mmcirvin | INTEL BUYING APPLE SHOCK HORROR!

INTEL BUYING APPLE SHOCK HORROR!

This Robert X. Cringely column, asserting that recent developments can only mean that Intel is buying Apple in an Ahab-like plot to destroy Microsoft, is pretty stupid. I have no idea whether Intel would want to buy Apple, but I don't buy the notion that the decision to switch to Intel processors is so baffling that it can be explained no other way.

Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?

This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week's presentation?

Yes, Robert, it was BS. Or, rather, not an outright pack of lies, but a lot of obvious cherry-picking of stats. People do this in the computer industry; it's called "marketing". Also, that was some time ago. The G5 was actually not bad from a performance standpoint—it started out pretty competitive with fast Intel boxes—but after it was introduced, IBM showed no signs of being able to crank it up at the rate Jobs wanted, nor could they make it low-power enough for laptops. Jobs said all this fairly explicitly, if you were listening.

Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system? [...]

I don't know enough about the 64-bit processor market to comment on this very intelligently. I was never clear on whether the magic 64-bitness of Mac OS X actually meant anything. Maybe they can borrow some bits from the Atari Jaguar; I hear it had a lot of bits. Pass.

Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

I don't know how accurate this is, but scuttlebutt is that AMD has potential supply-chain problems for the kinds of chips Apple wants. They'd been down that road before. If you want to do your best to avoid supply problems, best to go big.

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?

This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. [...] Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to Intel. But this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show how easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why give it a year? And companies typically make such announcements to their partners in private under NDA and get away with it. [...]

The stupidity of this boggles me, despite the kernel of truth concerning the "Osborne effect" he mentions. You've probably read about it: pre-announcing your future products too early can cannibalize sales of existing ones. Apple obviously knows this, considering how secretive they usually are about new products.

But Cringely's other claims are ludicrous; he seems to believe that everything will be as easy to recompile as Mathematica and that Apple could therefore spring this whole transition on developers with a few weeks or months to spare, and expect to have product-quality apps ready to roll in time. Developers who are not already using XCode are saying that this is going to be somewhat bumpier for them than the 68k-to-PPC transition was, and I distinctly remember that taking a while.

Cocoa/XCode apps will be almost trivial to port; other things, somewhat worse; things developed with (Freescale-owned) Metrowerks, and games that hit the system at a low level and are infested with hidden big-endian dependencies, probably quite difficult (though it might be easier to just port the Windows versions, if they exist, since these things are going to be pretty close to bog-standard PCs physically). Also, making code run fast on a different processor architecture is likely more than just a recompile. And that doesn't even take into account things like testing; ported code is new code, and we surely don't know that Mathematica for MacIntel was bug-free.

The developers do need the time, something that actually made John Gruber think that a switch to Intel could never happen in part for this very reason. And the notion that they could let every Mac software developer in the world know about this, and maybe ship them development systems, with a 12-month lead time without letting the cat out of the bag (especially given that Darwin/x86 was completely public knowledge, and MacIntel rumors had been floating around for years) is pretty stupid. We've got benchmarks on Apple's lashed-together dev box and photos of its interior already.

Companies do things like this in secret (and if my employers are reading, they can rest assured that I take NDAs very seriously), but it's partly security-through-obscurity; the huge, epochal secrets don't last long when the subject matter is something that has its own gigantic fandom and a small industry devoted to feeding the fandom rumors—a fact that drives Apple absolutely insane.

I figure that Apple knows perfectly well they're going to take an Osborne Effect hit, can't see any way around it, and announced this now because they're doing pretty well these days and can probably ride it out. Had they waited for Mac sales to slip again as a consequence of flagging processors, or for the iPod fad to fall from its crest, they'd surely die of it.

Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management? [...]

He doesn't think so. I actually agree with him here, though every other smarty-pants in the world is saying this is the secret real reason for the deal. I think that while Apple may be interested in that, it's secondary at best. Apple knows that while any DRM can and will be defeated, to make a bundle distributing entertainment DRM only has to be just good enough, and they can probably swing that with or without DRM-enabled processors.

The actual reasons for the switch are pretty obvious; nobody could give Apple the chips they needed in the quantities they wanted. The only reason it's a surprise is the sticky question of whether these problems outweigh the real risks of the switch. I certainly don't know. Apple evidently thinks so.

Having uncovered all these supposedly baffling anomalies, Cringely announces that the only good explanation is that Intel is buying Apple so that they can wrest the PC market away from Microsoft, which insulted their sacred honor, is now their sworn archenemy and must be destroyed just like the six-fingered man who killed Intel's father. Meanwhile, people accuse Steve Jobs of making decisions based on pique.

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Developers who are not already using XCode are saying that this is going to be somewhat bumpier for them than the 68k-to-PPC transition was, and I distinctly remember that taking a while.

I should add, for people who might be freaked out by this, that in one way the transition is likely to be smoother for users than the 68k-to-PPC transition was. One thing that slowed down the early PowerPC Macs running 7.x was that large chunks of the operating system were running under emulation as 68k code. The frequently-used stuff had all transitioned by OS 8.0, and the fraction of 68k code in the system gradually declined as time went on (but I don't think it ever dwindled entirely to zero until Mac OS X; these transitions always seem to be brought to a full close only by the next big transition).

That shouldn't be the case this time around, since Apple's been compiling Mac OS X as native Intel code from the beginning.

On 64-bitness, the big win of that is getting processes that can use more than 2GB of address space. In some areas (*cough*bioinformatics*cough*) that's a real need, which is why the Alpha was the processor of choice for those applications before Digicompackard killed it off.

The Itanic-AMD64 fight hasn't necessarily helped any.

In which case, it sounds as if Apple could easily supply those people with high-end machines based on Intel's knockoff of AMD64 running OS X.

My impression is that this switch was actually done more for the portables than for the high end. The PowerBooks have been more stagnant than the G5 towers and Apple covets the Pentium M.

Yes, the EM64T chips would be the obvious tack to take for the high end when those switch over. Nothing specific has been said, though.

I agree that it's the low end/portable stuff that really needs the bump, and will be the first to get it.

Yes, I was going to mention that he sounds like he never heard that Intel has adopted AMD's 64-bit extensions.

And also, yes, the reason to go with Intel and not AMD is the low-power chips. AMD doesn't have any that are anywhere near as good as the Pentium M.

I forgot to mention that he also falls for the notion that Apple could have switched to Cell, which is pure fanwank that's been going around on Mac site forums. Cell isn't intended or designed for desktop computer use and is not yet a shipping product line anyway. He talks about the server market being distinct from desktops, but doesn't seem to understand that game consoles and embedded applications have different requirements from PCs.

It occurs to me that this whole essay was probably inspired by another question that's been going around, one that seems profound but turns out to be close to trivial when you think about it: "Why is Apple switching to Intel now when Microsoft is switching to PowerPC for the XBox?" The answer is pretty simple: game consoles and PCs are not the same, and different companies are specializing in different applications. Only if you think of it as the Eternal War of Good and Evil, with Apple and the PPC makers on one side and Intel/Microsoft/Dell on the other, does it seem paradoxical, as if the Good Guys are giving up the fight with their enemies divided and victory in hand. But this is childish.

At the same time, AMD's dual core chips run much cooler than Intel's offerings.

What fight? Itanic has sucked all on its own, with AMD64 doing an end-around. I heard that Intel is actually going to be using AMD's 64-bit extensions, or something along those lines.

The other thing about the AMD question is that, now that they've decided to switch chip architectures, absolutely nothing technical prevents Apple from switching to AMD at some time in the future, or to a combination of Intel and AMD if they so choose.

In addition, Sun uses AMD, and HP just put out an Opteron line of servers.

Yup, that fight. The one between suckitude backed by agreements with other companies (HP, etc) and actual technical quality.

There are already Intel chips using the AMD64 ISA (or as Intel calls it, EM64T); we have some systems here with 'em.

I have a hard time considering this entire situation to be anything other than proof of mac people having some amiga-like cult elitism surrounding their hardware. it's a chip. the other chip is also a chip. they fetch, decode, execute, and retire instructions. the intel one will do the same thing.

besides, there's no need to worry about a year worth of "osborne effect" when the music side of the business (which doesn't give a hoot) is growing at 300%.

As I was saying in the article I was going to write instead of this one, Mac users are a fandom. It's a fandom that I'm in, so I have some affection for it. But some subset of those fans, probably not the majority but in evidence in online fora, are what Harlan Ellison called "stone fanboys", like the guy he wrote about who keyed somebody's car for not liking Star Wars enough. And these people are not accustomed to using reason when it comes to the fandom-object.

I don't have any strong feelings about this, but I do have a small worry that the high-end audio/video people (i.e., me) will be left holding the bag.

Could be; a lot of people in the publishing and design industries are still pretty resentful about the OS X transition for reasons having nothing to do with the fandom.

Other things I was going to mention:

- Feelings of entitlement toward the fandom-object ("they owe me"/"they betrayed us")

- Fandom as tribal identity (really harmless unless it makes you miserable or hostile)

- Demonization of the other/persecution complex (Microsoft/Intel; most of American politics)

- Deliberate provocation of the persecution complex by rabid, seemingly full-time anti-fans, who are perhaps even sadder than the stone fanboys

- Civil wars: Original Series versus Next Generation (OS X transition); oldbies versus johnny-come-latelies drawn by an unexpected eruption of part of the fandom into mainstream culture (iPod on Windows; Tom Baker fans vs. Nine/Rose shippers)

You can probably fill in the blanks...

You know, I used Macs only on a 'need-to' basis for 20 years mainly because of that 'fandom'. I'm not a cultist, and I love/hate all computers equally, for different reasons. But if you use a Mac, you're a 'Mac lover'. If you use a PC, you're, well...you're a 'computer user'.

Now that I have one of each sitting on my desk (a 12" PowerBook and a 15" Dell Latitude), I feel as though each is good at most things, and some things seem better done by one than the other.

My PowerBook is pretty, and very portable. But have you seen that new Vaio? My Latitude can interface with my pen. But it doesn't have Dashboard. My PowerBook can run BBEdit. My Latitude can run Winamp, and connect to Exchange servers natively.

Do you think it's the 'prettiness' of Macs that makes people fall in luhrve with them, rather than just think of them as tools? Because I'm as much about the 'ooh shiny' as anyone else. But maybe not when it comes to computers. :-)

It's several things that change with the era (and the changes cause friction and weeping and wailing).

In the late Eighties and early- to mid-Nineties, when Macs were not really particularly physically attractive machines, Mac fans were all about internal technical superiority. All the many physical differences that existed between Macs and Wintels at the time were taken as positives for the Mac. The 68000 or PPC was more elegant than x86. ADB and AppleTalk were better than serial, SCSI was better than your cheap-ass IDE drives, and so forth. Of course all these physical incompatibilities made it harder to get parts and peripherals, and they've all gradually eroded away over time, every time provoking grouching from the fanboys who are upset that Macs are taking another step backward and making them feel less special (you can even see that in the typically smart John Siracusa's eulogy for the G4/G5). But switching to commodity parts usually actually makes the machines easier to deal with.

Apple knows that people who like this feeling of technical superiority are part of their market, and they've tried to stretch it out in their marketing copy. But they also don't feel any particular obligation toward them, as they shouldn't.

In the Jobs era, the physical distinctions have mostly switched from internal parts to vastly prettier cases, and the later generations of Mac fans love that. Macs now look far more different from most Wintel PCs, even though they're far more similar on the inside than they were ten or fifteen years ago. The anti-fans sneer at this, like to talk about how Mac people are all style over substance; I think there's an undercurrent of sexual-stereotype politics there too (Macs as gay or feminine computers, Wintel PCs straight and masculine). Personally I like the shiny stuff, but the Mac fandom existed before Macs were all that shiny.

I think a lot of what attracts some people to the fandom is just the existence of the fandom. Personal computers were themselves a fandom in the early days that I remember from my adolescence. Now personal computers have so taken over the world that that can't be true any more; to generate the fandoms the world has to split up into smaller pieces. To get that fandom-feeling, people who like to be fans have to specialize on something. But it can repel too.

...With regard to design, I should add that some PC manufacturers have made their machines enormously pretty as well. But the smart ones don't copy Apple designs but go for their own unique look (e.g. Sony). I read some article recently about interviews with various companies trying to make "iPod killers" (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/fast-talk.html); most of them said things that were ridiculous boilerplate, but a designer for Rio actually said something interesting, that in their industrial design they were trying to counterprogram: "Where Apple was the ivory tower, we were going to be the dark rebel. Where Apple was geometric, we were going to be smooth and curvy."

ok, not a designer, he's the head of the company that actually built the thing...

Credit where credit is due: I've been thinking about these things in part because of this overclockers.com editorial (http://overclockers.com/tips00793/). It contains some wisdom, even though it's couched in snotty "bend over and squeal like a piggy, Mac losers" terms, and the author completely dismisses aesthetics, doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the software and believes the canard that Macs don't get viruses because nobody uses them. He's certainly right that the hardware's been converging for a long time, and he's right that this is mostly good.

"I'm not a cultist, and I love/hate all computers equally..."

No, no, no. "I love/hate all computers equally. PS: I am not a cultist."

I think Apple just wanted to give IBM one last good solid kick in the teeth, for good measure.

Hannibal of Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050608.ars) says everything I was trying to say, only more knowledgeably and elegantly.

He also muses on why this shook the Mac fans so badly. I do think he underestimates the pull of Mac OS X as opposed to imagined hardware differences. Personally, I was souring on Macs and pondering decamping to something like an Intel Linux box just when OS X started to get interesting. I know a lot of old Mac enthusiasts never warmed to OS X and insist to this day that it violated everything the platform stood for, and some points they made concerning the UI and file system were valid (especially in the early versions), but for me it was fascinating to see it grow, and the idea of a fancy desktop OS that was also a Unix-like OS was extremely attractive to me, since I was pretty familiar with Unix.

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INTEL BUYING APPLE SHOCK HORROR!

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