It'll be official on Monday: Apple switching to Intel chips

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Asher
iPod Sales are slowing, and an excessive overstock of iPods brought down Apple's stock: http://news.com.com/iPod+stockpile+w...l?tag=nefd.pop

That's mostly just the shuffle. Apparently buyers don't like the idea of a music player with no screen and which you can't select which songs get played. The Ipod Shuffle is stacking up in warehouses because better players are available on the market in the same price range.

[Provost Harrison]

That was such an utterly dumb move...trying to make the public look stupid by offering them a cut down version what costwise is probably the same price as the full version, which is artificially inflated in price. I feel insulted by the whole concept!

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Agathon
[q]
IBM are just lame because they couldn't do it. I guess that the financial impact on IBM will be next to nothing, but they do look a bit daft after their enthusiasm of two years ago.

I'm not seeing how IBM looks lame. They never promised anything because it didn't make financial sense to redsign the chip given Apple's tiny market share. It makes much better sense for them to use their resources going after the much larger game council market which they dominate. Apple sure does seem like they demand a whole lot of special favors but can't garrentee they'd buy enough chips to make such changes profitable so IBM told them they wouldn't be making a special chip for Apple.

It seems like Apple was the one who couldn't fill its end of the deal not IBM.

[Asher]

http://news.com.com/Cheers%2C+jeers+for+Intel+inside+Apple/2100-7341_3-5734339.html?tag=nefd.top

So Apple makes lots of noise about switching to x86-64 (which they and their fanbase have bashed for over a decade).

Freescale and IBM shrug:

Despite losing Apple, neither IBM nor Freescale appeared to be devastated by the news.

"It didn't come as much of a surprise to us as we've done business with Apple for more than 20 years," said Tim Doke, a vice president of communications at Freescale. "We understood that we may be reaching that point where our paths were not going in the same direction."

Apple only represents about 3 percent of Freescale's total revenue and only 2 percent of its wafer production, Doke said. The company is still committed to producing another batch of faster and low-power G4 processors for iBooks and Mac minis, Doke added.

"There is a silver lining to this, because now we are able to reinvest that R&D investment as we look at the consumer space and trade that with more of our other products.

IBM, which was also fired by Apple, said it won't lose much sleep over losing the contract to build the G5 processor.

"IBM is aggressively moving the Power Architecture beyond the PC, as shown by our recent successes with the next-generation gaming systems announced by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo," IBM spokesman Glen Brandow said.

Both IBM and Freescale said they are looking at replacing lost Apple production and putting it into other growth areas such as telematics systems used in automobiles. Freescale said it was also particularly interested in its communications processors like those found in base stations.

And Adobe's CEO says "What took you so long?"

If this whole thing isn't humbling for Apple, I don't know what is.

[Asher]

http://news.com.com/Apple+fails+to+meet+a+columnists+expectations/2010-1071_3-5734187.html

Apple fails to meet (a columnist's) expectations
June 6, 2005, 2:43 PM PT
By Michael Kanellos

Who ever thought Apple would convert to Intel?

Not me. Eighteen months ago, I wrote that such a deal wouldn't occur because it would potentially allow clone makers to produce cheap Macs and make price comparisons easier between Macs and Windows-based PCs. (I also predicted that IBM services would begin to teeter, so I wasn't a complete bonehead.)

When news of deals began to surface last month, I wrote another article quoting several analysts downplaying any budding relationship. They say animals can sense things early, but I completely ignored the fact that two weeks ago my cat started drinking coffee and fiddling with the band saw.

Still, the predictions weren't that bad. It won't be an easy transition. Sales will likely decline between now and June 2006 when the first Intel-based Macs come out, because few will want to buy a computer out of a product line heading for the tar pits. Clever PC makers and software developers, particularly in emerging markets, will be able to figure out how to put the Mac OS on white-box PCs.

Nonetheless, many decisions are fraught with risk and difficulty. The Austro-Hungarian empire originally didn't enforce its will on the Serbians in 1914 because of the all-consuming importance of the sheep-cheese trade in the Balkans. But fear of losing prestige, worries about Russia and pressure from the Kaiser in Germany all pushed them toward a precarious course of action.

With PowerPC chips, Apple found itself grappling with an ever-widening performance gap. Although PowerPC was somewhat comparable to Intel/Advanced Micro Devices processors in the first part of the decade, those chips began to pull away. Intel and AMD also came out with new, faster, cheaper versions at a faster clip.

The troubles began to come to a head with the G5, the IBM processor that debuted in 2003. Benchmarks from Apple touting the superiority of the G5 were widely questioned.

Apple also began to include a liquid cooling system in its PCs for the processor. Apple fans claimed the cooling system underscored the company's visionary sense of engineering. Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, saw it differently. The liquid system added about $50 to manufacturing costs. Historically, liquid cooling is also a sign that the processor line won't be around for long.

When Apple began to publicly complain about the G5 on conference calls, the companies had entered a danger zone. IBM doesn't cotton well to criticism, particularly from allies. "We invented the cash register! We came up with fractals! We sponsor Christmas specials," is sort of IBM's attitude toward the rest of the world. Big Blue started to hang out with console makers and listen to old Springsteen records on the car stereo. Divorce suddenly loomed as a possibility.

"As we looked out toward the future, we envisioned the kind of products we'd like to build, but we didn't know how to build (them) with the future of the Power PC road map," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at the company's developer conference.

Oddly enough, Apple has been gaining market share in the past few quarters despite the G5 issues.

Intel has power consumption problems with the Pentium 4 too, but a shift to dual core cures some of that. Future notebook and desktop chips (Yonah, Merom, Conroe) will further reduce power consumption, which in turn will let Apple come out with sleek, small systems.

There will be other benefits too. Intel increasingly is performing more of the internal engineering work required in getting servers and other computers out the door. It makes reference designs and lines up component manufacturers to adopt certain specs. By taking advantage of some of this work, Apple can likely reduce the delta between its computers--which tends to be about $300--and a similarly configured computer from a PC company.

On the other hand, Apple will have to live with being one of many. The red carpet was unfurled Monday, but a year from now, Apple will be lumped into the same courtesy shuttle as Toshiba, Sony, Gateway and the other "not in the top five" PC makers. Acer sells more computers than Apple and therefore will likely qualify for higher volume discounts.

Apple will also lose one more aspect of its uniqueness, which the company seems to crave, so who knows what will happen next? Feeling a bit dejected, Apple may start casting about again. Look, there's Hector Ruiz of AMD, the company might say to itself. He talks quite a bit about the importance of the emerging market. They're sort of an underdog....

[Hueij]

IBM doesn't cotton well to criticism, particularly from allies. "We invented the cash register! We came up with fractals! We sponsor Christmas specials," is sort of IBM's attitude toward the rest of the world. Big Blue started to hang out with console makers and listen to old Springsteen records on the car stereo.

Making fun of Apple is okay, but working for IBM and posting this?

[Asher]

[Last Conformist]

I still don't get how Aggie copes with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously being a commie and an Apple fanboy.

[FrostyBoy]

Why Intel? Why not AMD?

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Sn00py
Why Intel? Why not Athlon?

Because they have good laptop cpus

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
I still don't get how Aggie copes with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously being a commie and an Apple fanboy.

Corrected.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Sn00py
Why Intel? Why not Athlon?

I think they're tired of having to switch CPU vendors. Intel was the first, and it'll always be around.

AMD waffles between profit/loss regularly, it'd be more risky.

Plus AMD's Turion chips have nothing on the Pentium M/Centrino.

[FrostyBoy]

Agathon is a Communist? He's from New Zealand?

Ok, I buy that.

[Kuciwalker]

[Q Classic]

Dell? God give me strength...

Say what you will about Dell, OS upgrades for their Optiplex systems are just as smooth as the Mac upgrades for our 200+ seat workstation clusters.

When you've all finished, the result is that Apple now has a better chip supplier. IBM just couldn't do it. They'll make excuses, but that's all they are.. excuses.

I'm not arguing at all whether Intel is inferior or not. I'm simply saying that of all businesses IBM could lose, Apple is not something they really need to worry about.

Now, the Lenovo thing...