Is the switch to Intel one of Steve Jobs' best business decisions of his life?
When the switch to Intel was announced last year, I started a poll/thread entitled "Is the switch to Intel Jobs' worst business decision of his life?" A significant percentage - 19%, said yes. In addition, there were quite a few who voted "no" but still weren't all that thrilled about it.
Now that the whole line of Macs has been switched over to Intel, I thought it would be interesting to find out how everyone thinks the switch has gone. Has it been, from a business perspective, better than you expected? What about from a technical perspective?
Personally, I have been amazed at how well the process has gone. There have been plenty of niggles, but I was surprised at the lack of severe sales dip before the Intel machines came out, and the smoothness of the software transition.
From a technical perspective, the new Intel chips are much better than I expected, but on the portable side are not quite where I'd like them to be (power consumption is still too high, although performance is through the roof). I firmly believe that a dual-core 65 nm PPC chip would pulverise a Merom, but that's a moot point because no-one makes them. Hopefully Merom in conjunction with Santa Rosa will help to deliver better battery life and lower heat levels to the laptop space and then everything will be perfect.
Overall, I'd say that 1.) What I thought at the time of the switch was wrong and 2.) Apple switched to Intel at just the right time.
Now that the whole line of Macs has been switched over to Intel, I thought it would be interesting to find out how everyone thinks the switch has gone. Has it been, from a business perspective, better than you expected? What about from a technical perspective?
Personally, I have been amazed at how well the process has gone. There have been plenty of niggles, but I was surprised at the lack of severe sales dip before the Intel machines came out, and the smoothness of the software transition.
From a technical perspective, the new Intel chips are much better than I expected, but on the portable side are not quite where I'd like them to be (power consumption is still too high, although performance is through the roof). I firmly believe that a dual-core 65 nm PPC chip would pulverise a Merom, but that's a moot point because no-one makes them. Hopefully Merom in conjunction with Santa Rosa will help to deliver better battery life and lower heat levels to the laptop space and then everything will be perfect.
Overall, I'd say that 1.) What I thought at the time of the switch was wrong and 2.) Apple switched to Intel at just the right time.
Comments
I think the question should be restated, "Is it the best business decision?" Of course it was a good one, but not the best.
It wasn't a brilliant business decision, it was the moment Apple stopped putting terrible processors in their machines and started giving their users good performance.
The PPC processors were absolutely not terrible. A G5 could kick the crap out of a P IV with vectorised code. The PPC platform as a whole had significant problems due to lack of decent compilers and lack of optimisation - many programs where simply poorly ported from x86.
A good example is Microsoft Excel performance - On a PowerMac G4, the Windows version of Excel running inside Virtual PC is significantly faster than the native OS X version!
The best business decision of Steve Jobs life was buying Pixar. Nothing he did at apple can quite compare to a 40,000% return.
deleted post
The best business decision of Steve Jobs life was buying Pixar. Nothing he did at apple can quite compare to a 40,000% return.
We have a winner.
The move to Intel was a good decision though.
I fully expect this to be even bigger when Leopard comes out and wouldn't be surprised if Apple bought parallels or did something very similar with 3D windows support right in OS X.
I firmly believe that a dual-core 65 nm PPC chip would pulverise a Merom, but that's a moot point because no-one makes them.
PPC wasn't a techinical failure but a product developement failure IMO.
I fully expect this to be even bigger when Leopard comes out and wouldn't be surprised if Apple bought parallels or did something very similar with 3D windows support right in OS X.
I'd like to see something like Crossover and Parallels together. Crossover can do 3D - I'm playing Half-Life 2 under OS X - but it lacks compatibility and uses a kind of reverse-engineered DirectX driver.
Parallels has everything except the hardware acceleration and it's limited to the VM resources. If they could somehow patch the best bits of both together, it would be a great solution.
I'm still waiting to see how Parallels pulls off the hardware acceleration they have been advertising.
I said no, looking at the bigger picture I think the smartest business decision Steve ever made in his life was coming back to Apple. Yes, Pixar is doing well but Steve's real passion is Apple and I also believe that us users are better off because of his presence in the company.
I 100% agree! Steve is my homeboy. 8)
I said no, looking at the bigger picture I think the smartest business decision Steve ever made in his life was coming back to Apple. Yes, Pixar is doing well but Steve's real passion is Apple and I also believe that us users are better off because of his presence in the company.
We aren't talking about Steve's "business love life", or the decision that he made that is best for you, but HIS best business decision. Buying Pixar is responsible for 99% of his personal net worth - it is his best business decision.
If he had never re-joined Apple, he would still be a billionaire, but if he had never bought Pixar he would not.
We aren't talking about Steve's "business love life", or the decision that he made that is best for you, but HIS best business decision. Buying Pixar is responsible for 99% of his personal net worth - it is his best business decision.
If he had never re-joined Apple, he would still be a billionaire, but if he had never bought Pixar he would not.
Not only that but his success at Pixar helped restore his credibility as a business leader. Doubt he could have come back to Apple without the success he had at Pixar.
The PPC processors were absolutely not terrible. A G5 could kick the crap out of a P IV with vectorised code. The PPC platform as a whole had significant problems due to lack of decent compilers and lack of optimisation - many programs where simply poorly ported from x86.
A good example is Microsoft Excel performance - On a PowerMac G4, the Windows version of Excel running inside Virtual PC is significantly faster than the native OS X version!
The programmers had to optimize code for the PowerPC. In all but the most high end applications, the 4% marketshare didn't give incentive to do so. Most PPC Mac Programs were made just good enough to be workable. We can debate all day about the theoretical performance of the PowerPC, but Intel CPUs are the best bet for real world performance.