“Quite a number of pundits have gone out and predicted the appearance of Intel based Powerbooks from Apple this January – but it isn’t going to happen. In fact what I expect is either, or both, an Intel based Mini and/or some Intel based iBooks. Beyond that, however, Intel is just not going to happen for Apple next year – no Powerbooks, no iMacs, no Workstations, and no X-Serves,” Paul Murphy writes for ZDNet.
“Unfortunately there are two big problem sets: one is pricing, the other availability. Of these, availability issues are the least flexible but also the easiest to finesse, at least in the very short term. Apple needs the new instruction set extensions promised for the ‘Yonah’ architecture both for performance and to support its ‘best efforts’ hardware copy protection on MacOS X. Unfortunately, ‘Yonah,’ even in its first 32bit incarnation, isn’t ready and its full implementation successors, ‘Woodrow’ and ‘Merom,’ keep getting further and further behind schedule,” Murphy writes. “Pricing, in contrast, is a simple rocks and hard places choice. Right now a $999 list price iBook sells in volume for something closer to $699 and earns a small but positive margin for Apple. The PowerPC G4 in that machine has a typical volume price of around $72, or about 10% of the selling price for the machine. In comparison people like Asus, Quanta and Hon Hai Precision (who make Dell, HP, and IBM gear) pay Intel on the order of $240 per unit for the two year old, 32bit, 1.8Ghz Pentium M predecessor to the ‘Yonah’ line.”
“It’s not possible to make money selling iBooks in which the wholesale CPU costs amounts to more than one third of the typical selling price,” Murphy writes. “Something has to give here: either Apple has to significantly raise prices in public or cut everything else to the bone. Unfortunately raising the price significantly isn’t acceptable in the market, so if Apple wants to do sell Intel what they’ll have to do is accept lower product quality in other components and a higher DOA rate out of the plant gate, settle for a two year old, 32bit, chip without the new media instructions characterising the ‘Yonah’ architecture, cut its plant gate margins on the product, and reduce discount levels available to volume buyers. In other words to hold the list price constant on the iBook in the face of such a massive cost increase for the CPU, they’ll have to reduce both customer discounts and their own margins, take a big downstream hit on component quality, and give up on CPU level MacOS X authentication.”
“The obvious answer [for Apple’s dilemma] is to stick to PowerPC for another generation – pushing the first Intel products into 2007. IBM has a low power (13 Watt) G5 that would be a big winner in new PowerBooks, and Freescale’s 8641, a dual-core PowerPC G4 with integrated system logic and four Gigabit Ethernet media-access controllers, offers exactly the price/performance combination Apple needs to give both the iBook and Mini big performance boosts without changing retail price or cutting their own margins,” Murphy writes. “Sadly, however, good sense isn’t that likely to break out where personalities are on the line -instead we’re more likely to see Apple spend money along with both customer and developer loyalty on building enthusiasm for Intel solutions that are virtually guaranteed to eventually gut the company financially.”
Full article, with much more and highly recommended, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Quite a brutal outlook, huh? Choose between a delayed conversion to Intel for the full lineup of Mac models or lower quality-controlled Macs with no CPU-level ability to keep Mac OS X only on Intel-based Macs, or, the best option presented by Murphy, stay with PowerPC until Intel’s ready. Why do we think that Apple and Intel have a better plan than any of these options presented by Murphy? Because they’d better have a better transition plan, that’s why.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple resellers in the dark about Intel-based Mac transistion plans – December 03, 2005
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RUMOR: Apple’s Intel-based Macs coming in first quarter 2006 – November 04, 2005
If Apple makes iMacs, iBooks and Mini’s with Intel chips what will the reason be to buy a Power Book or a Tower???? 64 bit processing? Apple has a plan. Don’t expect too much out of the first Intel chips. No Yonah’s
Yonah is already sampling. Volume production is expected no later than mid January. A low power (and low clock rate) version of Yonah could be announced at MWSF as being in a new iBook and shipping by the end of January. The same could be said for the Mac mini.
Using a low power and low clock rate Yonah does several things:
1) the low end of the range has a higher percentage good chips in the early phases of a production run
2) the low end and low power versions are less expensive than the high end (and often not in a high demand allowing Apple to get a good amount versus fighting the Wintel crowd for the high end Yonah chips)
3) the low end and low power versions fit the thermal characteristics of the iBook rather well
4) the low end and low power version don’t set the iBook up to directly compete with the PowerBook (How would it look if the top of the line iBook was as fast as the PowerBook? That’s a marketing issue I doubt Apple wants to get into.)
I will be pleasantly surprised if Apple announces Intel based Mac minis and iBooks at MWSF. It could happen for the reasons I just listed, but I doubt it.
I have been hearing that Merom is going to ship in quantity before the end of Q3 2006. This would be a reasonable time for the Powerbook to make the switch to Intel. This would also keep the high end of Apple’s line firmly in the 64 bit camp.
Also the 13 Watt G5 has been announced. I don’t believe it is shipping in quantity. Also IBM lists
“typical” or “average” power (yet declines to precisely define how they come up with “typical” and “average”). I don’t remember what the peak power of this 970 is, but it is significantly greater than 13 Watts IIRC.
Also this 13 Watt G5 is running at only 1.4 GHz. A G5 running at 1.4 GHz (even with the faster front side bus) is no faster than (and maybe even slower than) the 1.67 GHz G4 of today. (Comparing performance of G4s versus G5s is extremely software dependent. It’s the old “deep versus wide” argument. Software specifically tuned to the additional processor units of the G5 will run faster otherwise they will run more slowly.)
Finally, an article with its head down out of the clouds. Reality at last!
that new yonah, even if it seems old and sad, has more up its sleeves than one might think.. i’ve seen benchmarks that compare it to the athlon 64 x2 4200+. Since that is one hell of a cpu, it is remarkable how well this yonah competes with it!
if the ibooks get this “bad” cpu as mr murphy appears to be calling it, it will be one hell of an improvement!
See the benchmarks: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627&p=1
Thank you Shadowself.
Shadowself for President!
Crayman — Doncha just LOVE that? Me too.
I also LOVE it when jackholes spend time commenting on dorks who waste forum space posting about their first post when they’re really too slow to beat a granny to the curb.
Get a life, dickless.
“[…] delayed conversion to Intel for the full lineup of Mac models […]”
Delay? Jobs said June. Things are looking on-target for June. What delay?
Because the rumor mill has been spouting “Intels in January” doesn’t make it so. If nothing else, this just feeds the FUD. Steve says June, the rumor mills say January. If January comes and goes without an Intel machine, the pundits start talking about how “Apple’s transition is in trouble” because Apple was “expected” to release an Intel Mac in January (even though Apple said no such thing).
Ya like list Murph ole buddy ole pal? There’s jus a coupla flaws in whut ya said…
1) Apple is not just transitioning a single product, they are changing their entire line. Even if the cost for a single CPU was higher than the PPC equivalent, the overall cost of all chips (including any portable devices..like perhaps ipods) is the bottom line for the supply cost of switching to intel.
2) Even if Apple was just selling a bunch of Notebooks or their product line was a few desktops, they could take a price hit on one Computer model to sell other for less than PPC pricing.
3) Are you high? The G4 NOW may cost the price you stated, but the historical price change in the ibook does not reflect a tumbling price change in the processor. You don’t find $320 pentium-m 1.8 laptops. Apple has a huge margin and they don’t have to keep selling iCustomers brand spanking new stuff because that costs more and that’s what the PowerCustomers are for….and really..
4) There is NO POSSIBLE WAY that Steve Jobs negotiated a deal that would make it cost the same amount of money for 1 x86 processor as 3 PPCs. If things were that bad…
YOU WOULD BE PREDICTING 3.5 CPU iBOOKS FOR MWSF…
ya idyaght.
Apple can’t keep using the Power PC chips and release Intel stuff in 2007, because they have pushed it literally as far as it WILL go. Steve promised certin prducts, and their curent technology cannot do it.
The Mac mini WILL be the first with an Intel processor. Why? Because it should be. Its a low end consumer model. Better to use that to get the bugs worked out. Plus the high powered Intel chips won’t be available for probably another year. It will happen in January.
hd: I saw that Anandtech expose last week – even sent it to the ‘Powers That Be’ here at MDN, but they didn’t run it – and you’re not being accurate in saying that Yonah was on par with the Athlon 4200 X2.
The 2.2Ghz 4200 spanked the 2Ghz Yonah in almost every catagory except power consumption. Yonah did better against the 3800 (also at 2ghz), again being better (in this case more slightly) in power consumption, but Yonah still lost in more catagories than it won against the 3800. This isn’t a good showing for Yonah, when you consider that Intel put a lot of effort into shoring up Pentium M’s multimedia and gaming shortcomings with Yonah, and these tests show that it still falls behind AMD’s current ‘bests’. Also – and this is really important – Yonah had some nice power consumption numbers, but only if you forget that the AMD CPUs used in testing were DESKTOP CPUs. When any mobile CPU competes against a desktop part, these sorts of numbers are to be expected, not cheered. I don’t know what AMD has up it’s sleeve for their forthcoming mobile CPUs, but it would seem that even if they don’t quite match what Yonah is doing now, they will more than match it in performance numbers (based as they will be on current AMD desktop chips).
The fact that the G4 and low power G5 (peak power 25 watts, from what I remember shadowself) can already match the power conpsumption numbers, overall performance, and are much much cheaper than Yonah (which, along with availability, was the real point of the article) really calls into question the purpose of this transition.
Unless you’re like me, and already accept that Intel’s hardware DRM, as the only method the studios would all sign off on before they’d offer up their video content to ANY computer company (Apple especially), as being THE motivating factor.
As I’ve said countless times, the law of unintended consequences is going to bite Jobs in the ass on this one. Betting all the ‘chips’ (so to speak) on video, regardless of what it meant for costs and overall platform performance, is dumb. Using what PPC already offered as a way of making inroads into video would have been a much smarter – and more cost effective – move.
BTW – I could be wrong, but I don’t think the iBook will be the first Macintel laptop. Assuming Apple isn’t willing to go with single core, 32bit Pentium Ms for such a high profile announcement (and trust me, because G4 iBooks will be VERY competitive against those CPUs, they aren’t), then it makes more sense to use whatever limited quantites they can get of dual core Yonah and put it in a lower volume seller like a hopped-up Mac Mini. Better to wait for Yonah to be offered in enough numbers, and different speed grades, that they can offer both iBook and PowerBook Macintels all in one swift motion.
Also, if the education market is a factor – as the author thinks – then I can tell you they are the LAST ones who want Macintels too soon. They’ve got a lot of stuff still running in Classic, and the Macintel’s will be of absolutely no use to them. In fact, a forced migration would cost them money, since they’d have to purchase new software to run on them. Bad mover for Apple to do that, as they’ll simply skip an upgrade cycle (or two) and stick with what they’ve already paid for longer.
MDN magic word: “choice”
As in, I hope Apple makes the choice of keeping Intel only as a supplier of CPUs for a media serving device. PPC makes much more sense for Macintosh computers and servers.
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Butthead: Hey Beavis, Paul Murphy is a seminiferous tubloidial buttnoid.
Beavis: Yeah yeah. Hmmm Hmm. Next thing he’s gonna say is there could be, like, an earthquake at the Intel plant and, like, all the top heavy iMacs would fall and, like, there’d be broken glass everywhere.
Butthead: Yeah. That’d be pretty cool.
Beavis: Uh yeah. Hmm Hmm. And I’d be like “I am Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole! Are you threatening me?!”
Misleading headline
Finally a voice of reason
“what they’ll have to do is accept lower product quality in other components and a higher DOA rate out of the plant gate”
According to W. Edwards Deming, this is more costly than paying more for high quality components up front. This guy is either not credible, or doesn’t understand manufacturing like Apple does.
<a href=”http://macdailynews.com/index.php?URL=http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-htmllink-970328″>Use html.</a>
<a href=”http://macdailynews.com/index.php?URL=http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-htmllink-970328″>Use html.</a>
<a href=http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-htmllink-970328>Use html.”</a>”
Damn.
Apple rocks!
when Intel Macs will come out. So can’t we HOPE? Throw us a frickin’ bone here!
Progeny–
I knew you could do it.
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