On Jan 4, 2006, at 6:03 PM, Peter da Silva wrote:
They should have waited for the MPC8641D. Dual G4 core, and dual 733 MHz DDR memory busses. That would make a killer powerbook even if it wasn't any faster in MHz.
Except Moto can't get the damned thing out the door in quantity at a reasonable price, and would really rather make other chips anyway.
Geez, it's not like the people running Apple are blind to the things we see. Steve Jobs is neither stupid or capricious (on this scale anyway). There's a meme out there that "Steve Jobs threw a hissy fit and decided to switch Apple to Intel chips", and amazingly enough, people are *buying* this bull.
He's not that stupid; and (the Enrons, Global Crossings, and Tycos of the world aside) publicly traded companies don't operate that way. If *I* can see that switching processors (and all the forced change that goes along with it in the developer and customer world) is a huge gamble for Apple, I'm reasonably certain that Steve Jobs and the Apple BOD can, as well. This wasn't anything done lightly or on the spur of the moment.
We've been getting PC laptops that are *killing* Macs in price, performance, weight and power consumption for a year now. *This* is why the change to Intel.
Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market, obscenely profitable (compared to desktops), and have been a major part of Apple's lineup since the PB100, and all we've gotten over the last year or more are a soupcon more speed and a smidgen more resolution.
Had Apple been able to count on Moto's dual core chips or others from IBM, they wouldn't have undertaken this sea change in their design. At the time this decision was made Apple was riding pretty high, more and more people were saying good things about Apple, Windows was having severe, and widely advertised security issues, and the potential was there to go higher, so changing everything over ran the risk of disrupting that momentum.
But Motorola would rather make and sell cellphones, and IBM would rather make CPUs for game consoles and high end servers. At least Intel is focused on the kind of chips and goals Apple needs.
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