In response to Applelust’s You’ve been punk’d!
My pal Dave Shultz at Applelust.com posted a strong reation to the Apple announcing that it had moved to Intel. You can read the whole thing, but here’s the first few sentences:
“Yes, I’ve been punk’d. Remember all the Expos with the demos of Photoshop up against a Wintel? Recall how they rendered everything faster? How Mathematica crunched numbers like crazy and the CEO would come out and talk of the wonders of the Mac? Remember the Intel bunny being burned? Yes, they poo-poo’d that this week and laughed at ol’ times on stage. I wasn’t amused – it was a badge of honor. Recall all the talk about CISC and RISC and all that? Pipelines and bottlenecks and speed increases and how it took two Intel chips to do the work of one IBM PowerPC chip? That OS X was written to take advantage of the power of the PowerPC?”
So I emailed Dave the following in response. This is pretty much where I currently stand on this issue:
Hello Dave
Read your edit with great interest; in fact, I share a lot of your feelings about this, and perhaps have I had them for longer that you. Which partially explains my voice becoming silent: If you have nothing good to say about someone, eventually you shut it up.
But I do not think you have been punked. I think Moto, then IBM, seriously dropped the ball, and made promises they never delivered.
I still have a PowerComputing T Shirt somewhere with big bold lettering ” My Mac is faster than your Mac – 240MHz!”. Back then, that chip – the 604 – WAS the fastest around. If current G5 had been delivered three years ago, as it was supposed to be – Apple would have kept the lead in speed.
But G3, G4, G5 chips started to fall behind production. Deliveries of faster processors were pushed back like Longhorn, and replaced with tiny speed upgrades. Fast chips for laptops were – are – nowhere.
There is NO doubt that IBM COULD have delivered; they have the R&D muscle to solve plaguing issues. But they allocated a skeleton staff to Apple’s need, and focused elsewhere. IBM was a supplier, not a partner – “buy what we have, or leave”.
Meanwhile Intel bettered those processors of yore. Smaller, faster, and more importantly – COOLER! Over thirty years ago I remember discussing with a computer engineer that the biggest problem they had was heat dissipation. That issue is still critical today. Heat is related to power consumption – that’s the power-per-Watt.
I am no fan off Intel, no fan of IBM, and not much of an Apple fan anymore. Think different became think bottom line; where the energy was directed at creating the best possible user experience – and yes, often at the cost of profits – it is no longer the case, and Apple just pays lips service to that and rides the coattail of previous successes.
The products are still best. But the company? blah. It’s all about share-holders these days, and since I own none, I am NOT part of Apple’s plans. I am an instrument to their financial achievements, if anything. Not much of one either – I have not bought a brand new Mac since the 6100, being quite happy with refurbishing my second-hand purchases…
That’s what I see here: IBM and MOTO dropped the ball. Intel picked it up, and looks like it has – or at least is able to project markets – far greater enthusiasm at the challenge than the previous two. In the long run, having all main PC on the same chips means a bigger market, which means more $ for R&D, which means faster, smaller, cooler processors coming faster to market. Which means better Mac, or at least faster Mac.
Absolutely nothing will change for most Mac user’s experience, aside for the need to upgrade with a bigger hard drive. At that – only if you must keep upgrading software as well. As bloatware becomes the norm, as spyware makes its way into Macdom (cf – Adobe), I have an increasing amount of reservation in doing even that. What I have works. It does what I need. Time to crystallize my gear for a while.
If it was not for the necessary testing and support of clients that must update, I would be quite happy with what I have; in fact, I have a major client that I have so far kept on OS 9. There are simply no advantages to them in moving to OS X; the only limitation we will eventually face is in finding dual-boot Mac.
The air balloons were superior to airplanes once. Trains once were faster and safer than the planes as well. It was no lie to say they were – at the time.