Apple goes Intel

Surprisingly (for me) apple computers will now come with Intel (or WINTEL as I used to call it) inside.

and in a galaxy far, far away the Emperor and Lord Vader will crush the rebellion with one swift stroke

I think this is a smart move on Apple's part. Apple computers allways seem to have had slower rated processors. I'm sure an Apple fan would say that even with the slower rated processor it is faster, which may be the case, dont want to get into that.(no need to start an IMB vs apple war)

But most consumers just see the number. Not sure what a good realistic example would be but when average joe is looking at computers and the IBM is 3Ghz an the apple is 1.5Ghz, reguardless of which one will surf the net faster he is going to THINK the IBM will.

With no apparent processor dissadvantage, apples will look better at least in the eyes of an average uninformed consumer.

I'm not sure why Intel is considered the dark side. I think they do good work. The new dual core chips are pretty exciting, and their mobile chips have been much better than IBM mobile chips for some time now (use a G5 mobile and never have kids again, etc.). The switch makes perfect sense...

Here's an educated analysis of the switch. It's back to the ol' emulator for non re-compiled code! (yet another transition period). Here's another analysis.

Thanks to my friend, Alex King, for the links.

What difference does it make!?

In the end I want a fast machine which does what I want...

Would like to have a G5 mobile, but seems not possible because of power & heat, so I'll be happy to take any processor with a OSX as long as it works...

Have fun

Torben

Easy, easy, I was just trying to start the discussion in a funny (polemic as I see now) way. The reason that I've always treated Intel as the dark side was because it has always been the powerful company associated with Windows. For now, I will wait and see where Apple goes in the next few months.

Have we all forgotten that IBM was once the evil empire? Anyone remember when Motorola made the PowerPC chip?

Frankly, it always amazed me when Apple jumped into bed with IBM on the Power PC processors. After, Steve Jobs himself once described IBM as the "Darth Vader of personal computing. " Doesn't anyone remember that famous Super Bowl commercial by Apple? That the West Coast garage boys ever hooked up with the East Coast corporate evil empire was simply astounding. Apple and Intel, whose headquarters are only a few miles apart in Silicon Valley, are much more culturally compatible. And remember, once Apple uses Intel, they can also use AMD processors. There's a lot more going on in the competition between Intel and AMD than on the Power PC front, and Apple will benefit from that, too.

Yes, I agree that most of it will be for good. The only bad thing I can think of is that I will have to buy lots of software upgrade, but that's not too bad considering that I would have to do it anyways in 1-2 years as most (if not all) companies now charge for upgrades.

Rocha, it's probably not going to be that bad... During the WWDC keynote speech, Steve Jobs showed off a dynamic binary translation layer called "Rosetta", as in Rosetta stone.

This converts PowerPC binaries to Intel binaries on the fly, and seemed remarkably fast considering what it was doing. It is quite clever in translating the binaries "just in time", and uses lots of caching of the converted code so that code blocks only need to be converted once per runtime of the application. He was running 10.4.1 on a 3.4 Ghz single processor Pentium 4 machine with 2GB of RAM. He launched Photoshop CS2 PPC, and it started up and ran about as fast as CS does on my 1 GHZ powerbook. That's not knock your socks off performance by any means, but it is so much better than the VirtualPC experience that I was duly impressed.

Rosetta will be a part of the enabling OS for the intel machines, so it will just be there and do things for us. It is far more transparent than running an OS9 application in Classic, for instance.

So software can be upgraded as you wish, and most of them will continue to run with no problems using Rosetta until such time as they go to native Intel binaries.

And as for Classic: goodbye! (won't work with Intel-based Macs)

Hopefully, Apple will engineer code to shock users who continue to use MSIE 5 on the Mac. (hehehe).

the more I think about it, the more sense it makes and the more advantages for the users are the result.

On the new Apple hardware with Intel processor it will be possible to install OSX, Windows and Linux...

All new Apple customers will get the hardware with OSX, so even Windows user who were never exposed to OSX will get to use it even when they install windows later on.

It will also be possible to install a Windows parallel to the OSX, which enables virus invested gaming and serious systems for serious work without any viruses on the same hardware.

I met so many people who were so amazed by the gr8 Apple hardware but had to use a specific software which required Windows... Even these poor creatures will have a chance to send a email without a virus now, just by rebooting

Hang on Windows users, help is coming

Me, for my part, I rushed to the Apple center round the corner yesterday and ordered a Imac 20", G5 2GHz, 2GB, 400GB... just to make sure...

Have fun

Torben