For those who want to keep PowerPC...

J

jzdziarski

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Since Apple's market share is so small (at least in computing), they are forced to rely on repeat customers upgrading systems. It's a quite simple solution really if you want to keep the PowerPC: get a large enough group of people to boycott the new Intel-based Macs to drive sales down. You've got another six months before the first Inhell-based Mac might become available, that's more than enough time to get comfortable with the hardware you have now and allow the new Macintelsh's to become an utter failure. There's not really much they can do if they can't sell intel machines, except fall back to PowerPC. I guess it all depends on whether Apple's cult members are really loyal to Apple or Apple Computer, Inc...
 
I vote for 3 iterations of OSX before PowerPC will be dropped. so 10.8, you might be out of luck.

I'm speculating, btw.
 
Dude!

Someone actually has to BUILD the PPC chips for us to suppor them... No chis = nothing to "support"!

Why not just start a support group for black holes and the like?

How is a boycot of Apple ever going to help them or you? Are you going to punnish Apple by buing a WinTel machine instead?
 
Seeing that most people don't care what processor's inside (I'm not talking this board or similar sites, but rather the general public), I guess all you'd get by boycotting Apple would be an Apple with a few lost sales. And that sounds like a stupid idea to me.
 
Boycotting out of love will not do Apple any favours. I am not opposed to the move to Intel per se, but the implications of what could be the outcome, Apple becoming a PC assembly company, in nice boxes with the Mac brandname plus a load of other outcomes that fanatics just don't want to hear. But jzdziarski, there is nothing WE can do, PowerPC isn't cutting it so according to Jobs we must switch, and switch we shall. The only real consideration is money and profits. Move with the flow on this one, or get left behind, there are no other permutations of the situation I'm afraid. :-(

As for PowerPC releases of OSX after Leopard, I think two more releases and that will be it, if my fears about Apple are true, I think we'll see a greater space between releases as they cut back on R&D. Expect PowerPC Macs to be officially laid to rest by 2010 if not well before.
 
How is PPC not cutting? Unless Jobs is lying to us, the PPC benchmarks twice as fast as high end Xeons. In other words, you won't see any significant performance increase in Macs until 6+ Ghz intels are available. I think a boycott might at least facilitate a healthy cohabitation between both processors. I've been thinking long and hard about what makes me buy Apple, and I think it's really the "think different" perspective. Moving to an Intel platform makes Apple just another PC manufacturer with nothing to set them apart from the rest of the Borg. I'll run Linux on my Powerbook before I buy an Intel book.
 
PPC are already showing its old age. No 3Ghz. No mobile G5. Besides, the Macs will still run OSX. Anyone who says they are jumping ships because of the Intel switch are fools.
 
jzdziarski said:
How is PPC not cutting? Unless Jobs is lying to us, the PPC benchmarks twice as fast as high end Xeons. In other words, you won't see any significant performance increase in Macs until 6+ Ghz intels are available. I think a boycott might at least facilitate a healthy cohabitation between both processors. I've been thinking long and hard about what makes me buy Apple, and I think it's really the "think different" perspective. Moving to an Intel platform makes Apple just another PC manufacturer with nothing to set them apart from the rest of the Borg. I'll run Linux on my Powerbook before I buy an Intel book.
Click to expand...

OK, now thats a set of more coherent arguements.

Jobs words must be taken lightly, as with all companies. The switch is starting a year from now and will last until the end of 2007, it's not about where we are now, but where the chip roadmaps are going in the future. PPC is great, fantastic, as an engineer I really admire it, but IBM can't deliver what Apple wants in the future. (If you are an Apple purist, you have to remember, IBM is "the enemy" anyway.)

The days of Wintel are over, things have moved on. Intel are not evil, hell we wouldn't even have microprocessors without them OR APPLE!. But yes, you raise a valid point about Apple becoming just another PC maker, that's my fear. It can go one of two ways can't it? Just putting an Intel chip into a computer design doesn't make a PC, think back how many computers in the past shared a similar CPU but were completely incompatible. There will be at least 'just enough' differences to stop Dell owners installing OS X and 'not enough' to stop Windows being installed on a Mac. We'll have to wait and see. If the end result is just a PC, I may not bother, the dev kits are no indication so we'll have to wait a bit longer. Look, there isn't much technology out there that DOESN'T have an Intel made chip somewhere.

Here, have a click on this and have a laugh.
http://www.macilife.com/audio/Macintel_Startup.m4a
 
fjdouse said:
Boycotting out of love will not do Apple any favours. I am not opposed to the move to Intel per se, but the implications of what could be the outcome, Apple becoming a PC assembly company, in nice boxes with the Mac brandname plus a load of other outcomes that fanatics just don't want to hear. But jzdziarski, there is nothing WE can do, PowerPC isn't cutting it so according to Jobs we must switch, and switch we shall. The only real consideration is money and profits. Move with the flow on this one, or get left behind, there are no other permutations of the situation I'm afraid. :-(

As for PowerPC releases of OSX after Leopard, I think two more releases and that will be it, if my fears about Apple are true, I think we'll see a greater space between releases as they cut back on R&D. Expect PowerPC Macs to be officially laid to rest by 2010 if not well before.
Click to expand...
Apple has said that PPC-based Macs will be supported for five years after the transition is complete. The transition is supposed to be complete in 2007. Five years after 2007 is 2012. This means that you can reasonably expect to get support for your PPC-based Mac for the entire life of MacOS X 10.x.
 
What a nightmare! Couldn't we just of gotten a price cut on the Power CPUs?
Arent' they blowing away all benchmarks at sub 3GHz speeds?
 
I think we are assuming too much...PPC support for 5 years after 2007???

Well at this rate we'll be doing a new transition in 2010 to who knows what...and we'll be lucky if we have suport for whatevere they replace :)

Don't get me wrong....I love transitions...it's a way to cleanup things, start over and move on. If WINTEL would've done at least 1 or 2 transitions instead of carrying so much old stuff over the new generations all the time maybe they would be better off right now.

I believe backwards compatibility must be done at the software level...Do you really need to be able to run natively MS-DOS applications??? Or even win98 software... I think not..Win XP should've been set on a completely new ground starting at the processor....and do backwards compatibility through software. I'm sure many of you will disagree so...shoot back please :)

From warm Spain...Ernest
PB 1.5 1G 80HD
MINI 1,43 512M 80HD
 
You mean the Power 4, Power 5 processors? You don't want your Macs to start at 10'000 USD.
 
The G5s are NOT twice as fast as equivalent PCs. Third-party tests generally conclude that the G5s range from "almost as fast" to "a decent bit faster" depending on the task, but they're not THAT much faster. Maybe for one or two very specific Photoshop filters or something like that. But for general use, no way. The best you can say is that they're about the same, really.

I agree, however, that going strictly by what's public knowledge, the G5 is holding its own very, very well. Since its release 2 years ago, the G5's clock speed has gone up more than the P4's.

That said, Apple isn't going by "what's public knowledge"; they know better than we do where IBM and Intel are heading. Steve Jobs made it sound like the big advantages of the switch are coming 2-3 years down the line. I don't know exactly what those advantages are, though.

The best guess I've heard for the long term is that Apple wants to get onboard Intel's hardware-based DRM train. I don't know a whole lot about this, but it seems likely. If Apple's doing this for shorter-term advantages, it's probably because the G4 is stagnating, and the G5 just isn't making it to portables. From what I can tell, even the current G4s compete pretty well with Intel's mobile chips, though, so again I feel like Apple's seeing a bigger difference down the line than exists today.

In any case, it's not because today's G5 can't compete with today's P4. But I have to assume that Apple knows what they're doing. This isn't a move they'd make on a whim.
 
the benchmarks apple published were ambitious, to say the least. at video editing, it's a very close race, PC's are about level, apparently. PCs apparently blow macs out of the water with 3d stuff atm. macs are better at photoshop and illustrator, and the OS is blinding.

At the moment, it's very close. I think, with the intel cpu's being the same as the pc versions, it'll be a true test of how fast the os is. windows is a very bloated os, after all
 
eguillem said:
I think we are assuming too much...PPC support for 5 years after 2007???

Well at this rate we'll be doing a new transition in 2010 to who knows what...and we'll be lucky if we have suport for whatevere they replace :)

Don't get me wrong....I love transitions...it's a way to cleanup things, start over and move on. If WINTEL would've done at least 1 or 2 transitions instead of carrying so much old stuff over the new generations all the time maybe they would be better off right now.

I believe backwards compatibility must be done at the software level...Do you really need to be able to run natively MS-DOS applications??? Or even win98 software... I think not..Win XP should've been set on a completely new ground starting at the processor....and do backwards compatibility through software. I'm sure many of you will disagree so...shoot back please :)

From warm Spain...Ernest
PB 1.5 1G 80HD
MINI 1,43 512M 80HD
Click to expand...


Hola!
Totally agree with you. The PC is a 'legacy beast', which is why I hoped Apple's x86 hardware would have taken different route, I'm not sure they will now, especially if Windows *will* run natively.
 
Well, the transitions we've had included a lot of legacy support, too. This next one will have legacy support in the form of Rosetta. (And sometimes I think Apple should _not_ include such a PPC emulator, because it'll give companies the opportunity to lag...)
 
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