June 6, 2005

Hell Froze Over!

Oh my...

The rumour about Apple switching to Intel is true.

I am truly amazed and stunned.

Half of me is dismayed, half of me says "I don't care what chip they use as long as I get OS X". As long as they don't have the rather nasty-sounding built-in DRM in the Pentium D I guess I don't really care too much.

Hell really did freeze over this evening. The PowerPC/x86 battle has been won once and for all. Now for the OS war?

Posted by Garry at June 6, 2005 9:27 PM
Comments

Your thoughts reflect my wifes when I told her this. I am a bit of a fence sitter when it comes to Apple versus Microsoft. There's plenty about our G4 I don't like to make up for the stuff that my PC at work can't do as well as it.

Her initial shock turned to "Oh well!" and life moved on.

At the end of the day you'll find it all boils down to money I suspect, no matter how many other excuses/reasons you hear.

Posted by: Gavin Kagan at June 7, 2005 9:53 AM

I still think it comes down to centrino.

Apple have always loved portability and the ipod has generated a huge amount of revenue for them. Laptops are now outselling desktops and the apple powerbooks/ibooks have some truly great features such as instant on from standby and keylighting. (I'd be happy to find a pc laptop that could RELIABLY come out of standby, never mind doing it instantly).

....but yet pc laptops have a killer feature. "centrino".. pentium-m + power saving features in wifi chipsets etc. Powerbook lasts 3.5hrs, toshiba m1 lasts 7 or 8 hours (depending how carefully I use it).

I've watched Apple struggle to try and get their laptops lasting longer and it's just not happening for them. They *need* centrino.

Then there's the tablet story. We're not interested in tablets, says Jobs but I think it's closer to the mark to say they simply haven't had the technology easily at hand. Swap to x86 and a world of chipsets becomes available to them to get a new laptop range with touch sensitive/drawing capability out there (I assume he'll call them something different to "tablet" to avoid a u-turn ;-).

Desktop power? dual-core was coming to powerpc anyway, so the cheaply available and plentiful supply of x86 is just a nice by-product for Apple.

For the real reasons that Apple is willing to endure the pain of an architecture swap, look not to your desktops, but to your laptops ;-)

Posted by: Keith at June 9, 2005 2:32 PM

Techies! Sheesh!

....Get'em started on a rant and..... :))))

Posted by: Carla at June 11, 2005 10:20 PM