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Posted on 06/03/2005 7:25:38 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it's scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned.
Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel's chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.
The announcement is expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech. The conference would be an appropriate venue: Changing the chips would require programmers to rewrite their software to take full advantage of the new processor.
IBM, Intel and Apple declined to comment for this story. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple was considering switching to Intel, but many analysts were skeptical citing the difficulty and risk to Apple.
That skepticism remains. "If they actually do that, I will be surprised, amazed and concerned," said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood. "I don't know that Apple's market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners, he said.
Apple successfully navigated a switch in the 1990s from Motorola's 680x0 line of processors to the Power line jointly made by Motorola and IBM. That switch also required software to be revamped to take advantage of the new processors' performance, but emulation software permitted older programs to run on the new machines. (Motorola spinoff Freescale currently makes PowerPC processors for Apple notebooks and the Mac Mini.)
The relationship between Apple and IBM has been rocky at times. Apple openly criticized IBM for chip delivery problems, though Big Blue said it fixed the issue. More recent concerns, which helped spur the Intel deal, included tension between Apple's desire for a wide variety of PowerPC processors and IBM's concerns about the profitability of a low-volume business, according to one source familiar with the partnership. Over the years, Apple has discussed potential deals with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, chipmaker representatives have said. One advantage Apple has this time: The open-source FreeBSD operating system, of which Mac OS X is a variant, already runs on x86 chips such as Intel's Pentium. And Jobs has said Mac OS X could easily run on x86 chips.
The move also raises questions about Apple's future computer strategy. One basic choice it has in the Intel-based PC realm is whether to permit its Mac OS X operating system to run on any company's computer or only its own.
IBM loses cachet with the end of the Apple partnership, but it can take consolation in that it's designing and manufacturing the Power family processors for future gaming consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Ninendo, said Clay Ryder, a Sageza Group analyst.
"I would think in the sheer volume, all the stuff they're doing with the game consoles would be bigger. But anytime you lose a high-profile customer, that hurts in ways that are not quantifiable but that still hurt," Ryder said.
Indeed, IBM has a "Power Everywhere" marketing campaign to tout the wide use of its Power processors. The chips show up in everything from networking equipment to IBM servers to the most powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene/L.
Intel dominates the PC processor business, with an 81.7 percent market share in the first quarter of 2005, compared with 16.9 percent for Advanced Micro Devices, according to Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Those numbers do not include PowerPC processors. However, Apple has roughly 1.8 percent of the worldwide PC market, he added. Apple shipped 1.07 million PCs in the first quarter, and its move to Intel would likely bump up the chipmaker's shipments by a corresponding amount, McCarron added.
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos and Richard Shim contributed to this report.
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geekdom ping!
Interesting but possibly false:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1823587,00.asp
Makes no sense.
Apple will stay with IBM.
I think so, too.
Steve is mad at IBM for the Cell processor , or for the alliance with Sony on the PS3, while at the same time IBM is not keeping up with the power curve for the G4 and G5 processors.
Thanks for the ping. Intel? May the saints preserve us!
HArd to beleive. I think that part of Apple's enhanced security is chip related. Wouldn't a switch to Intel open up vulnerabilities?
As I recall, Linus Torvald's switch to Mac was not to be able to run the Mac OS, but to get away from the Intel family of chips.
> Interesting but possibly false
That's how the trade press web sites have been covering
this not-new "leak" story for weeks.
Things that impair the credibility of the story are a
failure to mention which Intel architecture Apple would
move to (IA-32e/EM64T or IA-64), and if (as is likely),
it's EM64T, why AMD64 isn't also under consideration.
I don't care if they run on Fritos chips as long it's Mac OS.
Isn't the Apple all about RISC architecture? What RISC chips does Intel have beside the old DEC strongarm/alpha chips?
What are all those "Intel's CPUs are braindead" MacHeads going to do now???
Take it with a Grain of salt. Who is to say that Apple wont be releasing a new product using INTEL chips- Or that they wont just use it in a particular product line to drive their costs down - It doesnt have to be a jump from IBM. Currently Appe uses IBM and motorola for various chips ( some embedded, some processor) just like they use ATI and Nvidia for their gpu's- I would be suprised to see them switch all the way- But y'know, Steves a pretty bright guy - I think they probably have a better handle on it than most armchair quarterbacks :-)
Tech
Wow man, you mean all this time, my super cool G5 has been being run by a processor from them globalist pigs at IBM. Hey man what am supposed to use for a computer?
Convert to AMD/Linux?
I would like to see it myself.
If this story is true, then IBM just has to be considering the outright purchase of Apple. What better way to protect their investment in the PowerPC?
However, I think the far more likely truth is that Apple will release a version of MacOS that runs on Intel/AMD IA-architecture CPUs--without any commitment to either keep or abandon the PowerPC at the present time.
An immediate commitment to abandon the PowerPC is far too risky, for one thing. And it would change Apple's strategic situation from monopoly seller of a hardware platform to essentially a direct competitor to Microsoft (without any protection from Microsoft provided by the PowerPC and other Apple-proprietary aspects of the Macintosh hardware.) Microsoft is a more fearsome beast than Intel.
I wonder if there will still be a need for Virtual PC when the Macintosh switches to Intel?
Makes sense -- although AMD would seem like a more logical choice to me. Apple has been unhappy with the PowerPC for years. Now that they have gone to an entirely UNIX based OS, it's just a matter of a simple recompile for all their software. It's not like the old days when they had hand tuned RISC assembly they had to worry about.
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