| Tuesday, June 7, 2005 |
18:35 - See it to believe it
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/
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Streamed video of the hour-long keynote yesterday. It's worth watching.
Steve makes it stick, as usual. There are some genuinely funny moments, as usual. You get a good vibe, as usual. And in the current atmosphere, a good vibe is a soothing balm.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini sure thinks this is a good idea. (He, not Steve, initiated this bear hug.) And the little tale at the end that he relates, about two companies coming together after thirty years of being at odds, eventually coming to realize they've got a lot of shared DNA, is sort of moving.
Steve says he expects to have Intel-based Macs already on the market by this time next year, which—if it doesn't mean they'll be introduced at Macworld in January—at least means sometime in the spring. Probably the first things out of the gate will be laptops, the G5-class PowerBooks we've been hoping to see for two years now. Followed shortly by top-end Power Macs, or whatever they'll be called.
And that also means that the drought of high-end Mac sales will probably be briefer than I'd thought—it won't be two years until saleable and runnable Intel Macs are available, it'll be less than a year, maybe as little as six months.
This might work out after all. And in the meantime, I fully expect Apple will send up some significant price cuts on PowerBooks and G5s in the intervening time, if it'll be that short a period—and it's not like these machines will be duds, or significantly worse in initial performance than the first Intel machines, because those will mostly be running through Rosetta. In fact, for the first few months while developers transition to new binaries, G5s will probably still have a performance edge.
And you know what that means we can look forward to? Another long period of better and better software performance on the same hardware, as we've enjoyed with each successive release of OS X.
Apple's spending a lot of capital with this move, but they've also got a lot of it to spend. That includes emotional capital too, and my well hasn't exactly run dry yet.
UPDATE: AnandTech (via Steven Den Beste) has some thoughts and/or insights into what chips Apple will be using; also an outsider's surprise at the level of genuine support that the seated audience showed during what was really a tough experience to sit through, let alone clap for.
Don't miss Anand's heavily illustrated keynote coverage, either.
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Brian Tiemann
