News Review:
Will Intel-inside-Apple become a corporate standard?It will be software packages and interoperability that carry the corporation.
Apple Inside?
The decision by Steve Jobs to ditch Power chips for Intel might have made sense if he had taken it a year ago, but somehow I think he may have missed the boat.
Intel, on the other hand, have found another outlet for their entry- and medium- level chips and given a sharp jolt to the anti-Intel camp (which, from what I have seen, appears to be growing daily, with the rise of AMD).
So why did Apple suddenly decide to change camps? It's puzzling in some respects. There was an argument that the Intel 32-bit architecture with multiple core chips had a lot more power than Power. Certainly the new Powerbook G4 with Intel Inside has been reported to have better performance. But was the Power so bad? Not really, since you will notice that the battery consumption has dropped off with the new chip. Swings and roundabouts with any architectural design.
Winners and Loosers
Of course, there are downsides. One of these, which has barely been hinted at, is battery life. The Apple notebooks had a deserved reputation for long battery life. I know of one person who claims to regularly get 5 (five!) hours life from his G4 Powerbook. Not any more...
The Intel chips requires lots of juice. So battery life will, like as not, be down in the medium of PC-type notebook standards. Can't have everything, I'm afraid.
So what of the future?
Some analysts have said that Apple's move to Intel technology is the beginning of a process towards opening the Apple MACOS X operating system to other hardware. How about purchasing a Toshiba or Compaq, and having MACOS X loaded instead of Windows XP? Sounds very tempting. After all, I can run Microsoft Office on MACOS, can still use email, can be authenticated with an LDAP environment, share Folders using Samba. Sounds promising to me.
But will it happen? I don't think so. And the reason is to do with Drivers.
One of the things that makes Windows XP so pervasive, but which also can lead to instability, is the fact that it works with pretty much any hardware technology you care to name, Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba, Loveno, Tiny, Sony, ... the list goes on. In order to do this, Microsoft have had to invest in (or persuade vendors to create) device drivers that will work with these technologies. But therein lies the problem. The more drivers, the more complexity, the more likelihood that they will not easily co-exist. What happens when a NIC from one manufacturer has an IRQ conflict with a 17-inch display driver from another manufacturer? Most times, nothing. But the introduction of signed device drivers in Windows 2000 Server was one indication of the extent of the potential problem, at least in Microsoft's mind.
Apple, on the other hand, does not have these sort of problems. They have one set of hardware, and that is all the MAC operating system has to work with. Any problems, Apple make both the hardware, firmware and the software. Co-existance is easy. If Apple introduced new hardware support, they would fall foul of the device driver issues that have bedeviled Microsoft these many years (ever since Compaq cloned the IBM PC BIOS, in fact). I don't think Apple want to go there.
Whatever it's faults, an Apple is still a single-supplier solution. Incompatibility problems simply don't exist. Long may it continue
Reviewed by Dennis Adams in January 2006
