Are there technical/factual reasons why one should wait to purchase an Apple? Also, will the prices drop significantly as to be comparable with PCs (if at all, I’ve got no idea if the price is in the CPU or not)?
They are unannounced products, so the specifications and proposed pricing are not public information.
I don’t think anyone expects the price to drop. Apple makes nearly all of it’s profits on hardware margins. Going to Intel won’t change that. The new “macintel” systems will certainly be faster, so if anything, they might be more expensive. Also, older PPC based systems may be highly discounted since they will essentially be [del]obselete[/del] older technology.
The technical issue is that all the current Mac software that isn’t rewritten for the Intel architecture will need to be “emulated” in order to run (Rosetta). It’s unclear what kind of speed reduction there will be, but almost by very definition it won’t be using the new hardware to the full potential.
Probably the best advice I’ve heard to date on whether to buy or wait comes from well known and respected tech guy Leo Laporte. His somewhat painfully obvious advice is that you should buy now if you don’t have a computer or are running a terribly obselete one (think WinMe!). OTOH, if you’ve got a reasonably fast one now and you’re just looking to upgrade (or can otherwise wait) then you should wait, since the Intel boxes will be substantially faster. Basically the thinking is that most people upgrade their computers every few years, and since the macintels aren’t coming out until mid-2006 (who knows, really) buying right away isn’t such a big deal since you’ll be upgrading again not to long into the new wave so to speak. Of course, the closer it gets to rollout, the worse of an idea it is to buy a PPC-based Mac.
In fact, this has led some to speculate that Apple has intentionally set a far out release date in order that people will continue to buy systems. Then, maybe 6-months early, they’ll jump out with an early announcement that the Intel boxes are ready.
This kind of specious marketing isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility.
It’s kind of hard to imagine how they’d expect anyone to buy an old Mac in March if (say) the new ones are going to be released in June.
It’s unlikely the price points will change. Apple tends to pick a price and just keep updating the hardware at that given price. On the other hand, if you wait until the Intel ones come out, you can often buy the recently replaced models at resellers for $100-300 less (but, then, you can do the same thing every time there’s a hardware update)
Personally, I’m going to wait to buy an Apple until the Intel switchover because it will allow me to run Windows on the same box. If that’s not an issue for you, I wouldn’t worry. Not much is really going to change to the average user. I mean, can you tell me what endianness your current PC uses? Whether a given program is processor limited, bus limited, or memory limited? Me neither.
I think an important part of the decision with this transition is going to be the software you run. If you have some piece of software now that you’ll want to run for the next few years, you may want to get a PowerPC Mac now. No matter how fast Rosetta may be in some instances, it’s not going to as good in the first generation of Intel Macs. Later models will likely improve on it quite a bit, but remember you will never get better than an ‘emulated’ G3. There’ll also be fat – uh, universal binaries for some time to come that’ll work on the PowerPC (though almost certainly not Altivec optimized).
If you plan on or already upgrade your software with each new version or each new computer purchase, then it won’t affect you as much. Of course, it’ll be some time before a lot of software is updated (if ever), but the major stuff that is likely to affect your work should be there quickly. This is also why Apple probably won’t announce it early, at least not until some of the major application producers say they have Intel binaries ready.
One more thing - I’m pretty sure Classic is dead on Intel. Something to consider.
Something else - the Intel transition most likely will be top-down (in other words the Mini gets it last). I wouldn’t think Apple has the resources to roll their entire product line at once.
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- Depends on how much money you have to blow, and how long you want to wait. It is the opinion of many people who own both that a low-end P-4 system running the OSx86 developer’s image “feels” at least about as fast as a mid-level Power Mac. The P-4 PC costs perhaps $700 to build, the mid-level Power Mac costs about $2500+ to buy. It’s expected to be 2-3 years before Apple is selling x86 machines. When they do begin selling x86 machines, the prices/values of the PPC machines is going to fall off rapidly, as new OS and software development will likely not include them.
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- It is unknown at this point if you will be able to do this legally, without hacking one or the other. While you may not be able to boot a copy of Windows on an Apple PC due to the Apple’s proprietary motherboard features, it is very likely is that very soon after it is released, hackers will get a image of OSx86 working on generic PC hardware–and the generic PC hardware will almost-certainly cost less than whatever hardware Apple sells.
- Whatever Apple does, many people (myself included) suspect that Apple will have to drastically drop the prices of their products to hope to attract any new users. In the past, they have hidden poor performance and high prices behind the “different” PPC hardware they previously had to use–but that is no longer true, or even possible. When the hardware for both Windows and Mac is essentially the same, then the only justification for the price difference is the pretty cases and a copy of the operating system. Apple cases do tend to look nice, but they aren’t nearly the highpoint of functionality–there are PC cases that work much better. As for how much the operating system is worth paying for, well, that’s the real question isn’t it?
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Do you have a factual basis for these statements?
Loosely speaking (and your mileage may vary), if you’re an old-time Mac user and have gobs of legacy PowerPC stuff (including Classic applicatons you still use), you’ll want the last of the final-generation PowerPC Macs. If you’re a long-time Windows user with lots of PC software, you’ll want a MacTel so as to be able to dual-boot and/or run environmnent-emulation software that lets you have Windows running as a process under OS X (or vice versa) so as to have both systems running at full speed simultaneously. If you are neither — you’re mostly a computer newbie and you like the Mac — buy one after MacWorld Paris next month, when the last new models for awhile will be announced, which will make the prices on today’s models drop.
… as demonstrated by my G-5 iMac that required a new mid plane 3 months after I got it. (They have finally recalled it) :rolleyes:
<sigh> I want my old Performa 575 back <sigh>
IMO, it’s going to be a long time (say, around 2012 or so) before developers start releasing MacIntel-only versions of their software. I wouldn’t worry too much about buying a PowerPC-based Mac now unless you anticipate using it past that date.
I wouldn’t expect to see a major price drop, though; Apple’s prices are driven largely by (a) their desire to keep a healthy profit margin on hardware sales, and (b) recouping costs in areas such as software development, industrial design, and customized motherboards, none of which will change in switching the CPU from one architecture to another.
Actually, Apple has announced that they’ll be transitioning to Intel bottom-up – the iBooks and Mac Minis will be the first to switch over, and the desktop PowerMacs will be last. One of the big reasons for the Intel switchover is to get to a CPU architecture that uses less power and generate less heat, areas that are critical for laptops and smaller computers.
It’s basically a certainty that it will be made to run on any generic x86, as there are already images of an installed copy of the developer’s kit and the install DVD thereof floating about on BitTorrent that run on pretty much x86.
That’s assuming Apple doesn’t add code to the operating system to ensures that it only runs on Apple hardware. Even if they don’t do that, the operating system will only have device drivers for Apple supported hardware, which will be a small subset of what can be used to build a “generic x86”.
At least, so far Apple has avoided the first thing I thought of when they made the announcement without having product close to ready to roll - Osborneing themselves.
Note that Apple has <dr Evil>Billions</dr Evil> of dollars in the bank, and could survive financially for years without selling ANY computers. (Not to mention a significant portion of thier income comes from iPods) - so Osborning is not likely.
Brian
Gotchas all. Thanks. I’m more confused than before about whether to buy an Apple iBook now vs. later, but lots of good information in here… feh, maybe I’ll just get a $2000 LCD instead, or something.
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- Well don’t get a 23" Cinema display, they seem to be having pink-tint color problems: Google search, pink apple cinema displays
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- Well I said that “you might have to hack one or the other”. And if you hack the Apple OS it might not update, even if you paid for a copy.
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You mean “add code again”. The developer’s release searches for a chip embedded in the motherboard and shouldn’t boot without it. However, that protection has already been cracked. I’d be very, very surprised if the same doesn’t happen again.
The easy solution is to just run one or the other inside a virtual machine that pretends to be whatever stock hardware is expected. I doubt it’ll even be necessary to do this if you want to run Windows under OS X, because Windows has traditionally supported every bit of hardware it can manage to. It might be a little more tricky if you want to run OS X under Windows, but since people are already doing it, I have no doubts that whatever change Apple makes, it’ll be cracked soon enough.