On 6/7/05, Bruce Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Um, actually, not really. Real-world benchmarks already show that the > dual G5's were able to keep pace with the faster Pentiums. > > The big reason Apple's doing this is to get the laptop line moving > forward with the Pentium M.
Disagree. It's not about PPC at all. It's about Jobs having a world-class OS and feeling that the time is right to take on MS, which is looking weak right now. Why? [1] It's a long time since WinXP. [2] The 32-bit to 64-bit transition will be hard: all new drivers and a new OS just as it gets going. [3] Itanium is dead and was a waste of time & money for Intel & MS both. (Meanwhile, HP and SGI are truly buggered now. They must be terrified. They should be.) [4] Longhorn is very very late and being severely cut back. Most of the cool new features have been either cut or are being backported to XP anyway. [5] The spyware and virus problems are huge and getting worse. MS' OS and Internet applications all need fundamental changes to fix this. MS' strength is backwards-compatibility; this is now also its biggest handicap. Intel is looking weak too, compared to AMD, but it's a big company with deep pockets. It can probably pull a rabbit out of its hat. Probably a dual-core 64-bit Pentium-M derived chip, perhaps a Dothan variant. Intel, for its size, is agile. So is Microsoft - for /its/ size, astoundingly so. Both could turn around very quickly if they needed to. It's not the best time for Apple to do this. It would have been better announced in 2003 and started by now, but Apple needed the critical mass behind OS X to grow larger. Announcing this too early would have been fatal. Now, with Tiger and features like Spotlight and complete Quartz hardware acceleration, it feels that it has a strong enough offering. It's a very risky move, I think. Apple is a hardware vendor. It needs to persuade people that its expensive Pentium boxes are worth paying more for than everyone else's cheap generic Pentium boxes. The only real difference will be the OS. This will be a hard sell. However, if it gets it right, it stands to take a significant share of the PC market, as opposed to growing its tiny few-percent niche a bit. If it loses, in a few years, Apple will sell audio players and nothing else. It could very easily happen. -- Liam Proven Home: http://welcome.to/liamsweb * Blog: http://lproven.livejournal.com AOL, Yahoo UK: liamproven * ICQ: 73187508 * MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> 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/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
