Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

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

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
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Saturday, January 14, 2006
11:55 - A couple of random Intel thoughts	(top)
It seems that pretty much everyone who made predictions as to the contents of the Stevenote�in particular, which Macs would move first to Intel�was way off the mark. Some skeptics refused to get their hopes up over any Intel Macs at all; and those people who did expect to see them all agreed that the ones to arrive first would probably be the bottom-end, consumer-oriented machines (particularly iBooks). Matt Roth-Cline, in fact, was about the only one I saw who correctly predicted that the Intel switch would be something Apple could position as a huge leap forward in performance, not a crippling setback�and thus that they could move out the PowerBooks/MacBook Pros first, leaving iBooks (and Mac minis) for later. It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. Why wasn't it at the time? Probably for the same reason that none of us knew what to make of the iMacs and Power Macs. If the switch were something to be ashamed of, then Jobs would want to switch the iMacs before the Power Macs�but both the iMacs and PowerBooks had received recent refreshes, and so that (subliminally if not explicitly) took them both out of the running as candidates for any kind of major bump. So we all thought inevitably about iBooks, if for no other reason than that they were long in the tooth and needed (more than any other product) to become more price-competitive, which we hoped the Intels would make possible. What I guess we weren't willing to take into account was not only that Intel would be a giant boon to anyone using native software (and that there would be a lot more of that native software at launch time than we'd imagined�a lot of it rolled out in stealth as part of 10.4.4), but that Apple was in fact willing to rev the iMacs and PowerBooks, the two products in the lineup that had most recently been revised. This knocks most of our conventional wisdom into a cocked hat... but with Steve, that really shouldn't come as a huge surprise to us. Where it gets interesting is where it leaves the remainder of the product lineup. You can still buy G5 iMacs and G4 PowerBooks at full price, and word is that the 12" and 17" PowerBooks at least will continue to be available for a good long time, well beyond the inevitable introduction of the corresponding MacBooks (buyers might want to wait for Rev 2). And who knows about the iMacs. The question we have to ask is: who would buy the PPC-based alternatives right now? There must be a lot of them, to justify keeping the standard price and not showing signs of ramping down production of what now, in light of the new laptop's built-in iSight and cool magnetic power cable, looks like a defeatured discount model. All I can think is that enough people out there need Pro-level performance (for Pro apps that are Altivec-heavy) and aren't willing to wait for the universal binary versions of those apps, like Photoshop (or World of Warcraft), or pay for the upgrades of the ones that are coming soon, like Final Cut Pro. In other words, the Intel machines are a lot faster as long as you have or can afford all the software in native format; but the PPC machines are still faster if you have to run your critical apps in Rosetta, and for some people that's still going to be the case for a few months at least. It's a shaky theory, but it's all I can figure. But it does explain why they can continue trumpeting the recently revved Power Mac G5, with its shrieking and stomping quad processors (and fire-breathing performance�d'oh), without any word on when its Intel counterpart will be arriving, aside from "by the end of the calendar year". At least I could imagine buying a quad-G5 today, considering that it would undoubtedly be able to take advantage of some very specialized Altivec-accelerated apps and wouldn't make me break the bank even further by forcing paid upgrades of all the $1000+ Pro apps. But that leaves us with one question: Who would by an iBook today? iBooks aren't Pro-level machines; there's nothing you'd want to run on them that will cost you vast amounts of cash when the time comes to get an Intel-native version of it. Most iBook users get along just fine on bundled software alone, plus iLife and iWork, which are universal today and modestly priced. But we know that an Intel CPU will make those apps run two to three times faster right out of the box. iBooks are great price-wise and an obvious choice for someone of limited means buying a Mac; but such a buyer would also be cognizant of the need to get the most performance for the money, and would be willing to wait a few months if that's what it took. So who in their right mind would buy a G4-based iBook rather than waiting for its replacement? It's this that leads me to think that the next machine to switch over, and pretty soon (like maybe in March, along with the Pro apps, though that doesn't make a lot of sense from a rollout perspective), is the iBook. Maybe they're planning on waiting a whole year before revving the Power Mac (though it would be a big credibility hit for the power users�why would their flagship machine be the slowest, at least in perception?) and the Mac mini; but surely they can't expect the iBook, their highly-thought-of price leader laptop, to be the last team to arrive at the Amazing Race checkpoint. It's the least attractive thing to buy in its current configuration, and it seems to me it's the first one they ought to address. (Incidentally, I'm guessing it'll be renamed and called simply the MacBook, considering that Steve reportedly wants to have "Mac" be in the name of every Mac model, and considering the seemingly superfluous "Pro" on the current Intel laptops' nameplates.) Maybe it's just a massive hedge to say "by the end of the calendar year" for the complete switchover. But they've got to complete it a lot sooner than that, under the current conditions. Intel is not being seen as a handicap or any reason to wait for apps to become ready, as Apple has put a lot of effort into making sure that all the software they offer for everyday users is universal from Day 1. So waiting makes no sense; time is against Apple here, and they can't afford to take their time bringing out everything else in Intel flavor. It seems to be winning friends and influencing people already. More of the same, please, Steve!