Okay, everybody, chill out about Apple and Intel. The Intel-based Mac is a bona fide Mac. It looks, feels and drives like a Mac. Pentium 4 Hyper-threading, symmetric multiprocessing and SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) are all supported. Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guidelines are frank about which Pentium 4 features are exploited and about pain points in the transition from PowerPC to x86. The loss of PowerPC's Altivec will hurt the most, but only for the very few who use everything it does and which only run on OS X. Open source audio, video and scientific computing projects hand-optimize for both Altivec and Intel MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE2. Commercial apps, like Photoshop, can pull their Intel SIMD code straight from their Windows releases. Intel ports will be very, very quick.
Apps that haven't yet been ported to Tiger x86 will operate without recompilation in Rosetta. Rosetta's quick on the GUI but slow as hell on the compute, and there's no Altivec support. But the productivity apps for which most existing users lack source code will run at adequate speed. It's like lightning compared to Virtual PC running on OS X.
I'm really pleased, and more than a little relieved, with what the documentation and tools portend for Apple's Intel-based Mac desktops. You should check out developer.apple.com yourself; much of what's being discussed at WWDC is there, albeit with less detail. If you knew the things that you can't yet see on the public site, you'd feel, as I do, that this Intel business is irrelevant except that there will be a lot more Macs in a lot more hands, and a lot more apps (especially open source) created by those new users, and so on.
To address the question of whether people will buy Apple-branded PCs just to run Tiger, my answer is "why not?" Unlike any other PC player, Apple is buying its system software from itself. It can fire sale OS X out to lowball a machine, as it did with Mac mini (a market test for a low-end x86 Mac, I think), or it can present OS X as significant added value to tack a couple hundred bucks to a dual processor mid-tower box.
Developers already know Intel-based Macs are worth being jazzed about. Apple's installed base, and therefore the potential market for Mac software, is going to go nuts. Analysts, you can quote me.
--------Posted by Tom Yager on June 9, 2005 08:57 PM
