Apple and Windows and Intel
June 12, 2005 by Mike Wendland
I’m intrigued by all the possibilities of Apple’s planned move to Intel chips, especially that “it could allow Apple systems to run Windows - and its universe of programs- at full speed,” according to this AP story
I’m wondering if the Apple faithful see this as a sellout… or a brilliant move.
I think it will prove to be a good move for Apple. The G5 chips are not as fast as they should be and run way, way too hot. We need faster laptops, and there is still no way to put a G5 into a PowerBook because of the heat factor. IBM blew it, so let’s see what Intel can do. Heck, it might even bring us more switchers.
The heart of the Mac system is not the processor, it’s OS X. It looks like Apple has been planning for this eventuality for sometime and has made the tools for the developers very available. I have no qualms about my plans to buy a G5 system soon, as I know it will be compatible with future software. Using Apple’s coding tools, a developer can make a PPC-compatible “universal binary” as easy as making an Intel-only version, so I doubt many will neglect to do so. In addition, I see PCI processor upgrade cards becoming available.
It’s going to be an interesting future– but I hope Apple maintains their quality control by not opening OS X up to any old x86 based system. That’s the reason that Apple stuff ‘just works’ folks- hardware control.
While I think it will be pretty positive, since Intel doesn’t have chip supply problems.. my worry is that those in the scientific community, which overwhelmingly endorsed the G5 processor for it’s prowess, may switch to Linux on Power instead of sticking with Apple.
I also wonder what this means for the future a couple of the big Mac-based clusters (i.e. Virginia Tech).
In the end, I think this will work out well mainly because going with Intel means Apple can be more competitive on price and we still get to use the operating system we love.