Tim Worstall

Macs to Use Intel.

So the announcement is out, that Apple will start to use Intel chips. OK, makes sense to me. I can also see that there’s some money to be spent on software engineering:

The switch though is
not without risks, as Apple software developers are forced to rewrite
programs to work with the new processors.

"It
could cost hundreds of millions of dollars of re-engineering," said
analyst Brian Gammage at research group Gartner. "It’s not easy work.
It’s deep work at the base of the software kernel."

It’s well over a decade since I worked with software in any way but isn’t OS/X based on Unix? Doesn’t that make it easier?

But to my mind the much more important question is this. If they do all the work to port over to Intel chips, (and yes, I’m aware that there will still be proprietary things like BIOS chips etc) doesn’t  that make it a great deal easier to licence the OS to others? That "Macs" might no longer be exclusively manufactured by Apple? Is this just the beginning of the real strategy, to create a clone Mac market?

In

9 responses

  1. lascivious Avatar
    lascivious

    I am not sure Apple would want to change their business model to a more software orientated one. Yes they write and sell software, but only software that works on proprietry hardware. The great thing abouts macs is they just work. If Apple moved to OSX being available on any-old PC, having to support the millions of hardware configurations, OSX would become as bloated and unstable as Windows has become. And if anyone makes a clone of a mac, you can bet your bottom dollar Apple will sue. Apple don’t want clones just as the don’t want to support every bit of PC hardware there is.
    They would also loose their competitive edge. They would be competing for a market which is dominated by one player, who has many more resources to throw at defeating a direct competitor.
    The reason Apple are moving to intel is hidden in the Jobs’ keynote speech:
    “When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel’s roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do,”
    The G5’s have got a future in the desktop market – they offer the largest bang-for-buck compared to all the major platforms and the chips are still scaleable. The problem is, they are hot. Very hot. 5 fans are required to cool these beasts. In other words, they can’t get the G5’s cool enough to put in their rather sexy laptop line. And laptops are where the money is.

    Reply
  2. katie Avatar
    katie

    I saw something at boingboing about how this news was broken that made me think of Alastair Campbell.
    The leaks made by bloggers last year were unsanctioned, and therefore bad for business, and therefore sueable (not a real word I know.) The leak to CNET was sanctioned, and strategic, and therefore A Good Thing.
    How can a public know what a good leak and a bad leak is? If one is good, why isn’t another? Can Steve Jobs make up his mind about transparency?
    It’s like when Pavlov rang the bell but produced no food and left the poor dogs weeing themselves in agitation.

    Reply
  3. Mark Holland Avatar
    Mark Holland

    The re-coding will be down to the byte order won’t it? Big endian and little endian and so forth.

    Reply
  4. john b Avatar
    john b

    Not exclusively – PowerPC is a RISC architecture while x86 is a CISC architecture, which is equally if not more important.

    Reply
  5. David Wildgoose Avatar
    David Wildgoose

    “lascivious” made my main comment for me, so consider it seconded.
    Don’t forget that OS X is just the NeXT OS ported from Intel to PowerPC. Porting it back is no problem – they’ll have kept a parallel port running for years, just as Microsoft will have done with their MIPS and PowerPC versions of NT.
    And just like NeXT used Intel and proprietary hardware, expect Apple to do the same. Basically, Apple will have slowly transformed back into NeXT. I wonder when Apple will produce a “white” Cube… 🙂

    Reply
  6. PL Avatar
    PL

    Apple has been running OS X and building its software on Intel in parallel with PowerPC for a good while now. There won’t be so much redevelopment to do.

    Reply
  7. chris bunker Avatar
    chris bunker

    There is very little chance of a return of Mac clones. The last time they tried it nearly killed the company, and it was Steve Jobs that killed them off when he returned to the post of CEO. Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. The software adds value to the hardware allowing the very high margins they charge (compared to other hardware companies).
    Remember the last company to try challenging Microsoft’s monopoly on Intel clones was Be Inc. (now dead) who produced an OS that had a much greater comparative advantage over Windows in quality than Mac OS X does now. But Microsoft has their monopoly power, and are not afraid to use it to crush anyone that could in time really compete with them. Steve Jobs knows all of this so he will not be allowing official clone anytime soon (unofficial ones will of course start popping up very soon but you won’t be able to buy one from a major OEM).

    Reply
  8. -keith in mtn. view Avatar
    -keith in mtn. view

    Is it time to start rumors about the BeOS and BeBox again? 😉

    Reply
  9. dewi Avatar
    dewi

    The quote from Gartners is sheer bollocks, as usual. You might as well call them a textbook example of market failure, as they haven’t gone out of business yet.
    Apple has been building Mac OS X for Intel since even before 10.0 shipped – 5 years ago. That should be enough for some confidence in their estimates, surely ?
    You’re right about Unix, too. The reason it’s so battle hardened is because it has been ported to so many different machines. It’s a damn fine way of flushing out bugs.

    Reply

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