Initial thoughts on Apple switching to Intel
June 6th, 2005Tell me again how this isn’t supposed to be another Osborne?
Well, I guess there are a few reasons. For starters Apple is obviously in far better financial shape than Osborne was when they announced early. But how well can apple manage with what will no doubt be 12 months of sharply reduced low end computer sales, and likely 18 months of reduced high end computer sales? And what about software vendors? No matter how well that shiny new copy of Photoshop is supposed to run on an x86 box (through emulation) not very many people in the know are going to drop the change on it just so it can run slower in 12-18 months on their brand new computer.
Now iPods will also help, they’ll help a lot, but they account for 31% of revenue for Apple. Thats obviously not insubstantial, but neither is it the sort of thing that could keep a company from financial ruin.
Article le tiers: You can pretty much rule out any new hardware (that isn’t an iPod) in the next 12 months. No new laptops, desktops, or tablets. Apple would be pretty foolish to invest any R&D in a faster G5 that practically no one is going to buy. If it’s as simple as strapping in a new CPU and updating the Apple Store then they’ll probably go ahead and do it, but don’t expect much fanfare. I suppose the Apple Tablets just got a little more plausible, but only because they can now run on the Pentium M.
I’ve commented before about what I think Apple’s strength is. As far as I’m concerned the only value add they’ve got in their PC division is their operating system, but I believe the real money maker for them is how much they make you pay for a machine that actually runs that operating system. Obviously no one knows yet how Apple intends to ensure that you can only run OSX on Apple x86 platform, or if they’re going to try to do that at all. If Apple chooses to put some DRM in the BIOS to ensure you buy an Apple branded x86 box, and continue to charge literally twice as much for the same performance as Dell I believe that will really start to shake the foundations of the Apple loyal. It’s all well and good to pay $3,000 for a desktop when you can kid yourself into believing it’s faster, it’s much harder to do so when Dell sells the exact same hardware for $1,500. Which essentially means OS X would be a $1,500 operating system… that only ran on one kind of hardware… sketchy.
If on the other hand Apple chooses to go mass market with OSX, if you can buy a Dell with OSX already on it, that would a completely different matter. It would make Apple a boutique PC maker, a designer line of pretty hardware that only the most wealthy or zealous can afford. Which… is kind of what they are anyway. So theres that…
Personally (and selfishly) I’d like them to release OSX at whatever price for commodity x86 hardware and slap in a nice dual booting utility. Maybe something that would auto-parition your drives without letting you loose any data. And I think theres a real chance of that happening. Microsoft has proven that you can (oh god I can’t believe I’m about to talk this way) leverage the mind share of your operating system to gain traction in the consumer electronics market. Perhaps Apple can pull off the reverse.
Update: So it looks like Apple has chosen to go the route of preventing OS X from running on non-Apple hardware. That’s fine, it will ensure that the gloss of the OS is reflected by the gloss on the box. But there better be some significant price drops in Apple land. It’s always been sort of hard to compare (a’hem) apples to apples when Mac’s ran on Motorolla or IBM chips. But now you can put up a Dell and a Mac side by side and say the only thing you’re paying $1,500 for is the operating system and a pretty case. The Mac community has been fond of saying for the longest time that “Mac hardware is teh bettar and teh fastar and it is higher qalitee!” But you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that a higher quality case fan or cd-rom drive is worth hundreds of dollars. We’ll see though. If Apple releases a Power Mac with top of the line everything (not counting the video card, just make that above average) for $3,000 I’ll not complain. I also won’t buy one. The real question is going to be in their workman lines. The iMac and whatever form the Mac mini ultimately takes. If they still try to charge $1,300 for a machine that dell charges $600 I think a lot of consumers are going to balk simply because they feel insulted at the price differential. We’re not talking about iPod’s costing $50 than the equivalent Rio product. We’re talking twice as expensive for literally the same thing (except OS and pretty case).
I’m tired of rambling, but I’ll say this: I want to run OSX, I want to run it a lot. I want to give Apple my money and if I have to I’ll buy an Apple branded Intel box. But I will not pay $500 for the operating system. I could buy a whole computer (and one that’s a lot faster than a Mac mini) for that.