On Aug 24, 2005, at 5:19 AM, Kevin O'Grady wrote:
Personally, I don't like the switch. It seems that it will dilute
the Macs we all love and have grown up with.
When you see all the recent Intel press releases you see what they
are going after. Intel is announcing extensive redesigns in the
direction opposite that of the P4. Everything is going to be
instruction and power efficient instead of clock speed friendly.
Furthermore scaling is going to increase efficiency rather than
reduce it. I guess we'll all have to wait and see.
I don't see anything to worry about. If Intel does what they say
they will then everyone wins. If they do not Apple can always stop
the transition. There's nothing to stop Steve from saying, "geez
folks, Intel didn't do what they said they would so we're going to
stick with PowerPC. I sure hope you didn't mind porting all your apps
to XCode and killing CodeWarrior."
My personal hope is that it is part of a larger plan to make OS X
platform independent. I don't mean so that it will run on any PC. I
mean so that it will run on any computer and the original idea of
obese binaries is used. That would give them maximum flexibility.
For example, there's no reason they couldn't just keep making PowerPC
and Intel computers as the chips were appropriate to the problem at
hand.
Probably the biggest benefit is not going to be speed, power
consumption, price or anything else anyone has mentioned. The one
thing that Apple has disliked about the PowerPC is that they can
never get enough new ones.
Its a little too early to be thinking about the prices of new ones
since software and hardware migration won't even begin on the desktop
until 2007. And, that is intimately dependent on Intel being on
schedule. Which, if history serves as any kind of a lesson, is
highly unlikely. In the laptop space Apple is already pretty price
competitive. I don't expect to see any advantage (pricewise) of
going Intel there.
--
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
Mac Canada info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/mac-can.shtml>
--> AOL users, remove "mailto:";
Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]>
To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-canada%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
