“Apple’s mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers” was what caused Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel processors, according to Ars Technica’s Jon “Hannibal” Stokes.
Apple over the years has routinely demanded that Motorola dedicate their CPU design teams to making special chips for Apple that will never generate much revenue. If Motorola won’t play, Apple will go to IBM. Apple kept up the demands with IBM, threatening with their only valid threat: we’ll go to Intel. “Apple has been pulling these stunts for a long time, as anyone who followed the company’s relationship with Motorola knows,” Stokes writes.
Basically, IBM told Apple, “Fine, go to Intel.”
“The cold, hard reality here is that the Mac is Apple’s past and the iPod is Apple’s future. It’s a shame that Steve Jobs can’t be upfront with his user base about that fact, because, frankly, I think the Mac community would understand. The iPod and what it represents… is the Macintosh of the new millennium… [It’s not that IBM] dropped the performance ball,” Stokes explains. “What Jobs is really doing is shifting the focus of Apple from a PC-era ‘performance’ paradigm to a post-PC-era ‘features and functionality’ paradigm.”
“For the real reason behind the switch, you have to look to the fact that it’s the iPod and iTMS—not the Mac—that are now driving Apple’s revenues and stock price. Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel’s famous volume discounts on the Pentium and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per Watt, of the Mac,” Stokes writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Stokes’ questions about the recently announced PowerPC 970MP and 970FX chips from IBM are interesting. You’ll need to read Stokes’ full article, which we highly recommend. For us, it’s always been about “features and functionality” over “performance” anyway. As we used to ask Windows users, “what good are high performance CPUs if you’re constantly running virus scanners, routinely fighting the user interface, and can’t run best-in-class applications like Final Cut Pro, Motion, Logic, DVD Studio Pro, GarageBand, iMovie, or iDVD, to name but a few?”
Now that the CPU issue has been eliminated from the conversation, Apple’s strong points are highlighted even more. The Mac OS and the applications are without compare in the Wintel world. Mac OS X Tiger vs. Windows XP? Puleeze. If the Mac is Apple’s past, it’s also its present and future.
Seems like someone is contemplating his navel too much. Why does everybody have to come up with secret ulterior motives and hidden agendas? Is the simple answer that was provided too…… simple?
The growth area for the computer market is Laptops and Apple saw much better performance per watt down the road with Intel.
Steve is God. Please do not belittle our God´s wise decisions.
As the Apple Bible says in book of Jobs 3:24 “iSteve is wiser than iBM.”
And Jobs 5:18: “Thou shalt travel from Motorola to IBM to finally reach the Intel.”
And so it was.
In re-reading Stokes’ article for a third time, I’ve found a hint that demonstrates his bias and total misunderstanding of the iPod and Apple:
“The XScale is plenty powerful enough to do video playback, and I have reason to believe that Apple is currently working on a video iPod to counter the Sony PSP. (My guess is that we might even see it in time for Christmas.) When the video iPod hits the streets, Apple will have an iPod product that plays each of the media formats (music, pictures, video) represented in its iLife suite.”
So long as he continues to think that Apple is trying to COUNTER another company’s product — the sony PSP — in the production of newer versions of the iPod, he will forever misunderstand and “misunderestimate” Apple.
Apple is NOT “countering” ANYTHING from Sony; indeed, the situation is precisely the reverse. What makes Stokes think that Apple hasn’t had in mind, all along, an iPod that plays music, pictures, and video as a companion to iLife? iLife came out a long time ago … LONG before Sony’s PSP … and I have ZERO doubt that Apple has LONG projected such products as part of the “digital hub.” Remember that term?
Whiners, read his update.
“UPDATE: If you read all the way to the bottom of this article, and you think that my basic thesis is that “the Mac is doomed and Apple is planning to quit selling personal computers,” or some other such fatuous nonsense, then you need serious remedial help with reading comprehension. I already made my point about Apple’s shift in focus from the desktop PC (as exemplefied by the Mac) to the post-PC gadget (as exemplefied by the iPod) in a previous article, where it didn’t occasion nearly this much contention and idiotic, defensive ranting. I have no idea why stating the exact same case a bit more strongly should induce such spasms and seizures of rage in the Mac Faithful, but there you go. (Ok, actually, I do have an idea. It’s because I published the blasphemous, vulgar, and generally irreligious suggestion that The Holy Steve (may peace be upon him) was high-handed and arrogant in his dealings with chip suppliers, and that he was less than forthright about the reasons behind the switch. For such impiety I’m sure I’ll be duly punished… assuming that The Steve even really exists, of course, and isn’t just a figment of our collective human imaginations…)”
Not bad, Zeldorf … about on-par with the cries of Windows Evangelicals: “Macintrash is of the AntiChrist! Soon … by December, for sure … all Mac users will cast their Macintrash boxes into the junkyard of forgotten toys, where there will be much wailing and gnashing of hard drives. Then, only the “hole-y” Windows will remain as Lord of Master of all that is Digital. Bow down and worship the Holy Savior, Bill Gates … and his prophet, Michael Dell!”
the Steve does not exist???
But, but, but I see him once a year on stage somewhere at a mac thing…
Of course they don´t let the Steve give interviews that are not scripted, people would be shocked.
Gotta go…the apple info control police are knocking at the door.
No I don´t believe Steve is like into the Tom Cruise thing!!!!
RUN!!!!
Ben … methinks thou hast “read between the lines” in his update. hehehe
But it DOES sound like the kind of self-important arrogance I would expect from such.
To Rev/Neal, you must read your Apple Bible closer:
Apple Bible Revelations 2:12 “And The Steve called upon the masses of Apple worshippers – Ye shall toss thine PowerPC Macs into thy hell of false chipgods and rejoice in thine power of the Intel!”
And so it was.
Hallalujah! Praise The Steve!
I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon of being upset at any negative comment about Apple. But I find it amazing that newfound success in one area (iPod), is used as proof of failure in another (Macs). Macs have been succeeding in the all important “PROFIT” component under Steve Jobs. The iPod’s astounding success was a little bit of a surprise. Of course, Steve is trying to leverage that into other areas–he would be a fool not to try. The building blocks of an all media control device are there.
And yes, Apple is small potatoes to IBM. But I don’t think it a stunt for Jobs to push for better (and promised) performance from a manufacturer. I’m sure Dell does it to Intel on occasion when AMD chips are looking better from a cost/performance basis. That is just business. I was excited and worried about all three major gaming platforms moving to the Power architecture. It means more chips but it also means less leverage for Apple. I think, more than based on any real technology shortcoming, Steve Jobs is learning from past mistakes; Motorola started making more and more profit from embedded processors, such that they stopped really caring about desktop processors that required more research and achieved less profit. Now we look at IBM. Blades and Games are where the profit is. Sony will put out more Play-stations by itself than all of Apple’s Macs. Add in Nintendo and Microsoft and you get a marginalized Mac. Intel, for the next several years, will make the bulk of its profits from; Desktop chips, Laptop chips, and wireless (WiMax) technology. Apple won’t need leverage because they can count on the huge PC industry to keep up demand for better chips.
So, the real story isn’t technology, it is relevance to the provider (leverage). Nothing new about that.
And I would also argue about the “size over speed” assumption. Unless ArsTechnica (who, is on average, the most technically astute website on the web) had Apples original OS X code, they can’t really know what performance tradeoffs Apple made. Sometimes Size does Equal Speed. The 64 bit reduced instruction set code (64 bit RISC) is quit a bit bigger than 32 bit complex instruction set code. Perhaps in testing they found that, not only were they using a lot of hard drive space, but the compiled instructions were filling up the cache on the chip too quickly. So, that “on average”, reducing size resulted in faster code execution because more of the instructions could be fetched from L1 cache. I haven’t read the article and I don’t know the true facts. But I don’t think you can use the simple compile instruction of “optimize for size over speed” to prove anything. Why would Apple want to make things slower? You’d have to have a lot of mental juggling and conspiracy theories to make sense of that. The simplest answer to me would either be ignorance, or more likely, the engineers at Apple made a decision that a second hand observer just doesn’t understand.
When something good happens, Steve is King. When some nut suspects something foul, Steve is a rat. We jump to conclusions with only a scant bit of knowledge about anything. The truth is that we know very little about anything–yet we act as if we are all knowing and as if our opinion is God. Apple has a group of very intelligent people working there, and I believe they actually think about what they are doing before they do it. Yet the Monday morning quarterbacks are always going to be on the side lines trying to second guess everything that happens. I gives me a headache!
For an example of the average thinking of the Windows-Worshippers, check out what someone called “The Real Blastdoor” has to say in the article’s comment section:
“I would not be at all surprised if in 5 years there are no more updates to OSX and Apple switches to selling Longhorn boxes with some cool custom Apple apps pre-installed, and maybe some unique GUI tweaks. Don’t believe me? Just wait until people have Windows and OS X installed on the same hardware and we start seeing the benchmarks showing that Windows smokes OSX in performance.”
FOFLMAO … yeah, RIGHT. Dream on, bub. Dream on. By the looks of things now, if something called “Longhorn” is available by 2010 I’ll be surprised.
Zeldorf, LOL Not quite … but LOL nevertheless.
I have but one word to say about the author of this blatantly BIASED article”
JACKASS!!
U R confused: At MDN when Steve does something right, Steve is god; when Steve does something wrong, Steve is still god and everyone else is wrong.
Do I have to do The Steve´s 10 Apple Commandments????
Okay, only one then:
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor´s PC.”
It should be noted that, although the Mac clone fiasco of the mid-90’s may have whipsawed Motorola’s PPC production line and sales projections, Steve Jobs had absoulutely nothing to do with it — he was still at NeXT at the time.
Under Steve Jobs leadership, the Apple of today is a far better/different entity than the Apple of the mid-1990s. Any judgements or comments about today’s Apple should reflect upon the period of time from 1998 onward, not become mired in the details of the AIMless and Job-less Apple of the 1990s.
Niffy
If IBM makes such great chips then why is it in every commercial they air about their servers it is always followed by an Intel plug? Why didn’t IBM ever switch it’s own servers to PowerPC, or at least the ones they advertise? If the company that makes the chip can’t use it in their own servers, which probably run Linux, then I guess they don’t put much faith in their own technology. No one has ever commented on this and I always found it perplexing.
“the Mac is Apple’s past and the iPod is Apple’s future” is a huge statement only to cop out at the end and say “I don’t really mean it like that, ya’ll.”
I realize you need to write articles to get web hits to sell advertising space. But, it doesn’t really matter why Apple went to Intel at this point. This is about evolution. Apple is in a huge growth spurt in its evolution, and moving to Intel is just part of that.
“in the same way that the “PC” is the industry’s past and the post-PC gadget is industry’s future.”
I mean, what are you going to tell Michael Dell? “Sorry man. The PC is Dell’s past and the DJ is Dell’s future.” Read: Bleak.
“Time and time again Apple has changed business strategies abruptly, only to reverse itself again a short while later…”
He is anthropomorphizing Apple, Apple is not a single sentient being and the “business strategy” changes depending on who is in charge. Don’t forget they went from Jobs to Scully to Amelio back to Jobs.
Just when Apple was making its move JOBS decided to beach
the Mac–Future generations of MBA students will study this suicide
with wonder–Why did he do it they will ask? Putting Apple on the same
footing with Dell isnt a good thing—Its a bad thing. It means there is
no real good reason to buy a Mac–It means that Apple will be competing on the basis of its OSX except Microsoft will be selling its operating system to over 97% of the market while Apple will be selling its OSX to only 3 per cent of the market at most since JOBS refuses to sell OSX to
anyone who isnt buying an Apple. Wasnt it better to also have superior
hardware? Wasnt it better to be able to say our powerpc is better and faster today–will be better and faster with these new chips available from IBM today, and will be better and faster tomorrow too NOTWITHSTANDING THE INTEL FANTASY ROADMAP–when on that roadmap does Intel get to where IBM and Apple is standing right now???
what is it about Mac owners that they cant see the difference between the hardware market and the osx market and that when apple goes intel –“being on the same footing” means not being any different from the
97 per cent of computers out there that arent Mac exept for OSX? That means Apple has given up the hardware fight. It gave up while it was ahead. The best way to retire.
lisa = troll
————————
Stunt? So? As a result, Apple now has processor independence. Quite a stunt indeed!
Sure, Apple has pulled some fast ones, done 360’s, etc. Do these stunts impugn Apple? Question Intel’s sanity? I don’t know, but Apple has more processor leverage than it ever has had before.
Am I the only one that thinks this article is crap?
imo the iPod is the wedge that will crack the dam that is holding back the water that is MacOSX
Get ready for the world to flood… thanks iPod..
all of his “new news tht is getting ready to be old news” was already old news… I am sick of reading idiots opinions… OSX is Apple’s Jewel, iPod is Apple’s rocket booster.
Hey MDN,
In your “MacDailyNews takes”, you jump all over anyone who says anything bad about Apple. But when this slanted Ars Technica guy constantly uses religious remarks like “The Mac Faithful”, “Maclots”, “The Holy Steve” in just about every other Mac article he writes, you just let it slide?