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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, June 6, 2005
18:44 - The road more travelled
http://weblog.roth-cline.net/archives/2005/06/a_cold_day_in_h.html

(top) link
It's hard to get past the emotional impact of it, really, and discuss it dispassionately—but I guess we gotta. It's a done deal. Sorta like (though of course on a much smaller and pettier scale) how some of us involuntarily tried to make weird arguments to ourselves, on the evening of 9/11, for and against voluntarily tearing down the WTC, even though the judgment had essentially been rendered by history. In fantasy we like to give ourselves more power than we've got. So in the same vein, I (and others) find ourselves trying to see what's good about this step by Apple—and just as we've about got ourselves convinced that it'll all turn out okay, we step back and look at the situation with the eyes that embrace the enormity of the cataclysm, we realize just how irrevocable events have become, and we think, "God, this sucks."

Matt Roth-Cline has a pretty good run-through of initial reactions to today's Mac/Intel announcement. He's "cautiously optimistic" (his words), and I agree he's got a right to be on points. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to wake up tomorrow morning and find that this has all been an ugly dream.

For anybody who’s never seen a motherboard, this is a nonevent. For all the nontechnical crowd knows, switching from IBM to Intel is just a matter of dropping in a different chip. There’s a reason this announcement was made at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference: developers are the only ones who really know what the hell this means.

I made this argument today at lunch, too; I can't see consumer-level buyers caring a whit for this. But people like J Greely embody a user base that will cause Apple's bottom line some severe headaches in what's going to be a leeeean couple of years:

Was planning to buy
dual G5 tower real soon.
Bit less likely now.

The trick is the Rosetta emulator, which is cause for some concern. Reportedly it emulates only G3 code—Altivec stuff, code that depends on G4/G5 instructions, and other features (including Classic) will be SOL when it comes to Rosetta. I was worried that Rosetta emulation would perhaps be too good (thus disincentivizing developers from bothering to produce optimized Intel code), but reportedly I need not worry: apparently the demo rig during the keynote was a Pentium IV at 3.6GHz P4 which was running at about the equivalent speed of a 1GHz G4. So developers will be forced to write fully ported apps, or else they'll be pigs.

But that's the key, I think: Rosetta isn't supposed to be the end-all, be-all of the porting process. Rather, it's a stop-gap, in the same mold as Classic. (In fact, some might argue that Classic is the precursor to Rosetta, in structure and intent—a dress rehearsal.) The idea being that without Rosetta, we had a Catch-22: developers couldn't produce Intel versions of their Mac apps because they had no hardware to develop on, because Apple couldn't release Intel-based Macs until there was software to run on them or else nobody but developers would buy them. But Rosetta allows people—developers as well as consumers—to ease into the new platform, however painfully. At least it's no longer a logical impossibility.

App developers who care about the user experience would then develop real Intel-optimized versions of their software, not just Rosetta-powered ones. Sure, you can translate an app through Rosetta in two hours; but once an Adobe or a Microsoft sits down and spends a six-month release cycle developing a fully Intel-optimized version of each of their apps, they'll run at the full hoped-for speed, and apps that stay in Rosetta mode will flounder along like QuarkXPress in Classic mode, gradually alienating users.

Back to Roth-Cline:

Apple, however, needs to stay speed- and price-competitive with the x86 market. These days, the only way to do that is to enter the x86 market. (Incidentally, this is the same conclusion that Sun reached.) The desktop- and workstation-class CPU market has winnowed down to one architecture (x86) and two main competitors (Intel and AMD). While religious “enthusiasts” will bemoan the loss of their favorite architecture, this is a natural sign of a maturing market.

That's a fair point. Maybe it will be something we'll all get used to soon enough, talking about SSE2 instead of Altivec, as long as all the gee-whiz graphic effects in OS X still work the same way. I presume that everything that's so Altivec-optimized in OS X will be compiled to the standards of the Intel equivalents. Somehow I doubt that OS X itself will depend on Rosetta.

But then there's this small but important matter:

There’s another option that I haven’t seen mentioned. The Intel hardware for the Mac is likely not going to be the standard beige-box components. “x86” does not imply “open”; the XBox is a closed x86 platform. Control of the hardware is a big part of Apple’s business model, but it’s also a big part of their central selling point, user experience. A closed, controlled platform improves stability by giving developers a standard target. For example, game consoles are easier to develop for than the PC, because you only have to handle one set of hardware on the console versus a myriad of PC configurations, no two of which work exactly the same way.

Right, but as Will Collier says:

Yes, yes, Jobs and Apple VP Phil Schiller both say that Apple won't let other companies build Mac clones (Schiller says today, ""We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple computer,") but I doubt very much that they'll have much of a choice.

Very shortly after an x86 (i.e. Intel processor) version of the Mac OS is released to developers--which will happen in a couple of weeks--it's going to escape out into the wild. Sooner or later (I'm betting on sooner) some bright hacker or hackers are going to figure out how to get it running it on generic PC hardware, without the need for the proprietary Apple ROMs that will be included in "official" Macs.

And then it's all over for Apple as a hardware vendor.

They can't possibly compete with Dell and the "white box" PC manufacturers who buy commidity parts and operate on shoestring margins. Once that hack or set of hacks hits BitTorrent, that'll be that. Anybody with a copy of them and a copy of an Intel-friendly version of OS X will be able to cobble together their own Mac clone. I won't be at all surprised if Apple's own first Intel boxes are priced out of the market months before they can even ship.

No matter how well I've justified the idea of Intel Macs to myself with ancillary topics, this is what makes me step back, hyperventilate, and fall into despair. Yeah, performance might be better, yeah, we get fast laptops, yeah, Virtual PC can now be written in about ten lines of code—but Steve just opened the barn door. Now, granted, BitTorrent hasn't exactly ruined the Windows business model. But Microsoft subsidizes everything it does with sales of Office and corporate Windows installations; what does Apple have to compete with that? The iPod? I suspect that all those iPod profits are earmarked to helping Apple tighten its belt and weather the coming two-year drought of high-end Mac sales. There won't be any way for them to offset any hits to sales caused by piracy and cheapo OS X PC installations. But then, people who install cracked copies of OS X on generic Intel hardware aren't exactly the kind of people who would have bought a Mac anyway, or even who would have paid for a Windows PC. In the scheme of things, pirates might be a non-entity on the balance sheet. It's not like some company can pop up selling budget PCs running Mac OS X; Apple would send out flocks of lawyers from its newly colonized litigation planet where the lawyers' offices cover all the major landmasses and a giant sign stuck through the planet's crust says "Go stick your head in a pig".

They must have been planning this for a long time, in other words. They must know more than we do. They had to have been planning for this contingency since before the G5 even existed, back to the beginnings of the Marklar build and the Darwin/x86 project. Maybe they never thought they'd actually have to pull the lever, but here we all are.

So maybe Apple has secretly been planning a conversion to a software-maker business model all this time. Maybe they really do have their sights set on Microsoft—until today, they were in markedly separate market segments, one firmly on the software path and the other selling complete computing solutions; but now Apple's a skip and a jump from being right in Microsoft's space. Maybe this is the time to be there. Maybe Microsoft has become weakened enough lately by security problems and malware malaise and Longhorn skulls in the desert that Apple actually thinks it can survive in a head-to-head competition. If Steve has actually thought this through, he might well intend for Apple's eventual opening up to generic x86 hardware to become an inevitability, and the Mac to die off as he embraces commodity hardware while eating Microsoft's lunch at the software game.

But I don't think so, really. Too much of this smells like Apple is taking the least sucky of many sucky roads here, and they wouldn't be doing this if there were any remotely better option.

Five years from now we'll look back on today with the same chagrined shudder as we remember Bill Gates' face appearing on the MacWorld projector screen in 1998 or whenever it was, looking for all the world like Big Brother in the "1984" ad, dispensing his largesse in the form of a his promise to keep making Word for Mac while dictating that Internet Explorer would be the Mac browser of choice for the foreseeable future. Things had gotten immeasurably better since then for the Mac community, it's hard to deny. It's been like a wonderful dream for much of the past six years. But, well, this is more like what we were used to a decade ago. Time to suck it up and soldier on.

UPDATE: Engadget has a very intensive and detailed log of the keynote speech and announcements; via Paul Denton, who's pissed. Though perhaps unfairly—it's not like Apple could have foreseen this eventuality five years ago. As recently as summer 2003, they thought they'd be able to make a go of it with the G5. It's only since then that the promise has fallen short.

And besides, let's be honest here: it'll be years before Intel-based Macs are on the market in force and providing commensurate bang for the buck. Until app developers get their optimized versions done, there'll be no reason to feel gypped by a G5 bought in the current computing landscape. Realistically it will be 2009 or so before they stop producing fat binaries compatible with G4/G5 processors—and that's well beyond the lifespan of a new G5 sold today.


UPDATE: Peter N. Glaskowsky, who was caught as flat-footed as the rest of us by today's announcements, has a three-page analysis that makes the case that Apple's decision to go with Intel has not to do with IBM's failure to deliver fast top-end chips or low-power portable chips, but a bold territory-grab by Jobs into the Wintel market.

How will Apple prevent the Will Collier eventuality (rampant piracy of a cracked OS X for generic hardware)?

The ideal future x86 Mac will run Mac OS X and Windows, but I think it's unlikely that Apple will release a version of Mac OS that runs on non-Apple PCs.

Apple relies heavily on hardware sales to subsidize Mac OS development.

A shrink-wrapped Mac OS that runs on Dell machines, for example, would cut into Mac system sales.

Jobs did not address this question in his speech Monday, but we should learn the answer later this year.

If Apple had adopted the Intel architecture instead of PowerPC, this would have been a difficult problem to solve.

Apple would have been forced to make its systems fundamentally incompatible with the standard PC platform to prevent hackers from making their own Mac clones.

Today, Intel has the answer. LaGrande technology provides an unbreakable cryptographic lock that can keep Mac OS from booting on systems not made by Apple.

The LaGrande solution allows full PC compatibility, so Macs could be able to boot Windows, but dual-boot systems have never been particularly successful. Users don't want to be forced to choose between multiple operating systems when they start their computers.

The ideal solution would offer access to all the software and all the data on the machine at the same time.

. . .

Properly implemented, an x86 Mac wouldn't need to boot Windows to run Windows software.

Mac OS would be the primary operating system, but if the customer wants Windows, Windows could get its own partition.

With Windows running on the same machine, Apple can make Windows applications part of the Mac OS X environment.

Mmmm. Think "Windows-flavored Classic"? Interesting possibility.

If LaGrande can be made to reliably lock down OS X to only Apple-designed motherboards, that itself is a big relief; and if they can work Windows compatibility into the equation—making true some of the wackier rumors from people far too clueless to have genuinely predicted this situation—then maybe when we look back at today five years from now, it'll be with relief.


UPDATE: Jeff Harrell, in a comment on Will Collier's post, says:

And Matt, I don't know what the developer NDA covers, so I won't go into too much detail on this, but I have a source who has provided me with some details on the IA-32 machines that are going to start shipping to ISVs in a couple of weeks. They're Power Mac G5s with almost totally stock system boards and new, air-cooled IA-32 PMUs. The U3H memory controller and bridge ASIC has been altered to match the bus timing of the IA-32 processor, but that's all. Everything else on the system board is exactly the same. The internal components are all still connected via Hyper Transport through the K2 ASIC and the PCI-X bridge chip. The PMUs have 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 processors on them, but these will definitely not be the processors that Apple ships next year. The processors will be IA-32-instruction-set-compatible, but they will not be Pentium chips. They're going to be specially designed processors that Intel delivers to Apple but to no other customers, binary compatible with the Pentium family but not identical to any off-the-shelf microprocessor. For lack of a better name, I've taken to calling them "G6," but that's totally my own invention and not meant to be in any way authentic. It's just my own shorthand.

Geez, it's starting to look like everybody's right, to one extent or another...

See the comments thread for lots more details by Jeff.


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© Brian Tiemann