Mac to use Intel Chips!

ANY Mac you buy at ANY time will be obsolete after a couple of years. Apple has cut off support in Mac OS X for the G2 PowerMacs, then for the beige G3 PowerMacs etc., and with every new big version of the OS, they're cutting off a bit more. The G4 and G5 Macs (and the iBook's a G4), will be supported in 10.5 (comes out at the end of 2006) and probably still in the OS that comes _after_ that. If that again takes 1.5 years (and that's their plan) you have at least 4.5 years of the "current" Mac OS working on that iBook. That sounds more than good enough for me. If you need it now: GET that iBook.
 
mindbend said:
I personally found it utterly brilliant that they actually were running the secret dual life OS X on Intel for the "Just in Case" scenario. That's just smart.
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Remember folks, the mach microkernel started a CMU and then was co-developed by IBM and Apple back in '93. I was part of the project inside IBM and it was 100% Intel based machines. I bet the "kernel" and the GUI is 100% C. Only the micro kernel has to port and it is probably 99.9% C.

I bet Apple has had an Intel version all along. It would not be that much dual maintenance.
 
We _know_ that Apple had a PC version all along. They said they built 10.0 (Cheetah) for X86, and _before_ 10.0, Apple actually released Rhapsody DR 2 for PC Compatibles (to developers) and only stopped doing that when Rhapsody went final (Mac OS X Server 1.0 and up).
 
Anyone who says they bought a Mac for the outstanding operating system doesn't quite know what they're talking about. OSX is just barely out of its infancy. The Mach kernel has just recently (as of Tiger) received an overhaul that makes it "not a piece of crap", such as better locking and architecture. It's still, however, very immature. There are no 64-bit libraries so there's no /proper/ way to write 64-bit applications without making your app an ugly hack. Many of their new OS features, such as Q2DE, still don't work completely. If OSX is at the heart of Apple, then right now Apple has heart disease... honestly, I like OSX, but it's got a /long/ way to go before it's mature. In many ways, the Linux kernel is even far superior to Mach. The only thing most people see is the pretty UI.
 
I guess the biggest worry i have, is that third-party developers won't develop things that will take full advantage of the PPC macs any more. we KNOW the rosetta thing will do GENERIC G3-era code, but not G4, G5 or Altivec specific code. So why develop Audio/Video application XYZ with really good Altivec support up the yahoo when in two years your potential for new customers runs into a brick wall.

Yes, Apple will support my g5. yes they will release OS updates. yes, it will still work just fine with the CURRENT software. but apple doesn't control the mac market quite the way some people thing. SJ saying "this will happen" doesn't make it so.

anywho. on the plus side, it means that in theory, right before "the end" there should be SUPER FAST G5s available "REALLY CHEAP", because of the "omg that is obsolete" curse. and for general home users, students, or inversely, servers, they would be great. anyone who doesn't need the bleeding edge software, they would be great. Software updates from apple for several years at least. plenty of power.


my only question is this: the G5 uses 1/2 CPU speed on the FSB. Intel's fastest is 1066mhz, for a 3.something ghz P4. How are apple gonna market a DROP in FSB speed. (however, we may get other things intel push, quicker, like onboard SATA2 RAID, DDR2 (or 3), dual-core CPUs, 10Gb Eth(apple were good on the 1gb, but haven't updated for quite a while), on that note.. Does a dual-core, hyperthreaded CPU appear to the OS as "four" CPUs??)
 
Pengu said:
Does a dual-core, hyperthreaded CPU appear to the OS as "four" CPUs??)
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Yes. There are pictures of the CPU graphs around the net. Shows 4 graphs. Even right now with dual Xeon hyper threaded CPUs (non dual core).
 
jzdziarski said:
Well here's my good riddance letter
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/apple.html
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I think your article criticizes more of what you thought he said than what he actually did say. For one thing, he said a main reason that they were switching was because of performance PER watt of energy of FUTURE products. Notably not absolute performance, which is what you spend a large amount of time discussing.
 
so dual, dual-core, hyperthreaded Xeons (are they code/instruction-set compatible with plain-jane P4s?) would "act" as 8 processors. THAT would be a test of OSX's multi-tasking...
 
jzdziarski said:
Anyone who says they bought a Mac for the outstanding operating system doesn't quite know what they're talking about. OSX is just barely out of its infancy. The Mach kernel has just recently (as of Tiger) received an overhaul that makes it "not a piece of crap", such as better locking and architecture. It's still, however, very immature...
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lol, the image your post creates is just plain wrong. True, there are flaws, but it's child's play to point out tons of flaws in ANY major operating system. That's a cost of providing many features. The fact is, Apple has done a tremendous job providing those features with a LOW amount of flaws and HIGH amount of success.

You try and tell the hordes of geeks making the switch for OS X that they aren't, in fact, making that switch just exactly for that reason.

For example, here's what noted geek Paul Graham has to say about the flock of 'alpha geeks' making the switch for OS X:
http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

Paul Graham said:
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X.
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Side note: From every observation I've made, over half of the staff at my university has PowerBooks, and these are people that can get cheap education Dells and do know (and love with a pure-geek-tinkering love, or else they would have stayed in industry where they were making the big bucks) what they are talking about.
 
Performance per Watt...so what you're saying is that you're willing to live with a system that runs at half the speed of a PowerPC as long as it runs cooler? It must be what you're saying, since the G5 allegedly runs twice the speed of these high end Xeons. Who cares if they run cooler. They also run slower.
 
jzdziarski said:
Performance per Watt...so what you're saying is that you're willing to live with a system that runs at half the speed of a PowerPC as long as it runs cooler? It must be what you're saying, since the G5 allegedly runs twice the speed of these high end Xeons. Who cares if they run cooler. They also run slower.
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Are you speaking MHz-wise only??? Because if so there are other factors that contribute to the speed, hence why AMD is even slower than Intel clockwise but performs much better.

This is actually tough to argue because i'm sure all of us at one time or another criticized the P4 for being inferior to the G5, but now we're on the other side of the coin (at least once 06/06/06 rolls around). Weird...now I've gone crosseyed... ::ha::
 
Also consider that comparisons have been done with P4s running WIndows as opposed to P4s running both Windows and Mac OS X. Again, I can't wait to see the benchmarks on this. :D
 
jzdziarski said:
Anyone who says they bought a Mac for the outstanding operating system doesn't quite know what they're talking about. OSX is just barely out of its infancy. The Mach kernel has just recently (as of Tiger) received an overhaul that makes it "not a piece of crap", such as better locking and architecture. It's still, however, very immature. There are no 64-bit libraries so there's no /proper/ way to write 64-bit applications without making your app an ugly hack. Many of their new OS features, such as Q2DE, still don't work completely. If OSX is at the heart of Apple, then right now Apple has heart disease... honestly, I like OSX, but it's got a /long/ way to go before it's mature. In many ways, the Linux kernel is even far superior to Mach. The only thing most people see is the pretty UI.
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So what did you buy your Mac for? The OS? The hardware? The processor inside of the hardware? What, exactly?

I bought mine for the OS, the hardware (regardless of the processor), and the community. Call me a lemming, but that's that. What did you buy yours for? And how, exactly, is going with an Intel processor making you want to ditch Apple permanently? To the end-user, the switch to Intel will be seamless and transparent. You could sit down at a row of G5-looking computers, some with PPC processors and some with Intel processors, and I'll bet you couldn't make heads or tails of which was which without opening the computer and taking a peek inside (or by opening "About this Computer" and having the processor reported to you).

I don't mean to be rude, but it certainly sounds like you're experiencing an overblown knee-jerk reaction. What is your loyalty to the PPC processor?
 
It's not the Intel processor that lead me to ditch Apple. In fact my good riddance letter mentioned nothing about technical issues (although there are plenty). I am ditching Apple for the reasons I stated in my letter - they have consistently and outwardly lied to their customers (as recent as last week) in public press releases to continue pushing their now obsolete products. They release a new line of powerbooks and powermacs with soon-to-be-abandoned processors and that's supposed to be OK? I don't think so. The life of a high end system (especially a dual processor PowerMac) is well over two years.

It doesn't affect me as much as I'm sure it affects others. After all, I can have Debian up and running on this thing pretty quickly and be happy with it. But that doesn't mean I'm going to invest in a company whose shroud of secrecy is motivated by their bottom line.

The proper way to usher this in would have been to announce their low-end machines will include Intel processors and that their higher end machines would still be PowerPC based (like Sun did with their processors). Then the second year have both PowerPC machines and Intel machines in high-end machines, continuing support for the PowerPC architecture (without a phase-out). If Intel is really "better" than PowerPC, then they would have sales charts showing that more customers wanted Intel-based macs, and could then justify slowly phasing out PowerPC over another year or two... or phasing out Intel if nobody wanted them. At any rate, that would allow for a 4-year cohabitation of both processor families, allowing the customer to decide which was better.
 
They _do_ continue to support the PowerPC. Which part of this message didn't you get? Apple has a product line of PowerPC Macs and will introduce newer PowerPC Macs in the coming two years. They'll start to shift over to intel machines in June 2006 - not before - and they'll have a complete intel Mac lineup only in June 2007 or the end of 2007. The PowerPC machines will continue to be supported by Mac OS X even when the complete lineup is based on intel.
 
DUDE - Get a Grip!!! Apple has not lied consistantly to their customers. They were forced into this by IBM and Freescale. Apple did this so that 18-24 months out, they will have competitive product.

Where in the keynote, did anyone say that PowerPC would be dead in 2yrs? I heard Steve say that the migration will take 2yrs. 2yrs before all NEW Macs are shipping with Intel processors. For many years beyond that, Apple and developers will support both the PowerPC and Intel. Universal Binaries allow this. Your Dual PowerMac G5 bought today will keep running OSX, apps, etc. for years to come. Developers will have to put out Universal Binaries, so that their apps run natively on both processors.

If you are worried that sometime out there, your new Dual processor G5 will someday be obsolete, I have news for you: All computers are someday obsolete!

I would wait and see what Apple/Intel has in store. The thought of a dualcore, 4+GHz Intel based Powerbook with Centrino makes my mouth water!
 
I m wondering when Apple finished transition to Intel based. Once all Mac already have intel. In the future do I have able to buy a upgrade the processor at any stores? Without specific stores such as sonnent, Newer Tech and others. Will be cheaper?
 
RE: MacFreak

Not sure about PPC CPUs, but I do know that x86 processors have IDs that can be read in software. Couple that will this impending doom of on-chip DRM, it may be possible for Apple to basically restrict and prevent CPU upgrades. Meaning, you can't buy an off-the-shelf Pentium 4 CPU and pop it in.

I'm not saying that's what will happen, I'm just illustrating a theory. If you recall, there was a PowerMac firmware update in which Apple effectively made certain third party RAM modules incompatible. They certainly can lock out generic Intel CPUs.
 
Most of the time each family of new x86 chips requires a BIOS change to work, anyway, even if they are socket-compatible. So you will likely be able to replace the chip within a very small model range, but not as much as you'd like...

Complete conjecture based on the work required by PC motherboard manufactuers to get new chips to work :)
 
I say "good riddance" to those Mac users that say "good riddance" to Apple because they feel "shafted" because Apple didn't disclose every nook-and-cranny of their future plans to the public.

I have yet to hear one, good reason (IMO) that the switch to Intel is a bad move and that it is going to ultimately affect customers in a negative way. Sure, we fought with Intel on the "megahertz myth," bashed Microsoft for using their chips and touted the power of the PowerPC, but what in the **** did you expect Apple to do? Tell their customers that they were using sub-par chips and to just wait for the future because there was an inkling of an idea that they were going to use Intel chips in the future?

Lied to? Naah... if Apple has lied to you, then every other company you've ever purchased a product from has lied to you as well -- and then your problem isn't with Apple, but with "corporate America" as a whole (sorry to all the non-Americans here: that's just how the saying goes).
 
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