I was driving home the other day and a song popped in to my head out of nowhere. After replaying it a few times in my head I realized that this would make the perfect theme song for Apple’s switch to using Intel CPUs. So what song am I thinking of? None other than “Weird Al” Yankovic’s geek inspired tune:
It’s All About The Pentiums!
If you are having a hard time remembering how this song goes check out the sample on the Amazon.com: Running With Scissors page.
…
While your computer’s crashin’, mine’s multitaskin’
It does all my work without me even askin’
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide
I believe that your says “Etch-A-Sketch” on the side
In a 32-bit world, you’re a 2-bit user
You’ve got your own newsgroup, “alt.total-loser”
…
It’s all about the Pentiums, baby!
…
In the last month or so there has been lots of discussion about running the x86 version of Mac OS X on non-Apple x86 systems. www.osx86project.org has lots of information, with plenty of resources on their wiki. I’ve read some of the articles on how to make this work and watched some of the videos that demo a working install, but I never really got into it too much beyond that.
A friend of mine was a bit more determined though. The first time he installed it he was using the VMWare image and all the limitations and hoops you have to jump through to make that work. Later on he discovered that some folks had bundled together the needed SSE2 hacks and drivers into a DVD image with the OS X for Intel. He burned the DVD and has tried out the install on a few systems, all of them seem to work in various degrees. Most of the problems seem to be with driver support for video, network and audio systems. But the install is for the most part a standard OS X install, with a few customization options for installing SSE2 or SSE3 hacks and drivers. I witnessed an entire install of OS X on an older Dell system running a P4 1.8Ghz CPU (with SSE2) and 512 MB RAM. The install went fine, audio and network both worked and the video works okay, but only supports 1024×768.
The applications seemed to work fine also. Safari, Quicktime, Dashboard, iPhoto, iTunes and Preview all started up and appeared to run just fine. Downloaded SubEthaEdit version 2.2, which is a universal binary, and it ran without complaint. Even the PPC version of FireFox 1.0.6 runs on it. Speed wise it seemed comparable to my PowerBook G4 with 1.25Ghz CPU and 2 GB RAM. I’d imagine that on a high end Intel system OS X would run very nicely. I can’t tell how strange that sounds :-) Even stranger is the prospect of using Darwine to run Windows apps on Mac OS X.
So now I’m excited to see Apple hardware with Intel CPUs. I’d love to get a new PowerBook that I could split up 4 ways: Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD and FAT32 to share across the three operating systems. Of course I also want it to have great battery life. I don’t want to wait until next year (or longer), I want cool new toys from Apple now!
Seems the development Intel/Mac systems from Apple are starting to make the rounds. The folks at Think Secret have some initial details on the hardware. The only problem they seem to have run into with running Windows XP on it was with the video card. Running Intel/OS X on a non-Apple/Intel system didn’t work though.
The ability to dual boot an Apple system between Mac OS X & Window XP might be an attractive option. Perhaps a three hard drive solution would work best: 1 for OS X (Mac OS Extended file system), 1 for Windows XP (NTFS) and 1 for shared data between the two (FAT32 file system). I wonder if a shared iTunes directory on the shared data drive would work with iTunes on both Windows XP and OS X?
It appears that it is official, Apple is going to use Intel processors instead of PowerPC starting next year. The goal is to complete the transition in two years, by this time in 2007. Yes, Steve did indeed switch. Engadget has some notes from the WWDC keynote, where Steve made the official announcement. On a side note, the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) will be called Leopard and is scheduled to be released around the end of 2006, or early 2007.
So here is what we know right now. You’ll be able to run PowerPC binaries on the new Apple/Intel systems. It is supposed to be reasonably fast, but we’ll have to wait and see on that. A developer kit is available today for $1000, which includes OS 10.4.1 and a P4 3.6 system (on lease). Apple has been running OS X on Intel systems for years, just in case I suppose.
There are still plenty that we don’t know yet. Will you be able to buy Apple/Intel systems and run Windows on them? I’m thinking yes, but I won’t rule out Apple discouraging it. Even if they try to prevent it, someone will find a way around it. It seems almost a sin though to image Windows systems running in the Apple stores. The flip side of this question is will you be able to run OS X on plain x86 boxes (like a off the shelf Dell system)? This seems less likely to me. One of the things OS X has had going for it is that it hasn’t had to worry about drivers for everything under the sun the way Microsoft has. I’d score this possibility as unlikely, but again, some enterprising young soul will likely find a way around this too. Will sales fall off while people wait for the new Intel based systems? How will the stock market react? Will the performance on the Intel systems be better than what you can get out of G5?
If this is how things are going, I still think this suddenly puts wine in a very interesting position. How long until the same binary runs on both Windows and OS X?
Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, there is a lot of buzz tonight around a News.com article that reports that Apple will announce their switch to Intel CPUs on Monday. This was reported last month and everyone panned it as yet another rumor with no substance to it. Not surprising since “news” of Apple switching to Intel CPUs seems to crop up every couple of years. The rumor mill has cried wolf so many times, why should we believe them now?
I’m having a hard time believing this. There really is no good way to do this kind of transition, if you do it all at once then you’ll have an OS, but no apps until developers catch up. If you phase it in over time (which is what the News.com article suggests, starting with low end systems) then you pretty much kill sales of the already phased in systems for the same reason, lack of apps. At least when OS X came out you could still run older Mac OS applications.
There are two possible ways to deal with the problems of such a transition. One, you get these new CPU systems into the hands of every OS X developer you can, offer them for insanely low prices ($100 for an Intel based Mac Mini?). All you should have to do to qualify is to already be distributing an OS X application. The second method is the same approach that transition to OS X used, provide a way for PowerPC/OS X apps to run on Intel/OS X systems. I have no idea if that is even possible without some insanely high performance penalties. Perhaps they’ll integrate the PearPC work into Mac OS 10.5 to make this happen? If you are going to go that far, why not integrate Wine into Mac OS 10.6, which will enable you to run MS Windows apps on Apple Intel/OS X systems, which by then would be the only systems they sell.
Hmmm, now that I think about it that way perhaps moving to Intel isn’t such a bad idea after all. Shall I go out on a limb here? Sure, why not. By 2010 Apple will only sell systems with Intel CPUs and OS X will be able to run your Windows apps. This will give Apple enough time to bring Wine up to a more or less complete replacement for Windows XP and most of Longhorn. You’ll even be able to run .Net apps, thanks to Mono. And just like the base of OS X, all of this will be possible because of existing open source projects.
Or maybe not :-)
So, will Steve switch or not?