme
You forget all the things IBM and Freescale promised or anticipated that never happened. IBM didn't say "3 Ghz in a year IF you put high-end chips in your low-end systems." They said "3 Ghz in a year."
Actually, IBM didn't say that. Steve Jobs did.
It's quite simple. The PPC was and in some respects still is a better design and if you tie your ship up with Intel in particular (AMD less so) there's no way the Mac is ever going to be faster or more architecturally interesting than a PC. It's lost one of it's differentiating factors...It's all about software now. The hardware wars are over. PowerPC lost on the desktop.
Ah, true words. However, for 99% of the marketing that drove Apple's profits and revenues in the PowerPC era, it wasn't because of "PowerPC inside". We'd like to think that the Pentium-on-a-snail ads and toasting-bunny-suit-people were really effective, but that would be a fantasy IMO.
For the average Mac buyer, PPC was just part of the Mac and they accepted it as it was, most of the time, regardless of how much they knew about PPC chips compared to x86. I don't think they were like OMFG PPC w0000t!!!
However I will venture that the difference now with Intel is Intel becomes a key selling point. It helps bridge the gap between "What is this weird Mac thing" to "Oh okay, it's like a PC but no viruses and looks cool...". Intel inside helps reduce the alienation of the potential buyer.
I mourn the PowerPC on the desktop but from a marketing standpoint, PPC-inside contributed very little and now Intel-inside contributes something.
...That doesn't make losing a good, unique architecture any less sad...
I guess that's a personal thing*. There are a lot of other architectures out there doing lots of cool stuff - Pentium M (it was/is decent), Core, Core 2, Athlon, Opteron, PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox360.
*For me owning my very own G5 to produce trance music (Reason, Rewire, Ableton Live on software, M-Audio hardware) gave me a lot of joy. The people that make Reason (http://www.propellerheads.se/) coded a fantastic music application that was really quite complex but remarkably stable. My single 1.8ghz g5 blew away the dual 1.something g4 I had previously when handling synth tracks, sound processing, etc.
Reason is now a Universal application. Will the iMac Core Duo serve musicians now just as the single or dual G5 did? For studios that really want the power would they be on the dualcore G5s or quad G5s and waiting for Conroe 2 to catch up?
I guess I'm starting to ramble, maybe the point I'm trying to make is that all the tech sentimental attachments aside, for a lot of the public, Mac users are oblivious to the massive efforts put into the hardware and software engineering. And the creative professionals, for them, they will use what is best, affordable, and comfortable for the work they produce.
G3, G4, G5, Cell(???), Core -- all will just be footnotes in history as we move on to the end of this decade.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Actually, IBM didn't say that. Steve Jobs did.
Actually they both said it. We had this debate a year after, and there was a link posted to the original broadcast, and many of us watched it. They both said it.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06..._hd_with_g965/
Originally posted by sunilraman
Reason is now a Universal application. Will the iMac Core Duo serve musicians now just as the single or dual G5 did? For studios that really want the power would they be on the dualcore G5s or quad G5s and waiting for Conroe 2 to catch up?
That's one of the areas where the PowerPC will be missed. AltiVec is head and shoulders better than Intel's SSE and that difference pushed the Mac into areas PCs couldn't reach.
Back when the G4 came out I was on a mailing list for BeOS and we had audio engineers saying they were getting 10 times speed ups in their code because of AltiVec. Then again, we had ex-Moto engineers saying how screwed up Austin was.
Core 2 however should be quite capable still as it's now got 128bit SSE. It's the one thing that really cheered me up about the switch - finally a decent vector unit. Took them long enough.
(Ahh..! With the whole music side of my explorations 2001-2004 just using a G4/G5 Mac and Reason was a breath of fresh air from the late 90's trying to pull off stuff using Creative's AWE32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32)
Originally posted by sunilraman
Originally posted by smalM
That would be nice. In an Apple store you could go to the genius bar and ask an asian cock how to handle Apple's new wokstation or about a new recipe...
Umm, typo...
Not if we're talking about a chicken stir fry!
Originally posted by IntlHarvester
Ever since the original iMac, Apple has focused on high margins and slow growth for the Mac market.
But, PowerPC chips were so cheap, IBM/Moto saw almost none of the huge profits Apple was taking home. And to make matters worse, Apple played the ultra-segementation game meaning most of their volume was extremely low-profit low-end chips (think how long the G3 hung around).
If Apple had grown their marketshare to 5% and put higher-end chips in their consumer systems, you can bet that those suppliers would have stop dicking around and got Apple some better chips. As it was they were simply a lousy customer.
With Intel, Apple wanted started with a bang -- using only the highest-end, best performing laptop chips. This is a total reversal from their PPC product planning, and frankly I wouldn't expect it to last.
By next year, count on Apple's consumer systems lagging behind with Intel's cheaper, slower chips. Sure there will be a couple speed-queen models in the line, but for the most part Apple doesn't need to use Mhz to make large margins, preferring instead to rely on model segmentation and form-factors.
Ohhhh yes, of course...Apple had a change of heart when they got a change of processors. Do you really believe that horseshit?
You really think Apple was like "yeah, let's keep the G3 in the low-end for just another year?"
Originally posted by IntlHarvester
By next year, count on Apple's consumer systems lagging behind with Intel's cheaper, slower chips. Sure there will be a couple speed-queen models in the line, but for the most part Apple doesn't need to use Mhz to make large margins, preferring instead to rely on model segmentation and form-factors.
Time will tell. Frankly if they attempt that strategy sales will stagnate severely IMO. Apple already has a premium price on many of their products, using stale components in their models would be very detrimental to sales. When Apple switched to Intel, they bought into the Intel product cycle. This cycle moves rapidly and Apple can keep up or fall behind. With the margins Apple has they can afford to keep up.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
It's quite simple. The PPC was and in some respects still is a better design and if you tie your ship up with Intel in particular (AMD less so) there's no way the Mac is ever going to be faster or more architecturally interesting than a PC. It's lost one of it's differentiating factors.
It's all about software now. The hardware wars are over. PowerPC lost on the desktop.
I agree. I would add that I think Apple will adopt new harware technologies quicker than pc vendors but this will not make a huge difference in the hardware between macs and pcs. But honestly, do you think Apple hardware was significantly better, with respect to cpus, for a significant period of time? Seems to me the advantages were few and fleeting.
Originally posted by backtomac
Time will tell. Frankly if they attempt that strategy sales will stagnate severely IMO. Apple already has a premium price on many of their products, using stale components in their models would be very detrimental to sales. When Apple switched to Intel, they bought into the Intel product cycle. This cycle moves rapidly and Apple can keep up or fall behind. With the margins Apple has they can afford to keep up.
Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*...this is very different from Freescale and IBM which can afford to keep manufacturing the same chip for years (different types of customers in the the server, game console, embedded business.)
*to some extent.
Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*...this is very different from Freescale and IBM which can afford to keep manufacturing the same chip for years (different types of customers in the the server, game console, embedded business.) *to some extent.
I think Apple has pretty much secured via contracts whatever G4s? and G5s it needs to complete the transition. They can't afford to not have contracts in place to secure those chips. While Freescale and IBM might still make those chips, Freescale has moved on to releasing newer models and IBM too........
Yeah, I think Apple will keep pace with Intel. However there is some possibility they might hold back slightly from the rest of the PC world once ALL apps especially macro/adobe/office go Universal... That way they get extra profit boosts off Intel's tendency to deeply discount CPUs on their way out... (look at the prices for pentium Ds and you'll see what I mean).
Apple's got a lot of room to play with now with Intel's offerings. Just FIX THE BLOODY PORTABLE FRYING PANS* first!
*MacBook Pro, MacBook
Originally posted by backtomac
I agree. I would add that I think Apple will adopt new harware technologies quicker than pc vendors but this will not make a huge difference in the hardware between macs and pcs. But honestly, do you think Apple hardware was significantly better, with respect to cpus, for a significant period of time? Seems to me the advantages were few and fleeting.
Yes, they certainly were.
2001, Apple's laptops were thin, cool and the batteries lasted 4+ hours. Nothing to touch them until the Pentium M. You could get faster laptops with Intel but not thin, light ones. Speed weenies are blind to the principal reason by laptops often though - that they're portable.
About the same time the G4 was faster than the Pentium for a while and Apple were pushing dual processors in desktops too which shows in apps on OSX compared to Windows where developers don't have the same mindset.
When the G5 came out it was faster than anything by Intel/AMD for the money and the Quad is still faster for most apps than a dual Opteron/Xeon for about the same money. It had huge bandwidth then and killer FP performance.
Sure, you can build overclocked AMD monsters that are faster and cheaper but generally from the Tier 1 manufacturers, Apple has done ok on launch of new lines, only to be caught up later. The problem is generally that they don't update often enough so keep getting caught up and passed.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
The problem is generally that they don't update often enough so keep getting caught up and passed.
That's my point.
Originally posted by sunilraman
[i]...Yeah, I think Apple will keep pace with Intel. However there is some possibility they might hold back slightly from the rest of the PC world once ALL apps especially macro/adobe/office go Universal... That way they get extra profit boosts off Intel's tendency to deeply discount CPUs on their way out... (look at the prices for pentium Ds and you'll see what I mean)....
Apple has a strategy to take advantage of this, it goes under the product names Mac Mini, MacBook, and eMac. The MacBook Pro, iMac, and MacPro's need to keep pace with the rest of the Intel market or Apple will "loose Face" which will not look good when they are trying to gain market share. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Steve will be trying to get Intel to announce one of their chips on stage with him at WWDC or in SanFrancisco, or at least be on stage when a recently released chip is introduced in a Mac. Wouldn't it be great if the timing were right for Intel to join Jobs on stage to formally announce that Woodrest (or Morem or Conroe) is shipping and the MacPro (replace with appropriate model) is the first publicly announced computer to use the chip and will be shipping within X time frame?
Originally posted by nagromme
And what higher-end chips were you thinking would go in the iMac (which was G5)
The iMac followed the PowerMac by more than a year -- practically an enternity relative to the PC world -- and even then it only had the slowest, cheapest G5 CPUs in them. How long were G3s used simply for segmentation purposes?
My point is really that Apple will likely revert to this style of behavior after the Intel transition is complete. Their model segmentation gaps are so large that they really have no incentive to push newer, faster technology down to the consumer lines very quickly.
I don't see how that would magically have made IBM and Freescale "stop dicking around."
Nice that you deftly ignored the argument, but having higher volumes is not "magic", and if Apple had higher volumes, there would have been more interest in making PowerPC chips for them. Seems pretty non-controversial to me.
kim kap sol: You really think Apple was like "yeah, let's keep the G3 in the low-end for just another year?"
That's what they did, didn't they? So they must have thought it.
kim kap sol: Apple can't really fall behind...when Intel stops manufacturing a chip, it really does stop*
True, but there's usually a roughly equivilant replacement. Three years ago I had a brand new 1.5Ghz Pentium-M laptop, and similar speed 1.5Ghz Core Solo is still being sold in the Mini.
@homenow -- your description is right on. Truth is that PowerPC was a deadman walking as a personal computer chip after the first generation, and with hindsight, it was a mistake for Apple to adopt it. They should have gone right to Intel in 1994.
Originally posted by IntlHarvester
My point is really that Apple will likely revert to this style of behavior after the Intel transition is complete. Their model segmentation gaps are so large that they really have no incentive to push newer, faster technology down to the consumer lines very quickly.
I disagree. I don't think Apple's previous behavior will carry forward. I think they buy into Intel's product cycle and refresh just like pc vendors do. They really don't have any choice. Whether they like it or not Apple's products will be compared to pc vendors products now that the hardware is converging.