It's The End Of The World As We Know It

[serpicolugnut]

Are you sure about that??

At the WWDC when the G5 was first released, everyone was excited because we thought the SAME thing! That IBM knew what it was doing (compared to Moto.) They told us how in a year we'd be at 3 GHz. Sounded good. Everyone sipped the koolaid and all was good.

Now two years later, we're told that Intel is the way to go. I'm just waiting for the days when programmers decide, "F**K PPC users, too much work to tweak/recompile. We'll only release an Intel version."

It'll be interesting to see when they remove their charts from their website showing the G5 running 50 - 90% faster than a P4.

First of all, there currently isn't any mention on Apple's consumer website about this. For obvious reasons, Apple will want to keep this as "under the radar" as possible. Reality is, even if Apple doesn't tout it themselves, the whole world will know that it's coming.

And why wouldn't Apple tout it themselves now? Because it will make all PPC unattractive. Apple is going to have a hard time pushing Macs between now and the first batch of Intel Macs, because nobody in the market for a computer wants to buy a dead end platform. While it will probably be close to 2010 before developers cease compiling/releasing for PPC, it will come. If you use the 68K>PPC transition as a comparison... PPC released first in 1994 (and utilizing emulation for most non native software meant that most apps ran slower on the PowerMac 6100 than they did on the Quadra650). By 1997 (three years later) the transition was mostly complete, and developers started abandoning 68k binaries in favor of PPC only. So a PPC Mac bought in 2006 should have a useful lifespan of 4 years before the user feels the pinch of developers abandoning the PPC platform.

Still, for those who dont **need** a new machine, and just **want** one, it means we can easily justify waiting until 2006/2007 (or even 2008 if we don't want to endure the early adopter blues) for that next Mac purchase.

It's going to be an interesting 2 years....

 

[fjdouse]

2. Competition -- AMD and Intel compete with each other plenty, and now they can compete for Apple's business as well.

Well of course it depends on one's views as to the merits of competition, it usually ends up with one winner and a whole lot of loosers, especially if Apple and Microsoft end up competing for the desktop market.

 

[MacFreak]

Its good news for Apple. Because many customers confused about ghz. No more about MHZ/GHZ method issues.

 

[Ricky]

I've said it to all of my friends, and I'll say it again here...

It's the OS that matters, not the chip. I simply can't use Windows for extended periods of time due to the lack of UI features, like dragging and dropping onto an application icon, for instance. I really like Exposé too.

As soon as Windows gets stuff like that, I will seriously consider switching.

 

[fryke]

It's the end of the thread as we know it. (Too many other threads about it already.)

 

[Captain Code]

Just to spark some thought, how many times have you hear that half the problem with windows is all the shitty hardware that is made and available at Wal-Mart. Guess what? Now every Tom, Dick and Harry is going to be flooding these forums trying to get their ACME Joystick Memory Pad RAID device to work and causing all sorts of fits for OS X. What else is nice is that you will probably be one of them. Right now we are spoiled by a plethora of quality hardware, but at a premium. How much more tempted will you be to try out that Wacom knock-off when it is $20?

They never said anything about OS X running on anything but Apple machines. If it did then that could be the end of Apple's hardware sales. They better make DAMN sure that no one can get it running on some cheap-o PC.

I wish I had bookmarked it, but not long ago I read an article talking about a number of the problems with Windows being due to its attachment to x86. I don't know the specifics, as I didn't care at the time, but the jist was that the buffer overflows and other exploits are unique to x86 because of the architecture. Here comes the virus software!

That's just wrong. You get buffer overflows from bad programming, not from the CPU architecture. You can get them in Apache which works on x86 and PPC and it's just how it's programmed that gives you the overflows.