Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

It's not about x86, Nuno

Nuno didn’t read my posts closely enough, it seems:

Some people (lots of them in fact) seem to be sceptical of this and wonder why the heck would Apple switch from a so far successful hardware architecture.

I’m not skeptical (ant not sceptical, according to Mac OS X spelling check) about x86 choice by Apple. I’m skeptical about the choice of vender of x86 architecture.

My feeling is that Intel is not innovation in the last years and they don’t seem to have a strategy to x84-64 (compare Itanium sales to Opteron). That is my whole point.

Yes, I do understand your point about volume, but I’m not convinced yet. IBM will be increasing its production in huge amounts, now that they are powering Xbox 360, PS3 and the Nintendo Revolution. Of course, AMD is not there yet, but in high-end processors, they are cheaper than Intel (which kind’s of makes a dent in your point about volume == cheaper).

Anyway, Nuno, I welcome the change, if that gives me a better laptop than my current TiBook. And that is not clear to me yet.

Another thing, in your comments, you write:

What defines an Apple product isn’t the hardware - it is the design, OS and applications. Users don’t give a damn for what is under the hood.

As an Apple user, I’m sorry, but that is not my opinion. I say that the hardware is a very important part of this, because having to use Apple-sanctioned hardware makes the experience more complete and reliable. Apple “just works” because the hardware is engineered to work together with the software. And that is, to me, the most important part of the Mac: the fact that, on average, it just works. That is the reason I bought a mac, and it’s the reason that I don’t mind to pay the extra, to have a machine that was designed to “just work”.