Apple switches to Intel chips.

I am confused here, since the OS of the Mac is Unix based, I thought it was not going to be difficult to port it to the Intel machines, I always wondered why they didn’t release the Mac OS for Intel and Atlon computers before, will this mean that Apple will do that in the near future?

Porting OSX isn’t the hard part (Darwin, the *nix core is already out there)
But all the apps will have to be recompiled.

One of the nice things for Apple with making both the hardware and the software is that they can be tuned for each other and testing is easier.

It will be an interesting keynote.

Brian

Figures, already posted and I took a look. However, this is now not just a rumour as many on the other thread posted, this is confirmed now by the WSJ.

I find this surreal, if true:

Since PowerPC launched, Apple has been dissing Intel for well-nigh 10 years as being an inferior architecture. I recall being at WWDC a decade ago, and seeing graphs proving the coming Intel/MS architecture apocalypse as clock speeds rev up. But Apple would Save The World through RISC computing! Yay!

Gently skipping over such debacles as Bedrock and Copeland, we now find ourselves much later on the G5 (“a supercomputer in your pants!”) and now Apple is going to start up an Intel Inside strategy?

I’m waiting to see the first post from a Mac enthusiast telling us how this move Makes Perfect Sense! Wow, Jobs is a Genius! The mind boggles.

So surreal. We’ll find out tomorrow if cognitive dissonance is a new feature of OS-X.

If in fact this is true, i can predict that there will be an extremely vocal chorus of booing from the audience, Jobs may well get booed off stage, sort of like what happened in the “Dark Times” when the Antichrist, errr…Satan, errr…billy-boy gates appeared on the “Jumbotron” at Macworld and announced he was investing some pocket lint ($15 million) into Apple (thank Og they were non-voting shares…)

if it is true, i for one will be giving Jobs the finger from behind the comfort of my monitor, and holding onto my Mirror Door G4 as one of the last REAL Macs…

in all probability, the new intel processor is probably going to be an intel-made PPC chip, probably licenced from IBM/Motorola, moving to x86 would require a fundamental rebuild of the OS and apps from the ground up, and seeing as Tiger was just recently introduced, that doesn’t make sense, perhaps they may recode OS 11 (or more probably 10.5 “Cougar”)

i’m still hoping for it to be a rumor, like the iWalk or the vaporware tablet Mac…

Actually, Squeegee, a true Mac enthusiast would tell you that jobs is nothing special, he’s just a glorified salesdrone, an empty suit, the real geniuses are The Woz*, Jonathan Ive, and the rest of the actual hardware engineers and programmers, not some glorified salesdrone in a black mock turtleneck…

yes, this Mac fanatic actually hates Unca’ stevie, especially because he seems to be stuck in “Evil Steve” mode…

I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I do know that it doesn’t really make sense. The current crop of Apple chips work very well, and I can’t imagine what benefit there would be to changing. The only way this could make any sense at all would be if they’re keeping the same architecture but Intel is going to be making them now, in which case (assuming that Apple trusts Intel to make them up to spec), it’d just be a matter of who’s making them cheaper. But even that sounds fishy: With as important as these chips are to IBM/Motorola, one would think that they’d be prepared to offer Apple a better deal than Intel is.

My guess is that the “expected to announce on Monday” is just a reporter who paid too much attention to unsubstantiated rumours for the sake of scooping a story. Show me a “did announce on Monday”, and I’ll pay attention. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Honestly, I don’t follow the Mac enthusiast community lately (I was quite the Mac-head long ago) but I’d thought Jobs was held in a sort of tarnished sainthood by now: he’s…hrm…a dick. But a brilliant one!! He saved the company after Gil drove it into the ground!! Or something; I admit I haven’t followed Jobs beatification of late.

Woz is brilliant, but hasn’t done much since 1979ish. Certainly nothing for the Mac. No?

If I’m not mistaken, Jon designed the shape of some Macs. And how they could be manufactured. I’m sure he’s brilliant at what he does, but it doesn’t, to me, seem instrumental to the whole Mac Experience. But, again, what do I know. :slight_smile:

CNET now:

http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html

Possible reason: Hollywood Orders, uh, recommendation:

Apple seems to be fairly competent – relatively speaking – at creating their own DRM. Why bring Intel into it? Besides, commodity hardware means that when Intel’s DRM is cracked, so is theirs.

Except that the -D platform does not have new DRM in it.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23708

OK, I’m immensely skeptical about this:

"What’s new this time is a fast, transparent, universal emulator from Transitive, a Silicon Valley startup.

Transitive’s QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims. The techology automatically kicks in when necessary, and supports high-end 3D graphics. It was developed by Alasdair Rawsthorne. "

It could be a similar technology to the interpretor that Apple used when converting to the PowerPC chip years ago. But while that was reasonably fast, it sure wasn’t without a performance hit. And I really don’t see how you can do it without a performance hit because so much software is compiled to take advantages of features of the specific architecture it’s running on.

I guess we’ll find out today, but if the motivation for the change is truly the DRM, a lot of the Apple fanbase is going to be massively upset.

That’s impossible. There has to be some overhead in translating code from one instruction set to another.

“No performance hit” is about as believable as Nigerian spam.

Don’t worry about it, GIGO. It actually felt kinda wierd to be scooping the Mac enthusiasts like that, but that article was too interesting to ignore.

I’m half-expecting to see a news article titled “Steve Jobs lynched by thousands of irate Apple users.” :smiley:

Well, according to the PBP of Jobs’s keynote, it’s completely true, and he confirmed what we all knew: they’ve had OSX for x86 in the lab since the beginning. They’re releasing a new version of XCode that will create a single binary for both platforms.

His entire keynote has been running on a P4 3.6Ghz, in OSX, and he demoed all the standard apps.

I was skeptical, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. Hopefully someday soon I’ll have a dual-boot Windows, Linux, and OS X machine!

I wonder if it’ll be possible, myself. Considering how tight Apple locks their hardware down, I wouldn’t be surprised if they figure out a way to stop people from doing it.

If Engadget is to be believed, the dynamic translator they’re using, called Rosetta, doesn’t show noticeable slowdown. Jobs was demoing MS Office and Photoshop with it and everything worked, they said.

Here is the Apple press release:

Lots of details unexplained. Will Mac OSX run on commdity hardware?
I’m not sure how Apple prevents this. Custom BIOses can be cracked.

Brian

My guess is that it won’t use a traditional BIOS, and that it’ll look for specific video hardware, etc. If OSX for Intel doesn’t find a video card that says “Hey, I’m from Apple!” it won’t run, or some such. They’ll find ways to keep us from going to Pricewatch and building an OSX box for $400.

Either that, or hell really has frozen over and they’re going to allow clones again.