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How do you feel about Apple's announced switch to Intel CPUs?
1/1: How do you feel about Apple's announced switch to Intel CPUs?
Other polls | 4,448 votes | 33 comments
Buy now or wait?
I was looking at buying a 20-inch iMac G5 or fully decked out mini-Mac this summer.
Buy now or wait?
The standard hardware maxims still hold true even with Apple equipment. The best way to see a performance increase is usually to increase the amount of RAM available. If you aren't maxed out, I would do that before buying a new machine. RAM is relatively inexpensive and hopefully the performance increase will give you enough time to further evaluate things when Apple decides to release some more detailed information - like, for example, exactly WHICH Intel processor(s) will be used.
Buy now or wait?
Personally I think you'll run into more compatibility problems if you buy one of the first Intel Macs (which will likely be laptops anyway).
Buy now or wait?
I'm in almost exactly the same boat. My G3 iMac is nearly 5 years old, and while it's mostly good enough for what I do with it, I've been promising myself a new computer for a while now. My take on the situation is:
And yet, part of me thinks getting a Mac mini would be the smarter move right now, to last me maybe 3 years until the 2nd revisions of Intel-based Macs are available. Tricky call.
Buy now or wait?
To be honest, I'll be upgrading at some point. I have an old Grape iMac DV/400 running 10.3.9.
This transition is no big deal for users
There are very few people who need to be concerned about this transition. (e.g., scientists with limited budgets and a large investment in custom software AND a need for new hardware in 2007.) 99.9% of users will never know there's an Intel chip instead of a PowerPC chip inside their box. After all, Steve fooled 3800 software engineers at the WWDC -- how would the average user know the difference? "But what if my G5 is made obsolete by a P6 instead of being made obsolete by a G6?!" What if it is? All computer hardware is 'made obsolete' by the next generation of hardware. It will still run. It will still have been a good investment for you at the time you bought it, and continue to be a good investment long after Apple has switched processors. "Maybe I should wait a year or two to buy an Intel Mac instead of buying the computer I need today?!" But then it will be first-generation hardware and you won't want to risk hard earned dollars on new, untested technology -- better wait another year until the hardware is proven. THREE YEARS is a long time to lose productivity for a couple of extra processors cycles. Those that want all the reliability they have come to know and love with Macs and are concerned about the transition will actually want to buy SOONER, not later. More conservative consumers will want to to stick with "tried and true" PowerPC Macs for as long as they can. Of course, the Intel Macs have been in testing for the last FIVE YEARS, so they aren't exactly experimental. If Steve Jobs is doing his WWDC Keynote on one, you can bet it's pretty solid. The only people that really need to be concerned are the developers (I'm one), but the road map for us looks pretty straightforward as well. This is a ridiculously well planned transition. In fact, we don't need to change our code at all if it's not a processor intensive app. 'Rosetta' takes care of all existing apps without any changes, but they'll get a small speed bump when created as a universal binary. So, I think (almost) everyone can relax -- unless you are a developer with a processor-intensive app, or have a situation similar to the scientist scenario above, you won't even know it's happening.
Only 32 bit?
What worries me is that Xcode 2.1 (the new version that supports Intel) appears to only support 32-bit IA-32. It doesn't support new 64-bit chips that use the AMD64/EM64T architecture. The Intel Developer machine Apple is now selling at $999 is a Pentium 4 box.
Only 32 bit?
I suspect when they actually come out with a REAL MacIntels, some will have an Intel 64-bit chips. In the meantime, I suspect the laptop/mini/tablet markets will be the first to see 32-bit Intels with a "player to be named later" option.
Only 32 bit?
I'm sure Adobe will just love this.
Only 32 bit?
Thats the problem with using assembly and why languages like C, C++, and Objective-C were invented.
Only 32 bit?
For years they have been telling us that PowerPC is superior, and that it makes sense to spend ages optimising our applications to use AltiVec.
Only 32 bit?
since Photoshop already runs on x86 (in Windows), I think it's safe to assume that this work has already been done.
Intel Inside/IBM out of picture
I think desicon is more a "IBM wouldn't/couldn't" keep upgrading the PPC chip and produce enough quantity to keep Apple happy. We all know the benefits of RISC vs. CISC, and I think if IBM would have gotten a 3+Ghz PPC this wouldn't have happened.
Intel Inside/IBM out of picture
Just because you don't have to deal with IRQ's doesn't mean they don't exist on the Mac.
Intel Inside/IBM out of picture
Steve even said in the description of the P4 boxes that he was selling to the developers that they were only to aid in the transition, and would be nothing like what will be the first IntelMac...
Intel Inside/IBM out of picture
I think it has to do with 3 things:
Intel Inside/IBM out of picture
Nice thinking.
It all depends...
If the supporting libraries & APIs are as identical as they can be given the different endian tribes of the CPUs, and if the next few distributions use "fat" Mach-O's to be multi-lingual, and applications developers do the same, then the transition should be pretty painless--probably most people won't even have to know which CPU they have.
Xgrid?
This kind of makes Xgrid irrelevant, unless Xgrid has support for heterogeneous networks and fat binaries (and last time I checked, it didn't). Now you won't be able to offload compute-load onto the LAN unless all the workstations have the same architecture processor.
Xgrid?
But if a PPC can build binaries to run on x86, why couldnt you have a network of a mixture of chips doing a Xgrid compile?
Xgrid?
Xgrid doesn't need to support fat binaries. Fat binaries need to have support for Xgrid.
What if...
What if IBM comes to Apple in a year or two and has something that blows Intel out of the water? Will Apple stick with the dual platform or say no thanks? If options are good, as Jobs says, why not use PPC as an option for the high end users that prefer it?
What if...
Trust me, it will. Pentium D (dual core) chips can handle it now. When the transition starts, Intel chips will handle the load just as well as PPC. We don't have to worry about that, at least.
No Intel!
anyone who voted 6 or higher is a windoze user
No Intel!
You really should get out in the world. Intel <> Windows.
No Intel!
That means as of now, 2,080 "Windoze" users have voted in the poll, but only 1,346 Mac users.
Problem with upgrading soon
I think that those of us who are "worried" about upgrading our machines before the new Intel-based units become available probably remember the '040 to PPC switch. It was only a very short time, much less than a year, before applications started being written for PPC only, even though in many cases the 68k machines would have had plenty of power to run the program. This didn't happen for major products like Photoshop for quite some time, but it did happen with a lot of programs, including a substantial portion of the shareware scene. Was this Apple's fault? Not really, it was the fault of the people writing the software, but the result was the same; lots of hosed 68k owners.
only matter is Intel monopoly...
I believe the switch is good for Apple, the only sour taste being that while OSX *will* stay a good alternative, on the CPU side OTOH there will be a monopoly. Intel.
only matter is Intel monopoly...
That's nonsense. AMD competes quite aggressively with Intel -- in fact, they have the fastest x86 chips out there at the moment. I suspect that Apple went to Intel because AMD has had supply problems. But I'm certain that Apple will play these two off against each other, offer successively better deals...
pool structure biases to 'commented' level?
While this is quite off-topic, it really strikes me that those poll's levels that are associated to textual comments (whether they are positive or negative) attract *much* more votes than the other ones. I wonder whether one could deduce some "uncertainty bars" on the poll levels...
pool structure biases to 'commented' level?
It is certainly the case that the labeled responses attract more attention -- but also no surprise: this type of "framing" often affects surveys and other social experiments. However, these comments are, IMO, necessary in a survey like this: what does "6" mean exactly? Without some "guidance" or framing, one person's 3 or 4 may be another person's 7 or 8... and thus the aggregate results would be completely uninterpretable.
Error bars don't seem to be appropriate here: in no way can this survey be considered a random sample, so there is no statistically valid way to construct such error bands. Best one can do is look at the histogram and draw one's own conclusions. The median and modal responses both are 7 (53.2% of the mass, as of right now, was at 7 or higher), so most of the participants don't seem overly concerned. Notice that this is not how most the comments read, so it says something about people's willingness to click a button versus type in a text box. (Yes, one should always expect more extreme responses in a text box! ;) )
This is 2005, people.
Seriously. What do you see when you turn on your Mac? The hardware? No, you see software. It's Apple's software that makes the Mac experience so wonderful. And when was the last time any major platform underwent a hardware architecture change? Not an OS change, but architecture. That was 1994, with the transition to PowerPC on the Mac. That transition went smoothly, VERY smoothly. And that was 1994. This is 2005. I really don't think the processor is going to affect the end user, hardly if at all.
monoculture vs. multiculture
Finally announcing the x86 port was good. Announcing hardware for Mac OS X86 was good. |
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