Comments | anhline: Insights on Intel

anhline

Insights on Intel

Jun 13, 2005 01:24

In case you haven't heard, Apple announced last week that it will begin a phased transition to Intel processors in 2006. I've heard and read a ridiculous amount of misinformation and general retardedness in the last 7 days, as is expected w/ this kind of news. Most of this retardedness involves people assuming that Apple will be using Intel chips ( Read more... )

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brentturbeaux June 13 2005, 17:19:47 UTC

The only few places where Apple's going to have a hard time in the transition, as far as I can guess, would be:

1) Sales on current towers and notebooks will take a dive because of people waiting for the next big thang. I'm in this boat, actually, because I was thinking about G5-ing myself in the next few months--prior to hearing this news. How can a ~3% market share possibly withstand a damn good reason NOT to buy a Mac?

2) Apple will have an incredibly hard time convincing non-Macvangelists that an Intel Mac should be more expensive than an indentically equipped Intel PC (you know it's inevitable). Macvangelists, of course, can be convinced of anything.

3) Intel releases new chips with breakneck frequency, and publishes their roadmap well ahead of time (Apple couldn't possibly like that). To keep up with PCs, they'll have to dump the latest Pentium in there every few weeks or else look like slackers.

metaclops June 13 2005, 17:49:13 UTC

Your first point has a name: The Osborne Effect.

The move to x86 was unavoidable, IBM just could not deliver. Kudos to Apple for seeing this and maintaining x86 OSX builds.

brentturbeaux June 13 2005, 18:35:39 UTC

IBM could deliver, but not to a customer who purchases such a staggeringly low number of chips. I can see the board meeting now. "IBM, we want you to make the fastest desktop CPU in the world. And we want you to make.... ten thousand of them."

anhline June 13 2005, 19:14:35 UTC

Having a nice performance roadmap is definitely important but I'm sure when it came down to the bottom line, it was all about the money, from both sides of the story. With more dough flowing in from Apple to IBM, I'm sure they could have resolved their 90nm issues in a sufficient time frame. From Apple's perspective, why pay IBM more money for more development when they could probably get the same if not better from Intel for less money?

Hey, ten thousand chips though? A million Macs every 3 months is a little more than that. ;-)
But yeah, not nearly the same numbers as all three of the gaming consoles would get for IBM.

brentturbeaux June 13 2005, 21:41:43 UTC

No, the 10,000 was a joke, but in order to keep their stocks from sinking, IBM said that Apple accounted for less than 2% of their chip fab, so losing Apple as a client wasn't a huge deal to them. I guess delivering the chips they needed wasn't a huge deal to them, either.

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