A copy of a note I just posted to the local Mac User group (DEMUG). Warning, not for the non-geeky, it’s probably really boring to even those who know what I’m talking about. Having said that:
To be honest I’m going to wait and see about all this because I really don’t know enough about the pros & cons here to have a really educated opinion on it AND there’s nothing we can do to stop this switch, like it or not, your likely to have ‘Intel Inside’ in your next Mac. I do have a few comments based on things mentioned in this thread so far;
Chip’s Vulnerable to viruses – You really don’t here about many Linux viruses and a majority of Linux distributions run on Intel’s chips. While exploits have been found to prey on some of the intel architecture I’m sure the motorola one has similar problems if the right hackers focused on it. The good thing is, the intel architecture has been the primary focus of hackers for years and thus all the obvious exploits are pretty well known and can be prevented. Kind of the ‘open source’ philosophy here, hackers can be helpful. Also, we all know that if the right people focused on Mac OS we’d get viruses too. It’s been fun for the past decade to tease Windows folks about viruses but it’s time we all raised shields and got careful anyways.
Trusting Apple – Apple has had a track record of good decisions recently, but this has not always been the case. Steve Jobs has made alot of good decisions for Apple but also it’s pretty well known that he can be an arrogant stubborn pain the *ss and it wouldn’t surprise me that this whole switch is done more to spite Motorola/IBM PowerPC folks or for some other reason. Ok it sounds conspriracy theory like but I don’t think Steve Jobs is infallable. On the other hand, from what he’s saying if they didn’t make this switch then Macs would have a reputation of being really slow. I am curious why Apple got in bed with Intel instead of AMD but oh well. BTW – Sun has also released it’s OS in an X86 format. The days of the RISC chip may be waning.
I think we need to remember that Apple, while a hardware producer, is mostly a software company (ok mostly an mp3 player company with computer hardware and software on the side, sad as that may be). They make enough off hardware to not want to give any of that up with clones, but the majority of what they “make” is software. On hardware front they basically make pretty machines that contain standard hardware. Yes their engineers are very good at what they do but they aren’t ‘making’ anything really.
In order for them to survive they have to cut some corners and running on ‘standard’ hardware is the easiest way. People screamed when they moved from SCSI to IDE disks, but it reduced the cost of the machines. Same thing from SBUS to PCI, ADB to USB, removed the floppy drive etc. Basically, people don’t like to hear that the new machine they are running on now has ‘old’ technology, it’s like GM just said ‘All our cars are going to run on Diesel by 2007 because normal gas was found to be inferior’. (ok the analogy needs work but you get the idea). Also, proprietary or uncommon hardware can be a pain to maintain and support (and costly to replace).
Also, Steve Jobs recently gave a commencement speech at Stanford ( http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html ) and he basically said the same thing the Steve Wozniak (the other founder of Apple) said at a commencement speech he gave years ago: “We won. Every computer is a essentially a Mac.” (referring to the fact that windows came about to try to copy Apple’s GUI OS, etc.). Though I guess the reverse may now be true too.. every computer is basically a ‘PC’ 🙂
Ok I’m getting off my soap box now. Thanks for listening 🙂
-Matt