The Mac Night Owl’s 2005 News Archive
Lifted at The Mac Night Owl, where you will find the full; article.
I’m sure some of you have read about the Developer Transition Kit (let’s call it DTK) that Apple is leasing to help programmers build Universal Binaries of their products. The DTK includes a modified Power Mac with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor inside. Now I don’t know to what extent Apple is frowning upon stories about that test computer, but I will say this: Don’t assume that this Mac represents the kind of product Apple is going to sell when it converts to Intel processors. For one thing, it’s clear that Intel will have a different line of chips a year or two hence, and it’s very possible Apple might just create a whole new form factor to usher in the new order.
In fact Apple has been quoted as saying, “Don’t assume that what you see in the transition boxes represents what will be present in the final product.” I don’t see how things could be more obvious. It’s just a test bed to allow software publishers to make sure their updated applications will work properly in the Intel environment, and that’s it. In fact, the computer will eventually have to be returned to Apple.
In any case, this hasn’t stopped some folks from benchmarking the test computers to gauge the performance of the Rosetta emulation environment and other performance parameters. Of course, I should remind them that the benchmarking tool, itself, has to run in emulation, which is a double whammy as far as performance hits are concerned, though I’m sure native tools will be out before long.
Regardless, the results mean nothing, absolutely nothing. This isn’t the Mac with Intel Inside that you will eventually be able to buy. In addition to using chips that aren’t out yet, there might be many performance optimizations on the motherboard that aren’t present on the test product. Can I make it any clearer?
Then there’s the question of whether the special version of mac os X that comes on the DTK will run on a vanilla Intel box. Reports say it won’t, except for one that claims to quote developers as saying it will. I’ll go with the former, since it’s in keeping with Apple’s stated policy that, “We will not allow running mac os X on anything other than an Apple Mac.” Do you see any room for fudging in that announcement? I don’t, but that doesn’t stop some people from predicting that Apple will eventually allow some PC box builders to market products with mac os X. We know that Dell would like to do it, and I’m sure other PC makers are begging Apple to open up the platform.
But don’t expect it to happen anytime soon, and if it does happen, it may be strictly for products targeted at market areas where Apple has little, if any, presence. I suggested perhaps a Dell running mac os X Server, since sales of Apple’s xserve are still quote low in the scheme of things. But I don’t see it going further than that.