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Enormous changes at the last minute

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 6th 2005 | Discuss
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Apple's Switchers program takes a U-turn

Well, the pigs are flying today. In the days before this issue was going to press, the news started breaking that Apple would be transitioning to Intel's x86 processors. Not any x86 processor, mind you, but Intel processors. No doubt we were not the only ones who greeted the speculation with a resounding, Piffle (or words to that effect). Obviously, as the rumors persisted and moved up the editorial food chain to The Wall Street Journal the story started growing legs.

THIS YEAR IT'S TIGER, but Apple is hoping that Leopard is the real killer for 2006. We're thinking that Microsoft might have wished they rethought that Longhorn name.

By the time Steven Jobs got to the stage at the Developers Conference, the story was an invisible 200-pound gorilla roaming the room. IBM had already gone to work in an attempt to do damage control with briefings for key analysts and press on Friday and effectively confirmed the rumors ahead of Jobs's speech on Monday. You can bet that went over really well down on Infiniti Loop Blvd.

In general developers took the news pretty well. They were told that, yes indeed, Apple was going to move to the x86 platform. The reason given was not one of economy as has been speculated in the press—and dismissed by those who know of Apple's battles with IBM over price. But rather, Steve Jobs told the audience that Apple did not see how they could build the products they wanted to, given the PowerPC roadmap. Specifically, Jobs pointed out that the PowerPC had not reached the 3-GHz milestone that Jobs promised developers two years previously at the conference, and that there was no way the G5 could be made to run in a notebook.

What really interested developers, of course, was making OS X run on x86 processors. Jobs said that part was easy; in fact it was a fait accompli. Jobs told the developers that Apple had been leading a double life for five years and that every version of OS X had been developed with the goal of being processor-independent and cross-platform by design. Then Jobs unloaded one of his little surprises, and that's that his presentation and the demos had been running on a 3.4-MHz Pentium processor and that same processor would be available in a demo platform to qualified developers for $999. Note, by the way, you won't be finding that demo platform available on eBay either. Jobs told the audience that at the end of the transition period Apple would be wanting those development platforms back. He did not mention whether the company would be refunding any or all of the $999.

Now, there are a couple of points of interest here. If Apple plans on moving to regular old x86 processors, why would you need a special development platform? Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, batted cleanup and told the audience that Apple would not allow its operating system to run on anyone's but Apple's machines. No clones for now. And so developers will have to use Apple's machines. But, there is plenty of reason to expect to see dual-boot systems. Schiller added that Apple would do nothing to prevent Apple machines from running both Windows and Apple operating systems.

While developers were generally supportive, they were also restive. Steve Jobs them that there were two big challenges facing Apple in the transition to Intel. If you can imagine an audience snorting in unison, that's kind of what happened. Only two? Jobs told the audience that the biggest challenges are porting the OS, which has already been done, apparently, and moving the developer community and their applications over to the Intel platform.

There is a plan in place for this as well. Jobs categorized Mac programs into four categories:

• Widgets, Script, and Java: These applications include Dashboard widgets, and all, said Jobs, are practically instant ports. To demonstrate, Jobs ran around 10 Dashboard widgets on the Intel-based development platform during his presentation.

• Cocoa: Apple's high-level object-ori-ent-ed programming environment is based on Xcode and Jobs promised developers an easy port for their programs developed in Cocoa.

• Carbon—Xcode and Metrowerks: Apple's low-level language Carbon comes in two flavors and previously programmers could work in the Xcode environment or in Metrowerks. Jobs served notice to developers that they need to move to Xcode.

Apple introduced a new version of Xcode, Xcode 2.0, for developers to get moving on to the new platform and, he promised, it wouldn't be so bad. The new Xcode features a button developers can click that lets them pick whether they're developing for PowerPC or Intel. Apple told developers that the plan is for developers to release their products as universal binaries—CDs with code for both Intel machines and PowerPCs.

Apple trotted out Theo Gray from Mathematica, who testified that the port of Mathematica, a Cocoa-based application, was relatively painless and accomplished in a couple of days. "I get the most ridiculous calls from Apple," confided Gray to his peers in the audience.

Carbon-based apps will clearly take longer and those Carbon apps developed within Metrowerks will have to be completely ported.

Leopard and Rosetta

Adobe and Microsoft pledged that their programs for the Mac will be ready with the introduction of Leopard, the next OS, which will come out with the new platforms in 2006. Conceding that not all developers will be able to make Apple's timetable, Jobs also demonstrated Rosetta, an emulator that will be invisible to users and allow any program written to the PowerPC to run on the new machines. And the performance hit? Jobs said Rosetta is fast (enough) and with a 3+ GHz processor it probably will be.

To sum up, Jobs left out a third challenge and that's overcoming Apple's years of claiming that the PowerPC beats the x86 in performance. It was never true, but Apple has spent plenty of marketing dollars and it has devoted considerable psychic energy convincing the faithful that the Intel processor is a big barking dog compared to the "screaming" PowerPC. Well, who's screaming now? The faithful, that's who.

Developers, at least the ones we saw at the conference, are greeting this news with equanimity. Some no doubt look forward to the challenge. Others see new opportunities opening up with code that may be developed for different operating systems but that is at least running on the same processor. If this bet pays off, developers stand to get new users.

However, the user community seems to be having a little trouble with the idea. A look at the forums reveals some whining and no little gnashing of teeth. One typical post, reacting to Jobs's revelation of developing ports for OS X all along, asked, "Can we believe anything Steve Jobs says?" Now, we would wonder about the wisdom of a CEO who would announce a major technology transition without managing the transition internally first—but what's important about these protests is that they could portend a possible recalcitrance among the faith-based Apple users.

Waiting to buy?

There is the oft-cited danger of the Osbourne effect as users wait to buy machines until they can buy a new one. We think this is a real problem. At the moment, Apple has a cushion in the iPod, but as we'll discuss a little later, this cushion might flatten out a bit. As has also been mentioned, Apple has money in the bank. The company has $3 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Yep, that's $3 billion. This really is a good time to make such a move.

In the news flowing over the web after Apple's announcement, "insiders" are quoted as saying that Apple will move the lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and the higher-end models such as the Power Mac will move in 2007. This fits in with our own belief that consumers will make the switch to the Intel processor without much fuss, especially if they can get a good deal. A large proportion of professionals working on the Mac are not inclined to upgrade computers until they are forced to buy a new operating system. It makes sense that the high-end machines along with the more conservative professional users will move later.

This could very well be Steve Jobs's make-or-break move. Apple will have to weather what looks to be an inevitably rocky transition, but then Jobs will have his opportunity to show off what the Mac can do. Jobs told the audience, "More than the software, more than the hardware, the soul of the Macintosh is the OS." In 2006, Apple should be ready with Leopard and the company will be able to put a machine up against the best Microsoft can offer with Longhorn. In a strange reversal of Apple's Switchers program, now it's Apple that's making the switch—can it take along its hardcore faithful and take a bigger bite out of the Windows core as well?

Note: Anton Shilov at Xbitlabs did the most thorough coverage of the Apple–Intel announcement we've seen ("Desktop Computing Redefined: Apple Moves Step Closer to the PC"). This is a highly recommended read—it is very comprehensive with some great pictures.