Editorial: Apple on Intel

I feel your pain. I'm on an iMac G4 that is not as expandable as I thought it would be - my fault. But the truth of the matter is that all computer systems change fast anyway, by 2007 the Wintel machines bought yesterday may be obsolete too, so I don't think anyone should kick themselves too hard. For me the question has always been, does what you bought still do what it did when you bought it? Great, then you made a good investment cause you got to use it while the iron was hot so to speak. Want to be the first with an Intel Mac? Be my guest! If mine busts a gut or lightning strikes literally, I may be in line next to you, or I may be buying your old system for a song at your garage sale and loving it. Its easy to psyche yourself into thinking that you MUST have the latest thing. Right now. So enjoy what you've got. Its a great machine and still will be with the new chip. As for other systems' users who think they can tag along then on the Mac OS, I say: LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY!!!! The pun that had to be made, by Peter Pun of The Peter Files The Blog Where Everypun Knows Your Name

I feel your pain. I'm on an iMac G4 that is not as expandable as I thought it would be - my fault. But the truth of the matter is that all computer systems change fast anyway, by 2007 the Wintel machines bought yesterday may be obsolete too, so I don't think anyone should kick themselves too hard. For me the question has always been, does what you bought still do what it did when you bought it? Great, then you made a good investment cause you got to use it while the iron was hot so to speak. Want to be the first with an Intel Mac? Be my guest! If mine busts a gut or lightning strikes literally, I may be in line next to you, or I may be buying your old system for a song at your garage sale and loving it. Its easy to psyche yourself into thinking that you MUST have the latest thing. Right now. So enjoy what you've got. Its a great machine and still will be with the new chip. As for other systems' users who think they can tag along then on the Mac OS, I say: LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY!!!! The pun that had to be made, by Peter Pun of The Peter Files The Blog Where Everypun Knows Your Name

Mac's share of the overall market has gone from 10% to 5% to something between 2 and 3%. To anyone who's even vaguely objective this is called a death spiral. This decision has NOTHING to do with what Steve Jobs wants to do, it's about the ONLY alternative he has left, he's completely out of leverage. IBM was simply ignoring what Apple wanted or needed, the total business they represented has become utterly irrelevant to their bottom line and even with the small amount of R&D they were still devoting exclsively to the Mac PPC, it was probably unprofitable. What IBM has been telling Steve for years now is "Don't go away mad, just go away..." Why not move to the BEST xx86 technology? We all know that's at AMD...Simple: For a Mac to BE a Mac you need a closed hardware platform. They have already confirmed, OS X will ONLY run on Apple hardware. All of you with fanatsies that Intel was going to produce PPC chips or Apple was going to utilize some form of Itanium simply betray your complete lack of understanding of hardware. The Mac stays a closed system based on the mb chipset, NOT anything particularly proprietary about the cpu. Apple no longer consumes enough cpus to justify ANYONE making a proprietary processor for them...PERIOD. In case you haven't noticed, AMD doesn't make supporting chipsets, in fact that has always been one of their major weaknesses (with computer partners like VIA, you don't NEED enemies....lol). AMD can't deliver the closed integrated solution Steve requires. Steve is going to Intel because he has nowhere else left to go... and the reality is that he has even LESS leverage going into this relationship than he had when he partnered with IBM... that's what happens when you're in a death spiral. Intel will smile and say all the right things, why say no to extra business ? Someone earlier suggested Intel will let Apple have their "latest & greatest" as a boutique supplier... yeah right: You have 2 customers, both use your chips exclusively, but one has been your customer for over a decade and, btw, buys over 50x as many of your chips...now you're gonna piss off that customer by giving an exclusive on your newest and best products to the smaller customer ? When, and it's not if, it IS when, Intel starts treating Steve the way IBM has, then the 'genius' will be back explaining why he's had a revelation that what makes the Mac "insanely great" is not in the hardware at all...he's NEVER wanted to be 'just' an OS company. Kinda hard to sell the myth of superiority without ANY hardware you can 'style'...but Steve is running out of options and ways to spin it...that's what happens when you've lost all leverage.

Did anyone here watch the Keynote? Steve clearly said Apple will NOT be shipping any Intel based Mac's until next year at this time. He said they will be releasing new PowerPC based products in the future. Until June 2006 there is nothing to see here, move along. (unless you are a developer)

Well lets see before the switch from 68k to Power PC Apple had 10% marketshare. They lost 5%.After the OS 9 to OS X they had 3% today the have 2.4%. It seems to me that by 2007 it will be a moot point because the only thing Apple will be selling is iPods. I've been an Apple user from 1978 to today I have 4 Macs and 3 Wintel boxes I was going to buy another Mac this week but not now. Not anymore. I the this is wrong and I will not buy any more Macs.

I personally would love to see OSX run on PC's, that would likely drop all the excuses for not 'switching', but I doubt it will happen - Jobs tried it years ago and nobody was interested, I'd be surprised if he put his neck on the line again after being shunned once already (yes, I know we are in a different era altogether now)

Aren't we just going to call every Apple computer an i(ntel)Mac now? I like that better than "Mactel" or "Macintel" or "Aptel" or "MacinWintosh-el" or "Apintosh" or "Steve's new project" or...

Does this mean we will have to apologize for these ads? http://web.archive.org/web/19980429140407/http://www.apple.com/ (Thanks to the Wayback Machine)

Just note that we now live in a world where MX is running XBox on a Mac G5 and Steve Jobs is demoing a G5 with a Pentium chip ... we are apes and some dude just landed in a spacey-ship ... it will never be quite the same anymore - I'm just not sure of we're the apes or George Taylor.

I made a little gif animation thingy following the news from the keynote: http://mat.rubberfeet.org/stuff/appleintel.gif