“Make a note of this date, Monday 6 June 2005. It may well become logged in the annals of commercial computing as a turning point for Microsoft and Dell,” Jeff Lawson writes for The Inquirer. “Microsoft, the company whose operating system software brings daily GUI crashes and folder locks. Dell, the company that proffers market-stall computers with all the glamour of dishwashers. Enter, Apple.”
“Microsoft’s alliance with AMD has brought high-calibre multi-core processors to the PC world and brought it discord with Intel,” Lawson writes. “Dell is about to take AMD mainstream. Not that Dell particularly wants to lose its cosy relationship with Intel but it wants to lose customers to AMD vendors even less.”
“Apple’s receipts from its 76% dominance of the MP3 market plus Intel’s cash mountain gives them the financial clout to take on Microsoft and Dell. Luckily for the Apple-Intel team, they have superior technology too. Granted, Intel’s latest processors are dogs but the main event is eighteen months out, when Microsoft ships Longhorn, so Intel have the interim to get their act together. The next revision of Mac OS X, named Leopard, will be launched then too. Expect to see games running on x86 Leopard as fast as on x86 Longhorn: no need for gamers to run Windows,” Lawson writes. “Eighteen months and counting. Eighteen months and the choice will be simple: buy a solid operating system running on a PC designed by the coolest computer company ever or buy something of dubious ancestry out of a car boot. Time for fickle investors to repopulate stock portfolios. Time to think different!”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Microsoft CEO Ballmer: Apple’s moved to Intel? Ho hum – June 07, 2005
Apple to use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006, all Macs to be Intel-based by end of 2007 – June 06, 2005
A beautiful future for my precious Mac…
The x86 Mac will be most interesting to switchers who run Virtual PC on it. Windows and Windows apps would run at full speed, unemulated, on an x86 Mac. Think Microsoft will bother to port Virtual PC to the Intel Mac? Or will Apple adopt WINE or some other Windows emulator?
It’s been an entertaining year so far (Mini, Shuffle, Tiger, Intel) and things will only get more interesting from here on.
And my wife wonders why I spend so much time at this site. This is WAY better than watching sports or reality TV.
I like that!
Fatty Arbuckle, you’re married? You know girls? How do they smell?
Better than me, that’s all that matters.
i don’t understand why it is going to take so long to get intel macintoshes to market though. maybe they learned from the ibm 3ghz fiasco and are being very conservative. also, given the recent news on longhorn, leopard might be out for quite a while before longhorn.
I’ve heard a lot of comments about how switching to Intel will improve gaming for Macs. I do not know much about game design but I was under the impression that the two hurdles for porting games to the Mac was the CPU and the graphic cards (particularly the drivers).
Now going to Intel will help the CPU side, but how will it effect the graphics card issue? Will changing the CPU automagically make the graphic card drivers better?
Like I said, I know very little of this issue, other than what I have read.
With the switch away from PPC, Steve Jobs has killed off the last legacy of the “Dark Ages” (think Sculley/Spindler/Amelio) of the Macintosh. He’s also well along his push to standardize the Mac. The ADC is dead, USB 2 seems to be getting bigger play than FireWire these days and now a switch from PPC to the Intel family. It’s been and will continue to be a very interesting time to be a Mac user.
Intel’s processors have sucked major ass for a while now. What the hell is he smoking?!?
AMD has better technology, Apple went with marketing muscle, not better technology.
Intel’s Emergency Edition Pentium processors cost more than double and still can’t beat AMD’s FX series processors.
Mactel versus Wintel it a headline in the making. Dell can do what they want to their machines, it’s Microsoft that’s the problem
Will somebody please explain to me why, when I look across the floor of our building, which is full of Macs & PCs, all the Macs screen are still, but all & every PC, the screen flickers up & down, like you would see when you catch it on video? My eyes are great & I have no problem, but I do work on a Mac. I’m just worried that when I do have to go on a PC, if this would cause me a problem. I know up close the screen looks fine, but if they flicker from a distance, there must be some damage that’s going on. Is this flicker going to happen when they switch to Intel?
Snr Arbuckle:
I know what you mean. I tried telling my wife that the 05 Apple keynote was a turning point for computers. See looked at the bankley. I poored the tea, she continued mending my trousers…haaaa domestic bliss. At least she let me buy a 15″ 1.67 powerbook.
Given the recent events I’m not sorry I bought this now. I think it’s the best engineered laptop ever. A true benchmark. However I’m sure Apple have an understanding with intel and the next gen of x86books will be just as well crafted and better specified. Now is the turning point…..
Viva Apple, Viva OS X!
defondo
I’m not totaly convinced the Intel Macs will be on x86 platform. If you listen to the keynote, Steve’s performance/watt chart is what they project for mid 2006. No where does it say on x86. My guess is that Intel has something better in the works.
Just my 2 cents.
Hey, and all you nay-sayers should actually take some time a watch the keynote and understand what’s going on before you call the end of time.
If Apple/Intel can get an equivalent 3Mhz+ 64 bit PowerPC performance into a Powerbook, I think a lot of Nay-Sayers will change their iTune.
Look like somebody boat is starting to sink or two boats starting to sink.You can kill two birds with one stone. 5 years from now and it’s all over Mary Dell and Betty Gates. Thanks for wasting the people money you bottom feeders
iNext,
if intel was going to make a PPC chip, why did Apple hand out dev kits with x86 CPU’s in them. Seems like a waste of time getting devs to convert their code to x86 compatible binaries if intel are going to make PPC.
>See looked at the bankley. I poored the tea,>
Is this a third world sentence?
sorry miss read your post, just ignore what i said
Dix99,
That’s because the monitor refresh rate settings on the pc’s are too slow. Go to one and set it above ~85 hz and the flicker will go away. Some people are more sensitive to this than others. It drives me crazy when I see the flicker…
Ha! It was ron ron, it was ron ron.
I thought so.
“USB 2 seems to be getting bigger play than FireWire these days and now a switch from PPC to the Intel family.”
Well, let’s not forget that Intel announced just a few weeks ago they were including firewire support in future motherboards. The announcement seemed weird to me at the time, but in light of yesterday’s news, seems right on.
Yesterday, admittedly, I felt betrayed by the switch announcement.
Today, I have come to accept the fact and am even realizing what a brilliant move this could turn out to be.
I guess I just spoke before I had time to digest the news and the consequences.
Forgive my lashing out yesterday.
umm,
I didn’t say Intel would make PPC chip. I think Intel might have something in the works that is better than the current x86 chips.
and 64 bit tooo but you can get the developer mac right now for $1500 (Premier membership and $999 mac with Intel P4 at 3.6ghz)