Friday, June 10

PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 - Going for Broke

PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 - Going for Broke

I have to wonder what Cringely is smoking here. Must be that powerful sh!t that they grow in southern Ohio.

Intel buying Apple? I don't think so.

Let's take a revisionist look at the Apple news, asking a few key questions. The company has on its web site a video of the speech, itself, which is well worth watching. It's among this week's links.

Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?

This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week's presentation?

Obviously, it's because IBM didn't deliver what they said what they would deliver. I have no clue whatsoever what Intel has up its sleeves, as I really don't expect much more MHZ power out of the current crop. Going multi-core will help, certainly. But shouldn't we already being seeing 6MHZ and above now?

Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?

OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either.

So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing?

They made a big deal about it?

Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs and does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

Because Intel has made certain guarantees that I doubt that AMD would ever be able to make.

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?

This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him, Osborne was the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular fashion when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought Osborne 1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub with him (Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months?

Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout a new Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?

This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.

Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to Intel. But this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show how easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why give it a year? And companies typically make such announcements to their partners in private under NDA and get away with it. There was no need to make this a public announcement despite News.com's scoop, which only happened because of the approaching Jobs speech. Apple could have kept it quiet if they had chosen to, with the result that not so many sales would have been lost.

This means that there must have been some overriding reason why Apple HAD to make this public announcement, why it was worth the loss of billions in sales.

(emphasis mine)—Yeah, this is the part that I have issue with. MacTel in time for Christmas, not a problem. But waiting a whole year? Then again, the Mac faithful will probably continue to buy their boxes, regardless. I guess.

Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?

People "in the know" love this idea, that Hollywood moguls are forcing Apple to switch to Intel because Intel processors have built-in DRM features that will keep us from pirating music and movies. Yes, Intel processors have such features, based primarily on the idea of a CPU ID that we all hated when it was announced years ago so Intel just stopped talking about it. The CPU ID is still in there, of course, and could be used to tie certain content to the specific chip in your computer.

But there are two problems with this argument. First, Apple is already in the music and video distribution businesses without this feature, which wouldn't be available across the whole product line for another two years and wouldn't be available across 90 percent of the installed base for probably another six years. Second, though nobody has ever mentioned it, I'm fairly sure that the PowerPC, too, has an individual CPU ID. Every high end microprocessor does, just as every network device has its unique MAC address.

So while DRM is nice, it probably isn't a driving force in this decision.

I'm going to agree with this. It may be entirely wrong, but DRM could just as well be done with the PPC, as with the x86.

Then what is the driving force?

Microsoft.

…

Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn't always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel's standpoint Microsoft doesn't work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft's bloatware strategy just isn't making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.

Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.

That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.

Remember, you read it here first.

OK, I'm a bad person because I'm still running a five year old Pentium III running at 450MHZ (running XP of all things…) that I'm not going to upgrade because my Microsoft runs just fine on it? Er, no. I upgraded my first computer because things were going bad on me, memory, which nobody seems to sell anymore, and other things that the motherboard was indicating would crap out on me. Instead, I've had two hard drives fail on me after the upgrade. Grrrrrrrr. Apple's going to be the driving force for upgrades? Give me a break. If Apple does come up with software that requires a four core CPU running at 5 or 6 GHZ, doesn't that mean that Microsoft is just going to eat their lunch?

We've got quite the CPU power. Where things truly suck is IO. The gaming community has gotten the manufacturers to really improve on the video front, with great performance out of even the more modest cards. But hard drives? SATA II looks nice in being able to deliver some actual performance, but SCSI has been the top performer for quite some time, and most computers don't have SCSI. Not even the current crop of Macs. It's too damn expensive, and still is. CD-ROMs, well, you can only spin plastic so fast before it explodes on you, so the only thing that we can do there is increase density, while maintaining our 6300 - 7800 RPM limit of speed that we can spin that plastic. USB speed is improving, and so is FireWire, although it still needs more. And I won't go into Ethernet speeds. I'm rather surprised that my latest computer won't do gigabit Ethernet. My router won't do it, so it's not that important. When the other computer gets upgraded, it will be nice to have 100MB Ethernet on it as well. I'm rambling at this point.

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