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journal: mac
The rumor that won’t die: Apple to switch to x86?
Yes, you read the headline right! Here we go again…
In his WinHEC blog, Paul Thurrott made an interesting comment about Apple’s response to IBM’s progress with the G5:
This one’s bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously.
Thurrott is not considered a reliable rumor source. In previous instances, Thurrott claimed that Apple would add full WMA support to the iPod and iTunes as a stipulation in their iPod distribution agreement with HP.
In the meantime, Mac rumor sites predict that new PowerMacs up to 2.7 GHz are due tomorrow (April 27).
Deep Thought’s take:This rumor is almost as played out as the Apple PDA one! Since this rumor was spawned at a hardware conference, we’ll see how it pans out. For now, however, it would be safe to assume that this too is a groundless rumor (as was every other Mac-on-x86 rumor out there). From where I’m sitting, it almost sounds like wishful thinking from PC users that Apple would make OS X run on an x86 machine. Ain’t gonna happen.
More Info
Windows IT Pro: WinHEC 2005: Day Two Blog
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thinkback
Apple uses X86 chips already. They use them on the Xserve Raid.
>> Thurrott is not considered a reliable rumor source
But a perfectly reliable humor source.
In the short term this has no creedence, however, if there was a final knockout blow that Apple could deliver to Longhorn, x86 would be it. The question is whether Apple market share becomes so big that such a gambit would be feasible. Unlikely.
Uh, Al—Apple uses Intel chips in XServe, but they aren’t x86. They’re StrongARM, a descendant of the ARMs used in the Newton, technology that Intel acquired as part of the dissolution of DEC.
Self-correction: Intel calls their current implementation of ARM “XScale” the previous ones they called StrongARM. Or something like that, Tilopa invented RISC and taught it to Naropa....
They replace the i860 and i960, two really good chips that The Market never took a liking to.
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Probably not going to happen anytime soon, which is a pity. It would be nice to have a really fast Macintosh. In any case, it will never happen this year if it’s not introduced at WWDC. Without developer support such a machine would be DOA. And I don’t see any slots in WWDC for it.