[MindFad]

I'm honestly trying to understand, but I don't get it. While I am hoping for some explanations of it all, I can't imagine we'll get very far. But I am genuinely curious. (And I just wanted to be an ass and start another Intel/Apple thread, but seriously....)

[Millennium]

If you have studied the architectures, you'll find out very quickly just how bad and hacked-up the x86 architecture is, and how elegant the PowerPC architecture. I kid you not; we're talking night-and-day differences here. The x86 architecture descends directly from the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor, which was created for desktop calculators. You can imagine how this baggage has affected the architecture; it's a wonder Windows works at all. Most chip makers had the good sense to abandon this architecture when better designs came out -even the 680x0 chips were better than the x86 chips of their day- and PowerPC was one of these.

I demand the best in computers. If Apple will not provide them anymore, then I will have to look elsewhere. OSX is very good, but not good enough to follow it to crap such as Intel puts out.

[gururafiki]

Its a good question. Probably similar to the psychological tie to OS 9...Or the psychological tie (or negative reaction) to Microsoft buying Apple stock...

[RonnieoftheRose]

Because for years Mac users believed whatever hype they were told, sometimes rightly but most of the time wrongly, about how fast PPC chips were compared to Intel. At most the difference was 30% in general use. Never quite the two and a half times performance difference Apple claimed.

The rest is obvious, Intel = MS. Not true but to most "peecee" meant both companies and not just MS. Likewise PPC = Mac OS. It became a psychological barrier to those who had never used an Intel based machine.

[RonnieoftheRose]

Originally Posted by Millennium

If you have studied the architectures, you'll find out very quickly just how bad and hacked-up the x86 architecture is, and how elegant the PowerPC architecture. I kid you not; we're talking night-and-day differences here. The x86 architecture descends directly from the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor,

The G3 was an updated 604. The G4 still has a crap 604 FPU that has always been soundly toasted by Intel and AMD. What's the most elegant 32 bit processor available? It's the Dothan. What's the most elegant and cool running 64 bit CPU? This time AMD takes the crown. OK, not Intel but still X86.

Anybody remember Alpha? They had the fastest desktop chips around but never scaled. Once the Pentium series met them at the same clockspeed they also matched them clock for clock performance-wise.

[Don Pickett]

Psychologically speaking it an extroverted ego structure, that is, an ego structure whose self identity is more tied to external than internal signifiers. All of us are a mix of extrovert and introvert (self identity tied more to internal processes and signifiers than external).

[Kerrigan]

Because people have been fooled by Apple for years to think that the G4/G5 are faster than Intel processors. People are still in denial about being tricked by Apple's marketers and their rigged Photoshop benchmarks.

"Elegant" doesn't mean anything if it's slower and doesn't work in a laptop. The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.

Thank you for the new .sig!

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by Millennium

If you have studied the architectures, you'll find out very quickly just how bad and hacked-up the x86 architecture is, and how elegant the PowerPC architecture. I kid you not; we're talking night-and-day differences here. The x86 architecture descends directly from the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor, which was created for desktop calculators. You can imagine how this baggage has affected the architecture; it's a wonder Windows works at all. Most chip makers had the good sense to abandon this architecture when better designs came out -even the 680x0 chips were better than the x86 chips of their day- and PowerPC was one of these.

OK, that's the best explanation I've come across concerning the Intel thing; I'm not much of a geekoid and I don't know what to make of this. Some are weeping buckets and some are indifferent. Me, I'm off to the side having a smoke break until I can decipher this.

But can you translate your post to a more practical level for those of us (me) who don't know squat about architectures or x86 or...? For example, do you expect a MacIntel to crash more often, or be prone to hardware inconsistencies or...what?

And whatever the potential downsides are (and I'm being extremely naive here), do you think Steve hasn't considered them? He strikes me as one who is almost obsessive about producing quality machines and software. I can't visualize him plugging into a junk "architecture" just for the sake of making more money or converting Winfolk to Macfolk.

[JoshuaZ]

I think we all bought into Steve's hype. I mean, seriously, 10 years of hype behind a chip in a devoted fan base does a lot. Also, Intel is seen as part of the 'evil empire' along with MS.

[menglish]

I think it has to do with the percieved cachet of the Mac. Whether the PPC was better than the Pentium or not, it was different. The subculture of the Mac has strong roots in the notion of being a minority subculture. One of the problems with switching to Intel is that a foundational aspect of the culture is no longer different.

I'm not a car person, but what would the response of Mercedes owners be if they found out that Daimler-Chrysler had contracted out to Ford to get engines? ... And that response would come even though most mercedes owners wouldn't know much, if anything, about the relative quality of those engines (I certainly don't).

[Mastrap]

To be honest, I don't give a monkey's what processor powers my Mac as long as it gets the job done and runs OS X. Personally I think Millenium might very well be wrong and overreacting, but to each hi/her own.

My company runs 100% on the Mac platform. In three years time we'll probably bee upgrading to an Intel powered Mac. Who cares?

[dlefebvre]

Originally Posted by Millennium

...it's a wonder Windows works at all...

yes, but it has nothing to do with the machine it runs on...

[ROBO58]

Tell me I'm crazy but I believe Steve Jobs is out to rollover Bill Gates and Microsoft gang. That's the new Apple Mission Statement. It's Platform parity(X86) with Apple goodness throughout.

Techies have been arguing about CPU architectures since day one but its hard to argue with X86 product from a company that will do $36B in business in 2005. Companies don't grow to $36B producing crappy products.

For the record there are many more mission critical applications running on X86 than PPC. Platform robustness with any architecture is about good design & engineering and Apple has that hands down.

On the Apple subculture, you sure do have a mission and its the same as its been. A paragraph from the resent quarterly update:

"Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store."

Robo

[ambush]

Originally Posted by Millennium

If you have studied the architectures, you'll find out very quickly just how bad and hacked-up the x86 architecture is, and how elegant the PowerPC architecture. I kid you not; we're talking night-and-day differences here. The x86 architecture descends directly from the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor, which was created for desktop calculators. You can imagine how this baggage has affected the architecture; it's a wonder Windows works at all. Most chip makers had the good sense to abandon this architecture when better designs came out -even the 680x0 chips were better than the x86 chips of their day- and PowerPC was one of these.

I demand the best in computers. If Apple will not provide them anymore, then I will have to look elsewhere. OSX is very good, but not good enough to follow it to crap such as Intel puts out.

Question: Will it really affect your daily tasks? Is it so life changing?
WTF, chill out.


WTF do you want Apple to do? Sit there and do nothing? We'll be stuck at like 2.7GHz for like another year, probably. No signs of G5 procs capable of sitting in a laptop. Jeesus H Christ.

Stuff will still work, and probably wayyyy faster. Bring it on.

Does it also mean we'll be able to build our own macs?

THINK ABOUT THE OVERCLOCKING POSSIBILITIES!

[Kitschy]

I'm with Mastrap on this one. As long as OS X still runs and I can't tell any difference, then I'm a happy camper.

Also, being completely ignorant on the specifics of the architecture of x86 (and PPC for that matter), doesn't Apple's switch to Intel open the floodgates for Mac OS X to take over the Intels that are out there currently running Windows? Surely it's not this easy...

[ambush]

By 2007, the Intel roadmaps says they will supply 32-core chips. How about that kind of **** for OSX?

[Kerrigan]

Originally Posted by ambush

By 2007, the Intel roadmaps says they will supply 32-core chips. How about that kind of **** for OSX?

A single core 2.7ghz G5 is still nine times as fast as a 4.8ghz 32-core Pentium D when performing a Guasian Blur.



I wonder if there is going to be a new website set up with a forum for all the disgruntled PPC owners? You know, like that weird OS 9 website Thalo where everybody bitches about how awful OS X is in comparison.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by RonnieoftheRose

The G3 was an updated 604.

Actually, it was an updated 603, which was part of the problem. IBM's updated 604 (codenamed "Mach 5"; it was only ever used in the 9600) was superior in almost every respect, and almost became the G3, but Motorola's chip had a more impressive backside cache, and Apple chose it in the end.

What's the most elegant 32 bit processor available? It's the Dothan.

Come back when the Dothan has more than one reliable register (i.e. not prone to changing due to events only partly under the programmer's control).This is a legacy of the 4004 which plagues X86 to this day. Or shall I go into something as simpleas memory-to-memory copying?

What's the most elegant and cool running 64 bit CPU? This time AMD takes the crown. OK, not Intel but still X86.

Actually, not quite X86 either; AMD's chip actually has a couple of reliable registers, for starters. Not nearly enough, but better than x86.

[ghporter]

It has been my impression since the introduction of the original Pentium processor that the x86 architecture built into Pentiums is vestigal at best. In fact, Windows XP does not seem to use the "real mode" portions of the Pentium processor at all, instead using a virtual machine to emulate whatever hardware the Windows writers thought went best with the various itterations of Windows through the years for the "compatibility mode" to run old software.

The biggest knock against x86 architecture has to be its memory addressing scheme. Millenium is right in that it retains a serious legacy of earlier processors. When the 8086 was built, they decided that a specific number of addressing lines would be sufficient for using the chip as a microcontroller. That was all it was designed to be originally. That number of lines allowed the chip to address only about 64kbytes of memory at a time, though it did allow that 64k to be selected from a larger 1Mbyte range. Later x86 processors retained the "segmented memory" architecture for backward compatibility. One of the advances in the Pentium family was that this memory addressing scheme was "virtualized" in the chip; microcode in the chip emulated segmented memory addressing through the processor's much more flexible memory addressing lines.

The bottom line for me is twofold. First, Microsoft has not come close to really utilizing the capabilities of ANY Pentium processor. If Intel has retained vestiges of ancient chip designs, ol' Bill's boys have put truckloads of "legacy code" in even the most recent updates to Windows XP. It should be noted that most of Windows' vulnerabilities can be traced to legacy code that had never been tested in the more rigorous context of a connected and on-line world. To put it bluntly, running Windows XP on a Pentium 4 processor is like putting to the corner store in a Lamborgini Diablo. A real waste of hardware.

Additionally, I think that Apple's decision to switch to (what can only be remotely referred to nowadays as ) x86 architecture will be a bonus for everyone except IBM and Microsoft. Users will get more zippy processors (that will be much better utilized by a more modern, tighter and better designed OS) that feature more advanced floating point calculations (which equals better performance in everything from scientific programs to Paintshop) and have more flexible interface capabilities through already existing support chipsets. While I'm sure that Apple will go in a very different direction from the PC's "North Bridge" and "South Bridge" motherboard architecture, much of the rest of the computer has to remain fairly similar to what's already in PCs, so without reinventing the wheel, they can jumpstart advanced board development-and ride the coattails of the PC industry's years of experience with a whole range of components.

Historically, many Apple/Mac users have stormed off when Apple made a fundamental change in their product line. I really don't see what benefit this has given those former users. Apple has lost market share for a while, but then attracted new users who quickly learned that the basic design philosophy of Apple computers has never changed. Take a look at Millenium's signature for a very concise description of that philosophy. I'll just capsulize it by saying that with Macs, the computer works for you, while with PCs, the OS gives you the tools to do that work. It's a world of difference, and whether it runs on an 68000, a PowerPC G4 or a Pentium-Mac CPU, it will STILL be a Mac.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Bluesky

But can you translate your post to a more practical level for those of us (me) who don't know squat about architectures or x86 or...? For example, do you expect a MacIntel to crash more often, or be prone to hardware inconsistencies or...what?

In a nutshell, optimization becomes harder and more limited in what it can do, compilers and interpreters become more error-prone (which in turn can lead to bugs in any software which uses them, which is to say all software), and code gets generally more bloated and convoluted, which tends to make debugging more difficult. Technically, network operations can also suffer somewhat, though this is not much of a speed hit.

And whatever the potential downsides are (and I'm being extremely naive here), do you think Steve hasn't considered them?

Truth be told, no. I don't think he has. Even from the beginning, when it was just the Steves, Jobs was a salesman, not a techie. I think he sees clockrates and other manufactured benchmarks (what the hell is a "unit of power" anyway, and what does it have to do with wattage?) and translates them into marketing dollars. This happens at every single business the man runs; he comes in and does great things for a while, but thenafter about seven years or so he gets cocky and starts throwing out the craziness, usually driving the company right into the ground. Apple was lucky to survive the first time it happened, and I don't think it'll have the same luck this time. Not when it'll be competing against Microsoft in the same septic tank.

[RonnieoftheRose]

Originally Posted by Millennium

This happens at every single business the man runs; he comes in and does great things for a while, but thenafter about seven years or so he gets cocky and starts throwing out the craziness, usually driving the company right into the ground. Apple was lucky to survive the first time it happened, and I don't think it'll have the same luck this time.

You're talking crap.

See my thread:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=259240

[JoshuaZ]

Dude, he's running Pixar quite well right now. Really well.

I see this as a good business move. His reasoning is strong.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Millennium

This happens at every single business the man runs; he comes in and does great things for a while, but thenafter about seven years or so he gets cocky and starts throwing out the craziness, usually driving the company right into the ground. Apple was lucky to survive the first time it happened, and I don't think it'll have the same luck this time. Not when it'll be competing against Microsoft in the same septic tank.

Sorry, but I think you're presenting your opinions as fact here. And these opinions appear to me to far from what is actually happening.

As far as I can tell Jobs has learned a hell of a lot of lessons in the last twenty years. He looks to me an extremely capable CEO, both of Pixar and Apple. He managed to convince the music industry to allow the iTunes shop, he saw the potential in the iPod.

[yukon]

It's sad, I was a fervent mac user about a decade ago, now I'm just an "informer of alternate and superior technologies" I guess. The mac was defined by how it was different and better than the standard, it's been gradually moving towards the standard, and now for the most part everything in the next Apple computer will be IBM Compatible (hell, Shiller says it'll run Windows if the user wants it to), all thats left is the software. Everyone here seems to think that OS X is the essence of Macintosh, it most certainly isn't - I bought my G4 with OS 9, I knew exactly what programs or even menu options would bring up macsbug, operating systems like Windows 2000 didn't have that problem (it's not a great system, I've certainly used it enough, but hey, it was much more stable than OS9 on decent hardware), the OS is great but theres more to it than that, things that I think just can't be brought with modified PC hardware. I mean we're saying goodbye to PPC, to OpenFirmware, being able to run anything from before 2001, any applications that aren't going to update their app for a new CPU change or to remove hard-won altivec enhancements (before you say it's easy, remember how easy Carbon porting was? 10% and all, how they had Photoshop running in a Carbon demonstration with so little modification, yet we didn't see that released for a long time).

I read that Jobs had felt at one point that the Macintosh had run it's course ("My 500 Days at Apple", a biased source perhaps) and that he wanted to cancel it and do something new. An Intel "mac" won't really be a "mac", it'll be Macintosh software ported and running on a PC with a special System Enabler 775 soldered on. Maybe this is the new product, Jobs felt that there was no ability to win or continue on, that the choice was to lose or give up and take on a new battle, hence the Apple PC clone. All of what I just said can be argued against, but it's part of how I feel, and we are talking about the psychological (emotional) ties.

[starman]

Not for nothing, but let's look at some facts here:

1) No G5 laptops yet. We're WAY overdue for them.
2) No 3.0 GHz G5s yet either. We're WAY overdue for them.

To be honest, I don't care. So long as the damn thing works, so be it. Yes, the G5 is a better processor, but where's my 3 GHz machine? It's coming? It's not even breathing hard.

EDIT: I just want to add that from a developer's standpoint, who does Windows and Mac development, there are two issues:

1) Endianess. Will be a problem, but not a big one.
2) Assembler. Won't be a problem because no more #ifdefs!

Mike

[ironknee]

yes intel is psychologically linked to microsoft. but ibm was/is the biggest enemy.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by MindFad

What is this psychological tie to "PowerPC"?

Two decades of conditioning and devotion. To many, Intel represents Apple's Anti-Christ.

[discotronic]

Originally Posted by Millennium

I demand the best in computers. If Apple will not provide them anymore, then I will have to look elsewhere. OSX is very good, but not good enough to follow it to crap such as Intel puts out.

Could you get off it already. You are starting to sound just like mAxximo.

[techweenie1]

To Millennium and thinkers alike, what advantages over X86 do you specifically utilize on a PPC on a regular basis, besides Altivec which is fairly new.

[dlefebvre]

A lot of people have shown blind faith for so many years in a company that everybody else was proclaiming as dead. They were right to do so, Apple is alive and well. So, how come those people cannot trust this switch?

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Millennium

This happens at every single business the man runs; he comes in and does great things for a while, but thenafter about seven years or so he gets cocky and starts throwing out the craziness, usually driving the company right into the ground. Apple was lucky to survive the first time it happened, and I don't think it'll have the same luck this time.

Oh puh-leeze.

You should read your sig sometime ...

I would add that the Mac has an underlying operating philosophy, which boils down to: make it easy and give users a choice.

I personally don't care if OSX runs on Doritos. All IBM needed to do was create a mobile G5 chip, pass the 3.0Ghz mark without overclocking and meet demand with supply. The company failed on all three.

And older users should remember the controversy when Apple dumped Moto for Big Blue.

More than anything, I think people are adverse to change. And many Mac addicts like the underdog (us against them) mentality.

Things might be tough for a year or so but Apple's been doing good and still has plenty of inventive stuff (iTunes with podcasting is very near). A year from now and things will be pretty much the same as they are now except we'll have more choices and options.

[Mac The Fork]

Come back when the Dothan has more than one reliable register (i.e. not prone to changing due to events only partly under the programmer's control).

You manage to make it sound as though the IA-32 architecture operates primarily on free will. The registers are not "prone to changing"; they change as specified quite clearly in the instruction set reference as a response to the execution of instructions as written, a process that is misleading to express as "events only partly under the programmer's control".

The biggest knock against x86 architecture has to be its memory addressing scheme. Millenium is right in that it retains a serious legacy of earlier processors. When the 8086 was built, they decided that a specific number of addressing lines would be sufficient for using the chip as a microcontroller. That was all it was designed to be originally. That number of lines allowed the chip to address only about 64kbytes of memory at a time, though it did allow that 64k to be selected from a larger 1Mbyte range. Later x86 processors retained the "segmented memory" architecture for backward compatibility. One of the advances in the Pentium family was that this memory addressing scheme was "virtualized" in the chip; microcode in the chip emulated segmented memory addressing through the processor's much more flexible memory addressing lines.

That's not really a big deal. Although it's not possible to turn off segmentation entirely, 32-bit Protected Mode supports the definition of arbitrarily-sized segments that may span the entirety of the 32-bit address space. The definition of overlapping 4GB code, data and stack segments creates an effectively linear address space. This has been possible since the release of the 386, long before the Pentium.

[Hawkeye_a]

The PowerPC to the best of my knowledge, abandoned the old legacy processors and started fresh in the 90s with a simple design and has thus far scaled upto the G5 offering comparible performance to the competition.
Pentiums, etc on the other hand have just kept building stuff on top of previous designs and hacking their designs to be compatible with ancient code (probably because of the crappy design of Windows, and it's legacy code and compatibility).
Have a look at the size of the PPCs compared to the Pentiums for example.

I strongly suspect that Intel has mad a brancd new breed of processors, starting fresh....(could even be a flavour of itanium), which will be used for longhorn PCs and now apparently with OSX10.5.

What it boils down to is...
1. the powerPC partnership has disolved with motorola and IBM taking different directions and neither really interested in Apple's plans.
2. Apple has descided to bite the bullet and team up with intel, cause there's not really anyone else who has been doing this for this long for this market.
3. This turn of events has put Apple, once again....after 25 odd years....in direct competition with Microsoft for the desktop space....this next year is going to be the calm before the storm...Apple is taking on MS in a bit way.....heck....challenging the 'wintel' paradigm...is big enough. And think...Apple has never been stronger....it's brand is at the top, it's services are up there as well...it's design(both hardware and software) are envied by everyone....technophiles n hippies alike. I think the Dell's, HPs, etc...will be impacted greatly.
And whats more...for once, i reckon Apple has swallowed it's pride, and taken an extremely positive step to push the MacOS market share over 5%.

Cheers.

[d.fine]

Originally Posted by Randman

I personally don't care if OSX runs on Doritos.

Would be a little dangerous, might want to eat them...

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak

Two decades of conditioning and devotion. To many, Intel represents Apple's Anti-Christ.

How many times do this need to be brought up: Didn't IBM use to be Apple's anti-christ?

How quickly we forget...

[xi_hyperon]

I still see a lot of emotion being subsituted for reasoning here, mostly from the techno-types who care as much about the CPU, apparently, as they do the OS itself. In the grand scheme of things, I would bet this is a small minority of Mac users, with the majority more tied to the OS and its accompanying software offering.

If anything, I see this change as a plus in the long-term. I'm excited about the possibility that the Mac has a real and timely roadmap to look forward to in terms of CPUs. Outside of that, I just don't care what chip the Mac is built around.

[Randman]

I went to the Apple Store today and it looked like business as normal. People looking at Macs, buying Macs, etc. Believe it or not, the world is still turning.

[Hawkeye_a]

If Apple can price it's hardware to compete with Dell and Gateway,etc....i dont see a probloem with the migration. If they choose to keep charging premium prices, with design(hardware) being the only differentiator.....they might not be well received by the general price conscious consumers. (which has been the sole reason of pusing the Mac into a Niche since the original Macintosh imo).

If Apple on the other hand, swallows its pride.....puts 'profit-driven-busness' on the back burner, they stand to make great strides into the home market (given the fact that M$ has still not been able to deliver on it's promises since 1995). If the migration proceeds without a hitch, and Apple implements the new price point before Longhorn is released, they stand to make a considerable leap into the home, and finally offer a true, viable choice/alternative to the crap that M$ has spewed over this great earth. ....And that will lead to more developers on the Mac....and the following upward spiral. (this is higly optomistic of course).

The worse case scenario is Apple abandons it's hardware beusiness and becomes a software only company, developing an alternative to Microsoft. (Can you imagine what that would do to the prices of Mac hardware...they'd appreciate imo).

Oh well....lets see how this thing pans out.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Hawkeye_a

puts 'profit-driven-busness' on the back burner, they stand to make great strides into the home market

The major reason any business exists is to make profits. This is especially true for publicly traded companies who have an obligation to deliver the highest possible return to their share holders.

[Goldfinger]

I went to this press/copycenter today and of course they had a bunch of macs there. At the reception they had this Performa 5400/180 used as a display to display their "products" with a powerpoint presentation.

I looked at it and saw the multicoloured Apple logo and the original PowerPC logo and I smiled and thought: "aah, the memories".

[Hawkeye_a]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

The major reason any business exists is to make profits. This is especially true for publicly traded companies who have an obligation to deliver the highest possible return to their share holders.

I guess thats what John Sculley thought as well.
Short term profits vs long term steady supply of income. Microfot chose the latter, and thats the only place ill give em credit.....

I think Apple needs to do the same at this junction (especially since Jobs is in charge and not J.Sculley).

[Hawkeye_a]

Originally Posted by Goldfinger

I went to this press/copycenter today and of course they had a bunch of macs there. At the reception they had this Performa 5400/180 used as a display to display their "products" with a powerpoint presentation.

I looked at it and saw the multicoloured Apple logo and the original PowerPC logo and I smiled and thought: "aah, the memories".

..... i still want a PPC in my Mac for some reason....ill be buying a PPC-mac before they make the transition. (hopefully an iMacG5)

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by Hawkeye_a

..... i still want a PPC in my Mac for some reason....ill be buying a PPC-mac before they make the transition. (hopefully an iMacG5)

That's because a PPC is STILL a good processor today. This should not be forgotten in all this chaos

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by Randman

I went to the Apple Store today and it looked like business as normal. People looking at Macs, buying Macs, etc. Believe it or not, the world is still turning.

LOL! I just got this image in my mind of a crazed 'NNer bursting into an Apple store and yelling, "Are you people INSANE??? Don't you know the Macs you're buying today are going to be OBSOLETE because Apple is switching to Intel?"

[TETENAL]

They are not going to be obsolete because developers are building universal binaries for both processor types. Nobody is going to build Intel only applications.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Person Man

LOL! I just got this image in my mind of a crazed 'NNer bursting into an Apple store and yelling, "Are you people INSANE??? Don't you know the Macs you're buying today are going to be OBSOLETE because Apple is switching to Intel?"

I could see some reactionary like Sideus or Millennium strapping a Mac mini to their chest and holding an Apple Store hostage.

"No one moves or I'll be forced to compile. Resistance is futile!"

[legacyb4]

So did the switch from the 680x0 CPU to the PowerPC make the Mac any less of a Mac? By the same logic, the "new" PowerPC Mac back then was just ported Macintosh software on a computer with a 680x0 emulator to help smooth the transition.

Originally Posted by yukon

An Intel "mac" won't really be a "mac", it'll be Macintosh software ported and running on a PC with a special System Enabler 775 soldered on.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by legacyb4

So did the switch from the 680x0 CPU to the PowerPC make the Mac any less of a Mac? By the same logic, the "new" PowerPC Mac back then was just ported Macintosh software on a computer with a 680x0 emulator to help smooth the transition.

No, because the Mac has always stood for innovation and progress. PPC was undeniable progress; this is not.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by discotronic

Could you get off it already. You are starting to sound just like mAxximo.

There's an important difference. mAxximo wants to force Apple to give him what he wants. I, on the other hand, will simply get it elsewhere.