[summary] Apple intel transition (was: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems)

From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC (chad_at_shire.net)
Date: 11/17/05

  • Next message: Dan Nelson: "Re: EM64T supported?" 
    Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:26:48 -0700
To: Free BSD Questions list <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>

    On Nov 17, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:

    >
    > On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
    >
    >>
    >> The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to
    >> extract
    >> money from
    >> the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of
    >> people
    >> are like you -
    >> perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants
    >> money
    >> from them -
    >> so Apple has to shake things up.
    >
    > Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW. No
    > need for them to be shook up. You make claims but have nothing
    > more than your opinion to support it. Logic doesn't even support it.

    This is pretty much the gist of it:

    Ted maintains that the or a major reason for Apple to switch to Intel
    was to force an extra HW upgrade cycle amongst Mac users to generate
    more revenue than they would otherwise have gotten by maintaining the
    PPC as their architecture for OS X / Macintosh. He used the word
    "greed" to describe this.

    This ignores the fact that Apple is doing everything they possibly
    can, at great expense, to make sure that the PPC Macs are fully
    supported and usable after the transition. Very few people will
    upgrade their Macs sooner due to this transition and so most upgrades
    will happen on the normal HW upgrade cycle that an particular Mac
    user follows. Hence there is no short term economic benefit to this
    transition as no extra HW cycle will in general take place. There
    may be long term economic benefits from this decision based on
    component costs, R&D costs, etc. but Ted's "greed" argument falls
    flat on its face.

    There will of course be some upgrades to Intel platform by typical
    power-user/early adopter/tech weenie type people who are interested
    in the technology itself, but not enough to set any sort of macro
    trend or to have a meaningful padding of the Apple bottom line. The
    same kind of people are probably buying the Quad G5 now (I know I
    want one :-) ).

    Chad
    most of whose Macs are built from parts from eBay and parts shops and
    PC parts [total 3 Macs in the last 3 years -- personal and business
    owned], though he does have 3 original purchased Macs from Apple
    since 1998 [all business owned], 1 of which has been passed on to
    others. Also has built numerous x86 architecture based (mostly AMD
    chips) FreeBSD boxes and one Solaris 10 box.

    >
    > Chad
    >
    > ---
    > Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
    > Your Web App and Email hosting provider
    > chad@shire.net
    >
    >
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    ---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad@shire.net
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