Macs to have Intel Inside

[Jayce]

Story here: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2005-06-06-apple-intel_x.htm

I'm sure this will infuriate some people (but where they gonna go, to a PC? lolzers) and some people won't care.  I think it makes sense from a business perspective even if it eliminates some of the Mac's distinctiveness.

Good discussion of it here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/06/apple_intel_analysis/


[hopefully this is the right forum, even if this news is somewhat useless to most people here]

[schild]

About time. The other processors just weren't cutting it.

[Trippy]

Actually this is a horrible time to switch to Intel given how bad their P4 architecture is doing now unless Apple plans on waiting till the Pentium M is more fully developed. AMD is kicking Intel's butt on the performance front and PowerPC is where all the interesting desktop/workstation CPU development is taking place right now (a la the PS3 and Xbox 360 CPUs).

[Special J]

Could OS-X for the PC be that far away?

Just throwing it out there.

[Murgos]

Could OS-X for the PC be that far away?

Just throwing it out there.

Thats what I was thinking.  This seems like a good way to get Intel to foot some of the cost for porting OS-X over to IA-32 that doesn't really hurt Apple except for some good will with IBM.

If Apple were smart they would just offer Intel CPU's as an alternative and still offer the power PC also.

[Soukyan]

Could OS-X for the PC be that far away?

Just throwing it out there.

Darwin has run on x86 for a long time and the current release, 8.1, is Mac OS X 10.4.1. The other nice thing about Darwin is that it always matches the latest OS X release and there's never any lag time in updates. Updates are released simultaneously for both. So if you're interested, that site has a download link for the binaries in ISO format. The x86 distro weighs in at ~378 MB.

As to the linkage about Apple switching to Intel, you'll note that this is still blatant rumor-mongering on the part of the journalists this morning.

From the USA today article: "Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to announce Monday morning that Apple will discontinue using microprocessor chips made by IBM in favor of Intel (INTC) chips, according to CNET Networks's News.com and The Wall Street Journal."

Key word = expected

Also from the same article: "Officials from Apple, Intel and IBM could not be reached Sunday to confirm the report.

For years, rumors of Apple's wish to jump to Intel have been circulating. But two weeks ago, analysts were skeptical when The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel and Apple were in negotiations."

Notice that nobody from any of the involved parties has commented on it.
Second key word = rumors

I could be wrong in saying that it's all just a rumor, but we won't truly know one way or the other until 10 am PST when Steve-O makes his keynote address at WWDC.

[Roac]

AMD is kicking Intel's butt on the performance front

Yeah, the cost/performance of AMD chips is well above the Intel equivalent.  However, the brand image of Intel crushes AMD.  Their marketing is solid, while AMD's is about nonexistant (which may be why they have a better product).  It may well be that Apple is looking to boost the image of their OS by going with this chip, as well as bringing performance up to par (for better or worse) with that of PCs. 

All in all I think it's a good move on Apple's part.  I mean, who gives a rip what kind of hardware is running?  Users only care about what they see (which, in the case of Intel stuff, is the "Intel Inside" sticker).  Apple is selling the OS, not hardware.  They should probably go to an entirely PC architecture and be done with it.

[Jeff Kelly]

I deem it highly unlikely.

A switch to x86 would be very hard for Apple. It takes years to phase out old hardware. After switching from Motorola 68k to PPC it took years until every company had removed legacy 68k code, five years after that people were still using old 68k macs. Mac OS X has been released in 2000 and yet today more than 25% of the installed base are still running OS 9. It would take them and the software companies developing for the mac at least three to five years to completely switch from PPC to X86. In the mean time the companies would have to manufacture two versions of their software, one for PPC-Macs and one for x86-Macs. Two codebases, two boxes in the stores etc.

Many companies might not bother to do that. Such a switch will cause many software companies to abandon the Macintosh forever probably killing it in its entiirety

Emulation is out of the question. If you look at virtual PC for the mac it get's you the performance of a pentium 300 on a Powerbook 1,25. Nobody will put up with that.

Jeff

[squirrel]

Wow this is suprising to me. (I own 2 mac's and a AMD based box). Given the marketing effort behind the G5, the actual technical advantages and the differentiation factor (OSX 10.4.1 on x86 = why buy Apple?). I would be less suprised if they went AMD but Intel? Very suprising. We live in interesting times if this comes to be.

[HaemishM]

Should switching to an Intel core be that hard? OSX is essentially Linux with a pretty shell on top, and Linux already has x86 versions. I wouldn't think there'd be that much Apple specific stuff, but then, I wouldn't think smart motherfuckers would hold a death grip on their stupid insistence on proprietary hardware for so long.

[Special J]

Wow this is suprising to me. (I own 2 mac's and a AMD based box). Given the marketing effort behind the G5, the actual technical advantages and the differentiation factor (OSX 10.4.1 on x86 = why buy Apple?). I would be less suprised if they went AMD but Intel? Very suprising. We live in interesting times if this comes to be.

Unless those G5 boxes aren't making them a ton cash while OSX is. They may decide that the price of the hardware is stunting sales of the OS. Darwin would suggest they're at least looking at that option.  They could sell systems based on cheaper hardware or even spin it off completely and concentrate on their OS and gadgets.

I'm purely speculating here, and I've got nothing to back this up, so I'm probably completely full of shit.

[Soukyan]

Should switching to an Intel core be that hard? OSX is essentially Linux with a pretty shell on top, and Linux already has x86 versions. I wouldn't think there'd be that much Apple specific stuff, but then, I wouldn't think smart motherfuckers would hold a death grip on their stupid insistence on proprietary hardware for so long.

OS X is BSD Unix with a pretty shell on top (see: Darwin from my previous post).

And since Darwin is just that basis (the BSD Unix that they've customized), and since BSD supports the x86 architecture, it would not be difficult too "port" the OS X shell to that architecture as well.

As Special J suggests, if the OS is now their big money maker, they would be foolish not to open up to more architectures, but with recent sales figures up, it appears that the hardware may still be too much bread and butter to risk losing that business. If Apple were to make OS X available for x86 today, I would never bother with their hardware and its ridiculous prices again... and that would be a loss for Apple because I'd wager many other people would follow suit. At least all but the die-hard "I must have teh shiney wif Appel logo" people.

[Surlyboi]

I'll believe it when I see it.

That said, even if they do go X86, (and subsequently port all their binaries for proprietary software like FCP and all the iLife stuff from PPC to X86) you can bet your ass that OSX still won't run on your run-of-the-mill beige shitbox. There'll be some way to still tie it down to their hardware. Them and maybe Sony, as they're probably the only other company out there making boxes that his Steveness approves of.

[squirrel]

OS X is BSD Unix with a pretty shell on top (see: Darwin from my previous post).

And since Darwin is just that basis (the BSD Unix that they've customized), and since BSD supports the x86 architecture, it would not be difficult too "port" the OS X shell to that architecture as well.

As Special J suggests, if the OS is now their big money maker, they would be foolish not to open up to more architectures, but with recent sales figures up, it appears that the hardware may still be too much bread and butter to risk losing that business. If Apple were to make OS X available for x86 today, I would never bother with their hardware and its ridiculous prices again... and that would be a loss for Apple because I'd wager many other people would follow suit. At least all but the die-hard "I must have teh shiney wif Appel logo" people.

Agreed - i love OS X and don't mind Apple hardware per se,  but the day i can build a 64 bit AMD box and dual boot OS X/WinXP - well Apple will never see another red cent of mine for hardware. Given that i have a G5 and a powerbook i would think loss of the hardware revenue is not offset by my $140 for the OS. Now certainly it may be if they can get a large % of the market to switch to OSX but i think that's highly unlikely. Most casual users will just pirate the OS anyways. It's a good move for me but seems like a slippery slope for Apple.

[Jayce]

According to the Register article above, the reason is that it's economically inefficient for IBM to continue to R&D the PowerPC for the smallish Mac market, and they are showing a flagging interest in doing so. 

Apple could leverage the huge cashflow being thrown at x86 R&D, not to mention the competition between AMD and Intel driving that expenditure, or they could continue to pour cash into IBM just to maintain parity with the x86 world.

Makes sense, but you know there are a lot of Mac zealots out there who will be up in arms.

I keep checking the news, and it seems nearly everyone has said it will happen except Apple itself (even the WSJ).

edit: oh, btw, I read that Apple will probably keep driver software and other low-level OS stuff close to their chest to thwart people from beige-boxing OSX, but that it will probably only keep them away for so long.  It will probably be similar to XBox modding - a few hobbyists raise it to a high art, but it will never be mainstream.

[Yegolev]

I don't know where all of this is going, but I want to point out that Linux runs just fine on the recent enterprise-grade Power chips, namely the Power4 and Power5.  POWER, as an architecture, isn't the most backward-compatible, but it does well enough.  Porting may not be necessary but recompiling would probably be, when changing between various CPU types.

Another thing is that IBM has recently decided that their prefered flavor is Suse, moving from Redhat some months ago.  IBM will sell you either a Power or x86 architecture machine with SLES 9 installed/supported.  I don't think we have implemented a Power server with Linux, the main reason being that AIX is much, much better than Linux at everything, but we could if we wanted to.  If you believe IBM's marketing dept.

[squirrel]

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html

It's official. Actually the big benefit of this may be in the other direction, at least for me. Never mind running OSX on beige boxes, how about running WinXP on Apple hardware (in conjunction with OSX of course.) Hrmmmm...

The primary desire in my case is to play Win games on my OS X machine...

[Soukyan]

The rumor has been confirmed.

Apple is switching to Intel as their processor supplier. As far as I can tell, OS X will still only run on the proprietary hardware.

[Krakrok]

They're offering a compiler which compiles PPC and Intel support into the same binary. The comments over on /. quote Jobs as saying "PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70".

[Viin]

I didn't realize Darwin ran on x86 (but duh, why else would they even bother?) - I'll have to try to dual boot my home computer just for fun. (Not that there's anything exciting to do in Mac OSX if you don't do anything artistic).

[WindupAtheist]

No more Apple-apologists trying to tell me that their crappy 800mhz processor is actually teh pwn and worth a Pentium three times as fast?  End of an era.   

[Soukyan]

No more Apple-apologists trying to tell me that their crappy 800mhz processor is actually teh pwn and worth a Pentium three times as fast?  End of an era.   

Hehe. Pity Apple didn't go with AMD. I'm guessing the Intel marketing roadmap holds a big allure as well. They can really beef up their market share with "Intel Inside".

[Jayce]

No more Apple-apologists trying to tell me that their crappy 800mhz processor is actually teh pwn and worth a Pentium three times as fast?  End of an era.   

Hehe. Pity Apple didn't go with AMD. I'm guessing the Intel marketing roadmap holds a big allure as well. They can really beef up their market share with "Intel Inside".

That's another bonus.  The Apple marketing machine has a lot to do -- getting synergy cooking with Intel can only help. After all it worked for Dell :D

[Soukyan]

OT: The Dark Crystal was an awesome movie.

[AOFanboi]

The rumor mill has it that the real reason Apple can't get more powerful G5s from IBM is that it would make Macs as powerful as their AS/400 successor iSeries, cutting into IBM's sales.

IBM did something like that back when Intel made the 80386, where they didn't want to make a PC as powerful as their high-margin mini-computers, thus letting Compaq rule the 386 PC market.

[Jeff Kelly]

Bah, so i was wrong. Still I think that is a stupid move albeit a necessary one. Steve Jobs hinted as much during the keynote that IBM most probably will not continue R&D for the PPC because profits are too low, so sooner or later Apple would have been left with no processor to run their apps on  Still this might kill Apple.

The Adobe CEO can talk all night about supporting the new X86-Macs but when push comes to shove he will kill the Mac line to support Adobes bottom line. Already there are a shitload of Adobe apps which only run on Windows. Well let's see if they can pull it off again.

[Yegolev]

The rumor mill has it that the real reason Apple can't get more powerful G5s from IBM is that it would make Macs as powerful as their AS/400 successor iSeries, cutting into IBM's sales.

This logic escapes me.  Is there some beret-wearing jackass in a coffeeshop right now trying to decide on buying either a Mac or an AS/400?  IBM probably dropped them as part of some strategic realignment of its SBUs to more closely match its core values... meaning it was a semi-random management decision to part ways with a small market product.  Even if you assume Joe Artfuck would be in the market for an iSeries, just don't make the CPU as powerful.  But he isn't, because he doesn't need SMP and all of the other things the iSeries offers.  He wants something that runs Maya, PhotoShop and Paint Shop.

If I am off base about what people use Apple computers for, please correct me.

[squirrel]

If I am off base about what people use Apple computers for, please correct me.

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

This is obviously not a usual application but Apple has strong usage and market share in academic and scientific circles, particularly since OS X shipped and allowed *nix experts to leverage their knowledge.

[Ezdaar]

I think the main reason for the shift is IBM telling Apple that not only are they not going to focus their efforts on the stuff Apple wants (faster G5, laptop G5) but now that MS, Sony and Nintendo are using IBM processors Apple is a second class citizen. With Intel they get the Pentium M which I bet will be in the next round of Powerbooks and Mac Mini, etc.

What this means for the end user is not much. Though I imagine that Cedega(winex) will run on an x86 Apple so there might be hope for more games able to run on the Mac. Virtual PC will also run incredibly fast since there is no hardware emulation needed.

As for Mac usage I would say based on statistics I collect on our wireless network that approximately 20% of the wireless users have Mac laptops. I also notice many faculty have them, both in the arty stuff and in mathematics, physics and computer science. I prefer my PB since I get nice ease of use OSX stuff but can also run anything I want in an X window or open up a terminal and do any standard nix stuff.

[Viin]

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

This is obviously not a usual application but Apple has strong usage and market share in academic and scientific circles, particularly since OS X shipped and allowed *nix experts to leverage their knowledge.

Now thats just silly. Talk about a waste of money.

[Yegolev]

If I am off base about what people use Apple computers for, please correct me.

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

This is obviously not a usual application but Apple has strong usage and market share in academic and scientific circles, particularly since OS X shipped and allowed *nix experts to leverage their knowledge.

Apple blades?  Wacky.  I suppose that IBM wanted to kick that monkey in his nuts early.  "Bad monkey!  Massive parallel computing is not for you!"  Which would be strange since IBM makes the processors.  I still don't get it.  Maybe someone farted in a meeting.

[Rodent]

Is there some beret-wearing jackass in a coffeeshop right now trying to decide on buying either a Mac or an AS/400?

You know, not once have I seen a Mac user in a beret. I see Linuxheads in sandals all the time though.

[Yegolev]

You know, not once have I seen a Mac user in a beret. I see Linuxheads in sandals all the time though.

Both make crunchy noises when you roll a car over them.

[Rodent]

You know, not once have I seen a Mac user in a beret. I see Linuxheads in sandals all the time though.

Both make crunchy noises when you roll a car over them.

Hrmm, now that you mention it so does warcriminals and angry senior citizens... Coincidence?!

[squirrel]

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

This is obviously not a usual application but Apple has strong usage and market share in academic and scientific circles, particularly since OS X shipped and allowed *nix experts to leverage their knowledge.

Now thats just silly. Talk about a waste of money.

Er, no not really. In 2003 (year it was built) Vtech's supercomp was 3rd on the TOP500 list for performance (http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/) and cost 90% less to build than 1st and 2nd place winners and 40% less than the Dell NCSA computer that placed 4th. I have no idea how that compares today, but at the time VTechs solution was trumpeted as a 'cheap' way to go. ($5.2 Million for VTech vs. $200 Million for NEC Earth Simulator. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~yuenck/cs3220/1000)

So no, i don't think it's a waste by anyone's metrics.