Re: [MLUG] Mac moving to Intel

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/6/05, Pottinger, Hardy J. <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > Or, maybe he wants to go after the high end with ia64.  Who knows?
> 
> I'm certainly no expert on these matters, but my gut tells me that if he
> wanted that market, given Apple's "personality", he would have gone with
> AMD, as they appear to be better positioned with the geeks, and their
> dual-core stuff is getting to market faster.

That makes sense, but you do have to realize that they claim it will
take over 2 years to transition everything.  So AMD will get dual-core
chips out first, but the difference in timing might not mean much by
next year, when the first Intel Macs are likely to ship.

Now, a more interesting point is that once Apple has gone x86 based,
they presumably are in a much better position to use (or threaten to
use) AMD chips than they are now.  And the only things I have read
suggest pretty heavily that Intel is going to give Apple a truly
phenomenal pricing/engineering package for making the switch.  Apple
has already ported Mac OS X to Intel for in house evaluation, and so I
think they know exactly what they need to be different for this
combination to be truly fast.
 
> If he's signing with Intel, and he says its because they can help him
> better meet demand, it doesn't take too much imagination to see where
> this is probably going. If not now, soon. And why not now?

Not now because I suspect he wants to hit the market with something
nobody else has, rather than just another clone.  I suspect what we
will see out of this is processor/chipset/mobo combination that will
vastly outperform what white box makers will be able to do, but that
will take a year.

And this is why I'm willing to bet you won't immediately be able to
buy Mac OS X for your Dell any time soon.  Apple wants a
high-performance and high-availability processor, but they *don't*
want to be seen as being just another PC maker.
 
So having said all that, I predict this switch will be a complete
fiasco.  It is very difficult for me to foresee this working, not
because of technical issues, but because of the Osbourne Effect.  You
see what Jobs just did?  HE JUST END-OF-LIFED ALL OF HIS CURRENT
HARDWARE OFFERINGS, and he did it a year ahead of having any
replacement.  The only way he'll be able to sell this stuff in the
interim is to make completely sure that everybody understands:

1) No, you will not be able to run OS X on that Dell notebook
2) Yes, all your software will be ported/translated automagically to
the Intel platform
3) Yes, our new boxes will be stupendously fast
4) Yes, our prices are going down 20% immediately...but no further.

Man, what an exotic move...

jking

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