The MacDeskBlog

I read I, Cringely for June 9, 2005 and I must say, that I think he really is pretty far off the mark this time, to the point where I feel compelled to try to debunk some of what he says. I think he’s trying to build up a straw man with his five questions, but it doesn’t really come across very well. Maybe he’s just putting forth questions he keeps hearing. Or maybe he’s just being rhetorical. Regardless, to me the Q&A comes across as too misleading.

“Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC’s supposed performance advantage over Intel? ”

That’s a damn good question.

“… Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week’s presentation?”

It was not BS. Apple absolutely did mean it. And it was totally ignored this week because Apple isn’t leaving the PowerPC because of past performance, they’re doing so because of current and future performance. Remember what every mutual fund broker says? Past performance is not an indicator of future returns. Well, past PowerPC performance was good (as has been borne out by numerous comparisons from MacAddict to PC World to Ars Technica), but the future looks bleak. Heck, the present is pretty dire for Apple’s laptops.

In addition to the 3GHz G5 and the PowerBook G5 that we were supposed to have by now, we were also supposed to have dual and quad core G5s. Actually, we were supposed to have dual and quad core G4s even before the G5 was developed, now that I think about it. That is how far behind IBM and Freescale are on their roadmap for the PowerPC line. PowerPC processors were also supposed to be smaller, faster, less complex, use less power and generate less heat than x86 processors, only one of which has been true since the 603, and not by much (less complex). Of course, Intel had similar but different problems within that timeframe. Itanium was supposed to be the be-all-end-all, second coming type of blockbuster exclamation point <insert your own superlatives here> to the x86 line. And it turned out to be an overpriced, under-performer. The P4 turned out to be less powerful per MHz than the P3, though it made up for it with higher clock speeds. And I seem to recall some incompatibility problems with the early P4 too. Oh well.

Even so, G5s are at parity with P4s in today’s desktops.

“Question 2: What happened to Apple’s 64-bit operating system? … So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing?”

This question is pretty much answered as asked … “marketing”. When a company decides to invest in a particular technology and push it to market, they tout it as ‘new and improved’. Is it new? Certainly! Is it improved? Only time will tell.

So, will Apple abandon 64-bit processors in their move to Intel chips? Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see. Will they be disgruntled about switching back to 32-bit processors if they have to? Maybe. Or maybe they’ll be ecstatic. We’ll have to wait and see. The only thing we can be sure of is that, whatever they decide to do, they’ll market the hell out of it!

“Question 3: Where the heck is AMD? … Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.”

Come on. Get real. AMD is a bit player. Apple has just spent the last 30 years playing with a bit player and getting ridiculed for it throughout the past 20 years. The PowerPC was obviously superior technology in 1994, but it’s not anymore because the manufacturer doesn’t have enough interest in it. Apple is now happy to let other companies play with AMD. They want to latch onto the juggernaut for this type of a major transition. Once there, might they release some AMD models? Who knows? Personally, I doubt it, but it would certainly be more logical to do it then than announcing that they’re switching over the CPUs from one marginal manufacturer to another marginal manufacturer even if that manufacturer is compatible with Intel. Does AMD have great products? Probably, but that’s not as relevant and selling this transition to press and public, and that means going with Intel.

“Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?”

Well, before I delve into my longest response, I need to set it up by circling back to Question 1 and expanding upon it just a little.

In addition to IBM and Freescale being way behind in development of the PowerPC line, they don’t seem to have PC chips in mind for the future. They essentially don’t want Apple’s business anymore. They decided that they can’t compete with Intel for desktop processor design, so they’re going to find another pond (gaming consoles, primarily) in which to try to be big fish. Sure, they’re happy to sell Apple their existing processor lines as long as Apple is willing to buy them, but they’re not going to develop anything for Apple anymore. Apple doesn’t seem to have had much of a choice in the matter.

So, working from the premise that Apple’s switch was a fait-accompli, why would Apple pre-announce it?

Let’s think about what would have happened had Apple not pre-announced it. Next year, Apple would have discontinued a particular model of Mac and when the channel dried up, they would have announced the switch to Intel. Developers would have panicked. No matter how good Rosetta is, performance using it will not compare with performance of native applications. Sure, Adobe and Maya would have had native versions of their applications in the works, which they only spent 3 hours converting but which wouldn’t be shipping for another 3 months, and Microsoft would have a similar story except the new Office suite would be ready any day now and end up shipping 9-12 months later. The rest of the developer community would have felt entirely betrayed and justly so. Native software would have trickled in over the course of the next year. Consumers would have panicked. All they would be able to buy would be an obsolete G5 desktop or a more obsolete G4 iBook/PowerBook (though laptops will probably be the first to be converted to Intel) with plenty of software available for it at the moment but a big tombstone painted on its side, or a brand spanking new Pentium M Mac (whichever is the first to get replaced) with no software available for it. Consumers would have felt entirely betrayed and justly so.

What do you get from disgruntled consumers and disgruntled developers? Three things:
1. No sales. Same result as pre-announcing, sales dry up for about a year until the software is ready.
2. Really bad press, including the return of the Apple Death Watch.
3. Class Action Lawsuits galore.

So, what happens over the course of the next year?
1. Some consumers will decide to wait until next year.
2. Some consumers will decide that waiting until next year will hurt their productivity, so they’ll buy anyway.
3. A few consumers will decide that the Dual G5s really do kick the butt of Pentiums. Doing the math, they’ll figure that Apple is going to take at least a full year to convert the entire lineup (as they have said), and new software will be fat binaries for several more years after that. So they really have little to lose over the lifetime of a computer, and they probably have a lot to gain by buying now and/or when Apple has a fire sale to clear out the last of the PowerPC inventory in 2006/7.

Overall, Mac sales will dip over the next year, but not as badly as they would have over the following year had Apple waited and blind-sided everyone.

Cringley says that Apple could have quietly released the developer machines under NDA so their would have been native software available at release. But that wouldn’t have worked for several reasons:
1. Apple’s developer programs are open to everyone (student memberships were $99 last time I checked). NDA or no NDA, that cat would get out of the bag and fast.
2. WWDC is the only opportunity Apple has to talk directly to a broad range of developers in order to get them on board. WWDC is a public event with press inside at the keynote and around talking to developers and eavesdropping.
3. Apple could have seeded a few of the developer systems to only their most trusted developers in order to avoid the two problems above, but that puts them back into the disgruntled consumers and disgruntled developers scenario I described previously.

Sure, Apple is great at keeping secrets, and it’s great at taking risks. It’s also pretty good at major transitions (68K to PowerPC and Mac OS 9 to X). Keeping this transition secret would have been at least as hazardous as making it public. Personally, I think the risk of trying to keep it secret would have been greater than that of making it public now. Apple’s prepared to take its lumps now, softened by the continuing success of the iPod line, so that they’ll come out less bruised when the transition is complete.

“Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?”

Actually, I agree with Mr. Cringely here. I also think that DRM is a non-issue.

“The obvious questions about performance and 64-bit computing come down to marketing. … The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, … and nothing that IBM couldn’t have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD … This is simply about business — BIG business.”

Yes, I agree that 64-bit computing is largely marketing. We’ll see how committed Apple is to it. I disagree, though about the roadmap. IBM has lost interest in developing the PowerPC line, preferring the POWER chips instead. Skimming the Ars Technica article on the Cell Processor leads me to the conclusion that switching to the Cell processor would be a comparable task to switching to Intel chips. Well, Cell is an IBM chip design, and Apple is tired of being burned by IBM. They’d be foolish to hop to another chip line from the same manufacturer and end up in the same place in five or ten years, if lucky. Besides, the press would have eaten them alive for switching processors again, to a non-Intel processor, again. IBM has demonstrated an inability to outpace Intel’s development efforts, while simultaneously demonstrating a willingness to license its own manufacturing advances to Intel to ensure that they keep up. IBM did a terrific job with the PowerPC for several years, but the bottom line is that they just aren’t committed to it anymore, and that doesn’t bode well for the Cell Processor either.

So yes, it’s about big business. Apple bet against Intel in the past and got burned by it. Manufacturing machines which could not run Windows contributed substantially to Apple’s market share decline from 50% to 3%. They’re trying not to perpetuate that mistake. Not licensing early was the other. It is entirely conceivable that HP will want to license Mac OS, and it’s remotely conceivable that Apple might let them. Steve seems to be of the opinion that they already missed the boat on licensing, but that might have or may in the future change in the new Intel landscape.

“Then what is the driving force? Microsoft.”

I believe that Intel and HP and many other major players in the PC world hate Microsoft. I think that Apple does mean more to Intel than another 3% market share, though you also shouldn’t underestimate the value of 3% market share to Intel. Apple is a potential rapier for Intel to fence with MS. Intel, however, is not a software company. Buying Apple would not gain them much, if anything, appreciable over partnering closely with Apple, as they are suddenly doing. Intel has been making processors and only making processors for a very long time now. Diversifying into software development would be a mistake for them. (I know they do write a little bit of software, but it’s just a little, and aside from their drivers, it’s not very good.)

While Cringely makes a few interesting points and conjectures, I think that his questions are pretty much red herrings, and his hypothesis that Apple will followup selling its soul to Intel by selling its body to them too is off the mark. And, I really doubt that Apple or Intel stockholders would approve of such a merger. I sure know my Apple shares would be voted against it.