Quotes about apple on intel
cnet.com report:
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac..... However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
www.wired.com
In the PC industry, Apple lost the productivity/office era to Microsoft, but it's trying to get the jump on the next big thing: the entertainment/creativity era, and Apple's going to drag its users, even if they're kicking and screaming, with it.
a comment on burningbird.nets entry
I’m feeling very depressed right now. I hope Apple has a lot of cash on hand to survive the inevitable Osborning of their current hardware.
I hate computers….
two comment on arstechnic.com forums
Even though I haven't owned an Apple box since a ][+, I'm sorry to see this happen. Repeatedly in college and beyond, I came to admire the details of the 68K architecture more than X86, and was happy that at there was at least one major customer for the Motorola lineage. C'est la vie.
Of course, the PC architecture itself isn't anything to write home about either; if Apple can take X86 and wrap it in a better mousetrap, I'm all for it.
- Spacemaggot.
m a small Mac developer (I make a video compositing app), so I can at least speak for myself... I'm incredibly disappointed by this news. I can't see any advantage for either developers or users.
Users will have to put up with a fractured platform - some apps will be PPC only and run only in slow emulation on x86, many other apps will be x86 only and probably won't run on PPC at all. It will be a major negative point against the "it just works" philosophy.
Many developers were relieved that the Mac's transitional period was seemingly over and OS X APIs had just become stable a month ago. Now everyone will have to buy new hardware, rewrite performance-intensive portions of their apps, and suffer for a year while Mac sales collapse - nobody wants a PPC Mac now, that's for sure.
My app uses AltiVec all over the place because Apple has been touting it for five years as a great solution and an integral part of the Mac hardware platform. I'll have to rewrite all that code. Apple has essentially lied to all their developers about their commitment to AltiVec. Yeah, that really makes me excited about a sudden architecture flip-flop, one which looks completely unnecessary to make matters worse...
Intel's roadmap certainly doesn't inspire confidence. I don't see any evidence that IBM would have been unable to make a competitive PPC chip for Apple, had Apple been willing to pay. Instead, Apple's hubris appears to be so great that they're willing to risk the entire platform.
- pavlov
comments on slashdot.org
...The rumors were only half-true.
Apple is adopting Intel, but is not "ditching" IBM.
New G5 towers will still be around for at least another year, and probably at least two. Intel is probably going to start by replacing the G4 CPUs in Powerbooks and minis.
At the Stevenote, he informed devs that they would be supporting both platforms for a long time to come. - Golias
...For Apple's actual customers, this fucking sucks....It took five years or so, but the software library has now gotten to the point where if I suddenly find myself thinking "hmm, I need an app that does blah" I can look on versiontracker and more likely than not find it.
Except now this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero... - mcc
....The transition was so difficult for the audio and video industry, that for many people it STILL hasn't happened. You can find workhorse macs running OS9 in nearly every recording studio and post production house in LA..... - soupdevil
...Financially, this is going to be a big bump for Apple. I'm certainly not going to order any more new Macs until the Intel systems are available. This may be one reason why they chose to do it now, when the success of the iPod will carry them through.
It may be the best decision for Apple, but I still think that it would have been better if they'd been able to reach a deal with IBM to develop the PPC further. I would much rather have seen multicore PPC's. - tgibbs
...did he say anything about a two-button mouse? - Nice2Cats
My worry is that the move to x86 will only cause stability issues for the OS. This is from Apple's own transition doc:
"The x86 C-language calling convention (application binary interface, or ABI) specifies that arguments to functions are passed on the stack. The PowerPC ABI specifies that arguments to functions are passed in registers. Also, x86 has far fewer registers, so many local variables use the stack for their storage. Thus, programming errors, or other operations that access past the end of a local variable array or otherwise incorrectly manipulate values on the stack may be more likely to crash applications on x86 systems than on PowerPC." - tu_coates
Apple posted Intel Universal Binary[apple.com] documentation to their website. It's interesting, and everyone should read it. Notable is a caveat that OpenFirmware is going away. That seems to point towards more standard hardwware. - Knytefall