Xapplimatic said:
Take the plunge? What are we afraid of? Apple's hardware will still sell on its own merits of being from the mothership and of a higher, more reliable and consistent caliber. Microsoft will be instantly trashed in Windows sales, and the "halo effect" will also trash sales of Office, same moment when people find out Apple Pages and Keynote are compatible at a fraction of the cost. Apple will continue to pump out OS X revisions at breakneck speed now with an even beefier warchest with all the OS sales to the other 90% of the world.
Will it distract from Macintosh efforts? Unlikely. It will morelikely broaden Apple into having a new division for "PC" affairs which will take its cues from Macintosh which will of course be the trendsetter and the posterboy.
Will it rob hardware sales? Also unlikely. You can't get the equivalent performance of dual 2.5 G5s on PCs wether or not it runs OS X. High end sales are secure. Apple has begun to understand low-end sales, so it's not likely that Dell will rob Mac-Mini sales.. well, just look at how pathetic the competition is! Small? Lol.. Quiet? Lol... If they held out this long from buying a Mac, why would they change their mind in 3 years from now? Let them have a better OS on their crap hardware.. Apple will be able to afford to hire more programmers to keep up things on the PC side.
What will the effect be on Mac software development? Amazing! Instantly thousands of programmers will start writing their first Mac programs, having lost the lust for Windows.. It can only be a major boost to the Mac software development community in terms of man power, labor pool, cross-platform experience, etc... Expect major applications to be ported swiftly that have never before seen a single-button mouse click.
More viruses on Mac? Ya, but probably only still affecting PC hardware, and Intel-compiled applications. Doubtful that there will be any marked increase for PPC-based Macs. Open source is regardless of popularity still going to be fairly virus-resistant compared to closed Gatesware.
In short, it will knock the wind out of Microsoft, and it will be the biggest thorn ever in Bill Gate's side, and potentially a bigger boost for Apple than the iPod even.
Just a few points. If Apple ports (and I don't expect them to nor do I really want them to, although I would certainly benefit from it), their hardware market share will not increase. Some Intel/AMD users might switch over, but you'd find some Mac users switching to cheaper hardware too. At best, it will preserve their share of the market. Keynote is a fine application, but Pages is no Word substitute. Not even close, and it was a wise choice that Apple isn't marketing it as one. Office will continue to sell, if only because it's already entrenched in most corporate and government markets (and because no open-source project has approached the level of functionality while preserving compatibility with Office).
Next, it has been disclosed that major updates to OS X are scheduled to slow down. The one major revision a year pace is going to let up for Tiger, allowing it to go for presumably 2 years at least.
You can get equivalent (or better) performance on PC hardware. The fastest computers in the world are based on PC hardware, and Apple's dual G5 is NOT the fastest end-user system available. It's a great machine and it runs superbly, but it's simply not the best, and it would be helpful for many posters to take a step back and accept this fact. I prefer Apple hardware, but I don't pretend that it's faster than PC. It might be more effective and more productive, but it's not faster. The Cell system, if it lives up to its potential, could change that.
More viruses for Macs would mean more viruses for both PPC and x86 and any other architecture employed. The x86 version wouldn't be any more prone to viruses than the PPC variant, because most virus and worm writers would be targeting the platform at the OS level (except maybe some rogue programmers angry at the x86 port), in order to be effective. That said, the severity of those viruses wouldn't be anywhere near Windows-scale. Open source isn't inherently more secure from a virus standpoint (in fact, logically, it's less secure, given that all of the tools and workings and source code is lying out for anyone to see), and MacOS isn't entirely open source anyway. The design of the security model is what keeps viruses away, not the fact that it's an open source BSD variant.
I agree that it would definitely have some dramatically bad effects for Microsoft. I would love to watch the spectacular demise of Windows, but the port isn't happening, and Windows has little to worry about, unless Intel and AMD can't deal with the Cell threat (assuming Cell actually performs the way it's being described).
