[X4U] Apple's move to Intel chips

Mark Phillips mark at mophilly.com
Mon Jun 6 14:22:35 PDT 2005


FWIW, I tend to agree with Paul. Apple's appeal is built on the synergy 
of having control of the hardware and the OS. By engineering each to 
suit the other, the overall user experience is greatly enhanced. Stuff 
"just works" without the hand wringing often observed among users of 
other OS's.

Music composition software is a good example: the variations of video 
and sound cards in "standard" computers for Windows often renders the 
software application useless. On the Apple platform this is less likely 
to plague the software vendor. So much so, in fact, one well known 
vendor of music composition software abandoned the PC platform 
altogether.

The announcement wasn't "MacOS on every PC". The announcement was 
"MacOS on the Intel architecture". Big difference, in my mind.

Happy days,

  - Mark

On Jun 6, 2005, at 2:11 PM, Steve Talkowski wrote:

> Huh?!  Not according to Steve himself.
>
> Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for Intel for the past 5 
> years.
>
> “As a matter of fact, this system I’ve been using here…” the keynote’s 
> been running on a P4 3.6GHz all morning”

On Jun 6, 2005, at 1:39 PM, Paul Moortgat wrote:

> Apple will always have proprietary chips.  It's just an Intel chip 
> working with specific Apple chips.  You can't run X on PC.
>
> Paul Moortgat
>
> On 06 Jun 2005, at 21:53, Steve Self wrote:
>
>> I think this will be a minor transition for most users... Those that 
>> use odd and complex apps not managed by Apple, Adobe/Macromedia, and 
>> other major players may find some medium term issues in 06-07. There 
>> will be some upgrade costs, like there always are every few years. As 
>> long as the integration and feature set is attractive people pay.
>>
>> I also think we need to trust SJ and Apple in that they would never 
>> have made this decision if they thought it would compromise the user 
>> experience. Since I don't code or program, and neither do 90% of 
>> Apple's customers, I don't care whether they have IBM, Intel or 
>> squirrels inside the box. I only care that the user experience is 
>> more powerful, more integrated and more fun. And Apple has 
>> demonstrated their commitment to this, year in and year out.
>>
>> May you live in interesting times...
>>
>> S
> _______________________________________________



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