Writing things down helps, supposedly.
Caveats: I’m an old-guard Apple supporter, and part of that is about being the underdog, being different. Different software, different hardware. Better hardware, even if it was more expensive and less megahertzy – that was part of the mystique: Wintel fanboys wouldn’t and couldn’t understand that. Through the dark days of Quadras and Performas and Gil Amelio there was always our operating system and those Motorola processors beating at the heart of our beige boxes. Kick that up a gear to the early PowerPC’s and we were different once again, RISC’ing a radically different – cleverer – approach to the brute force of Pentium. Shifting to IBM seemed obvious, even invisible; oddball enough to be different, but focused on performance and the user.
I’ve had a bad, twisty feeling in my gut all weekend, waiting for the news from the WWDC. I’d read the rumours and the speculation just seemed to be an unending whirl of “well, yeah, they could – but why the hell would they want to do that?”. Sure, there were plenty of pros and cons, not to mention whether this was a future-of-the-Mac thing or a some-other-device thing – a getting-x86-chips-from-Intel thing or a getting-PowerPC-chips-from-Intel thing.
But the PowerPC’s actually had better growth than Pentium recently, even if it’s missed Steve’s magic targets. PowerPC has better scalability. PowerPC is cheaper. PowerPC is smarter. It’s different. It’s ours.
How could Apple leave that behind?
That twisty feeling in my gut didn’t go away. Largely because of the oh-so-certain reporting in the Wall Street Journal – real journalists apparently aren’t allowed to just make stuff up. But there were also the twinges of 1984 about the magical anti-piracy abilities of the Pentium-D: I suddenly saw the Mac platform remolded in the light of the iPod, complete with a restrictive set of DRM gubbins that has, until now, not affected me in the slightest. I believe in the second coming of Steve Jobs as much as the next man, and I didn’t want to think that he could have been secretly angling to make Apple his own little media company at the expense of my computing platform.
But now it’s announced, annoited in the Reality Distortion Field, and I’m not sure how to feel. So let’s look at a few basics:
This is about chip supply and availability, jostling for more space in a marketplace whose public seems to think Intel is the only brand, and laptops. It’s not about processor speed, future chip development potential or unit price.
Part of what I feel, then, is that Apple is sacrificing being different (read: better) for market share. And that feels like betrayal.
Of course, there’s also the simple fact that my lovely (and expensive) iMac G5′s going to run out of new software sometime in the next one to two years. I’m a) poor and b) a cheap-ass, and Apple hardware’s always been better value for those willing to invest over a slightly longer term than your average Windows user, so this, like, really pisses me off.
Narg.
But it’s a done deal. Mac OS X has been co-developed for x86 hardware throughout the last four years. Cocoa apps can apparently be ported reasonably easily, Carbon with a little more work. OS X running on Intel will have backwards compatability with PowerPC apps. New apps can be compiled ‘fat’ for PowerPC and x86 – but who’s going to bother with that? I’m starting to feel left out in the cold.
And how many G5′s are they going to sell over the next year?
After putting it off, I finally read the coverage of the keynote. Then I went and watched The West Wing, which really lost its way in season five: empty scripts, hollow direction, the dramatic abandonment of characters I’ve absolutely cherished like no others.
Seemed familiar, somehow.
