Random Eyes

Yesterday’s big news story is a load of baloney. Just about every Mac rumor site has posted something or other about a supposed rumor that Apple is going to ditch Power PC and switch over to Intel processors. I won’t even bother linking to the many stories, because it’s just not worth it.

The idea has been brought up before, many times, and it just isn’t going to happen. The rumor resurfaces whenever there’s a slow news day and let’s face it, it’s been a slow news week. So of course some idiot has to resurrect tired, old unsubstantiated rumors to make the week go out with a bang.

If you read Slashdot or MacSlash, plenty of reasons have been given to explain why this is a boatload load of crap. I don’t agree with all of them, but I am getting really tired of hearing this stupid rumor over and over. I do want to throw one idea into the soup, though. Apple got one thing from NeXT that a lot of Mac fans seem to have forgotten about.

At one point in time, NEXTSTEP / OPENSTEP ran on four different processor architectures (680×0, Intel, Sparc, and HP-PA). Now, as Mac OS X, it’s running on PPC. During the “Rhapsody” pre-release days, it ran on Intel and PPC. Returning to the old days, building an app for all four architectures wasn’t hard at all. You’d just click a checkbox in Project Builder for each processor you wanted the app to be able to run on. Adding a new architecture was as easy as enabling a checkbox before building. The app would be built as a “fat” binary, containing the executable code for each processor in a single executable file. The operating system would in effect extract the part it needed and run that. For the user and developer it was a transparent process. The only trick for developers was that they had to be careful to write code that didn’t care about processor endian-ness. Most code that stuck to the frameworks didn’t have any troubles at all. Every app I wrote worked fine — and it worked the same on every architecture. Pretty cool technology.

This could certainly happen again, if Apple ever felt it was worth the trouble. Given that the people at Apple already know how to do this, and know how to make it easy for developers and users to use, I postulate that the reason Mac OS X doesn’t already run on Intel processors is primarily a non-technical one. (There are many possible reasons, and I don’t feel like detailing them right now.) There may be some technical hurdles, but nothing Apple can’t handle. But I don’t see any dramatic marketplace changes that would alter the non-technical issues, so I just don’t see Mac OS X on Intel being a very high liklihood. A lot of alternate scenarios have been brought up, and I find many of those far more plausible. The most obvious would be Apple using other, non-CPU chips from Intel in upcoming machines. That’s happened before, so seems quite reasonable.

Anyway, I guess we’ll know for sure after Jobs takes the stage at WWDC. My best guess is that this whole thing is a red herring to distract from whatever the real annoucement(s) will be. Whatever is announced, I sure hope it’s cool!

Edit/Update: Well, it looks like it did happen and I was wrong to say it wouldn’t. Oh well, no biggie. As I said above, I don’t see this transition as being a big problem from a technical perspective. It will “just work”, just like you’d expect from Apple. On NEXTSTEP, it was easy to compile for four architectures at once. And I never once had trouble with code behaving differently on one processor or another — if it worked on one, it worked the same on them all. So as a developer, this isn’t going to cause me any extra work.

I wasn’t ready to believe in this switch due to non-technical factors; I guess IBM called The Steve’s bluff and he turned around and said “it ain’t a bluff guys”. I did know Apple had x86 builds in house, so I was aware they could in effect flip a switch and run on Intel at any time (ie, no technical barriers, really). But I didn’t realize Jobs was that pissed about IBM’s lack of progress with the G5. I’d say that now it’s pretty clear he’s had enough, though. I guess that IBM making a liar out of him (”3.0 GHz in a year”) didn’t sit very well and he’s really run out of patience.

I still have to wonder about what this shift will do to Apple’s hardware sales, though. If Apple is going to make a transition like this, it’s obviously better to do it sooner than later. Just the same, it will be interesting to see how this affects Apple’s balance sheet over the next couple of years while the transition takes place. I suspect hardware sales will drop off until the Intel machines ship. It seems like the typical customer’s logic flow is going to be something like “well, I was going to buy that nice shiny new G5, but if an Intel processor is so much better according to The Steve, then I’ll just wait for that.” In fact, I sort of hope that happens, since I wouldn’t mind picking up a dual G5 at fire sale prices (IF the fire sale price is “can’t even give them away” low enough, that is). They are still decent machines. On the other hand, I’m starting my savings for a dual-proc, dual-core Intel box. A four way system would be really sweet…and now there’s no way I’ll be shelling out the megabucks for that dual G5 I had my eyes on for a while.

I also wonder if this whole thing is going to end up mirroring the NeXT days, where they eventually stopped making hardware all together. I still can’t quite see Apple doing that, but then again, their real advantage has been the operating system, and no matter what processor it runs on, that’s still the same. Seems like if it is bad enough, lost sales during this Intel transition could force them into a position where they have to drop hardware. Luckily Apple is healthier than NeXT was, so hopefully a hardware drop won’t happen.

And one thing about this really makes me happy. I’ll never see that inane “Apple is switching to Intel” rumor popping up again on a slow news week. Those who manufacture stupid rumors will have to come up with a new one. After hearing the same crap over and over, it’s good to see one of the too-often-repeated rumors finally put to rest forever. I’m really curious to see what new dead horse they’ll be dredging up so they can beat on it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 4th, 2005 at 11:17 am and is filed under Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.