More Mac blather
Jun. 12th, 2005 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA lot of people are wondering if Apple's transition to Intel chips is going to be like the transition to Mac OS X. It won't; it will be more like the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC chips around 1994-95. Through that transition, Apple kept most of its user experience intact; users had to deal with issues of software compatibility, performance, and a certain amount of instability and quirks in legacy apps running under emulation.
And as I've said elsewhere, the OS itself switched to PowerPC code more slowly than it ought to this time around, and that dragged down overall system performance in a way that probably won't happen again. The absence of a modern OS with preemptive multitasking, protected memory and such also made it worse, since it multiplied the aggravation associated with unstable apps.
People will probably stay away from the remaining PPC Macs, but it might not be rational, and whenever you get that kind of market failure, it means deals, deals, deals. My first Mac was one of the earliest PPC Macs, a Power Mac 6100. It wasn't a bad computer, but it had the shortest useful lifetime of any of the Macs I've owned, and for much of that time the PPC transition was incomplete and it could be hard to find native apps. I learned from that that, contrary to intuition and popular belief, you usually get more years of value out of the last machines of a dying product generation (which have undergone considerable refinement, and are often sold loaded with standard enhancements at something of a markdown) than from the first ones of the next generation, which can be quirky and underpowered for the price.
This even extends to support. Support for an old product line with an established user base takes a long time to disappear, whereas the new machines take a while to establish a third-party industry. My second Apple was a G3 that was pretty much the last of the beige ADB/serial desktop Macs. I often had an easier time getting peripherals and support for it than people had with contemporaneous Bondi Blue iMacs. That was as big a transition in terms of peripheral and upgrade compatibility as this one will be in software.
So if Apple's forced to mark down their current inventory, it might be worthwhile to take advantage of that. On the other hand, the stats on the current PowerBooks do seem kind of unimpressive, and at least Apple's pre-announcement means that a significant amount of native software support for the new computers will probably be there when they actually roll. So waiting could also be reasonable if you aren't desperate for an upgrade.
Every time I bought one of these things, I was convinced that it would be my last Macintosh. My current Mac is three years old and it isn't particularly disappointing me, except that I could use a better video card and will probably replace it soon. It will probably be a couple more years before I start itching to replace the computer. A lot of things can happen in that time, and I might end up switching to something other than a Mac. Even Windows, for its faults, is nothing like the horror show it was at the tail end of the version 3.1 era when I bought my first Mac. But if you force me to guess, I'll say that I'm getting a little tired of physically bulky and power-hungry computer equipment, and in 2007 or so there should be some pretty fast and stable Intel PowerBooks.
And as I've said elsewhere, the OS itself switched to PowerPC code more slowly than it ought to this time around, and that dragged down overall system performance in a way that probably won't happen again. The absence of a modern OS with preemptive multitasking, protected memory and such also made it worse, since it multiplied the aggravation associated with unstable apps.
People will probably stay away from the remaining PPC Macs, but it might not be rational, and whenever you get that kind of market failure, it means deals, deals, deals. My first Mac was one of the earliest PPC Macs, a Power Mac 6100. It wasn't a bad computer, but it had the shortest useful lifetime of any of the Macs I've owned, and for much of that time the PPC transition was incomplete and it could be hard to find native apps. I learned from that that, contrary to intuition and popular belief, you usually get more years of value out of the last machines of a dying product generation (which have undergone considerable refinement, and are often sold loaded with standard enhancements at something of a markdown) than from the first ones of the next generation, which can be quirky and underpowered for the price.
This even extends to support. Support for an old product line with an established user base takes a long time to disappear, whereas the new machines take a while to establish a third-party industry. My second Apple was a G3 that was pretty much the last of the beige ADB/serial desktop Macs. I often had an easier time getting peripherals and support for it than people had with contemporaneous Bondi Blue iMacs. That was as big a transition in terms of peripheral and upgrade compatibility as this one will be in software.
So if Apple's forced to mark down their current inventory, it might be worthwhile to take advantage of that. On the other hand, the stats on the current PowerBooks do seem kind of unimpressive, and at least Apple's pre-announcement means that a significant amount of native software support for the new computers will probably be there when they actually roll. So waiting could also be reasonable if you aren't desperate for an upgrade.
Every time I bought one of these things, I was convinced that it would be my last Macintosh. My current Mac is three years old and it isn't particularly disappointing me, except that I could use a better video card and will probably replace it soon. It will probably be a couple more years before I start itching to replace the computer. A lot of things can happen in that time, and I might end up switching to something other than a Mac. Even Windows, for its faults, is nothing like the horror show it was at the tail end of the version 3.1 era when I bought my first Mac. But if you force me to guess, I'll say that I'm getting a little tired of physically bulky and power-hungry computer equipment, and in 2007 or so there should be some pretty fast and stable Intel PowerBooks.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-12 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-12 11:02 am (UTC)But as it turns out, I got a Mac Mini, and it is almost fanless. And it's a joy to use. I am seriously, thoroughly, fed up with space heater microprocessors and running your computer right on the edge of burning up. I am also oh so sick of fan noise.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-12 01:39 pm (UTC)My next computer is likely to be either the "silent" style (i.e., fanless or running with cleaver airflow methods and a single quiet fan) or a liquid cooled solution.
Granted, the system that is making the most noise at the moment is the unix machine (which turned 5 or 6 this past march) and has three hard drives on it (which is causing most of the noise, oddly enough).
no subject
Date: 2005-06-12 03:31 pm (UTC)Personally, I'm waiting until the 2nd generation of Intel Macs to get a new one. My guess is that the transition will be pretty smooth, given the lead time and Apple's apparent committment to helping developers. I don't remember that kind of attitude from Apple at the PPC conversion. On the other hand, I have little doubt that bugs will surface in the first large-scale rollout, and I'd just as soon give Apple a chance to stomp those bugs before they bite me.
In the long run I think this is going to yield better machines, and I'm looking forward to it.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-14 06:41 am (UTC)One unanswered question is whether this will attract more game developers to do Mac ports. Currently, it takes too much effort to port a high-end game to Mac OS for it to be worth many developers' time; the switch to Intel should make it pretty easy, since if your game mostly hits the system below the level of the OS, it should be almost the same program on Wintel or MacIntel. On the other hand, some game developers immediately reacted to the news by saying "Now the True Gamers will all just install Windows on their Macs one way or another, so as of today, we don't have to worry about developing for Mac OS at all."