Comment Articles

Apple's tough year buys a bright future

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 07 Jun 2005 17:55 BST

There are a lot of people feeling betrayed by Steve Jobs today. The Mac faithful bought into every facet of the machine's special nature, including its non-Intel soul. Now, that key differentiator between the magic Macintosh and the evil Wintel has been lost: how can they look OS X in the eye again?

They should chill. Nobody buying a computer does so for the processor. This is a source of much sadness to those who appreciate good design: over the years, the Intel architecture has seen off any number of technically superior competitors. Even at birth the 8086 chip was something of a kludge, designed to work efficiently with small amounts of memory at the expense of making the systems software harder to write. Deep within the latest Pentiums, some of that legacy remains: in terms of aesthetics, this is the ugliest heart to beat within the Macintosh.

That doesn't matter. What matters is that Macintosh will be cheaper and faster than otherwise, and Apple now has the option of changing processor manufacturers again without any fuss whatsoever.

The effects on software — the stuff that people do buy computers for — will be subtle. As with the transition from the 68000 architecture to Power PC, there'll be a range of effects. Some software won't work well with Rosetta, the PowerPC translation program that will run old software on the new platform. It won't be updated and it will die with the old hardware. Some will work well enough, although there will be a performance hit. Some will be released in Intel form. By and large, although not without pain, the Apple world will move across.

Expect a slew of numbers. If there's one thing the technical press and its readers like, it's benchmarks — and in this case, there's no faffling ambiguity over what the figures mean and whether they're relevant to real life. Power PC versions will be run alongside Intel versions and the results endlessly descried for significance. Not that it matters: there's no going back.