[Ti] The reason we use Macs instead of PC's (long)

[Chris Olson]

This is technically OT, so the folks that don't like it can move on  
and delete it now instead of reading on.

On Nov 22, 2005, at 2:45 AM, Mikael Byström wrote:
> Being condescending doesn't put your point across very well nor  
> does it educate.

Agreed.

> Being knowledgeable doesn't mean that everything you say are  
> truthful.  Educated speculations may be more reliable than pure  
> speculations, but it's still speculations.

It's called "educated opinion".

> There are many really good programmers that acknowledge the problem  
> space Chris touched upon and that still don't agree with what he's  
> claiming regarding OS X on Intel.

Perhaps if I explain why I so dislike the x86 architecture, you could  
better understand.

The one and only reason it (x86) still exists today is because of a  
lumbering giant called Microsoft that isn't light-footed enough to  
migrate millions of users and applications to anything else.   
Otherwise it would've been dead long ago.

The reason I dislike Intel so is that, like Microsoft, they have used  
predatory business practices to methodically destroy elegant RISC  
architectures such as the DEC Alpha.

The technical reasons:
PowerPC is 64-bit from the ground up, with a 32-bit subset.  This  
includes the G4 (Motorola 74xx) with a 64-bit ALU accomplishing 64- 
bit floating point arithmetic in one clock cycle.  Mac OS X, while  
not a full 64-bit operating system, since most of the interface uses  
32-bit code, is able to use 64-bit code for applications that require  
a 64-bit address space.  OS X, with the PowerPC processor, is the  
_one_and_only_ operating system and platform in existence able to run  
natively on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures with only one  
version of the operating system.  That's elegant and technically  
excellent.

The x86 architecture is a CISC design with variable instruction  
length.  The x86 ISA is 16-bit with 32-bit and (now) 64-bit  
extensions piled on top.  Backwards compatibility has always been a  
driving force behind the development of the x86 ISA. The design  
decisions this has required are hotly criticized by those of us  
frustrated by the continued success of an architecture widely  
perceived as quantifiably inferior.  For example:  once you enable 64- 
bit pointers in the x86 ISA, everything; drivers and apps, must be 64- 
bit.  To run 32-bit code on x86 with 64-bit pointers enabled you need  
32-bit emulation libraries either supplied by the operating system or  
the application.  This is not elegant.  It's a kludge made successful  
by marketing and monopoly.

To sum up my opinion, there's an old adage in this business:
"Marketing will always prevail over technical excellence in the  
consumer marketplace"

That adage is the reason Windows is more successful than Mac OS, and  
x86 is more successful than the elegant RISC archs.  I see ~90% of  
the people on this list falling for marketing instead of focusing on  
technical excellence - something I had always believed Apple's "Think  
Different" perpetuated.
-- 
Chris

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