The main reason I couldn't believe the Mac on x86 rumor (aside from the
utter insanity of it in the first place) was that MW had just finished
selling off its x86 compilers.... Actually, that appears to have been a
good
move, considering how Apple is now shoving XCode down everyone's throat.
Maybe MW knew after all. I can't wait to hear their long-promised
announcement at WWDC (I'm glad I saved my $2500-$3000 this year.)
I haven't looked lately, but IIRC Apple has an installed based of around
30
million, and they sell a couple of million a year. Given that NONE of the
major apps (the ones that sell Macs) use Cocoa, and therefore can't merely
be (hah!) recompiled, how is Apple going to convince Adobe or Quark to
****t/fork their product line _again_, so they can sell to maybe 10% of a
market they barely care about anyway? They couldn't swing it with OSX, and
Adobe loves Apple, compared to most hardware manufacturers: judging by the
quality and availability of drivers I saw at OSX launch, I expect the
worst.
And not only that:
- How about all the shareware / small operations? Our stuff isn't as hard
to ****t, but we'd have to spend many registrations worth of cash on new
computers to sell to the same tiny market (and maintain 2 versions for a
few
years too.) XCode will be the only way to play (and playing is about all
it's good for.)
- When the PPC switch happened, Apple had a *more* powerful chip that
could
do things like emulate legacy code at reasonable speed; without that, the
PowerMac's would have gone nowhere. This time they're switching to a chip
that's about equal in speed. Do the math.
- Intel has other irons in the fire. If Microsoft officially endorsed
AMD,
they'd cost Intel more than Apple's business will ever be worth. Would you
want to be in that position?
- If many of the the major players are interested but decide to wait a
few
months or a year to see how it goes (I would), the platform is dead (no
software -> no sales -> no software.) Quark did that w/ OSX, probably in
the
hope that it would go away before they had to bother; are they going to
jump
at this?
I've been an Apple fanboy since '86. I've written Mac shareware and
commercial apps and cringed every time Apple did some gloriously stupid
thing. For the first time in 19 years I think they really have blown it
irretrievably. Technically it will work: the chips are powerful enough,
the
OS has been ****ted, etc, but their new platform is likely to ****p with
zero
third party software (except iLife, not one piece of which I use) for the
foreseeable future. Coming off a year of near zero hardware sales (would
you
buy a PPC mac now?) I think this will be it. They'll still have the best
OS,
but if no one buys it or the computers that run it, they get to be
BeOS2....
If they somehow manage only a 50% loss of volume, they'll see a 95% loss
of
driver sup****t, which means it'll take an extra year but be no less
certain.
I have a G5 and a TiBook, still the best Internet / general use machines
ever built and likely to be for a while yet; I might even spring for
Leopard, depending on how my transition to Gentoo is going by then. You
see,
I've never had anything against Intel (except their value compared to
AMD);
I could care less what chip I run, and I've done Windows for a living for
years. I'd stick with Mac if I thought there was any chance of it working
out. As it is, I don't think the risk is worth gambling $1500 (Premier
member****p + $999 computer) to stay in the game. And I fear I'm not the
only
one.
I think I'm going to be sick. If you read this far, sorry for the long
rant
but it's my first and I thought I deserved it.
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