Apple Hedges its Bets

Fuck apple. There I said what nobody has the nads to say. All their recent products are in markets where someone else has taken the chance in and they come along and stick their finger in the air to see which way it's blowing. Fuck em. They are no more a computer company than sony is anymore. It's all about their crappy lifestyle products marketed to the mass market idiots and wannabe steve jobs.

I haven't looked too heavily into this, but I keep seeing specific mention of deals with Intel, as opposed to the general intent to support the x86 architecture. No love for AMD? More specific compiler optimizations for Intel CPUs? -_-

This has been reported heavily, but it's a non-story. Apple will of course need Power PC's to support existing roducts. They also don't plan to have entirely phased out PPC hardware until 2007. That's a direct statement from Jobs at the expo where he announced the transition.

The speculation about hedging bets or backing away from Intel is just navel gazing, IMHO.

Hey guys,

Applecare <<<

Apple will need G4/G5's through 2008 to have replacements for machines under Applecare.

Correct me if im wrong but IBM has been making computer chips for apple for quite sometime, but it seems that IBM is starting to back down from the hardware market and focus on service industry... hence it was a right business decision to jump over to Intel.

Is this really gaming news? lol

I run a mac laptop for graphic design work, along with my PC/Linux desktop, so these are things I follow... If this were for G5s it would matter, but G4s are at the end of their useful life anyway. As others have said, this is for support, so they have a supply to build replacement mac minis and powerbooks/ibooks out of.. If they enter into this kind of an agreement with IBM for the G5, then it's at least worth making some baseless claims off of. As is, this is just stupid.

Plus, note the wording. They're required to purchase nothing. Oh and no offense Remo, keep the console goodness coming (but BIGGER INTROS, stat! quit your slacking! :D )

What on earth is there to hedge? Does anyone really think Apple's going to have less luck with Pentiums than with PowerPCs? There was a great post at Slashdot (of all places) regarding the switch that I think hit the nail on the head:

"There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.

Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the ones that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.

'Consumers don't benefit'? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2 Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.

I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform. "

i wonder what the marketing will be like for the intel based mac. i mean, didnt they totally try to diss the intel platform and tell us that the g5 was 5 billion times faster then anything in the world?

This was on slashdot yesterday, and I thought it seemed baseless. This could just be in order to supply replacement parts for PPC machines still under warranty, of which there are guaranteed to be some in 2008, since we're already almost to 2006 ...

I guess they might still need chips for supporting existing hardware - at least for a few years still.

I don't really see this as any indication of Apple going back to PPC or staying away from x86. I just see this as Apple making sure the switch goes as smoothly as possible.

The idea of Steve saying, "We're sticking with PPC" to consumers at a conference after creating all of that buzz would be funny, though.

I'm not so sure it's going to hurt all that much at all really.

aside from pissing off a few developers, all the big ones that anyone actually gives a shit about anymore have pledged support... which means they'll be doing universal binaries, which means switching back and forth depending on who's fielding the new hotness at any given moment is a non-issue.

"Hedges their bets?" No. Apple's making sure they have a supply of PowerPCs for support purposes: there will still be G4 and G5 Macs in existence after the first Intel Mac comes out, and Apple is still required to support those G4s and G5s. Therefore, they need the ability to order replacements.