My Thoughts on the Apple / Intel Marriage Well, it looks like hell hath finally frozen over. The unthinkable, at least in the Mac community, has happened. Apple has chosen to migrate over to the x86 architecture.
Rumors began to crop up over the weekend, and honestly I didn’t really believe that Apple would simply move over to a new architecture. I figured that Apple either was recruiting another chip maker on board to produce PPC processors, or maybe the rumors were pointing to some sort of new Apple device – a “tablet PC” has been in the rumors for quite some time. In any event, I never thought they would simply announce a wholesale change to a new platform.
I was wrong. The reason that this happened, in my humble opinion, is IBM could not get a G5 processor into the PowerBooks. It’s as simple as that.
People have been demanding a more powerful version of one of the most popular notebook computers for quite some time, and IBM could not deliver. The G5, while a very nice processor, does not scale down well due to its massive power requirements and equally massive heat production. Basically, if IBM were to put such a chip into a laptop, it’d leave a really nice 3rd degree burn on your leg faster than you can say emergency room.
Moreover, I can’t see one of those laptops having a battery life of over an hour or so. So, I think IBM approached Apple and said, “We can’t put a G5 into PowerBooks or iBooks. It’s just not going to happen for the next 2 or so years.” PowerBooks are one of Apple’s biggest sellers (I don’t have or know of any actual stats, but anecdotal evidence points to that), and without an update on the horizon, sales would plummet, killing a huge chunk of a company’s revenue stream. Obviously, something had to be done.
Enter ‘Marklar’, Apple’s not-so-secret project of developing Mac OS X from day one to run on x86 and PPC platforms. Basically, the Apple team developed their OS to be able to run on both major platforms without any noticeable difference in speed. Starting early next year, Apple computers will have Intel chips powering them, rather than the G4s and G5s that are currentl under the hood.
This actually should happen first for the laptops – iBooks and PowerBooks could really use the speed bump that some of the mobile processors Intel has in the pipeline right now, and the G5 desktop line still has some life in it. So, this time next summer we should see a new generation of portables, and maybe an announcement for a new desktop line (G6 IntelMac iCentrino ). Should be very interesting to see what happens now that the “which processor is faster” battle is at least somewhat squashed. Now the Intel/AMD war really heats up, I suppose. The two things that are going to make this transition possible are things called “fat binaries” and a piece of software called “Rosetta”. Fat binaries, or “universal binaries”, basically are programs that will run on both Intel and PPC computers.
Simply checking a box in XCode (apple’s software development tool) and changing a few lines of code should be enough to have a new version of your software ready to run on either platform. One company said it took them 2 hours to have a copy ready to run on either. Additionally, Josh Aas said that Apple demoed how to port Firefox to the new arch in almost no time at all.
This really seems like a fairly simple process for most developers. Rosetta is a software emulation layer, somewhat like Classic on current Macs, which will essentially translate the code from older applications that were not made into a “fat binary”, for whatever reason. Steve Jobs ran a copy of the x86 version of OS X on Monday and the copy of Photoshop and Office 2004 he ran went as fast as my G5, and that was emulated speed.
I’m anxious to see what will happen when they have more time to tweak their OS to work better with specific Intel chips and developers have time to port their code over to the new universal format. Some things I’ve been reading about that I should at least clear up here: NO, you won’t be able to run OS X on any old home-built PC. YES, you will be able to install windows/linux/whatever on the new Intel-based Macs. YES, someone will eventually hack either OS X, their own computers, or write an emulator to run OS X on their home built 1337 machines.
Big deal. As John Siragusa said, “…All Apple has to do is make sure that only Slashdot-reading, VoIP-using, PC-assembling, DMCA-breaking geeks hack their way to an “unapproved” configuration of hardware and software. If it’s illegal (thanks to the Mac OS X EULA or the DMCA) or at least “technically complex and/or annoying” to run Mac OS X on non-Apple x86 hardware, Apple will be able to absorb any loss in hardware sales attributable to geeks and hardware hackers.” I think it’ll take time, but people will get OS X working on non-Macs eventually.
People like that aren’t the type that would ever pay for an OS or Apple hardware anyhow, so it’s no real loss to Apple. My thoughts on the m