Holy crap. The rumors were true! Apple is switching to Intel chips. Even the best Mac pundits got that one wrong. Man, I haven’t even gotten my new replacement G5 yet, and it’s already obselete! Friggin’ great.
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Comments
3 responses to “The rumors were true.”
I think everyone with older chips (G4, G5) is overreacting a little bit. (I was monitoring a Mac IRC channel while it was going on– your complaint is tame, compared.)
I mean, they’re not instantly obsolete, right? And a 64-bit G5 is still faster than a comparable 32-bit Pentium 4. There’s really no downside to this– faster chips were going to come out, of course, but now they’re just from a different company.
The upside is that PC emulation will be much easier and much faster. Steve did this (in part) to break down the walls between Mac and Windows. Mac is still retaining its individuality, but it’s just playing a little nicer with the other kids.
There’s no way this could hurt Apple’s marketshare.
My complaint/question is mostly in regards to further iterations of the operating system. Will they release two versions of Leopard, one for PPC and one for x86? I’ll be happy as long as I don’t have to run some godawful emulation version…
I think that’s the thing– the emulation is built into the architecture of the OS and the chip, so only one version is needed. It’s this whole “universal binaries” dealie. I’m not a CS person, so I don’t know the details, but watching Steve’s keynote might assuage any fears (I know it did for me):
http://stream.apple.akadns.net/