Editorial: The Day After WWDC Headache

Yeah, I understand the desire for every conference to feel like christmas, but the *only* thing on developers' minds over the next two years will be sorting out their apps for Intel, so I think its entirely right that got top billing. Any other announcement next to it would have been utterly lost, so even if they had any new hardware, they may as well wait to announce it. And the fact that they've just dumped IBM suggests that we really shouldn't expect any new Macintoshes for a year.

Okay, everybody seems to have their own opinion about this, so I wanted to share my two cents. It's too long to post here, but I discuss it on my blog. You can read it here: www.scott-o-rama.com/2005/06...s_blog_entry.html Leave a comment to let me know if you agree, disagree, or have another insight. Thanks!

Does this mean MACs will get the Windows viruses easier - especially those who will want to dual boot????????????

why is the pic for this post of the ITMS?

Why did it surprise you that Steve Jobs did not announce any new stuff during this year'ss WWDC? Anything new would of been overshadowed by the Intel switch story. It was just NOT a very good time to announce any new product line, etc.

I have to agree on the WWDC being less than stellar. I found myself checking the Apple site numerous times yesterday looking for the new or updated hardware. To no avail... The other disappointing thing has been the "I'm not buying another Apple product ever again because..." comments. I watched the Jobs keynote last night and I was pleasantly surprised by the candor. Admitting that PPC chips couldn't deliver a G5 Powerbook or a 3Ghz G5 PowerMac was a strong statement to why this move to Intel is necessary. I think it is quite premature to pass judgement on Apple for wanting to deliver a faster computer. Furthermore, I fully expect that once OSX kicks Windows' rear on similar hardware, there will be no doubting the superiority of OSX and there could be more switchers coming Apple's way. The knee-jerk reaction of "Now I dislike Apple" seems unfair.

The Mac will now actually have decent performance relative to the PC, and within the year. Complaining about not having any other announcements? You might as well complain about only getting an enormous sack of diamonds.

maybe this article sheds a little light onto what apple was looking forward to with the switch, a dual core processor with a unified cache that will not blow up in a notebook http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4922

One thing that I haven't heard in all the Intel noise is what IBM has been up to besides not making better G5s. They are all about their new baby, the Cell processor. The engineering effort has been huge on the Cell and IBM thinks it's the wave of the future, so there probably hasn't been much effort devoted to PPC development. So if you are Steve Jobs and you have a choice of switching CPUs to IBM's Cell or Intel, the choice seems easy. Cell is an unknown and Intel has the history and a long roadmap. Intel ends the megahertz debate when comparing hardware. It forces Microsoft to compete on merit, where it is weakest. It allows Adobe (and others) to not divide its developer time optimizing for two architectures. Intel is more than just CPUs. They make all the other guts as well, so Apple potentially saves R&D money by not having to build the entire system bus; Especially since Intel has been doing a lot of stuff with highly integrated systems. I think this is another reason why Intel was appealing versus the currently superior AMD offerings. AMD tends to leave the rest of the mainboard to other companies. The timing isn't the greatest. It would have been better if this had happened before anything G5 was ever mentioned, but it appears that IBM really dropped the ball on what they thought they could/wanted to do with the G5. We should be happy that Steve was smart enough to have a backup plan.

So does anyone have any rumors about when iTunes 4.9 possibly could be released? I've only got 28 days left on my iPodderX 3.0 trial. Hopefully it's before Macworld Boston.