More on this massive announcement
So everyone is weighing in on this and I’ve been reading tons of commentaries. Here’s some of what I thought were the most insightful.
First of all, Apple has Steve Job’s keynote up so you can watch it for yourself. The one thing I got from that which I hadn’t seen covered yesterday was the fact that Apple has more PPC machines in the pipeline. What this means for those of us trying to decide if we want to get one of the last PPC powerbooks is that we might want to wait a bit longer to see if there will be one more performance boost before the Pentium-based machines show up. The other thing that was interesting was that the Pentium-based machine Steve was demoing on was using a “standard-issue” Pentium which might put to rest some of the speculation around a custom intel chip. Also, the responsiveness of Steve’s demo machine which was using a 3.6 GHz Pentium didn’t seem that much better than my 867 MHz PB.
eWeek’s article about how the transition will affect developers was interesting, but could have had more depth. Steve made it sound like most of the OS X developers had already made the switch to Cocoa and X-Code, but what he neglected to say was the majority of the developers using Metrowerks and Carbon are the oldest developers for Macintosh, with the largest codebases. Don’t expect too many new big features in your favorite mac apps releasing in 2006.
SiliconValley.com has a nice article on some of the other potential benefits for Apple by moving to a processor family with more vendors and options.
Dan Farber has his own summation of the techno-pundits on his blog.
David Berlind has got some great insights in his blog
Thomas Claburn of Information Week has confirmed that while Apple won’t let OS X run on non-Apple hardware, it won’t prevent other OSes from being loaded on Apple hardware. This is a pretty important detail. Imagine being able to dual-boot XP and OS X on sweet Apple hardware… I don’t think Apple should try and become an OS vendor since one of the reasons that OS X is so much more stable and secure is because of it’s limited hardware surface. Some insane percentage of crashes in XP systems is due to driver issues according to Microsoft. Apple has avoided this with their strategy and I think that is a major part of Apple’s appeal.
Peter N. Glaskowsky at eWeek presents a very interesting perspective on the whole deal.
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