Apple's move to Intel processors is likely to go rather
smoothly
If IBM couldn't deliver a G5 processor for the
PowerBook, what choice did Apple have but to move to a different processor?
Laptops are a large share of the market for computers and Apple can't afford to
be left behind in laptops if they are going to continue selling
computers.
Apple demonstrated that it is ready for the move
to an Intel processor. Every version of Mac OS X for the past five years has
been made to run on an Intel CPU and Steve Jobs demonstrated the latest Mac OS X
10.4.1 running on a Pentium 4. He demonstrated PowerPC apps running at an
acceptable speed in emulation mode. He got Wolfram Research to port
Mathematica, consisting of millions of lines of code, to the Pentium-based Mac
and it took them only two hours to get it running, changing only 20 lines of
code. So porting large programs can be done in a very short time in some cases.
Developers have a year to get the job done and it's likely to take them no more
than a few weeks in the worst case if they have been using Apple's Xcode
development environment.
Ordinary Mac
users are likely not to be able to tell the difference between similarly
configured Macs with Pentium and G4 or G5 CPUs. Most people don't have a clue
about the CPU in their Mac. What they see and interact with is the graphical
Mac OS X environment and that's not going to change. It's going to run the same
on old and new Macs.
People who have
PowerPC-based Macs aren't going to suddenly find their Macs obsolete; nor are
they going to have to upgrade their software. When they do get upgrades to
programs they own, the upgrades will run natively on their PowerPC-based Macs,
because developers are going to be delivering their software in Universal Binary
format containing native code for both CPUs.
People buying a new Pentium-based Mac
and wanting to continue to use old software they already own will also be able
to do so. Their old programs will run under the Rosetta emulator on the new Mac
without any upgrading. The old programs won't run as quickly as native apps,
but if the new computer is faster than the old one it's replacing, the user may
not see any significant difference. When they eventually do get a software
upgrade, they will get a faster native-code version. Developers may offer old
customers a free or cheap upgrade to the Universal Binary version of their
software.
Apple's target for a complete
conversion of their family of computers is the end of 2007. That is 2 1/2 years
away. Apple is going to be supporting PowerPC-based Macs for a very long time,
even after that conversion is complete. There is no reason to believe that the
early models of Pentium-based Macs are going to be substantially faster than
current Macs at that time. Even 2 1/2 years from now the current high-end dual
G5 Power Macs are likely to be reasonably competitive with the Pentium Power
Macs. Steve Jobs said in his keynote address that Apple still has "a lot of
great PowerPC products in the pipeline." So the PowerPC line is by no means
dead at Apple.
Posted: Wednesday - June 08, 2005 at 12:29 AM