Monday, June 06, 2005
Apple going Intel: I say bring it on
Alright, I'm sold. Let's do this. Things are going to be just fine, and this isn't even a big deal.
Well, actually, it's a great big huge deal, perhaps the mother of all deals... but only within Apple's headquarters. After watching Steve Jobs' Keynote just now, it's clear that there's been a massive amount of both planning and work involed on this, some of it going as far back as five years. But the fact that Apple is treating this internally as a huge deal is the reason why we end users won't have to. Even developers appear to be mostly off the hook here, as the ones who want to participate will apparently barely have to lift a finger, and the ones who want to be lazy (or have already been discontinued) will literally not have to do anything at all, thanks to whatever this "Rosetta" thing is. I don't know what it is, I don't know what it does, and frankly, I don't care, as long as the end result is that I can walk up to an Intel-based Mac and start using it without even knowing that there's an Intel inside.
The only downside here is that we have to wait for one to two years to get our hands on an Intel-based version of our favorite Mac model, depending on which model that happens to be. I suspect that a whole lot of users are questioning right now whether they shouldn't just hold off until that time before buying their next Mac, even if they had previously been planning on upgrading in the near future.
I fell into that trap for about fifteen minutes this morning, thinking that there was no way I was going to plunk down two grand on a G4 PowerBook, knowing that now, the G4 is not only the wrong processor family, it's the wrong platform. The reasoning is, of course, that the last thing you want to do is invest money into a platform that the developers of your favorite software are about to start moving away from. But the more I think about it, in yesterday's paradigm, developers would have been moving away from the G4 in favor of the G5 anyway, and now they're simply moving away from the G4 in favor of the Pentium. So my situation hasn't changed at all. Yesterday, the next-gen laptop I want was a long way away, and today, it still is. But at least now we have some kind of a legitimate road map for getting there, instead of the phony buried treasure map that IBM's been sticking us with for the past two years. So for the future, it's a good move. And it doesn't affect my present one way or the other. I'm going to go ahead and buy a G4 PowerBook as soon as it suits me. One to two years from now, when the first Pentium PowerBook rolls out, I'll consider upgrading to it at that time.
I was also briefly thinking that perhaps this was a matter of Apple having to screw Mac desktop users in order to give Mac laptop users a brighter future, and you really couldn't blame Apple if it had made such a move. After all, laptops now sell faster than desktops, and this is particularly true in Apple's case. But after thinking through every scenario I can think of, I don't see any Mac users getting screwed here. I don't think there's anyone who should put off their impending purchase of a new Mac just because of this announcement. For instance, my mother, who just bought a G5 iMac last month? Nothing's changed. A year and a half from now, Apple will move away from the G5 iMac in favor of the Pentium iMac, but it's right about the time that Apple would have hypothetically moving the iMac to a G6 processor anyway.
So no one's getting screwed here. Developers have a long time to do a small amount of work that they can opt out of doing anyway, IBM is losing business but doesn't seem to care, Intel is gaining business and appears to love the fact that it's doing so. And you can believe that whatever deal Apple has struck with Intel, it doesn't allow for Apple getting screwed over the way it did by IBM. How do I know? For one thing, if we've seen one thing out of Steve Jobs it's that he consistently learns from his mistakes. But it goes beyond that. When Apple was trying to bail out of Motorola, it was desperate to find a solution before things got even worse, and the whole world knew it, leaving Apple in the worst kind of bargaining position possible: IBM knew that Apple had no other choice. Apple presumably got a weak deal as a result, and we've all seen how that worked out.
But here in 2005, it's a different story. Apple didn't have to do this right now. And that's why this was the best possible time to do it. You don't wait until after it starts raining to fix that hole in the roof. If you know storm season is coming, you do it on the sunniest day possible, far enough in advance that you leave yourself all the time you need to make sure you do it right. Over the next two years, Apple's engineers will redesign the internals of every single Macintosh model on the market to accommodate the whole new game it's now playing. But as a user, you won't have to do a thing.
If you're feeling any apprehension about Apple moving to Intel, it probably has more to do with the symbolic nature of the idea than any real expectation of a substantial downside. I say bring it on, and I suggest you do the same.
Alright, I'm sold. Let's do this. Things are going to be just fine, and this isn't even a big deal.
Well, actually, it's a great big huge deal, perhaps the mother of all deals... but only within Apple's headquarters. After watching Steve Jobs' Keynote just now, it's clear that there's been a massive amount of both planning and work involed on this, some of it going as far back as five years. But the fact that Apple is treating this internally as a huge deal is the reason why we end users won't have to. Even developers appear to be mostly off the hook here, as the ones who want to participate will apparently barely have to lift a finger, and the ones who want to be lazy (or have already been discontinued) will literally not have to do anything at all, thanks to whatever this "Rosetta" thing is. I don't know what it is, I don't know what it does, and frankly, I don't care, as long as the end result is that I can walk up to an Intel-based Mac and start using it without even knowing that there's an Intel inside.
The only downside here is that we have to wait for one to two years to get our hands on an Intel-based version of our favorite Mac model, depending on which model that happens to be. I suspect that a whole lot of users are questioning right now whether they shouldn't just hold off until that time before buying their next Mac, even if they had previously been planning on upgrading in the near future.
I fell into that trap for about fifteen minutes this morning, thinking that there was no way I was going to plunk down two grand on a G4 PowerBook, knowing that now, the G4 is not only the wrong processor family, it's the wrong platform. The reasoning is, of course, that the last thing you want to do is invest money into a platform that the developers of your favorite software are about to start moving away from. But the more I think about it, in yesterday's paradigm, developers would have been moving away from the G4 in favor of the G5 anyway, and now they're simply moving away from the G4 in favor of the Pentium. So my situation hasn't changed at all. Yesterday, the next-gen laptop I want was a long way away, and today, it still is. But at least now we have some kind of a legitimate road map for getting there, instead of the phony buried treasure map that IBM's been sticking us with for the past two years. So for the future, it's a good move. And it doesn't affect my present one way or the other. I'm going to go ahead and buy a G4 PowerBook as soon as it suits me. One to two years from now, when the first Pentium PowerBook rolls out, I'll consider upgrading to it at that time.
I was also briefly thinking that perhaps this was a matter of Apple having to screw Mac desktop users in order to give Mac laptop users a brighter future, and you really couldn't blame Apple if it had made such a move. After all, laptops now sell faster than desktops, and this is particularly true in Apple's case. But after thinking through every scenario I can think of, I don't see any Mac users getting screwed here. I don't think there's anyone who should put off their impending purchase of a new Mac just because of this announcement. For instance, my mother, who just bought a G5 iMac last month? Nothing's changed. A year and a half from now, Apple will move away from the G5 iMac in favor of the Pentium iMac, but it's right about the time that Apple would have hypothetically moving the iMac to a G6 processor anyway.
So no one's getting screwed here. Developers have a long time to do a small amount of work that they can opt out of doing anyway, IBM is losing business but doesn't seem to care, Intel is gaining business and appears to love the fact that it's doing so. And you can believe that whatever deal Apple has struck with Intel, it doesn't allow for Apple getting screwed over the way it did by IBM. How do I know? For one thing, if we've seen one thing out of Steve Jobs it's that he consistently learns from his mistakes. But it goes beyond that. When Apple was trying to bail out of Motorola, it was desperate to find a solution before things got even worse, and the whole world knew it, leaving Apple in the worst kind of bargaining position possible: IBM knew that Apple had no other choice. Apple presumably got a weak deal as a result, and we've all seen how that worked out.
But here in 2005, it's a different story. Apple didn't have to do this right now. And that's why this was the best possible time to do it. You don't wait until after it starts raining to fix that hole in the roof. If you know storm season is coming, you do it on the sunniest day possible, far enough in advance that you leave yourself all the time you need to make sure you do it right. Over the next two years, Apple's engineers will redesign the internals of every single Macintosh model on the market to accommodate the whole new game it's now playing. But as a user, you won't have to do a thing.
If you're feeling any apprehension about Apple moving to Intel, it probably has more to do with the symbolic nature of the idea than any real expectation of a substantial downside. I say bring it on, and I suggest you do the same.
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