Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
If this happens get ready to throw every PPC box in the trash in 6 months to a year, software development for the PPC will head the same way OS9 development has.
Hmmm. Well, considering the PPC-x86 shift would require little more than a recompile, I don't think that many developers would drop PPC support immediately. It would "fade" as apps get optimized for the other architecture, but not dropped, probably for a few years at least. Think about it: at what % of the Mac population do you cut PPC off? 50%? 10% ? 1%? There is a cost/benefit analysis there, and I just don't see the costs being very high except in the QA department.
Also the shift would have to be product wide, you can't just put an x86 in a PowerMac and leave a G4/G3 in the consumer products, you then have two platforms and two different software requirements, hell you have two Macs that are not even compatable with each other!!!!!
Why not? I mean, XServe for instance doesn't generally share apps with your home iMac, right? I would expect all new apps to be PPC/x86 fat, and remain so for quite a while.
...this will be a huge mess and we don't even know how these chips will perform on OSX. What if the same chip runs OSX slower then it does XP?
Ummm ... then Apple doesn't use that chip until OS X is marketable against Windows? I mean, you do understand that Apple will test these machines before selling them, right?
That could really happen you know, then Apple has some serious issues, because they will then be benchmarked right up with XP because the system will be exactly the same except for the OS.
I don't get this. On an application level, you could always benchmark Photoshop performance in Windows versus a Mac. On an OS level, you can always benchmark OS X performance versus Windows. How does it help knowing that under the OS is an x8 processer instead of a PPC? It changes nothing whatsoever.
If OS X is "slow" because of the PPC architecture or because it is poorly written, that does not matter for the end user. All that matters is, is a Mac fast enough for me, and if not, is a Windows machine faster?
I mean, Linux and Windows share processors and even often dual-boot on the same machine. And yes, Linux file browsers (KSE Konqueror and Gnome Nautilus) are slow compared to Window's Explorer, but that doesn't even register in most people's minds as a reason not to use Linux.
Dumb Dumb Dumb Steve Jobs, you brought Apple back from Dead with the G3 and the iMac, but you are going to kill it just turning it into another Wintel box maker.....duh!
Personally, I am giving Jobs the benefit of the doubt here. Until we know that Apple is scutting its hardware business to go full time into selling and promoting OS X on Intel/AMD franken-machines, and that OS X is indeed ten times slower than Windows on equivalent hardware, I am willing to believe that Apple's engineers will do their work and due dilligence.
