I just watched the keynote video from today’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s the sort of thing you do if you’re a Mac user.
This one was more than a little… the adjective that springs most readily to mind is “insane”.
Apple have just announced that they are starting a transition from the PowerPC processor they co-developed with Motorola and IBM to processors made by Intel. And not to some stunning new architecture Intel is about to release. They’re going to bog-standard Pentiums.
The presentation by Steve Jobs went on at some length about how smooth the change is going to be, and Apple certainly has experience at managing these sorts of things. Existing PowerPC software will run through a just-in-time translator with a smallish performance hit, and developers will be able to compile native Intel versions of their software very easily and release them in a bundle so that end users don’t have to know or care about the difference. It’s been an open secret for years that Apple has always had in-house versions of Mac OS X running on an Intel-based PowerMac, and Jobs demonstrated the current 10.4 version running smoothly.
So it’s not that the can’t do it. The question is why they would want to. IBM has been making high-end PowerPC chips for Apple in recent years, and while they’ve missed some of their more optimistic predictions about how fast they’d get, they still perform competitively with anything from Intel. On top of that, they’re ramping up their performance faster than Intel seems able. IBM is doing sufficiently well that they’ve just won a big contract to provide PowerPCs for Microsoft’s X-Box, which used to use Intel.
The only area where Intel is doing better at the moment is laptop hardware, where power consumption is as important as speed. Intel chips don’t run down your battery as fast. This was the aspect Apple focused on in the very brief what the hell are we thinking segment of the keynote. It is true that IBM hasn’t shown much interest in producing low-power chips for laptops, that Apple sells a lot of laptops, and that their laptops are falling behind competitors in terms of raw performance. But there are other suppliers of PowerPC chips.
Apple has a lot of iPod money at the moment and they’re going to need it, because this is going to put a lot of people off buying Macs over the next couple of years. The last time they tried a transition like this was from the Motorola 680×0 processors in the early Macs to the PowerPC. That was more obviously necessary, because 680×0 performance had fallen behind to the point that a PowerPC could emulate the best 68040 faster than the real thing. There’s no comparable performance differential between current PowerPCs and Intel Pentiums. A great deal of software never made the transition from 680×0 to PowerPC, and the transition correlated with a massive drop in Apple’s market share. There were other reasons for the drop, but uncertainty about software availability can’t have helped.
It’s one of the most bizarre moves in the history of personal computers. I hope they know what they’re doing, because I don’t.
