It will be a huge blow to Apple. My prediction is that the Mac sales are going to dive into downward spiral for the next two years as developers grow extremely hesitant of spending their limited engineering dollars on yet another transition.

Wintel platform has been very stable in terms of development, and many developers will migrate to Wintel platform where they know they won't be pushed around by an arrogant and ego-centric company with nothing but delusional so called "vision" authored by one man. After all, why should any developers have to put up with multiple transitions while they can just develop for Wintel platform where they can guarantee long product longevity and platform stability?

The best thing we can do is to abandon the Mac and switch to Windows. Longhorn looks very promising, and OS X will be on Intel, so there is no reason to stick with Apple hardware.

Here is what happened: Intel showed Apple their "roadmap" which is just a nice way of saying "we are 'thinking' about doing these things, and we 'guess' we can make it happen." IBM has done that, made a bunch of money off Apple's contract without meeting their goal, and Intel saw it. Intel's plan is to slowly kill Apple by intentionally delaying chip manufacturing cycle while supplying chips for other PC vendors. Apple doesn't realize that no chip vendors are on their side because Apple's 3 million units per year sales just isn't significant enough to matter at all.

It's good to have all options and not to restrict oneself to a single provider. I don't care wether I am working on an Intel or an IBM processor – as long as it's under Mac OS X. And also architectures like cell will more easily be integrated. I think computing will be more processor independent than it is now.

I'm ordering today. yeah!

> Intel's plan is to slowly kill Apple by intentionally delaying chip manufacturing cycle while supplying chips for other PC vendors.

I think the whole point is that Apple will have access to the exact SAME chips as the "other PC vendors." While I have concerns about all this, your "plan" is not one of them...

so glad I switched (to PC) years ago

this is SO depressing

And in 2 years from now Apple can still go for the PPC if it turns out the better or stay dual platform.

Man there are dower people here.

Bottom line: No other chip maker can support the volume, the special needs, and the engineering that Apple uses. The deals with IBM and Moto were simply attempts to match what Intel could give us without going to, what at the time were lesser processors. But it's no longer viable. With IBM jerking off to console developers, and Moto hooked to Cell Phones, neither company could afford to make the amount of chips Apple needed, with the development toward the future.

I think if Apple couldn't have dealt with Intel, we'd still be OK - we're growing strong still. But The nice thing about the Apple BoD is that they don't just consider what's happy for the stock now - but what's going to be good 5 years down the road. With IBM, could we say "Yes, we're sure we'll be comfortable 5 years from now?" h*** they couldn't meet a rather basic guideline given a whole extra year.

Intel has what Apple wants and needs. Apple gets secure development. And IBM isn't going to lose here - they're still going to be plenty of PPC chips to be made. But I think Apple's making the best choice.

Whether it boots Windows is not important - I for one have no intention of dual booting. Now if WINE is going to be developed, I'll run Windows programs. But I'm not shoving money in Gates' pocket just because I can. I don't have programs - games or else wise - that needs it!

Is there fear? Yeah. Is there a little annoyance at having to choke back years of venom? Yeah.

But watch out Windows - You can't hide behind "Apple is slower!" anymore, the numbers are the same. And you can't hide behind crappy hardware, because we're going to develop great machines with the same hardware. And If you can't innovate - if you give us more breathing room... well guess what?

EVOLUTION HAPPENS.

Personally, I think this transition is going to be much more like the 68k-PPC translation of the mid 90's. It was pretty unintrusive for the end user. SOme speed issues cropped up, but even a 12 year old me understood that there were two types of programs, use the PPC one. But we don't need to even worry: That's Rosetta's job.

My brother, who is attending WWDC, I bet has his programs ported all ready.

I am excited as all h***. Am I going to buy a new Mac... I'm not sure. Maybe. But honestly, I don't feel scared. I'm just kind of hoping the roadmap gets sped up and maybe there'll be a new system sooner. But that's probably a pipe dream and I'll likely be buying a PPC mac. And I'm not going to be left in any lurch. For any of the developers I'm using, from my brother on down, I trust there'll be both little buttons clicked.

BTW, the first person to get a program that removes a fat binary (removes the Intel on PPC and PPC on Intel) will make a killing, or at least grow lot of good will.

This is extremely similar to the transition from 68k to PowerPC: fat binaries, transparent emulation for old programs (Rosetta)... In the 68k to PowerPC transition 68k machines were very quickly relegated to the rank of unwanted relics (about a year). Of course this is going to hurt sales big time.

Once the Intel machines are released, the problem Apple will face is how to justify the price premium. When people see a 3.6GHz Dell on sale for $500, they might have trouble understanding why Apple charges twice as much for theirs. And of course this will make the performance penalty caused by the stupid Mach microkernel even more painfully obvious... Hopefully this will convince the powers that be to ditch this ridiculous choice once and for all.

Well... DUHHHH!

Maybe they want to sacrifice short term sales for long term viability.

Then again, if OSX works so well on Intel... why don't they just release it for PCs already on the market to capitalize?

What a mess...

LordJohn: Well, I think because there was a sigifigiant diffrence between 68k and PPC. THere's less now. I don't know bout kernels, that's never been my bag. But end-to-end, I trust Apple. They've never steard me wrong. Both the previous transitioned led us to better systems.

Now prices you have a point on. Hopefully, people will understand, using a car analogy, that though both a Yugo and a Ferarri are four-wheeled transportation devices with internal combustion engines, one costs more because it has other features that make it more worth money. For example, an Audi A4 has the same basic suspention system as a VW Passat. But other parts are upgraded to make the A4 a better vehicle.

The Mac runs the same engine - but the internal parts work better, are of higher quality, and the OS is consiterably better.

Lots of people buy based on price. But lots of people buy on quality - and won't take cheap. Apple has big protential here.

Apple's got BILLIONS in the bank. Sitting there. That's the best reason do to this now - with iPod sales high, with billions in the bank.. Apple can weather a two-year storm.

Man, I've rarely seen a guy who can look at the fact that clearly and then come up with the completely wrong analysis. Intel doesn't want to put any computer maker out of business. Especially anyone who they can sell chips to. They courted Apple for a reason, they like to make money, and Apple pays good money for it's processors.

I think Intel tooks notice when Apple started selling the Mac Mini. That little machine has been selling like hotcakes. Kind of like the iPod. Intel showed off a sample of an Intel based Mac Mini clone for one reason, to tell Apple that they wanted to do business with them.

All I can say is, if james9490 is an investment banker, he must be broke by now with his kind of analysis.!

* Will this help the mac as a gaming platform, esp w/openGL games fine-tuned for x86?

* Will macs allow dual-booting w/other OS's?

* Will OS X be able to run in virtualized environments on non-mac PCs? (How might apple stop this?)

* Will OS X work great w/WINE?

* Might OS X use qemu/bochs on PPC to run OS X x86 binaries? (kind of a reverse Rosetta?)

* How can OS X x86 ("OS X86"? "Mactel"?) machines leverage Windows DLLs? (Linux does this a lot.)

W

W

That's whats going to make this year so freak'n interesting!!

There's an old chinese curse... "May you live in interesting times". Well guess what peeps - things just got a hellova lot more interesting. Stop fearing, and start embracing... we're on a ride!

/this post brought to you by the State of Intoxication.

I'm really curious as to how Apple is going to introduce speed bumped G5 PowerMacs and iMacs in the interim and how they'll try to sell and promote them. Apple's current iMac page talks about the 'Future Proof G5 processor'...

The very high end ....ala VA Tech and their machine...will probably remain ppc whether Apple or IBM provides the machines/blades. That particular "environment" has a short life cycle - it has already been retooled once - so the move to intel on the consumer end won't impact this at all. It will probably be switched out several more times by the time intel comes to Apple.

...plus the VA Tech machine has little relation to what we know as out-of-the-box Apple and OS X.

apple cannot afford to use their billions to 'weather the storm'...if it comes out apple didn't make a profit, then the industry will assume apple is dying...if apple is dying, then its too risk to purchase a mac.

They have no choice but to make profits the whole time.

a couple things that may work in their favor....despite the punditry here, you should be rushing out to get any discounted powerpc machines that might be out there.

those are the 100% support right now, no waiting machines, that also happen to be darn fast...sure someday they will seem slow by that days standards, but that is always true.

you say it won't last as long....well duh, a machine bought in 2005 lasts about two years less than one in 2007, but you also owned it two years longer.

HP servers are moving from pa-risc to itanium...they've known this for years, and the itaniums have been out for years too....this year, HP was hoping to sell more itaniums than pa-risc in their server market...their goal was 50%...they missed that goal...

now why is it the hp server buyers want pa-risc so much,d on't they know its outdated and won't last as long? WHAT THEY KNOW is its the tried and true tech...they will switch when they have too, when they are dragged kicking and screaming to switch.

Feel very safe buying the high end powerpc powermac's...its a very fast machine, its rock solid stable, it has 100% support of all software, and switch to intel, someday when you have too, and all the bugs are worked out.

the idea that you don't have a machine to buy is insane...if appple had released 100% intel machines today...only then would you not have a machine to buy, and I would have to recommmend you wait till the bugs were worked out.

I also made the transition from 68000 to PPC and if I remeber correctly the 68k users were left in the dust pretty quickly. After two years no new applications would come out for 68k, mainly because of the poor performance. I fear that this will be the same for the current PPC systems. So I don'tt expect new PPC software to be available beyond three-four years from now. my last mac was a 7600 from 1995, upgraded with G3 card, ATI graphics and Adaptec USB/Firewire card. Due to Xpostfacto it even ran 10.3. until January this year when I thought it would be a good time to buy a new IMac. I guess that Imac will not last as long as my 7600. It will be interesting to see how long Apple will support PPC. 10.5. will be running on PPC I guess, but what about the next version ?

For now I will not recommend for anybody to buy a Mac if they don't have to and wait for two years from now. In case you need some, buy one ( or more ) now and wait through the transition period, but I wouldn't be willing to be one of the first buyers of MacTel hardware.

greetings

Thomas

You want me to upgrade. Well, solve some of these problems first. I wanna wanna list:

1. no hard disk or moving parts. No fans. 2. Smaller than mac mini. 3. 64 bit and multiple core processor. 4. Graphics that match a console box.

Macs moving to Intel is an excellent decision. Now the Apple OS will work on BOTH of the major chips on the market. How is this bad?

I'm sure M$ thinks this sucks because Mac OS will be competing head to head on the same machines as their insecure, out of date, crash prone Windows.

Yes, all computers become obsolete and software advances to where you need to buy a new machine to get the latest and greatest - same as it ever was...so what? This is not the "Empire Strikes Back" it's "Return of the Jedi" and truly the end of an evil monoculture. So don't worry - be happy!

Will the Intel version of OSX run on any ol' PC? I don't recall hearing that specific question answered by Apple. The Intel box used during the Keynote may have "Apple spec" hardware. But if so, as some have mentioned, why not sell the software now?

Could we see Intel upgrade cards for the G5 2.7?

As a stock holder I am concerned about the short term impact. The iPod can not sustain Apple during this tranistion.

I wonder what the "vision" is for OSX and what Apple would like to do with it that IBM couldn't offer.

It would seem that the game consoles would be more demanding than a computer and with the XBOX switching to G5s it looked like the roadmap from IBM was the way to go for powerful computing.



What are the

Processors are irrelevant. Its the user experience. Apple has, with Rosetta, taken the pain out of any real issue.

Game

my last mac was a 7600 from 1995, upgraded with G3 card, ATI graphics and Adaptec USB/Firewire card. Due to Xpostfacto it even ran 10.3. until January this year when I thought it would be a good time to buy a new IMac.

Don't know how to tell you this, but Apple doesn't care about you, doesn't like you, and really could care less if you were a customer. Actually, they probably would be hard-pressed to call you a 'customer' since you've only bought two macs in 10 years. Using your 7600 for 9 years doesn't help Apple at all. Basically they only care about those who update every couple of years, or buy multiple computers. [BTW, they don't care for me either, since my last desktop was a G3/266 (ha! newer then yours!) that kinda ran 10.3, until I just bought a G5 2.3 tower (ha! wasted more money then you! At least Apple won't be updating those for a couple of years!). Of course, I would've updated sooner and more often if their prices weren't so ridiculous. As it is, my new tower will have to last me 5 years to get my money out of it (including upgrades to make it usable). If they made cheap $1000 towers, I'd be buying a lot more.]

My comments with all of this, which includes some people's perceptions on this is:

1) I would be more appreciative if Apple could spend some time actually fixing their OS rather then spending it on a transition. Tiger is so full of problems, inconsistencies, user interface issues, etc. Its a mess. With each realease of OS X, Apple is more and more making it like Windows (where nothing is consistent or makes sense). And the irritating part is they take stuff out that makes sense and works, rather than just adding (for example, no more toolbar in system preferences, replaced with, of all stupid things, spotlight, so now I have to hunt or type to find my often used panes - stupid!)

2. Does anyone know if Intel will be making the motherboards for Apple, or are they still going to be using Apple's incompetent hardware team to build the innards. It'd be nice if Apple could produce a computer that didn't create 20 pages of problem reports on Macintouch.

3. This doesn't help at all get better graphic card support in OS X. Drivers are written to the OS and the video card, not so much to the processor or mobo. ATI would still have to write drivers for OS X, and they've shown no desire to do that outside of a couple of cards.

4. Same goes with any/all peripherals, printers, etc.

5. It doesn't somehow magically get Wintel software to work on the Mac (until some magical red box is announced). Quicken will still suck compared to its windows brother. And unless its a true VPC-type emulator, then not all apps will run anyway (just like Rosetta, I doubt that a Red Box would magically get IE working, or some VPN clients, etc).

6. Rosetta is not as capable as the 680x0->PPC emulator in OS 7/8/9. There are lists of incompatibilities in this emulator, which could cause a large number of apps to fail even for minor issues.

7. Macs will still be overpriced and underpowered. And more about design then functionality (i.e. don't expect accessible USB or firewire ports, ability to have more than one optical drive, or two internal HDs, or changable video cards in anything but the towers.

I've been trying to think of what sorts of programs would need extra work (beyond just a recompile). The things I am finding are actually pretty encouraging:

1. If you wrote hand-tweaked code that doesn't use the system APIs, you will need to rewrite it. Duh! Does anyone really think that this wouldn't have happened if Apple had moved to IBM's Cell processors? (Of course, the endian issue will raise its ugly head if you skipped the APIs and wrote data to the network, which wouldn't be the case with Cell because Cell is Big Endian as well. As for writing to files: this is only a problem if the data files written without protection on PowerPC and using multibyte data will be transferred to Intel and read there without protection -- cache files shouldn't cause issues. If your files won't be transferred, or if you make your code always read Big Endian from now on, or if you have an indicator -- a BOM -- in your files, you'll be fine.)

2. If you use Altivec, you will need to rewrite that as well. It's doubtful whether IBM would be willing to bolt Altivec onto Cell, so the odds are you would have to do this anyway, sooner or later. Also, Apple has already started giving out instructions on how to do this; it's not quite "find and replace" but it's not "painfully rework your code by hand for months" either.

3. If you have unprotected division by a variable (which is bad coding practice) then you need to add protection, because of the possibility of dividing by zero, which stops x86 but not PowerPC. So bad code won't work. Gee, how sad!

4. Some parts of the API, in addition to returning a status code, return data. If a call fails on PowerPC, they return blank data, but garbage on x86. So if you ignored the status code and processed the data anyway -- bad code again -- your program will fail. Boo hoo.

5. Open Firmware won't be there any more, so you can no longer get a complete device tree. This one is, to me, a bit more serious. They're saying "you can get a partial tree using other calls" which doesn't sound helpful. This is where they need a new part on the API. I wouldn't be surprized if one shows up to do exactly that.

I'd be willing to bet that Apple is working, even as we speak, on getting into Wine, the way they have with X11 and khtml. If they already have the licensing issues worked out, then they are probably throwing some engineers at it, to help close the holes in it. Given that we know Steve Jobs wants to take down Bill Gates, and that Apple is moving to Intel, and that, if they can hammer out a license agreement, they get Wine for free, it's pretty much a given. (And even if they don't do it officially, I'd be willing to bet that some developer will get it running within a few months.)

Think of the potential for advertisements: "now you can run most of your Windows software, but not have any of those pesky viruses, spyware, or security holes." If nothing else -- if Apple goes bankrupt just as Wine for the Intel Macs come out -- we're going to see that, just because it will get up Bill Gates' nose. I, for one, can't wait.

As for it preventing people from developing for Mac OS X natively, I bet it will to a certain extent, but that, too, may pass. It depends on how many people buy Intel Macs. If Apple can get the right sorts of people to switch, or can just get a lot of people to switch, then they're home free. We will never see Piece Of Garbage Shareware Program Written By A 14-Year-Old In His Spare Time In 1998 And Not Updated Since Then #76543 get ported, but more serious programmers will be likely to start considering switching, because nobody hates viruses and security holes more than a computer geek, and they'll want to program for what they use.

Maybe it's a good time to buy a G5 now. Currently you will be better off with a PPC processor, because the code of our apps will run natively on the PPC, but fot Intel chips it partly has to be converted through rosetta, which generates G3 code, which might lead to performance loss. I think all the G5 owners will be fine for the next 5 years.

regards Andy

The iPod has become the most successful digital music player because of its hardware design and software design. An iPod runs on Windows and Mac computers. It also has grabbed the attention of the hard working middle class and upper class. It is sold at competitive prices and there is an iPod for everyone. The new generation of Macintosh will be as successful as the iPod because of hardware and software design. You'll be able to run Mac OS X on an intel or PPC Mac. The prices will be competitive and your applications will run seamlessly. Normal users are already considering Mac OS X as a viable option to replace their Windows PC. Plus your computer is designed rather than built as an added incentive. Apple is the leader of the pack in digital music and soon in the pc market. Go Apple!

I agree with you, Andy. I know that a PPC app is *supposed* to run on the Intel Mac if it was written to the G3; but much was written to the G4 & G5, and the promises there seem hazier. I may buy a new PPC Mac in 2006, but I won't be be buying any software I don't absolutely need until they start shipping dual-platform versions.

Pity the poor Mac developers; they have yet another (financial if not technical) storm to weather.