“It’s rare that one gets to watch grand strategy played out right before one’s eyes. Apple’s decision to switch from IBM to Intel as its microprocessor supplier is one of those moments in corporate history,” Arnold Reinhold writes for Hurwitz & Associates. “Apple, particularly after the home-run it hit with the iPod, is seen as a threat by Sony and Microsoft. Both companies have tapped IBM as their supplier for next-generation game consoles, a market that is bigger than personal computing and booming. That gave them far greater leverage than Apple in guiding IBM’s PowerPC road map, a situation that Apple couldn’t tolerate.”
Reinhold writes, “At the same time, Intel saw itself being reduced to a supplier of commodity chips for products built to run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, with little prospect of the kind of product differentiation that justifies higher margins. Intel’s Itanium effort collapsed in the face of AMD’s 64-bit, x86-compatible Opteron. With Apple as a customer, Intel no longer has to wait for approval from Redmond to innovate.”
Much more in the full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Infoworld’s Yager runs hot and cold about Apple’s move to Intel – June 30, 2005
Is Apple morphing Mac into the ultimate PC capable of running Mac OS X, Windows, Linux? – June 20, 2005
The Washington Post: ‘In a year or two, the best Windows PC may come from Apple’ – June 19, 2005
Intel’s built-in virtualization tech could be one way to run Windows on Intel-based Apple Macs – June 16, 2005
If Intel-based Macs can run Mac OS X and Windows, buying a Mac will be a no-brainer – June 15, 2005
Apple could use Trusted Platform Module chip to keep Mac OS X off non-Macs – June 14, 2005
Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005
Why buy a Dell when Apple ‘Macintel’ computers will run both Mac OS X and Windows? – June 08, 2005
Microsoft and Dell must have a lot of bricks lying around today – June 07, 2005
Apple to use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006, all Macs to be Intel-based by end of 2007 – June 06, 2005
it’s going to be interesting to see how the Intel/PowerPC/Apple/Microsoft drama plays out…
am i first again?
That article says a lot about not a lot…
slow news day?
That was a good analysis what is happening.
Good article indeed.
It is unbeleivable how a company like microsoft can stifle innovation. Almost as bad as that urban legend, where a clean, cheap fuel driven car has been squashed my the oil- and motor industries.
My opinion, companies like Microsoft represent the last century, where the bottom line of who made the most money was most important.
In this century the emphasis wil be on philantropical achievements, and there Apple is leading. Sure, Apple also makes its blunders, but never has there been a sinlge company, or government for that matter, that has elicited such a tremendous amount of loyalty and devotion. With most people becoming disillusioned by heir governments lies, who else but corporations can one turn to for their “Vorbild”. Apple has realised this, and in years to come they will be remembered for the new kind of business practices that the consumer wants. A company that is loyal to their customers, gets a loyal customer in return. Previous changes by Apple have all been eventually accepted by the consumer, and the myth that Apple lost marketshare because of the switch to PPC is just that. At the time there was a boom in the PC/IT industry, that the management at Apple slept through.
Now a new revoluton is on the horizon, and Steve & Co are the new business models that companes must aspire to become, if they want to retain the respect of the consumer. Never before has the adage that the customer is king ever been so true as it is today. Consumers are better informed, and wiill not be subject to used car sales tactics.
… and now i will go and drink some more Kool-Aid.
magically brought to you’se all by the word “PROGRESS”
nice article, however brief. This is the part that worries me most:
“And Power-PC’s different object code made it almost impossible for cross-platform viruses and malware to propagate.”
Will the new Apple machines be more susceptible to viruses?
what I’D like to know more about is the 64 bit aspect of the Intel/Apple effort. not much coming from Intel and Steve-o didn’t make much mention of it during the keynote weeks ago. and i did make the first post! thank goodness… i thought is was slippin’.
that is….
“i thought I WAS slippin’.”
It’s also going to be interesting to see if IBM can keep a production of millions of chips going for 2 different machines. I don’t see how since they couldn’t do it for Apple. And the record, the 3 ghz chip still hasn’t been met. Apple is still waiting for that one. Of course now that Apple has said bye,bye to IBM they will probably release one. But without that pressure I doubt it if they would have come through this year with one if at all.
I’m sure that iNtel has some innovations up it’s sleeve, but the question is if the Mac market can sustain their R&D…
We all know that they’ll be able to milk the M$ cow for many more years (or as long as M$ is in business, whichever comes first) because there is no way that M$ could pull off the type of transformations that Apple can in switching platforms.
Well, somebody big seems to be pulling for Apple here of late. Could it be Intel? Or maybe Disney? .. or both, perhaps?
You know how we’re always lamenting the lack of Apple coverage and general Mac marginalization? Oddly, during all of the past many days, at a time when there was wasn’t really any amazing new Apple news, Google News has consistantly kept a few dwindling headlines about podcasting alive as top featured news stories, even when the dateline on the newest of the presses was many days old.
Peculiar, that. And about time, too.
It´s all talk until we see the first product from Apple.
And when the first thing we here from Apple/Intel is a “slight delay” waiting for Intel to build the chip Apple needs…..bad news….
“In this century the emphasis wil be on philantropical achievements”
You crack me up, you really do.
We just had the most powerful democratic nation on earth turn into a conservative-lead semi-democracy, where the president is selected rather than elected, and that same nation initiating an aggressive war upon two other countries on pretexts that never in the history of mankind formed a casus belli, agrieved by the fact that one of the pretexts (WMD) turned out to be a total lie. All this, because some ‘philantropic’ captains of industry (mainly from oil- and weapons type) managed to get their way in a manner that we’ve never seen before.
Open your eyes, man! We’re being led by the nose to our own destruction for no other reason than money money money. Heck, the last century was TAME in comparison!
What a tool.
Bite me,
Kate
FYI: sorry, you wouldn’t know this: by calling myself O’Toole I refer to the gentleman who said that ‘Murphy is an optimist’. Murphy is the person who said that ‘everything that possibly can go wrong WILL go wrong’.
IOW, I’m not as optimistic as ph8te
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
The implication of the article is that Microsoft and Sony may have switched to IBM processors in their game consoles to sidetrack IBM’s development of Apple’s G5. An interesting scenario that I had not considered, although I thought it extraordinary that they both moved to the same new processor at the same time. Is it possible that Sony and Microsoft conspired to damage the progress of Apple’s computer development by stealing IBM’s resources? Was their switch meant to accomplish more than improve game play on their consoles?
You can brag about being first all you like IF you have something to say!!!!!!
I think you just say nonsense like you wrote above to be first.
Man what the hell is with that?
While I agree to some degree that M$ (threat: OS X) and $ony (threat: iPod) might have seen Apple as a threat and teamed up with IBM to draw attention away from the G5, but I doubt this was the main motive.
M$ and $ony are too busy trying to lock up the gaming industry which is much more important to their overall strategy than hurting Apple. I am sure both companies did their research on which chip was the best bang for the buck and decided on IBM. But I remember hearing about how Xbox was supposed to have this advantage over all other consoles due to the x86 architecture it was based on (basically a cheap PC) making games easier to port from the PCs on which they are developed. Why switch from this strategy?
Well, Greg Sparkman, if that’s your real name, what’s I’ve heard is that the new XBox and Playstation are not performing up to expectations. If their goal was to hurt Apple, that would be a pretty bad strategic gamble.
Consider if it were successful. If the PPC platform get a big influx of money, attention, and resources because of its great success in the game industry, it would only hurt Apple temporarily and then give Apple a huge lead due to improvements coming from this project. MS knows they can’t switch hardware platforms. What’s the result?
No, I think that IBM had a design that looked good to game designers due to raw throughput. SIMD processing is great for 3D gaming, but not really great for AI.
Apple is set to take over the PC industry in a completely unexpected way, just like NExT took over Apple in a completely unexpected way. Intel’s DRM technology will allow Apple to secure their hardware business and help prevent open piracy.
As far as philanthropy goes, that’s just the wrong term. Building loyalty is NOT that same as giving somethign away.
O’Tool notes:
Wrong.
Should read:
“We just had the most powerful Constitutional Republic on earth . . .”
The USA is not a democracy.
Ben Franklin
Hey, Ben –
Your Constitutional Republic died when Lincoln was elected. And what has been done cannot be undone without starting over from scratch. Besides, most people, being a majority, prefer that peculiar brand of socialism called democracy. Capitalism, the politics of freedom, is evil. Ask anybody – especially the minority.
MW: “history” Haaaahaaahhaaa!!
misnthrope: “freedom, is evil…”
Hmmmm. Where’s my gu… uhm… bow and ar… uhm… slingshot. Yeah, slingshot. That’s what I need. And a blowgun. With some poison darts.
O’Toole wrote;
“Open your eyes, man! We’re being led by the nose to our own destruction for no other reason than money money money. Heck, the last century was TAME in comparison!”
How soft we’ve become.
Let’s take a quick, simple look at 20th century Earth:
Central Europe laid to waste by war. Twice.
60-80 million casualties in/around WWII alone.
Millions more killed by Stalin’s purges.
The Holocaust, numerous “ethnic cleansings” (including 1990’s Iraq).
Two cities destroyed by nuclear bombs.
The USA and USSR brought right to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba.
Near nuclear war by technical glitches, at least twice.
Iraq 2005 trumps all these somehow?
The US went into Iraq over then-current WMD intelligence and the still-unanswered question of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks (not to mention 12 years of Saddam’s nose-thumbing). These have been argued ad-nauseum.
Instead of throwing a fit over current politics and policy, why not field a competent presidential candidate in 2008? “Anybody But Bush” was a loser’s platform, nobody ever won on hate. Give people a reason to hope and vote FOR your side instead.
As for the relevance to Apple and Intel? With any luck we’ll be seeing the 2008 election results on our 9GHZ Intel-powered PowerMacs.
The Corporate States of America will soon be a 2nd world, major-debter nation where nothing is manufactured and the main source of future employment for its under-educated masses will be the service/entertainment industries.
Put a fork in it, folks. Its done.