Controversy
I witnessed a historic Keynote speech by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs today - he announced that Apple is planning to migrate it's computers from a PowerPC processor to an Intel x86 processor. And I have mixed feelings. It's quite a controversial move at the moment... it's kinda like when Yoda looked at little Anakin in Star Wars: Episode 1 and says something like "Clouded this young boy's future is".
Student Sunday was wicked. I've met and been taught things by people who write awesome books on programming - I'm meeting all the famous people in the Mac programming industry... it's all going great!
Learning lots of stuff too! And the speakers are really funny too! Pictures are coming, don't worry.
Student Sunday was wicked. I've met and been taught things by people who write awesome books on programming - I'm meeting all the famous people in the Mac programming industry... it's all going great!
Learning lots of stuff too! And the speakers are really funny too! Pictures are coming, don't worry.
posted by Kiel at 3:53 pm
5 Comments:
Personally, I like the Intel switch. As far as I can tell, there won't be a negative effect on the Mac Experience, nor will Apple be surrendering any of it's essential "apple-ness", and as a bonus, we don't get the announcements of, "yes, well, *cough* we WERE going to do this, but the processors are too hot/too slow/in short supply, so you'll have to wait a couple of weeks/months/years."
Plus if Microsoft lets people install Windows on macs, I think we'll see the number of switchers increase phenomenally.
Granted, it's not the ideal situation we'd all hope for, but it seems to be the best option for Apple right now.
It's not really a big deal. Apple will keep their custom mainboard with their custom ICs but swap the PowerPC chip for an Intel chip. Apple aren't adopting a PC hardware architecture. So Windows won't be able to be installed on these Macs.
I see what you're saying, and I never figured Apple's hardware would be completely the same as any old windows pc, it's just that I saw a reference to a news.com article saying this:
"After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
Yep, Phil Schiller stated in that interview that Apple would not allow Mac OS X to run on common PC hardware, and that Apple wouldn't stop people from 'modding' Windows to work on Macs. I don't have a problem with this. Ma and Pa aren't going to mod their Macs just to run Windows. The local geek may, but that won't hurt Apple's bottom line.
The only thing Apple needs to do is make sure that a PC weenie can't hack Mac OS X to run on Dell boxes or the bullshit rigs they get made up. Apple could get Intel to make slightly modified Pentiums or whatever.
As far as I can tell, all Apple is doing are replacing the CPU with Intel processors on the motherboard - but the Developer Transition Kits here have BIOSes and other PC features (probably because they're transition kits as opposed to a commercial Intel based mac). Also, none of the engineers are able to comment on how different a PC is going to be to a Mac, unfortunately ;-) Damn NDAs.
Only time will tell, and we'll have to trust that Apple are thinking this and will make sure that Mac OS X runs only on Intel Macs.
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