| |
Hollywood Orders: Apple Wed Intel
by flynn23 at 12:17 am EDT, Jun 6, 2005 |
If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.
If this is indeed true, then the world will be turned upside down on Monday. Consider the plausible chain of events that would unfold if Apple does indeed move to Intel AND Transitive's emulator indeed works as advertised. o It will immediately disrupt the entire PC industry. Since no OS will be married to any hardware platform, all bets are off. The entire industry will be reorganized based upon market demographics, not price or distribution. Dell will still exist, but it may or may not be the market leader depending on what consumers of PCs truly want: affordability or well integrated design. o Microsoft's dominance will be in serious jeopardy. With OS/hardware weddings being moot, then the value proposition for Wintel based systems will be seriously undermined. Right now its main value is price/performance. That ceases if Apple can produce an Intel based system, with its typical tightly integrated design, and top notch OS. Microsoft will be left forced to compete on features and functionality, a battle that it almost always loses in the end. o Apple will be absolutely positioned to enter the content on demand market, with video at the fore front. They already are positioned well, but using an Intel based system could enable the DRM that the content industries are requiring. Yes, Microsoft has been a big champion of DRM, but Apple has the mind share of the marketplace right now. WMP does not. If this does happen, then Apple will surely enter this space faster than MS can, and it will put the two companies squarely against each other as they battle it out on the content industry front. Apple is clearly better armed than MS in this regard. o If all of that comes to pass, Apple will be the dominant player, and will control not only hardware, OS, major applications, but also the content and consumer marketplaces. In one fell swoop, they will have united all of those subchannels and brought convergence to reality. Which, added all together, makes me think that this is not possible. That would be such a radical shift and have such deep and paradigm shifting consequences that it seems nearly impossible. |
| |
RE: Hollywood Orders: Apple Wed Intel
by Decius at 2:48 pm EDT, Jun 6, 2005 |
flynn23 wrote: If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.
If this is indeed true, then the world will be turned upside down on Monday.
Well, it appears half true. Apple is making an Intel powered mac. The QuickTransit Tangent seems a figment of this reporter's imaginination though... at least without anything to substaniate it. o Since no OS will be married to any hardware platform, all bets are off.
I think this decision is a lot less important then most people are making it out to be. Even if I had QuickTransit it doesn't mean my commodity PC will instantly run OSX. OSX depends on lots of particular hardware being present. If I'm going to make computers that have all the right hardware, along with a QuickTransit chip... Well why don't I just go ahead and do that right now with a PowerPC chip? I think there is some sort of legal reason why people don't make cheap OSX compatible computers, and I don't think its likely to change. Even if Apple goes to Intel procs in its computers this does not mean I'll be able to run OSX on non-apple hardware. From a consumer perspective, nothing has changed. |
|
| | |
RE: Hollywood Orders: Apple Wed Intel
by flynn23 at 2:58 pm EDT, Jun 6, 2005 |
Decius wrote: flynn23 wrote: If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.
If this is indeed true, then the world will be turned upside down on Monday.
Well, it appears half true. Apple is making an Intel powered mac. The QuickTransit Tangent seems a figment of this reporter's imaginination though... at least without anything to substaniate it. Dunno. There have been a lot of articles that mention the Transitive option and the fact that Apple is a licensee of the product. I haven't been able to find a transcript or anything on the keynote yet. It should've ended about 45 minutes ago. o Since no OS will be married to any hardware platform, all bets are off.
I think this decision is a lot less important then most people are making it out to be. Even if I had QuickTransit it doesn't mean my commodity PC will instantly run OSX. OSX depends on lots of particular hardware being present. If I'm going to make computers that have all the right hardware, along with a QuickTransit chip... Well why don't I just go ahead and do that right now with a PowerPC chip? I think there is some sort of legal reason why people don't make cheap OSX compatible computers, and I don't think its likely to change. Even if Apple goes to Intel procs in its computers this does not mean I'll be able to run OSX on non-apple hardware. From a consumer perspective, nothing has changed.
In the beginning, yes. But the barriers for someone like Dell to produce an OSX compatible machine would be removed severely. Once more, it wouldn't be hard to create OSX compatible hardware without licensing anything since this is precisely how Compaq reverse engineered the IBM PC. A current Mac uses all commodity parts. Only the CPU and proc chipset are specialized and hard to replicate today. With a switch to x86, this would not be the case. They'd be readily available at least from Intel to start. The other dynamic is that it puts Apple on equal footing with Dell and HP as a supplier of a robust and powerful system. The advantage is clearly Apple's, since it will have tight control over hardware and OS, something that Dell and HP do not. The point I was really trying to get at was that this move will create a chain reaction of events that will be rather large in impact over time. Even if Apple keeps the mboard closed and doesn't license it to other hardware mfgs, it will now be in the most prime position to utilize its position in the marketplace as a major force. Intel supporting Apple cannot sit well with Microsoft, but I'm sure HP and Dell are either salivating or quaking depending on how much the consumer market is part of their strategy going forward. Somewhere buried in all this is probably a soap opera on how IBM is supplying Microsoft and Sony their new weapons but dissed Apple's demand for a mobile G5. |
|
| | |
Translating the Intel-Apple Deal
by noteworthy at 12:15 am EDT, Jun 7, 2005 |
Decius wrote: I think this decision is a lot less important than most people are making it out to be. From a consumer perspective, nothing has changed.
I think this matters a lot more to Intel than it does to Apple. But Jobs is flashy and fashionable and Intel is just a chip company, so they let him do the talking. For now, anyway. The collective spin on this story is interesting; Apple steps out loud and proud with a "Death to the Power PC!" message, while Intel sits in the back of the room, silently taking in the reactions. According to standard practice in the semiconductor business, this was Intel's deal to announce to the world. In industry jargon, it's called a design win. Precedents abound: Transmeta, AMD, and many others. Here's an excerpt from a pre-Jobs-announcement interview that Macworld is running today. (The Computex exhibition in Taipei, where the interview was conducted, ended on June 4.) Chandrasekher: We always talk to Apple. Apple is a design win that weve coveted for 20 years and we continue to covet them as a design win. We will never give up on Apple. IDGNS: What would you be willing to do in order to win Apples business? Chandrasekher: Well, nothing unnatural that we wouldnt do for other design wins. Its got to make sense from a business standpoint. We would do what makes economic sense. If we can do that and still get the design win, wed do it.
|
|
|
|
