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[KingSparta]

Not sure if many people are following the news that Apple is starting to use Intel for there new computers. I am kind of wondering why the change after all these years?

And how this will impact Apple for not only Music Sales but sales for there new computers. this could be a turning point of slumping sales for the company.

Apple Unveils New iMac with Intel Core Duo Processor
New iMac is Twice as Fast as Predecessor

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jan/10imac.html

[Mr ChriZ]

I've never been a huge mac person,
but i think if people start to believe everything
Apple tells them, and they've already got IPods,
ITunes, then their eye balls may be drawn to these things.
So many people are fed up with Windows, wouldn't
have a clue how to set up Linux etc. 
Mac comes pre-setup, at the moment has few security problems,
has an interface which pretty much everyone loves, and is starting
to come into a price range which is doable.
I've got two non techy friends recently that moved from XP over to Mac and been
very happy.  More and more apps are becoming cross platform etc
it's becoming very easy...
If it became a fashion like IPod,
then I think they could actually become a bigger contender again
for the home market.

[hit_ny]

Not sure if many people are following the news that Apple is starting to use Intel for there new computers. I am kind of wondering why the change after all these years?

Apple were not selling enough to make it worth it for IBM to make the chips at the price Apple wanted.

Enter Intel.

We are not about to see OS-X on windows box or windows on a mac box yet.

[Mike Noe]

We are not about to see OS-X on windows box or windows on a mac box yet.

I wouldn't be so sure....:  http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13363

[bob]

Actually Apple sales were not slumping, the PC sales were up strongly (%40) over the same quarter last year even after they announced the intel change. People were not waiting to get their hands on the intel HW. The truth is, like them or not, Apple is doing really well. Their stock has risen steadily and they passed Dell last week in total market value.

As far as the change to intel goes, it's a lot of hype. The intel processors are faster the g5 on certain benchmarks, just like the g5's were faster than the best intel chips on certain benchmarks. They just pick the benchmarks that show them off the best and use those.

Apple simply couldn't get IBM to give them a low cost low power G5 for laptops because of the relatively small order quantity so they went with off the shelf intel chips. More profit for them as well. IBM didn't care because they captured the CPU orders for all 3 of the new game consoles including M$'s Xbox 360

Battery life on intel based laptops have always been dismal compared to the ibooks with g4's in them. The g4 (made by Motorola) is an extremely efficient chip in terms of power consumption. I'm sure the battery claims on the new MacBooks are inflated. They probably have bigger, heavier batteries as well.

The one positive thing I see out of this is that virtual PC will run in native intel mode now so it should be rather efficient to run XP under OSX.

[KingSparta]

Apple is doing really well

yes if you include IPOD sales and that is almost twice the apple computer sales for last year.

As for the slumping sales, Apples stock has been downgraded (almost $3) because of apples own sales estimates for 1st qtr 2006. apple estimates of the sales drop for there computers is due to two reasons (that i could find), (1.) due to customers waiting for the new computers and (2.) apple does not believe they can crank out computers to keep up with demand.

the company estimated worth
Apple Computer ($72,132,428,843)
Dell ($71,970,702,760).

the problem with this is dell is only one company of sales out of hundreds for the windows platform compaired to one Company "Apple" So the market share for apple computers is rather low.

Even if this is "Hype" (and i do beleave some of it is) if it can increase sales 100% this would make a major impact on the Windows "PC" Market.

[Gene]

At the last Intel developer conference, they made a very big deal of virtual machines for everyone.   Content providers even are excited because now they can run their decoders in a protected environment where there are no hacker tools.

What does this have to do with Apple?   Well, it opens the door for a PC to run both Windows and Mac OS on the same PC at the same time.  Not just in the Virtual-PC mode on the Mac, or VMWare on the PC, but in a kind of micro-kernel mode where the operating systems are co-equal, and if you want you can run your mail program and browser on its own virtual machine so when you get infected, there is an air-tight firewall to protect the rest of your computer.

I suspect we will see these things start to become mainstream inside of 3 years.   Of course that is just my spin.... 

[JaredH]

Actually Apple sales were not slumping, the PC sales were up strongly (%40) over the same quarter last year even after they announced the intel change. People were not waiting to get their hands on the intel HW. The truth is, like them or not, Apple is doing really well. Their stock has risen steadily and they passed Dell last week in total market value.

As far as the change to intel goes, it's a lot of hype. The intel processors are faster the g5 on certain benchmarks, just like the g5's were faster than the best intel chips on certain benchmarks. They just pick the benchmarks that show them off the best and use those.

Apple simply couldn't get IBM to give them a low cost low power G5 for laptops because of the relatively small order quantity so they went with off the shelf intel chips. More profit for them as well. IBM didn't care because they captured the CPU orders for all 3 of the new game consoles including M$'s Xbox 360

Battery life on intel based laptops have always been dismal compared to the ibooks with g4's in them. The g4 (made by Motorola) is an extremely efficient chip in terms of power consumption. I'm sure the battery claims on the new MacBooks are inflated. They probably have bigger, heavier batteries as well.

The one positive thing I see out of this is that virtual PC will run in native intel mode now so it should be rather efficient to run XP under OSX.

Thank you for saving me the typing energy. I was just about to clear that up when I saw your post.

[glynor]

As far as the change to intel goes, it's a lot of hype. The intel processors are faster the g5 on certain benchmarks, just like the g5's were faster than the best intel chips on certain benchmarks. They just pick the benchmarks that show them off the best and use those.

Apple simply couldn't get IBM to give them a low cost low power G5 for laptops because of the relatively small order quantity so they went with off the shelf intel chips. More profit for them as well. IBM didn't care because they captured the CPU orders for all 3 of the new game consoles including M$'s Xbox 360

Battery life on intel based laptops have always been dismal compared to the ibooks with g4's in them. The g4 (made by Motorola) is an extremely efficient chip in terms of power consumption. I'm sure the battery claims on the new MacBooks are inflated. They probably have bigger, heavier batteries as well.

That's not really all it was.  Market share and order quantity were one part of the equation, I'm sure, but... IBM couldn't deliver a low-heat, low-power version of the 970 because of leakage, not just because of market share.  There were also some serious yield issues at first, and the cooling required for the higher-end G5's was problematic (this comes from someone in an office with 4 liquid cooled PowerMac G5's -- two of which have had the CPU units replaced twice each for cooling problems).  All for much the same reason Intel couldn't push the Netbust Netburst architechture into a laptop form-factor efficiently and eventually had to abandon it for the P3/Pentium M/Yonah architechture (not to mention that they were and are getting slapped by AMD's performance).

There's also a huge amount of speculation that Apple wanted Intel's PDA-architechture processors (Xscale) for some new as-yet-unannounced iPDA product.  We shall see...

The G4-based PowerBook's battery life was certainly superior to anything Intel has now, but there were other huge problems with those systems too.  They were choking on an incredibly antiquated bus (bandwidth starved), so they really couldn't effectively use any of the clockspeed increases that Motorola did manage to squeeze out of them.  Basically the same problem Intel had with the Pentium 3 just near the end of it's life.  Apple/Motorola/IBM just didn't have a genius Israli team to produce the G4-M for them like Intel did (and there lies the order quantity issue).  The problem really was that ALL of the major chip manufacturers, excepting AMD, went down the "slay everything to the almighty GHz" route and didn't consider power consumption and transistor leakage to be the problem they ultimately turned out to be.  The G4 was a beautiful processor system for it's time, but it was still running on a 133MHz bus....

Intel had economies of scale, the Xscale processor, and the ability to deliver in REAL volume if Apple's sales really take off (as they appear to be).

Oh, and as far as dual-booting?  Apple has said repeatedly that they will not stand in the way of booting Windows on a Mac.  Booting OSX on a commodity PC will be more difficult, and Apple will try to prevent that (probably, though who knows), but I would be surprised if it doesn't eventually happen.  They won't like it, and it certainly won't be easy, but...

Microsoft didn't think you'd be able to boot Linux on the XBox either.  Hackers will hack, and if they make it illegal, they'll just do it in China.

[Mr ChriZ]

Found an interesting article here
on using an emulator to run Mac/OSX on a 3.0Ghz PC under Windows

[bob]

As predicted here Jobs was blowing a lot of smoke on the supposed intel speed increase

http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/imaclabtest1/index.php

Intel 2.0g core duo in real world tests is a modest 10% to 25% faster than single processor 2.1g g5.

Hype, hype, hype...

[Gene]

As predicted here Jobs was blowing a lot of smoke on the supposed intel speed increase

http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/imaclabtest1/index.php

Intel 2.0g core duo in real world tests is a modest 10% to 25% faster than single processor 2.1g g5.

Hype, hype, hype...

Steve Jobs was very careful to reference the spec benchmark, and said very clearly that application performance would not increase by the same amount.

I remember a phrase something like: "...because the disk isn't 3  times faster..."

This was like the most honest statement about performance I can remember ever hearing from a top executive in a computer company.... 

[bob]

Hmmm,

http://www.apple.com

2x faster. No qualifications.

[glynor]

Yep, and they had the first 64-bit personal computer too.   

(Pay no attention to the linux people with Athlon 64's over there behind the curtain.  Let the RDF comfort you.)

The truth be told though, the Core Duo will be quite a bit faster in some applications than a single core G5.  In some, it won't really shine though (especially in those apps that make heavy use of the G5's Altivec acceleration and apps that aren't heavily multithreaded).  In time though, most apps will be recompiled to support SSE and all Intel's other goodies, so the final word is still up in the air.

I'd never base my opinion of any product on one single set of benchmarks (particularly theoretical ones).  To find it's real value, you need to see a wide range of benchmarks, and especially see applications you will really be using.

For those, I'd have to use Rosetta, and that won't let it perform anywhere near what it needs to.  ...yet.