David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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Apple Pie

6 June 2005

Well, it’s all official now; Apple is moving to Intel! I know of no-one, myself included, that believed the rumours (which were exactly right), so I’m a little surprised – I had assumed that IBM and Apple’s relationship wasn’t that bad, at least, not bad enough to do what it has done, anyway.

Some thoughts, in handy point form:

  • For me, as a cocoa developer, this looks like a pretty simple recompile – the same will probably go for pretty much any cocoa app that doesn’t do anything to complicated. For big, old apps like office and photoshop, it probably will take a bit of doing – but they’ll manage it without to many problems.
  • When the new intel-macs come out, they won’t run any games well, if at all – as most mac games are pc ports, they’re hacked together to make them work. These hacks will fall to pieces when moved to intel.
  • The plus side is we will probably be able to run pc games semi-native (wine-style), or at least boot into windows (shudder). If this is easy to accomplish, this may mean we don’t get any more mac game ports – normal programs, where UI matters, will still get ported, however.
  • If we can boot into windows/linux (and OS X, of course) all in the same box, an intel-mac looks very, very good to anyone doing cross-platform development (like, say, web-developers).
  • You will not easily be able to run OS X on a non-apple PC. It will probably be possible, but too difficult to go mainstream. Example: The current X-Box has a Pentium based chip, but no-one has windows running on it (to my knowledge).
  • The intel-macs will be lots faster then current macs, and any current mac-fanboy will have to eat their hat and admit that power-pc (in all its forms) is not as fast as x86 (for most things).
  • However, Mac OS X will still not be as fast as windows, and their will no longer be any excuse. This doesn’t matter, though, as no-one ever bought macs for their speed anyway.
  • This will not be the end of the mac, apple or apple’s hardware business. To the average consumer, a mac will still be a computer that doesn’t run windows, and all that entails.

This is an exciting time in the mac industry – lets hope (for everybody’s sake) it goes smoothly.

From: Articles

6 June 2005