Mac to move to Intel!!!

Its my opinion, as an Apple supporter back to the original Apple II days, that they will alienate their customers if they start selling Intel hardware instead of PowerPC hardware. Worse yet would be if they started selling both.

I am leaving it up to them to selling/licensing their OS and have others make Intel hardware. That way you can choose just as you do now. You can choose between going with non-Apple hardware and a greater potential of incompatibilities or going with the PowerPC hardware from Apple and have a better chance of your apps working with your machine. Its hard enough today for Apple to keep each of its new operating systems working with all of the hardware that they support.

Ted

Again, it would be interesting to announce an Intel version of OSX thus increasing your potential customer base 20 times over.

I guess developers wouldn't have a problem recompiling for a 3rd platform if it holds the promise of greater sales.

Ted

The reason apple's marketshare is so low is that they have a very very small presence in the business, medical, and institutional worlds right now. These markets account for a much bigger chunk of the overall computer market than "regular people" do.

So when you ask your neighbor what computer she uses, there's a much greater than 2% chance that she has a mac. But when you ask her what she uses at work, there's probably at least a 95% chance that she doesn't.

Personally, nearly everyone I know are mac users. But even my very mac-friendly office has more pcs than macs. (And hell, I promised myself I'd never use windows again, but if you want to get technical, I'm a PC-owner myself, it's just that my PC is unplugged and sitting in the closet, and has been for years.)

-----------------
Charles Bandes
http://www.bandesphoto.com

I think you just described it. Businesses don't buy macs, and and most people are buying pc's right now. I'm back in school, and because of discounts a large percentage of students and faculty have macs. But out side these discounted environments, macs continue to lose.

My compaq notebook (discounted from a friend at hp) was half as much as the equivalant powerbook. The powerbook seemed like it was made of better materials, etc, but both are fine machines. That cost difference just was too high.

The move to intel chips along might help decrease these costs. Most mac applications are first release on pc platforms. The switch should help these software companies in testing and release. At the small market share of 2% there is not a big enough incentive to port applications quickly.

The real problem is switching costs for users. Will mac users buy the software again, or will they just switch to pcs. The xp operating system is a fine operating system. But I'm sure Apple needs to get there hardware costs down. I'm sure they made the calculations. We will see in 5 years wether it was a good move or not.

As highly unlikely as this is, it's a persistant rumor. There is no technical reason why it couldn't happen, but there are a raft of practical reasons. Nevertheless, Apple is probably discussing non-CPU chips. Intel makes more stuff than just Pentiums.

Someone mentioned Apple's market share. Another meaningless number. Here's one reason why: I work in the Graphic arts field at a large format printer. Macs outnumber PC's about 30 to 1 (and except for the rips, are mostly in admin areas). The Mac's we're using are from 10 years old to new, with most of them in my area about 5 years old. Most companies don't have pc's that are that old. They are generally replaced every three years or so. BTW, the Mac I'm using at home is 5 years old and I don't expect to replace it until 2006. There's nothing wrong with it. I've got plenty of RAM and hard disk space for everything I do.

Leon Wittwer said:

The problem seems to be that IBM does not have the economic
incentive to push hard for faster processors that Apple needs to
compete against Intel, et. al. since the Mac market is small.

Click to expand...

On the other hand, there are companies smaller than IBM such as AMD that are competing quite well with Intel. AMD's current design is arguably superior to Intel's, and AMD is using a fair amount of IBM manufacturing know-how to produce their CPUs...

I have however considered the fact that Intel produces xScale CPUs, which use the ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) design. Guess what Apple used in the Newton...

In the unlikely event that this news isn't complete BS, my bet is on a new ultraportable using Intel-manufactured ARM chips if anything.

snowboard9 said:

First off, they have less than 2% of the market

Click to expand...

That's worldwide. Our company (fortune 500) paid for research to see whether or not we should support safari. The results were surprising, and we do have support Safari (and Firefox) on the US market.

snowboard9 said:

and now GAIN
developers who are familiar with X86 compilers.

Click to expand...

I'm a developer myself, and if I had a large codebase already developed for Mac, I'd be PI$SED. I'd have to spend additional resources (and Mac developers aren't exactly bathing in money) to:

1. Make my software processor independent (good luck if you're using a lot of AltiVec assembly)

2. Support both old and new versions and release PPC and x86-64 (invented by AMD, btw) arcitecture versions in parallel.

Both things REALLY suck if your resources are limited.

snowboard9 said:

BULL.. Intel is not overpriced and in fact DOES represent the
best "bang for the buck".

Click to expand...

Just because you say so doesn't mean it's true.

snowboard9 said:

Intel
outships AMD on 64 bits about 20 to one !

Click to expand...

And that means absolutely nothing if we compare technical merits of respective processors. Intel has a good marketing department and an exclusive contract with Dell - the biggest PC maker. If next year Dell switches to AMD (a change I'd welcome), AMD will be outselling Intel.

I have a Mac for graphics, Windows XP laptop for work and a Linux file/web server. So two questions here.

1. How do they account for my linux server (it was sold to me as a barebone system, without OS)

2. What marketshare, Windows or Mac I'll be counted in? A lot of folks are the same way, they have both a PC and a Mac.

This would be great news it it's true. There's been rumors of OS X runnng on the x86 platform for years.

Apple have had problems getting competitive processors for years, but with the G5 seem to be almost there, so it's a bit surprisng that they would change now.

On the other hand, they can't use the G5 in portables for some reason and that's a problem. Having to use the slower G4 in a market that gets more and more important must be a problem. Also, the dual core AMD/Intel cpu's will start shipping tis summer and that will increase the performance gap again unless IBM brings out something similar pretty soon (they have the technology).

Most (all?) big/important Mac software names have Windows versions too, so they already know the x86 architecture and the move shouldn't be a huge problem. And if you're looking longer term it will be a benefit as it's easier to support two versions on the same cpu than on two different cpus (even if the os is different).

The big problem for Apple - in my opinion - is that a x86 version inevitable would be hacked so it can run on any x86 PC, and where would that leave Apple's hardware department? Look at the xbox, Microsoft do exactly the opposite. They tried making a non-pc compatible xbox and it was hacked imediately. So on the xbox 360 Microsoft swithc to a PowerPC cpu (3-core?).

So, guess I'll be following the news next monday. Maybe in a year or two I can dual boot my PC to either a Windows or a Mac os. Sounds too good to be true, but would be great, wouldn't it?

You get counted as 3 1 Windows, 1 Mac, 1 Linux

LInux has a large market share and growing in the server market.

Normally they count the desktop market seperately. In desktop you count as 1 windows and 1 mac. In the desktop market mac is around 2%, linux is over 3% and growing. One reason linux is ahead of mac on the desktop is that it runs on inexpensive hardware. If apple switches to less expensive hardware, this bleeding might stop. I say might, because every year linux becomes a better desktop. It is very difficult to determine how many linux desktops are out there, and most people belive they are competing against microsoft, and not apple. But people want an easy to use microsoft alternative. The question is in 5 years will this be OSX or linux, or some other OS.

photogeek said:

I have a Mac for graphics, Windows XP laptop for work and a Linux
file/web server. So two questions here.

1. How do they account for my linux server (it was sold to me as a
barebone system, without OS)
2. What marketshare, Windows or Mac I'll be counted in? A lot of
folks are the same way, they have both a PC and a Mac.

Click to expand...

I didn't buy my Linux CDs. I've downloaded them for free from RedHat/Fedora FTP site. So my installation of Linux is very likely to go uncounted. Also, what about the longevity of the Macs? If we count the marketshare in current shipments, but Macs last 30% longer, wouldn't this make the real Mac installed user base percentage larger?

As I said, according to the web statistics collected on a few extremely large web portals Mac browsers are used by about 5% of the visitors, and the number is slowly growing. Linux is a lot less (which is expected, as most Linux machines are servers), and stays steady.

Greetings to all

Mac's be talking with Intel for a year or two now. It seems that Intel is willing to set up a private section for a chip designed to Mac spec. Mac needs more speed and other things for what they want to do, from what I've read. Mac, at least for right now, is one of, if not the hottest company in the market today and one of the most profitable, it's refured to as the "Golden Apple" on the stock exchange and their stock has just been split, which I liked. Becaused if there were no Apple where would Gates get this ideas from?????
Have fun
Roger J.

I'm not sure how IDC estimates them. It is much more probematic that windoze or mac. I know they are predicting 6% of desktops running on linux in 2 years. IBM is trying to get microsoft to port office to the linux environment, and taking other measures to try make that number higher.

The 2% for mac are new shipments. Since mac sales used to be higher the installed base is higher. Its been 4 years since I did software marketing, so I can't tell you what the current number is, I'm sure someone else will know.

1. When you have 5% of marketshare, the last thing you want is to pi$s off your developers. Maintaining software for two different processors can be pretty complicated, even if it's the same OS, especially considering that Intel chips have a different byte order (endianness).

FACT: NextStep (which MacOSX is based on) ran on Motorola and later ported to Intel x86 processors then later to PowerPC. There is NO reason why it should be that difficult to port to Intel. Even Steve Jobs said it won't be a problem to have MacOSX run on Intel. He said, "It's perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor."

Source: http://news.com.com/Apple+says+could+move+to+Intel%2C+but+happy+with+IBM/2100-1045_3-5103279.html?tag=nl

2. Intel is overpriced and does not represent the best bang for the buck or the best performance anymore. AMD is the king right now with their 64 bit processors.

I agree.. right now AMD is the king but I am sure by the time Apple releases the Intel Macs, the Intel chips will have support for 64-bit software.

-jeff

Apple wont give up proprietary HW. So this chip has to be custom. It will also be multicore, so that leaves lots of interesting possabilities, Apple has some rights to PPC architecture.

1: Mac PPC Core, and x86 core, with Intel multi-OS capabilities. Can run windows and Mac programs simulataneously at full speed. That would be sweet.

2: Only x86 cores, with customizations so that new OSX-86 won't run on standard Pentiums, but Windows will still run. Again with Intel Multi-OS, it would be possible to run Mac + PC simultaneously.

3: Only PPC cores: Nothing too exciting, just a new suppliier.

photogeek said:

1. When you have 5% of marketshare, the last thing you want is to
pi$s off your developers.

Click to expand...

When you have 5% of market share and shrinking, you'd better make some changes or youre share will continue to dwindle. That's not to say that switching processors is necessarily among the smart changes to make.

photogeek said:

2. Intel is overpriced and does not represent the best bang for the
buck or the best performance anymore. AMD is the king right now
with their 64 bit processors.

Click to expand...

Who's to say that they'll go Pentium? Perhaps Apple could be the first high-volume customer for a desktop version of the Itanium 2, sort of like how Apple was also the first high-volume customer for a desktop version of the PowerPC.

It's been a day or so since I learned about this alledged switch to Intel. The only compelling reason I see for it is IBM's apparent inability to make a low power G5 for their powerbooks. I realize that IBM could if they thought there would be sufficient ROI, but perhaps Jobs was unwilling to make such a commitment. One imagines Micheal Dell being highly ammused at all this.

Actually, I misspoke and mislead in my message. I meant that Apple with the PPC was not competing as well as they would like against PCs with Intel, AMD, etc. processors as IBM was not pushing higher capabilities all that much. Intel could provide faster processors as could AMD. This whole thing may not be about the CPUs in computers anyways. It could be about other devices being produced by Apple.
--
Leon
http://homepage.mac.com/leonwittwer/landscapes.htm

In the early 80s Andy Grove approached Apple and suggested that he be licensed to mass produce the Macintosh chip so clone makers could have access to them. Apple said no. Actually, Steve Jobs said no. So Grove when to IBM and they licensed him to make PC chips. That's why clones are PCs rather than Macs. Grove at that time thought the Mac architecture was superior. There was a brief flurry of Mac clones when Motorola was making the chips...and Jobs was busy with Next and Pixar. When Steve returned to Apple he put a stop to it.

A friend of mine who is highly placed at Intel says both chip architectures are obsolete and that the big winner will be whoever jumps first to a new level of technology.

Zidar
Alaska

--
'He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond
the pale of any acceptable human conduct.'

• Apocalypse Now

What's Cray's marketshare? How come nobody talks about that?

Bill Gates best trick is understanding who makes the decisions on what computer to buy. When the personal computer was evolving, IT decisions at big companies were made by PhDs who went to MIT or Cal Tech. Gates could see those days were over. Now computers are purchased by guys who a generation ago would have been assistant service manager at a gas station or driving a milk truck. Gates saw that coming. His product is tailored to those two-fisted, hard charging, hairy-backed guys. The Mac buyer went to art school, drives a Citroen, and smokes French Gitane cigarettes.

Zidar
Alaska

--
'He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond
the pale of any acceptable human conduct.'

• Apocalypse Now