Posted on 08/11/2002 9:46:45 PM PDT by sourcery
NEW YORK - As with many rumors about Apple Computer, this one started with a single sentence uttered by Steve Jobs.
The setting was an analysts meeting in July, where the Apple chief executive outlined his company's financial condition and discussed future plans. He took a question about the possibility that Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) might one day use chips from Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) instead of the Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) chips now in its computers.
The answer was classic Jobs: careful, noncommittal and just vague enough to keep people guessing. First, he said, Apple would have to complete its transition from using OS 9, its older, "classic" operating system, to OS X, the new operating system that has given the company new life. "Then we'll have options--and we like to have options," he said.
So what does that mean? If you're Andrew Neff, analyst at Bear Stearns, it means there's a better than 80% chance that within four years Apple will think "less different" and stamp its machine with a brand that says "Intel Inside." Neff made his prediction in a research report on the state of the PC industry released this week.
This kind of talk has touched off a lot of speculation about Apple's long-term plans for the platform. Obsessively tight-lipped, Apple routinely does not comment on future products. But, rumors aside, there are three very good reasons why Apple won't switch from the chip architecture it adopted with the first PowerMac computers in 1994. First of all, it would create new friction for software developers when they already have enough of that with the recent switch to OS. But more importantly, it would needlessly put the Mac directly on a collision course with Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ). Finally, Apple doesn't need to change chips, as the PowerPC family of chips may soon give it all the improvement Apple could ask for.
The argument for shifting chips is based at least in part on the Herculean effort Apple is making to push its user base over to its new operating system. Mac OS X is, at its core, based on Unix, which runs in various flavors on Internet servers all over the Internet. It likely wouldn't take much tweaking to adapt OS X to work with chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD - news - people ).
A shift would give Apple two chip vendors who are primarily focused on the PC industry. Motorola and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) jointly developed the PowerPC, and both have supplied Apple over the years. But both have sold more to other customers than to Apple. Motorola, for example, has sold PowerPC chips to Ericsson (nyse: ERICY - news - people ) and Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ).
And it would certainly give Apple a marketing boost when it comes to chip speed. The current generation of PowerPC chips are topped out at a clock speed of 1 gigahertz, while Intel chips are due to break the 3-GHz barrier before the end of the year. While comparing the clock speeds of both chips is an apples and oranges problem--powerPC chips are faster and better at certain kinds of computing tasks--potential buyers are often turned off by the lower speed rating. Adopting Intel chips might eliminate that problem.
But it would create another one, most notably among Apple's software developers. After years of building software for the older operating system, they're either still in the process of adapting their software to the new OS or have just completed it. Switching to another chip would require a whole new round of rebuilding, or "porting," existing applications to work on the other chip. Plus supporting older or "legacy" applications that have run on the Mac for years would create a whole new set of problems.
The PowerPC has a lot to do with what makes a Mac distinctly different from a Windows-based PC. Most of the other components inside a Mac--the hard drive, the memory chips and often the graphics processors--are no different from what you find in a PC. Once there's a motherboard with an Intel or AMD chip in there, what's to stop a user from installing Linux--or dare we suggest it?--Microsoft's Windows on an Apple computer? Very little, it seems.
And therein lies the biggest reason that Apple will stick with the PowerPC chip for the foreseeable future. It doesn't want to go head-to-head with Microsoft.
Even though its advertising campaign is aimed at convincing frustrated Windows users to switch to the Mac, at best Apple can only hope to erode Microsoft's share of the computing world by a fraction of a percentage point. An insignificant downward shift for Microsoft would mean real progress for Apple. But advertising aside, Apple's platform still exists on the periphery of the computing world, and its sales still account for less than 3% of the world's PC market share, according to market research firm IDC.
"By saying its machines are a separate OS on a separate platform, Apple can say it doesn't compete directly with Microsoft," says Kevin Krewell, analyst with MicroDesign Resources. "Moving to an Intel or AMD platform would put them directly in Microsoft's crosshairs, and that is something Apple should not want to do."
Finally, there's a good reason Apple may want to stick with the PowerPC. In October, IBM will unveil a new 64-bit version of the PowerPC chip, aimed at desktops and low-end servers, at the annual Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif. By moving to 64 bits, the chip can address a great deal more memory than the current generation of 32-bit chips, allowing the chip to make faster work of complex computing tasks.
IBM hasn't been a major supplier to Apple recently, but it just opened a new chip factory or "fab" in upstate New York--a fab it would like to see very busy.
"I think you'll see IBM going after business from Apple much more aggressively that it has in the past," Krewell says.
While Apple has made no public commitment to using IBM's forthcoming chip, it certainly gives it another option to increase the performance of its computers. And as Steve Jobs has said, Apple likes options.
Writing for Intel does increase one's problems exponentially, because now you also have to troubleshoot someone's hardware configuration. And you're right, to be efficient, Apple writes its OS with a deep knowledge of the hardware. This may not necessarily translate to the same performance against two different Intel boxes.
I can't say if Apple is as bad as Be when it comes to knowledge of the hardware, but I was extremely disappointed in BeOS. It was so cool and had so much promise, but I couldn't get it to install on one of my systems. I bought at a CompUSA 2 Toshiba Infinias on the same day. I installed BeOS on one, it worked like a champ. It would never install on the other one. I spent hours and hours and hours trying to figure it out- after consultation with Be, it turned out that there was a tiny rev difference in the chipset between the 2 machines. That was enough to make BeOS install on one Toshiba and not on the other. No wonder Be never made it! If Apple is that dependent on the hardware, it will never make it in the Intel arena.
Still, this is not rocket science. There should be a way to write an OS that can work in either Intel or Motorola environments - that is, assuming Apple wanted to do that.
I can't see many software makers rushing to rebuild their software for yet another combination of OS and hardware with no tangible market except the PC-users-who-hate-Microsoft-enough-to-shoot-themselves-in-the-foot.
On the other hand it ran like a bat out of hell (for the era) on a stock HP Pavilion 83**. R5 which was the last version I used ran circles around my friends' custom built boxes that had athlon 600-700s running WinNT/2k on my old 8390 which had a P2 450 and 128mb of ram.
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