Does New Development For Mac OS X Make Sense? 394
DLWormwood wonders: "As a long time Mac developer, originally as a hobbyist and then a professional, I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform. With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance. (If it wasn't for the poor past performance of VPC, I would not have gotten my first Mac programming job.) Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'"
Now is THE Time To be a Mac Developer (Score:5, Insightful)
The market has always viewed the Mac as another computer, one interchangeable with every other computer. While a Mac is (technology wise) a computer, the people who buy them view them very differently and the sheer dynamics of the Mac Economy (the customers, companies and products that hinge on the Mac platform) prove this out.
Take your fear of people figuring out how to run X on beige boxes... Apple doesn't care about these folks. Simply by having not purchased a Mac, this portion of the market has already proven that they are unwilling to have ever paid the Apple premium so, in effect, Apple will virtually never loose a sale to this crowd.
Or think of it this way; the kind of people who are drawn to the Mac platform are drawn to it PRECISELY because they don't want to fuck around with patches, workarounds and general hackery in order to make their computer run. Here is the test: could you imagine telling your mother to run out, buy a beige box, download some boot hack, install it, then install OS X on top of that? Probably not and that's exactly why Apple isn't going to be kept up at night worrying about the people who are going to hack OS X to run on commodity hardware.
If anything, I think this will bolster Mac sales- the kind of people who are willing to jump through the hoops to make OS X run on beige boxes are computer enthusiasts and typically serve as the computer information maven within their circle of friends. I think that if these hardcore Windows guys get OS X (for free) and play with it on their beige (or Tie Fighter) boxes, they are going to be pretty impressed. When it comes to telling people what computer to buy though, they will probably just recommend to their friends that they buy a Mac.
The same logic generally applies to your second point (will software developers still make Mac versions of their stuff). I think that the answer here is again, a big yes because there is a fairly substantial wall between people who will want to run native apps and people who want to run emulated apps. As someone with a Mac, I've proven (by voting with my dollars) that I am someone who will pay a premium to have an elegant computer that "Just Works." Any software developer with half a brain is going to realize that forcing the Mac customer to run clunky Windows emulation (even if it is at native speed) is inherently out of step with what that customer wants.
I think this is the perfect time to start developing Mac software. Porting over PC code is going to be easier then ever. The overall buy rate of Macs is going to be increasing significantly. A major chunk of risk in regards to the stability of the Mac platform has now been removed. Apple will be rocking the computer world within the next 24 months...
Well, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
One, Mac users will still want Mac-native applications. Witness the lack of interest in X11 ports of Linux programs. These all work just fine, but look comparatively ugly. Same goes for Java apps.
Two, Cocoa and friends is a wonderful language / API set. The programs I have made under OS X have been actually fun to create and build. I, for one, will still program for OS X, regardless of what everyone else does, because I use OS X.
I think the problem facing people programming for OS X will be the same as it always has been, which is just getting enough user base to make the application financially viable for companies. That is up to the markets.
Excuse me? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of things that made a Mac a Mac long before those two technologies were introduced.
NuBus
Motorola 680xx CPUs
SCSI
1.44 MB Floppies
ADB
HyperCard
(and many others)
Did the Mac stop being a Mac when those technologies were replaced with other, better technologies or dropped altogether?
I'm completely confused by your assertation that if someone makes OS X run on beige boxes that development houses won't look at Carbon/Cocoa. In a word, "HUH???" How do those two statements have any correlation to each other whatsoever?
Apple needed to switch to a different chip supplier because IBM/Motorola will be spreading themselves thin filling supply contracts for all three next-generation consoles. Since those contracts are going to be bigger and more lucrative than Apple's purchasing commitments IBM/Motorola probably told them they'd be last in line.
Apple saw the writing on the wall and moved to a CPU supplier that can fulfill their needs. That they get a higher speeds, dual cores, and lower prices also is just icing on the cake to them.
How this change affects corporate adoption of the Macintosh platform is probably a great big, "not much". Those industries that have shown a predilection to Macs will continue to use them. Those that haven't, won't. Unlike geeks, most people don't care what chip runs their PC. They care about what tools are at their disposal.
If it quacks it's a duck. If it has minimalistic (not minimal) design esthetics, ease of use, runs OSX, and is sold by Steve Jobs it's a Macintosh. It's a Mac regardless of what collection of silicon and transistors makes it run.
Fear FEAR FEAR not heard of since the OS X switch (Score:4, Insightful)
And now we're swamped with all these Apple people throwing out fearful statements like "Apple's switching to Intel, therefor Apple going to get replaced by Windows!".
You guys DO realize that an Apple computer is more then just a Processor, right? There's still a whole proprietary computer built around the CPU, and this OS X thing which runs on the Hardware, and some applications which run on the OS.
I seem to remember similar hysteria during the old MacOS to OSX change. "My programs will never run! The WORLD IS OVER!" but Apple's been doing pretty well since then, as has development for the Mac.
Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares if it's x86 or PowerPC - it's the OS and the Apps that make Macs great.
Re:Now is THE Time To be a Mac Developer (Score:3, Insightful)
"Porting over PC code is going to be easier then ever."
First of all, when you say 'PC code' I assume you mean code written to run on MS Windows. That is a fairly nonsensical statement. Most software never accesses the processor directly, so porting code will not be any easier or harder than it was before.
Still a great post though. Now is a great time to start writing software for the Mac!
Hmmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that it's not a lot different than it is now. OS X is still OS X and it will still be running on Apple hardware (which will be the only legal way to run it).
--
And WTF is wrong with
choose OS X for features (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does it seem so strange that people might actually choose products based on their attributes?
Re:rebooting is annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
They who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Yeah. After all, it did OS/2 a whole lot of good that it could run Windows 3.1 applications in protected memory space, and pre-emptively multitask them back in 1992.
Sorry, but you're failing to learn from history.
Back before Windows 95, OS/2 had a significantly better desktop environment than Microsoft Windows did. It ran Win16 applications, typically better than Windows itself did. I knew of a lot of Windows developers who did their development on OS/2 because of its better memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and crash protection.
And what good did any of this do for OS/2? I remember personally contacting ISVs to talk to them about porting their popular software to OS/2, and the answer I always got was "why, when it runs our Windows software so well?". They didn't care one whit about the desktop environment, or the fact that their Win13 and Win32s applications looked bad on OS/2, and ran worse than native applications, didn't integrate into the desktop environment, couldn't use long filenames, etc. They cared only about one thing: how do we target the largest possible market at the lowest cost?
I don't see that much has changed within the industry. There are a lot of Windows-only ISVs out there who have no intention of putting any effort into making OS X applications, but who wouldn't mind increasing their userbase. And there are a lot of other ISVs out there who put minimal effort into OS X native applications, but who would love to do away with the additional staff and costs associated with that.
Fortunately for Apple, unline IBM they already have a significant development community using their APIs. Cocoa is an absolute joy to develop with. If anything, I would think that instead of having good Windows emulation, what Apple really needs to do is to port Xcode and Cocoa to Windows and Linux, and get developers on those platforms to write applications to their APIs, and allow existing Xcode developers create apps which will run on Windows and Linux. That is where the real battle is -- for the hearts and minds of developers. If you permit Windows to run on OS X as well as on native Windows, you concede the most important battle by telling developers that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using your own APIs.
That is the lesson IBM learned the hard way. They continued to make that mistake with their Open32 APIs, which mirrored the most common Win32 APIs in order to permit Win32 applications to be recompiled to run on OS/2. That didn't work out too well either.
That was introduced about 10 years ago. Do you want OS X in 10 years to be where OS/2 is today?
Yaz.
Re:I think that the prospects are better... (Score:3, Insightful)
What about Mac OS X? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is reasonable to assume that 10.5 and probably 10.6 will be released as PPC versions, but what about there-after?
For internet usage, audio/video/DVD playback, such a computer should last at least 6 years (just like my PIII has). Did I make a poor 'investment' or will Apple release PPC OS X for several years to come?
Mike
Here's an alternative question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about Mac OS X? (Score:3, Insightful)
For the uses you mention (internet usage, audio/video/DVD playback), it will continue to run for many, many years after that. Eventually the HD may develop errors, or you may need a new DVD drive, but those are easily replaced.
What I'm trying to say is, a machine doesn't have to run the latest and greatest to be useful. Would you expect today's $500 PC to run Longhorn? Then why would you expect it from a Mac?
It's not like it up and dies the moment Apple releases 10.9 or whatever that won't install on it.
m-
Re:Here's an alternative question... (Score:3, Insightful)
"The company has standardized on Manufacturer X, and you need to buy what we they say."
"Our current hardware manufacturer provides better support."
"Running Windows and Windows applications is unsupported by Apple."
"It doesn't have drivers for Hardware X that we need/want to use."
"Our IT department won't support integrating Mac OS X applications into our network and workflow, so what's the point?"
(Note: I'm not endorsing these arguments, merely proposing them as typical of some businesses.)
Mac users don't like ports (Score:3, Insightful)
I never saw OS/2, but it happens all the time that some useful app comes to the Mac as an ugly port from windows/linux and gets picked up. Its popularity always lasts precisely as long as it takes for a Mac-native competitor to appear.
The fact is, any developer who decides that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using Apple's APIs isn't going to last very long on Apple's platform -- not because they'll give up but because they'll be replaced. Mac-native applications will still be written as long as users keep voting with their feet, the same way they do now. I haven't seen any reason that should change.
If things *didn't* work out this way with OS/2, it's either because their users didn't strongly prefer native apps, or there weren't enough of those users to justify independent development. I've been on Macs for a decade, and everything I've seen suggests that your history just doesn't apply here.
Yes, Program Away! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are extremely lucky to be developing Mac applications for a living. I envy you.
Apple is still going to be making incredibly well designed computers. They'll still be named "Macintosh". The Macintosh will still have a great looking case. The OS will still be called "Mac OS X" and will have code names based off of large cats. What will change is that the CPU inside the Macintosh will be named something else. That's it. You will still have to buy it from Apple, and you will not be able to put your Mac OS X installation DVD into a Dell or Gateway PC and expect it to install. Hackers may come up with a way, but it will be unsupported, since anyone who installs the OS onto a non-Apple certified machine will be breaking their license agreement. No company in their right mind will run PCs with a hacked OS X installed -- they'll just buy Macintosh computers and be done with it... and they'll be better off for it as well.
So program away, and feel good about yourself, you are doing what others only wish that they could do.
Your assessment is extremely flawed... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just stupid. "PowerPC" doesn't make the Mac. Otherwise, IBM would be a big seller of Macintoshes. Open Transport is just a poor attempt at reinventing the wheel. It made sense before TCP/IP was the only game in town, but it belongs in the bit bucket, in favor of modern network stacks built around IP.
With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance.
Sorry, but this is just as stupid. Once again, what is OS X, if not Carbon and (especially) Cocoa? Lots of developers code for X, not because it runs on PowerPC, but because, well, it's cool. Powerful apps are quite easy when you're provided a good set of frameworks.
Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'
You definitely don't get it. Mac is the frameworks. Intel changes none of this.
Re:rebooting is annoying (Score:3, Insightful)
Since OS/2 ran Windows apps "out of the box", it's easy to see how a lot of people saw OS/2 as a nice(r) way to run Windows apps rather than as a development target in its own right... I agree with what you're saying there.
Here's the key difference between OS/2 and OSX w/ Virtual PC or VMWare... OSX won't include them for free. OSX won't run Windows applications "out of the box" like OS/2 did.
For those who really want or need the functionality of running Windows applications on OSX, they have to pay for the emulation/virtualization software and a Windows license.
So, while OSX x86 will be able to run Windows applications very nicely for those who don't mind spending the extra cash for a Windows license, I don't see it becoming "a prettier way to run Windows apps" as you say.
Think about it from a developer's standpoint. In the OS/2 days, you could say "well, we'll just write a Win16 app and let the OS/2 people use that". I cannot imagine today's developers saying "we'll just write a Windows app and let the OSX users use that plus pay several hundred dollars for a Windows license and additional software".
Apple is now a staid, conservative corp (Score:3, Insightful)
The shift from PPC to Intel signals a shift in culture at Apple. It means that Apple has gone from being an innovative 'cool', 'hip' company (of course we know that a lot of that is just marketing hype) to being much more staid and conservative.
If Steve Jobbs felt he really needed to make a move to a different CPU he could have made a very bold move (something he _has_ done in the past) and chosen to move towards the Cell processor. Why would that make so much sense? Well, for one each Cell processor contains several PowerPC processors, so chances are there would have been a fairly easy transistion from PPC to Cell - almost seamless. And two, the Cell architecture promises a quantum leap in performance over what is available now.
But instead, Steve looked out over the CPU landscape and chose Intel. Intel: boring, staid, not terrifically innovative anymore, married to an old CPU architecture. Their only real gamble in recent years was the Itanium and it failed miserably.
So this time the switch from PPC to X86 is nothing like the switch from 68K to PPC for Apple. Going to the PPC really did give Apple a quantum leap in performance. This switch is being done more for bottom-line business reasons. Jobbs feels he can get better pricing out of Intel. He also feels that the relationship with IBM was somewhat rocky. I think one of the big problems was that he couldn't get a G5 in a laptop. However, he may have lost his patience at just the wrong time. IBM was apparently about to be able to fulfill that wish.
This was a huge opportunity lost for Apple. Had they gone with the Cell processor it's possible that they would have been able to create machines that were so much faster than Intel/AMD PCs that it would have drawn a lot of attention and market share. But instead Apple took the safe route. Too bad. These are strange days when Microsoft is going towards PPC (XBox 360) and Apple is moving towards Intel. Perhaps the bold move in the computing world will come from an IBM/Sony partnership creating Cell-based boxes that run Linux.
But look on the bright side: in a few years you'll be able to pick up dual 2.5GHz G5 machines at garage sales for about $25.
Apple, the new Be Incorporated (Score:5, Insightful)
Some say Apple has a good OS, so they'll have success. Others say their Intel hardware will be superior and people will buy more of it, since it will be cheaper and efficient, so Apple will be successful.
And yet for some reason, I'm also pessimistic here.
We had the evil wintel. And then we had the Apple, motorolla, IBM alliance. IBM is very busy pushing Linux-on-PowerPC, which means that hardware platform will have a future, and might just pull ahead of x86.
However, the AMD64 platform showed that the x86/x64 platform is the best thing out there and Apple is too moving to it. Less diversity. Just a bunch of OSes on the same chip on roughly the same motherboard (since the mem handler is built into the chip, theres less else on the AMD64 mobo). Thats now the entire desktop market of the world.
There was once a time when we had IRIX on MIPS, OpenVMS and Tru64 on Alpha and VMS, Solaris on Ultrasparc, HPUX on PARISC, Unixware on Intel, OS2, and all the BSDs plus Linux out there. It was a rich world. Lots to learn. Each one had a strength you could count on. All thats collapsed, Be was bought out, SCO was too, Alpha, Tru64, OpenVMS were too, Ultrasparc and Itanium and PARISC are dying, MIPS is dead, OS2 is dead, the diverse mainframes are dead, and we're seeing even more industry consolidation, and later the demise of some of the companies who couldnt differentiate enough.
I suppose I'll feel different when I'll see a cheaper macmini with an Athlon64 FX55 (or equiv) running OSX.
OSX had better be able to make me buy the whole deal now.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've read about the keynote, or watched the video, you'll know that Apple will introduce the Intel line in 2006, and complete the transition of all Apple products to Intel in 2007. My guess is you'll have two years of OS X updates for PowerPC after that (about how long OS 9 was still maintained after OS X was introduced). Simple math says your PowerPC will probably be running Mac OS X 10.8 (Garfield?) in 2009 by the time PowerPC is EOL'd.
Of course, I don't know for sure. It's just speculation based on Apple's historical transitions. They're not going to leave you out in the cold.
Re:Fear FEAR FEAR not heard of since the OS X swit (Score:3, Insightful)
My caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
As a programmer since the Z80 and 6502 days I'm a little perturbed by this move, but really just for aesthetic reasons. The reason I could never abide the x86 architecture is that in its original incarnation it seemed so brain-dead and backwards. With its backwards endianness, funky limited-use registers, paged memory, and bolted on extensions it always seemed like a kludge on top of another kludge.
When I discovered the 680x0 architecture (through the Amiga) I was very pleased. The bits were in the right order, the registers were all general-use, and there were plenty of them, and they seemed to be more interested in energy efficiency.
While Intel was building processors that required giant heat-sinks and fans to dissipate all the waste heat I was glad that Apple was seeking out processors that pushed efficiency and low energy consumption.
Maybe this is a misconception, but I thought that at some point the ancient x86 instruction set and registers were "set aside" in favor of a more modern RISC-style processor core, and the old x86 stuff is supported as a kind of pass-through layer on top of that. I understand that's the case with AMD's Athlon, anyhow.
So what I'm hoping is that any new computers based on the Intel architecture will eschew the legacy cruft and compile only the core instruction set. Then perhaps they can drop the pass-through x86 layer and get even more power for the price.
How much have I got wrong in my thinking on this matter?
Re:The apple is still worthwile developing for. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's thinking bigger than that. It's not just about the graphics card or altivec, it's about providing abstracted system libraries for just about anything. If you write a program that uses the system libraries, Apple will ship an implementation that runs fast on a sufficiently advanced GPU, one that runs fast on AltiVec, one that runs fast on SSE3, one that runs fast on whatever the next step is. If you use this library, you get the benefits on all platforms.
Re:Apple is now a staid, conservative corp (Score:3, Insightful)
The shift from PPC to Intel signals a shift in culture at Apple. It means that Apple has gone from being an innovative 'cool', 'hip' company (of course we know that a lot of that is just marketing hype) to being much more staid and conservative.
Clue: Apple used to be at the mercy of "cool, hip" middle management that couldn't focus more than two months into the future. These days, they're at least thinking strategically and realistically. In five years, Intel will be delivering much faster processors than they are making today. Five years ago, no one would have believed the G4 would only experience a three-fold clock speed increase to date, but it's true.
Intel has to satisfy practically the whole industry, and they have to stay competitive with AMD. I think they can do better than Motorola or IBM when it comes to general purpose CPUs.
I tend to agree with your pessimism, but perhaps for somewhat different reasons.
The shift from PPC to Intel signals a shift in culture at Apple. It means that Apple has gone from being an innovative 'cool', 'hip' company (of course we know that a lot of that is just marketing hype) to being much more staid and conservative.
If Steve Jobbs felt he really needed to make a move to a different CPU he could have made a very bold move (something he _has_ done in the past) and chosen to move towards the Cell processor. Why would that make so much sense? Well, for one each Cell processor contains several PowerPC processors, so chances are....going to the PPC really did give Apple a quantum leap in performance. This switch is being done more for bottom-line business reasons. Jobbs feels he can get better pricing out of Intel. He also feels that the relationship with IBM was somewhat rocky. I think one of the big problems was that he couldn't get a G5 in a laptop. However, he may have lost his patience at just the wrong time. IBM was apparently about to be able to fulfill that wish.
Says who? Can I borrow your crystal ball? When did IBM announce that they'd be shipping 3.2GHz G5s for Apple? Oh - wait - they haven't, and although they assured Apple the 3GHz part would be ready two years ago, it still isn't ready.
This was a huge opportunity lost for Apple. Had they gone with the Cell processor
Which isn't shippping either....
it's possible that they would have been able to create machines that were so much faster than Intel/AMD PCs that it would have drawn a lot of attention and market share.
Intel has to deliver faster and better product for every company making PCs. That now includes Apple. Cell doesn't work in a Mac, it isn't a general purpose CPU, and is nothing to base long-term desktop or laptop design on.
But instead Apple took the safe route. Too bad.
As a Mac user who wants to keep using Macs for a long time and as an Apple shareholder, I am fucking overjoyed they took the safe route. It's just a box, after all. The OS is what makes it magic, and Apple keeps delivering on that front.
I expect the hardware side of the business to fix things when they're not optimum either, and that's what the move to x86 is all about. Intel's roadmap is more compelling than IBM's.
I think one of the big problems was that he couldn't get a G5 in a laptop.
Yeah, Steve just couldn't wrap a PowerBook around a processor with heat dissapation on par with a Halogen lightbulb. It helps when you realize that the 1.6GHz G5 has nearly four times the power dissipation of the 1.2Ghz G4 part used in the PowerBook.
No matter what you think you know about Cell, multicore G5s, or other fantasy products that could have been the basis of new Macs, the reality is that Intel will be delivering faster and faster x86 processors every year to satisfy the PC industry. IBM and Freescale are more interested i
OS X hacking will not be a concern (Score:3, Insightful)
Just program in Java. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no real difference from now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:rebooting is annoying (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, what they said is all very well, but the truth of the matter is that there simply wasn't a customer demand for OS/2. At the time, Window was largely "free" in that it either came with your hardware or was readily pirated. Remember those were the days before license enforcement actually happened. Anyway, contrasting that to the price of OS/2 which was, I forget the exact figure, but in the ball-park of several hundred bucks, it's not hard to see why uptake on OS/2 was sluggish.
No customers, no ISVs. OS/2 lost on price alone. But unlike OS/2 vs. Windows, both OSX and Windows now cost, and there is an existing market for OSX. The battlefield today isn't cost, it's (some notion of) value. My gut feeling is that OSX is not going to go the OS/2 way primarily because Apple will bust it's blankity-blank to position itself as at least equal or better value to Windows.
In that sense, the move to Intel and the potential of Wine does just the opposite of what Windows support in OS/2 did. In OS/2 it provided an excuse for developers to ignore the platform even for the tiny market that was there and subsequently that market dwindled because of being ignored. What this really shows is that there wasn't a core market for OS/2 without the Windows support. But OSX is doing just fine without Windows. Now adding Wine adds value.
As long as the value of OSX without Windows support is still at the same as or better than the value of Windows, OSX will be healthier than it is today.
Re:Now is THE Time To be a Mac Developer (Score:3, Insightful)
The big effort in porting are the APIs; that is, going from Win32 -> Cocoa.
That's not a easy job, and the switch to Intel didn't make it any easier.
Re:Now is THE Time To be a Mac Developer (Score:3, Insightful)
Those @(#$&&!!!! endian bugs, on the other hand, can turn your schedule into an utter trainwreck and your profit into LESS than nothing. So eliminating them is a much bigger benefit than the actual percentage of effort they take up *in a well written app* --which most are faaaaaaar from -- would lead you to suspect.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but I and many others like me stopped buying Apple when they dropped good technology for no good reason.(Specifically ADB, serial and onboard SCSI)
Apple WILL lose a lot of PPC fanboys over this. It remains to be seen how many new converts they'll gain. Perhaps Apple will gain more than it loses.
For the past 10 years, Apple has been making much of how much faster the PPC is compared to Intel's offerings.
Even though I haven't bought a new Mac in 7 years, I still think that the PPC is fantastic. It was Apple's greatest advantage.
I was wrong about Apple switching to Intel chips, and maybe I'm wrong about how this will end up; but I think that Apple just jumped the shark.
LK
Mactel fanbois: why your closed platform is DOOMED (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yes, Program Away! (Score:3, Insightful)
I could imagine that one group might be a development house which has software targetting both Windows and MacOS. Eventually they'll be testing the software on a real Mac, but it'd sure be cheaper if all of the programmers could just run commoditty PC hardware and emulate a Mac well enough to do their testing alongside the Windows versions.
Of course, the fact that it'll be illegal might put them off a little.
huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
One positive aspect of this is that any code tuned for the x86 (ie, DOOM 5 or whatever) will be able to run on Mac immediately, so I expect that the Mac will get applications like that much sooner.
Re:My caveats (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The concern is very real (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there's the power of good design. Not as in oooooh shiny pretty case, but as in clever, suave, wanna have and above all HARD TO COPY. Not all Apple designs are brilliant, or totally perfect but they evoke something that resonates with a lot of people. Especially on standardized parts I think they can benefit from this. In a sense they've removed a huge future bottleneck with the intel switch (the horror! but still).
A real-life example, a bad one:
I really like my G4 Cube, probably a lot more than it deserves to be liked. It's not too fast after five years of service, its connections are inconveniently at the back/bottom of the machine, the optical power button has long lost its novelty value and is a nuisance (especially in conjunction with those connections: tilt computer carefully, plug in Firewire cable, slowly, carefully put the computer back upright and... it magically turns itself off or falls asleep, because the casing invoked that shiny optical power button), the space saving is relative, since you're not going to push that looker UNDER your desk, are you?
Still, with minor upgrades (ram, HD) this little machine has served me for five years on two continents, four countries, three different AC/DC schemes, and still does the OS X thing with panache. People still ask me where my computer is when in fact they're already staring at it and the thing can even play a decent game of Quake III (don't even think about Doom III, just don't).
There's incredible good design in this machine, but I only focus on the mistakes of this particular model and the obvious strengths that just about every mac model has. My point, even when not perfect, people really really dig the Apple experience, I just would have given up on computers ages ago if they'd gone away. I really like working with computers, but have absolutely no tolerance for things that go bleepbleepbleep when they shouldn't.
So in essence there's not a whole lot Apple has to change, in fact the less the better.
I don't like the intel inside idea, but that's because I remember the bunny burning, I liked it, I can still tell what I was doing when I first saw it (I was watching a silly commercial, see?!). I grew up on Apple, my first computer was an Apple//c, so I'm allowed a bit of grumbling, but as long as they keep doing most things right, I'm actually not worried at all.
Techy view of OS/2? (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple appeals to a different market than IBM, and always will. The consumer market is where Apple has it's biggest successes. It doesn't matter what you can/can't port or run on Apple, because people purchase Apples for simplicity, home use and high-end graphics. You mostly can't replace these things with emulated Windows apps, so the Apple won't lose it's appeal.
Listen, OS/2 was terrific engineering. But IBM couldn't win in the market - their fate was essentially set when IBM clones appeared. It's the same reason that Apple faltered at the same time- nothing about porting software, it's about competing against the huge Wintel biosphere with expensive, proprietary stuff. IBM left the PC OS business essentially because they had other options, and Apple didn't. Apple found a market that worked for them, and they've stuck around long enough to gain ground back at this opportune time.
I know this move won't help Intel with the PC makers, so Intel has finally given up on M$. They clearly see that their integrated chip designs work better in Apple's economic model because Apple doesn't have to leave their options open with AMD. Apple can sell at higher prices and people will pay. With Dell, HP, etc., their competition keeps driving the price of Intel's components down, and M$ doesn't budge on the OS, so I'd make a deal with Apple, too. The future is integrated systems like consoles and cell phones (Microsoft Cell OSs run on non-Intel), not these monstrosities called Personal Computers. Despite the prices, Apple is closer to selling information appliances than HP/Dell/Lenovo/Gateway+Windows is. Does anyone else think the Media Center PC is a disaster in the marketplace?
The computer market is getting crowded and messy.
Re:Just program in Java. (Score:3, Insightful)
It builds and runs - including the microphone input - on Mac, Windows, and Linux without a single byte of code change.
Somehow I doubt Apple's processor switch is going to affect my development workflow in the slightest.
Re:Apple is now a staid, conservative corp (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's dominant, and it blows. That's what makes the move so hard for many Mac-heads to accept. The Mac has always been about doing what's technically right, not what's most popular.
For instance, I vastly prefer the clean simplicity of the 6502 to the ugliness of the Z80, having written code for both. The 680x0 was a joy to write for compared to the 8086 thru 80486.
Moving up out of the realm of processors, SCSI was clearly superior to IDE. USB was obviously the right thing, even if serial ports and ADB were far more popular and USB peripherals were initially almost impossible to find. Firewire is better in every way than USB 2.0 HiSpeed.
In the software layer, the way the Mac filesystem works is a pain in the ass to write for, but the way the system behaves to the end user as a result is clearly the right way. (Programs don't break when you move them, files launch to the application you last edited them with, and so on.)
In short, the Mac has always been about picking the best technology. But now suddenly there's going to be an x86 CPU in the middle of it all--kludge after kludge piled on top of the original 8086 design. And recall, IBM chose that because it sucked, they didn't want to choose something that might threaten their real computer systems.
Worse, it's not even going to be a leading-edge AMD 64 bit x86 CPU, it's going to be an Intel processor.
The Mac community is being served a shit sandwich. It may still be the finest ciabatta bread, the freshest pickles and lettuce--but there's going to be a huge turd in the middle, and some of us are having a hard time preparing to swallow it.
Re:I think that the prospects are better... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Dammit! My buggy program ran just fine on PowerPC, but it crashes on Intel."
Re:My caveats (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why I will forever stand by my use of the words "wrong order" in reference to little-endianness.
So a better analogy might be, schizophrenics wear me out because I have to decipher everything they say.